Creating an Article Writing Service

[Andy]

Hi Marco,

Thanks for starting this thread. No doubt there is a market for good content even though there seems to be an abidance of cheap writers around. As much as I hate to say this the key might be in a charge more/ pay more combination.

While I've thought of starting a service in a related niche, it's all speculation on my part.

Ajeet, I'd be interested to know how you think might have been better if you'd done anything differently.

Andy

[Ajeet]

Ajeet, I'd be interested to know how you think might have been better if you'd done anything differently.

Ok, here is my profound word of wisom

Creating a marketplace that solely relies on bringing buyers and sellers to one platform does exploit a business opportunity. But scammers / spammers / newbies etc start corroding that marketplace. Do not just be a marketplace, be more than that. Provide value added service. Make this scalable and you have a really solid business model.

Specific to writing service, try and embed the following: thorough plagiarism checks, writer reminders and project milestone managers, and above all editing of the submitted stuff. I think that you can get very large volumes of business at around $8 per 500 word articles. If you can manage that price and automate as many parts of your service as possible, you might have good business.

[mgallone]

For me, automation is the main problem. The main issue being- how and where to start?

[tke71709]

For me, automation is the main problem. The main issue being- how and where to start?

Until you can resolve that I wouldn't go any further.

Break down each step of the article selling process and see which steps you can automate and more importantly if you can get an off the shelf product to do it or if you have to get something custom coded.

Eventually you would probably have to go custom for an end-to-end solution but at the beginning there may be ways to automate different pieces with different solutions.

For example,

Placing for and paying for an order.

What can you automate for that?

You'll probably want a web form that will include certain fields and that users can submit that will accept and store their order for you to retrieve.

Look at shopping carts that can do this for you. Once you get the order out the backend you'll have to manually finagle it into the next part but that's a start compared to coding a system to do that from scratch.

[delta4]

I like system used by Constant Content - www.constant-content.com

You just need to adapt their system to lower prices on my opinion.

I recommend a custom system.

[mgallone]

Hi delta4. I have looked at that kind of model- however the expertise/funds in setting up a system like that are (perhaps significantly) out of my reach at the moment.