In my business (which is copywriting), there is a subset of copywriting services that offer ridiculous pricing on copywriting. Prices that are hard to believe, quite honestly. Like “$5 for a 500 word article” pricing.
To be clear, I’m not talking about “regular” competition. We all have competition – I understand that. But certain businesses, especially creative businesses, have a subset of competition that must live in mud huts, because their prices are sooooo ridiculously cheap. Web designers go through this. So do graphic artists and marketing people. And, like I mentioned, us copywriters go through this.
Here’s what I’m up against in this respect: like I mentioned above, there are companies out there that will produce a 500 word article for $5
Five dollars.
I’ve written a LOT of 500 word articles. Depending on the topic, it’s anywhere between one and three hours work. Sorry, but like most professionals and/or business owners, one to three hours of my time runs into the hundreds.
To me, there are only three ways this can happen: a machine is copying existing articles and changing a few words to pass plagiarism checks; a third world person is writing them from the high speed connection in their mud hut; or the company “crowdsources” and has hundreds of wannabe writers “compete” for a “chance to be published” (which these days means “on a blog somewhere”). And in the fine print, the writing is property of the company, so they always have hundreds of articles that they didn’t pay for. Personally, I think it’s more #1 than anything. I think a lot of copying/editing/pasting is going on.
So how do I handle this? Simple – I don’t even give them the time of day. If a client brings up “hey, I can get this done for $5”, I say “go ahead”. Fortunately, the writing is sooo God-awful, only the most desperate person would do such. I won’t even acknowledge the price in a negotiation – no “let’s meet in the middle” stuff. It’s so out of the norm (and the writing is pretty bad too) that it doesn’t even exist on my radar.
In other words, I sell / negotiate on writing quality that’s on a par with my writing. And I’m a damn good copywriter. Given sufficient visitors, I will raise sales every time.
THAT’S how you handle that kind of competition folks – you don’t even give it the time of day (well, save perhaps writing a blog post on it.) And good clients are ok with that (unless they are living in mud huts themselves, I suppose.)
Great point. It’s sad that these discount article writing companies have become so proliferous. They have managed to create the perception, at least with some people, that article writing should be dirt-cheap. Part of the problem is the fact that unscrupulous SEO companies have popularized the tactic of distributing large numbers of low-quality articles across multiple blog sites just to build backlinks.
I can only hope that Google continues to press forward with its algorithmic updates and one day renders these tactics useless.