When using TCA for the base articles would you recommend getting their 'great' or 'excellent' articles? Is it worth paying that extra 30%?

I don't think so, and here's what I've realized:

-The quality difference isn't that noticeable. They often use the same people for both, so you won't notice a spike in the English writing department.

-You don't need actual excellent quality articles to serve as rewrites. You won't be posting them on your money site, instead you'll be using them for your support articles to serve as backlinks. Your personal money site articles Vs. support articles is kind of like the gap concept in toureny poker. You need a better article to post on your site than you need to throw onto another site in the background for links.

-If you hire competent rewrites (native English speakers, or people with a firm grasp of English) it won't matter. They aren't going to use the exact poor phrasing that an original might. If you have a sentence like, "The nuts is poker deals which is unbeatable at the final showdown" into equal gibberish. They'll rewrite it into, "The nuts is an unbeatable poker hand that always wins at showdown", etc. TCA articles don't have crap like this anyways, so you'll be fine. The difference in "quality" is the amount of research into it, and you don't need gold for support articles. I post tons of crap to article directories which is basically standard info repeated over and over, but it reads nice enough.

So basically, just get something which conveys the overall message clearly so your rewriters can get the message across easily as well. Also, I should note that finding your own writers for original articles (both originals to be rewritten and higher quality site-worth originals) is definitely possible and often a better method than services like TCA.

The margins for rewritten articles to turn a profit are very slim so they have to markup. You're not paying for higher quality with a company like TCA, you're paying for 1) a quick turnaround time, 2) an easy to use interface which can handle bulk orders and 3) a professional company with a support team, etc. You assume much more responsibilty when hiring your own writer, and it takes a bit more hands on time (double checking articles and such) but if you find your own little team of trustworthy people you can save a lot of money and increase your production by a lot.

I've learned a LOT about outsourcing after ordering tons of articles through the last 6 months for the company I do SEO for (in addition to my own sites of course). I hope these outsourcing tips help.

Anyone else who wants to learn some helpful tips on SEO and the "build sites for extra cash" process, feel free to sign up for TKA under my affiliate link and I'll do my best to help you. Thanks.

Phresh do you work for an SEO firm or in-house? Could I PM if you dont want it public?

I'm an independent contractor. I do work for a friend's company in addition to my own stuff. It's a very large online site that sells certain merchandise. It was long overdue to receive some SEO love as they'd been neglecting it for a long time and were seeing their competitors rise through the ranks and overtake them for big terms. I'm not some guru or some big time internet marketing baller. It's just a hobby of mine, but something I'm working towards doing as a career in the future.

So I could use 'Great' for the content on my site, 'Basic' for link building articles, and then go on Odesk for rewrites to generate further link building articles?

anyone have any experience with Warrior forums? I've been doing a LOT of reading over there (hardly ever even understand what is being said) - and in particular saw their forum where you can buy services.

Some of them seem very inexpensive to me. They talk about creating back links and submitting articles all over the place; etc - is that stuff considered "black hat" seo? Is there any risk in that stuff?

No. You're using none of these options for the content on your site. Your site quality should be much better researched and more informative and fun to read than some outsourced TCA article. I mean, you can do whatever you want, and it's possible to get well written articles. But I prefer to write my own or use someone I know for sure will research the topics very well.

I would order a single article from TCA under Great and then use it to be rewritten lots of times by different writers from oDesk. I would write my own site content articles.


You're buying crappy links and some black hat stuff. I'd stay away from Warrior forums if you have to ask questions about this stuff. No offense.

thank you - just the kind of advice I was looking for

You can find some great vendors on WF. Some are better than others, but there are some awesome backlink vendors. I've also had success w/ Fiverr and DP.

You have to be willing to test, test, and test some more

thanks for the advice. My situation is a strange one - as I'm trying to generate users for a site that doesn't generate any revenue (maybe some day - but no time soon) - so all costs are analyzed pretty closely - and though I don't see my site as ever being 'search engine' fed - I wouldn't want to jeopardize my status with google by doing anything 'illegal'.

There are legitimate deals in the WF, but it's mixed with lots of crap. That's why I advise you not to mess with it unless you know what you're doing. Why can't your site receive search engine traffic?

It probably can - but I don't know how effective that would be...

it's kind of like a message board where you try to break bad habits / create good habits - so I guess it could pick up users who search "how to break a habit" or something (I'm sure it's clear - but I'm an idiot about these things).

If you want to see it - it's www.loopchange.com

That can easily be SEO'd and monetized. You can create certain pages/parts of the site that are dedicated to specific habits. Like you can make a section of the forum to discuss quitting smoking or drinking and you can have AdSense ads for fighting addiction, etc. You can write an eBook and sell it (or promote another persons) or sell eCigarettes or something.

