I’ve only spent about half a decade now as an increasingly successful online marketer. However, during that period–over and over–I have learned the truth in the frequently mentioned cliche that content truly is king, no matter what the form of that content.

There are plenty of online sources of information addressing the important necessary talents of writers of web content. Those skills are not quickly learned, nor can they be cheaply found.

I happened to stumble across a free lance marketplace last evening. I don’t even remember how my browser ended up there. I was intrigued, though, so I started to look around the website at some of the projects that businesses had posted. I was appalled. (I won’t tell you the site, but I will say that it is not one of the two or three such venues that are most frequently mentioned.)

One business was looking for someone to help with search engine optimization by negotiating over a thousand one way links, all from ranked sites and all with keyword rich anchor text. A good plan, no doubt. Their top end of the budget for this work was (Are you ready for this?) $300! Oh yeah, they mentioned that they had tried to reach their goals before but hadn’t received good results. I wonder why…

More to the point was another company that was looking for 300 optimized five hundred word articles. This project had a more modest budget of $150. Could this explain all the sites with worthless content that give the Internet a bad name?

I suppose we all have to make our own mistakes. I ordered ten articles when I was new to this business. They were all to be written to my key phrase specifications. The price for this package: $70, a mere seven dollars an article. I felt as if I was getting a great deal, and I did wonder how they could do that much work for so little money. I found out when the articles were returned, on time as promised. Except for the key phrases, the articles were virtually identical. They weren’t similar enough to have been the results of spinning, but it was clear that the writer had not taken any time to research. I wasted a couple hours trying to rewrite them, correct the many errors and salvage something from my investment. I finally just gave up and deleted them all.

Think of it this way: Our content, whether it is published on our own sites or distributed to other sites with links leading back to us, reflects on our business. If we have shoddy content, our customers are going to rightly wonder about our dedication to detail. We must be wise in our content syndication efforts.

I only had to learn once from my $70 mistake. While I am careful with all of my expenses, I do not try to skimp on content. If you pay the price for junk, you will receive junk in return.

I have an acquaintance to operates a number of retail sites. He says that he learned his lesson (as it seems we all must). He has found some excellent writers. He pays $50 for each 500 word article and reports that it is money well spent. I’m absolutely sure that his business is much more profitable than the company who is offering fifty cents an article or the business that is willing to pay less than fifteen cents per “quality” link.

I genuinely hope some of you will learn from the errors in this regard that my friend and I made. However, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll have to learn the hard way just like the rest of us–by making your own mistakes.