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Comment by Azkar | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like he's doing quality work, really. There's no secret. He claims to have a GREAT copy writer for his niche and provides them with the exact info they are looking at google for. Do that for a few hundred well written articles and any site will rank well too.

But a google algorithm change could definitely crush his income.

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Do that for a few hundred well written articles and any site will rank well too.

There, no secret. That is the barrier to entry. 100 hundred well written articles will probably cost a good $10,000 on the mid/low end. Not many people want to spend $10,000 then see if Google will send them traffic.

He mentioned he spent $7,000 on articles before seeing any affiliate income.

That doesn't mean that he didn't get any income until he spent the whole 7k. It could be that he spent the 7k over 6 months period (assuming 1-2 article per week for $100 each). He could have started earning a few hundreds of dollars and re-invested in his business.

It took him 4 months to reach $100/month in income and 6 months to earn $1,000/month, so it was an outlay of thousands of dollars before seeing enough income to pay for itself.

That is way low and you're not going to get anything decent for that price. Honestly, what you get might not even be worth publishing.

I've done this as a full-time job (both in-house and in an agency setting) and you're off by about an order of magnitude for anything worth paying for.

From American and Western European English Speaking writers, this is true.

I have paid 5-10c per word for articles between 500-1000 words, that were all very well written in Eastern European countries by expats and fluent English speakers.

A few colloquialisms needed editing out, but if you are getting only 5 articles a week, you are spending $300-500, and 1-2 hours of editing per article if that (which includes formatting, adding hyperlinks, etc).

Google does not care about how much content you have; Google's claim that "the best way to rank is to have good content" is a lie, they've been completely gamed for the last decade.

Google cares only about how many links that content has. Links do not occur organically, especially not in the age of social media, where most natural non-commercial activity is locked away in walled gardens. Content owners have to actively pursue them. When serious competitors come in, they will have their own "private blog networks" that cross-link and crush any hand-made link networks.

SEO is a lie. You have to spam to win whenever there is significant competition.

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