Everyone knows that getting and publishing articles on your niche is a great way to:

1. Provide unique content
2. Get backlinks
3. Increase the number of pages of your site

Finding decent (and cheap) writers can be a lot easier than you think. Here’s a few ideas:

• Post a quick blurb to the Help Wanted section on Craigslist. There’s a writers section.
• Pretty much everyone knows a single mom. Many of these ladies are decent writers, and will work cheap.
• Teenagers and college students will work cheap.
• Put a help wanted in your local paper. Won’t cost much, and you’ll be supporting your local community.
• If your local community has a website, consider contacting the web person that runs it. They may know some local writers looking for work.
• Post a help wanted on free classifieds sites.

Ask potential applicants to submit an article on a subject of their choosing. Weed through them and pick out the good writers (nice grammar, punctuation where it should be, etc.) and see what they’ll work for.

Lastly, run the articles they submit to you through CopyScape to make sure they aren’t just copy/pasting stuff into a document for you. Last thing you want is to get hit with a duplicate content penalty.

Since this website is all about ‘cheap’, you can imagine that, just like anything, you’ll get what you pay for. I’ve paid as little as $50 for 10 articles, and I’ve done that several times. Now I usually offer 2 cents per word for good content, and then I raise it if the writer continuously provides good stuff. I’ve paid as much as 6-7c a word, but I’d advise against that unless you’re getting really technical/specialized stuff.

As a side note, if you’re not interested in doing all that work, and need a writer, I know of two who are looking for work. One is a freelancer, she does decent work and doesn’t charge too much.

The other is a seasoned writer for a major newspaper, so he obviously costs more. He was recently laid off in a downsizing effort, and is looking for work. If you’ve got the money, and want some good stuff, he’s your man. I’m very impressed with his articles.

For info, just write to me. info at PoorSEM dot com

For the rest of you, good luck on finding a good writer. There are plenty out there that will get you the content you need.