Offering low rates for your writing services is frowned upon by the pros. Often referred to as selling out, or not “working smart”, writing “for peanuts” has its benefits.

Huge market. There is an insanely high demand for keyword rich articles that bring no value to the site other than building organic traffic. I know of a company that delivers over 1,000 such articles daily, 20 days a month. Getting customers is really a piece of cake, just log on DP and you’ll find zillions of requests in the BST thread.

It’s easy to be the best. Well, not the best, but, if you can deliver better content than this piece of dung, then you’ll get orders. There are hardly any big fish to compete against in this market.

Easy to write. I can’t vouch for other writers, but it doesn’t take me more than 20 minutes to come up with a 500 word article on mostly any topic. I hardly need any research and there can usually be no copyright issue related to rewriting other articles, since there is no branded idea to be presented. If I were to move on the next level, I’d probably have to work tenfold for 5-6 times the pay. No, thank you.

Hardly any responsibility for ideas. When writing low end content, you generally don’t have to put in your own thoughts and personal experience. The articles are generally in the line of ”what product X is”, ”how to install Y” or ”how to use product Z to achieve W”. There is hardly any need for analysis, personal inputs, hence you can’t be held accountable for what you wrote. You just sell the articles and forget about them.

Selling cheap content has to do with the economy of the country you’re from. If stacking plates at McDonald’s gets you more per hour than this, writing for pennies will probably not pay up. Where I come from, delivering 20-30 such articles per day brings me about 6-7 times the national net average wage, while still allowing me to work on personal projects.

Cheap content shouldn’t be regarded as a quality over quantity dispute. It simply addresses a different share of the market. We don’t do press releases, copy letters or magazine editorials. Many of us choose to stay in this market because we want to, not because we cannot move to the next level. And such is the case in all industries: you don’t see Renault building Porsches just because the assembly time is about the same, but the latter sells for ten times the price, do you?