I think that's actually a really good niche. Your site looks legitimate and well developed as well. It can easily blow up as a "we'll fight our habits together" community and get more users. I'd start getting emails logged so you have a user base to sell something to down the line (or to give free help information as well).

I know a guy who makes over $1k/m on one of his sites which deals with fighting alcoholism I believe. It just posts tons of helpful tips and guides and such, but has AdSense ads on it.

Good luck with the site.

@Loss Tee, make your social networking ~4x bigger.

thanks for the ideas Phresh - I guess I've always thought "get a user base - then worry about monetizing". But maybe that is backward thinking. Thanks for taking a look (and the compliments). I am getting emails logged but it has been a slow process.

thanks rothko - what do you mean? Facebook and twitter have really been the only means of trying to promote the site. I'm using an adder program on twitter - but struggling some on facebook.

The site has been officially 'live' for 1 week. In that time - here are the stats (either from the site - or from google analytics which started last thursday at ~3:30pm)
13 sign ups
6 of those started a mission
3 of those never validated their email address

300 visits
410 page views
76% bounce rate
2:21 average time on site
68% new visitors
212 unique visitors

1 week in and I've exhausted all of my "please look at my site" messages on my personal facebook - and I'm starting to get nervous that it won't have any legs. At warrior forum - I could hire one of those SEO guys - but I'm scared by the fact I know so little - but I've got to come up with something to continue on.

I've submitted 3 articles at ezine (2 approved so far - 1 pending)
I've got a blog going
Twitter with ~320 followers (most who auto follow back)
Facebook fan page with 30 likes (mostly friends)
Submitted to stumbled upon
Had 1 user who wrote us up in her blog
Have looked into 'press release' stuff - but unsure how legit that is - though I've seen what I consider way 'worse' sites get written up in real magazines, etc.

Now that the site has been developed - and the 'idea' is built - I'm finding out just how clueless I am!

Press releases can be ok very dependent on what youre talking about (if it its actually worth the ~$50 or w/e). 76% bounce is very high and troulbing (dont know anything about your content though). Youre right tho no way to learn like actually starting it

What does everyone generally think about social bookmarking for driving traffic to a blog and link baiting (digg, stumble, delicious, reddit)? Which have the most favorable mechanics (like twitter with follow back and search)?

seeems really high to me too. Sometimes the home page loads very slowly (5-7 seconds) and I wonder if people are bailing during that load process.

Also - I questions google analytics a little bit - as an example, I could have a user in Denver. I know that user has updated their mission yesterday (which would take 10-15 seconds at an absolute miniumum) - and google analytics shows that there was a user who went to the site yesterday from Denver - but it shows 0:00 as the time spent.

The other WF, Wicked Fire, has this nice thread What's the best service on WF?

loopchange seems a lot like stickk.com (which has more traction)

thanks! I'd never seen that before.

You're right - definitely similar - the financial angle is interesting (goes on an honor system and when a mission fails - they pay to a charity).

There is another I found called Habit jar which appears pay the site money if you fail your mission.

But stickk looks VERY good - and has tons of press. I'm not saying one is better than another - but www.loopchange.com is built more around message board / accountability / community - and theirs seems more 1 on 1


anyway - thanks again - a lot to look through on that site - and I will be.

Don't know if it's true or not - but on their wikipedia page it claims they started with 150K - and soon after raised 2 million $ more to get the site going..

That's a lot of money!

I have a first day rookie question.

So I bought the domain name "minisportsworld.com" with the intention of just writing about sports and improving my writing abilities. I'm not looking to make money or anything.

So I host it via Hostgator, and install Wordpress. The guide says to type in minisportsworld.com/wp-admin to get to the dashboard after installation. Every time I do that it goes to the site, which just shows that it is parked by GoDaddy. I have no idea how to get to the dashboard. Any help is appreciated.

er, that was supposed to say, "make your social networking buttons ~4x bigger."

like this, but don't use mspaint obv:

You need to log into GoDaddy and change the nameservers on the domain. You'll go into My Domains and click on minisportsworld and in the menu at the top select nameservers. Then click the button at the bottom that says "I have private hosting/nameservers" or something similar and you'll enter your HG nameservers.

The HG nameservers will be in your cPanel on the left sidebar towards the bottom. They'll look like this: ns173.hostgator.com and they'll be marked with "nameservers."

Once you put those into GD and hit select it'll take up to 2 hours to change. Then you can log into WP.