Outsourcing Content From Crowd Content: Are There Better Options?

A little insight into my life right now – I'm in the middle of moving house, and made the dumb decision to do it myself. I didn't realize how much junk I had lying around, and how much attachment I had to things that I hadn't looked at for 2 years. In other words, it's taken me a month to do so.

Adding on that I bought a fixer-upper house, I'm just swamped with work on the new place, so my publishing schedule has fallen behind. I have about 40 articles in drafts that need to be edited, and my research on Crowd Content is one of them. Well, it's time to get back in action and get this article out there. However, proceed with this one caveat!

I haven't put 100% effort into the review of outsourcing content at Crowd Content.  Here are my other, more in-depth articles on where to outsource content for your affiliate site.

So, rather than take you through the typical “building an argument” type of proof-based article I usually do, I'll just spit out the conclusion here in the beginning:

Crowd Content has a great user experience and a professional looking website. I chose a 2-start level, and was not very happy with the quality of the content. I paid $0.35 per word, or $50 for 1500 words. There are higher levels available, but since $50 for $1500 words is already “mid range” by my standard. For a professional, paying more is not out of the question, but for repetitive, churn and publish style content that I'm looking for, going to the higher tiers of writers will probably be out of the question.

The point of researching these services for me was to find a content service good enough outsource a website 100% and not have to edit, or to find one cheap enough that I could hire an editor to edit the content and still be under budget. Unfortunately, this level of quality (2-star) will absolutely need an editor, and paying a native write $10-$20 per hour to edit would bump me up to $70 per article, which is just too expensive to publish multiple times per week.

The rest of the content here is just my notes for now. I'd like to update with images and more text in the future, but for now, I need to get this draft out of my queue. In the meantime, UpWork is still my favorite place to build relationships with writers and create long term projects for building my affiliate websites.

enterprise vs self serve. enterprise for scaling content with help. Self serve for open order style

lots of detailed options for ordering content

a bit overwhelming for a simple article order but great for specific, scalable projects

can choose specific writers based on star rating and focus expertise

Writers can do “Writing” “Editing” or “Microtasks”

can create teams. UX has more of a feel of an “app” or writing team builder

can create regular scheduled content, organize by project. Would work for VPN style reviews; one vpn review per week.

“Campaigns” in beta. Could be cool to pre-plan content based around a template. Not sure how uploading world work. Would need team to get articles, then upload. Sounds expensive.

can add attachments to orders and communicate directly

difficult to have “open word count”, for “top X lists”

annoyingly resets to 3-star review when you edit project

choose open order vs direct order

has the “avoid something” feature. Which service is that similar to?

Posted order. Picked up in less than 2 minutes

delivered Apr 22 evening. not very high quality. 2 star. .035 per word. $50 for 1500 word article

Basically not very usable. Not complete, erroneous information.

cannot reject, but can ask for modifications. Will need major edits.