Allow me to tell you this story. There has been a controversy on one of the forums I’m a member of regarding the quality of the articles that one should maintain for the article submission and I decided to make a post out of it here.
When I just came here, I started working construction as most immigrants.
We were installing vinyl siding and after I learned the trade my crew would always be the best. I demanded the highest quality from my guys and would make them tear down the entire wall and re-side it in order to be absolutely perfect.
There was this builder who we would side the houses for for a few years in a row. And again, my quality was just like in the text book - unprecedented.
This one time we were to busy and he had to use some other crew - two rednecks with one busted step-ladder, one of them was my former supervisor who was well-known for being a useless idiot when it comes to a vinyl siding installation (that's him on the picture from the post about "Anthropology..."). Every time he screw something up and I would point it out to him, he would say "I don't care! Can't see it from my house, all right?"
So this time his crew sided the house and got paid exactly the same money as I would.
I went to check out the job
after they were done and it took me just a few minutes to find a whole bunch of ridiculous screw-ups. I didn't even have to look for them, they were right there in my face when I just approached the house.
So the builder was there and I asked him if he was disgusted by this quality and if he finally understands what a unique people my employees are.
He said that the quality was exactly the same and he doesn't understand what I'm talking about.
After that I scaled down to what we call "production quality" - visually almost identical for the consumer, but much less time-consuming for me. That's where I was able to stop working physically myself and finally started making money.
Another example.
I enjoy cooking a lot and I would often invite my guys over and cook something impressive and we would have a good time and play some pool and have a few drinks.
That particular time I cooked, I think, Pollo Alla Rustica, elaborate dish that takes knowledge and time to cook and present accordingly.
When I served it, two guys immediately requested ketchup.
Like if they were in a Burger King eating French fries for 99 cents!
It would've been less offensive if they would've just stood up and pissed in their plates!
I bet they would have been as satisfied if I gave them just some lame hot dogs!
That was another time when I made a decision to stick with a "production quality".
When it comes to articles - I've written articles myself for which I received an "otta-boy" from published writers, and I've also outsourced article-writing to different groups of people with different price-tags and different levels of quality. The worst case was a bunch of very inexpensive writers from India who supplied me with a few sets of fraises, each of which would be a very properly-built English sentence, but all together they would be just a senseless garbage. All of those "writers" would advertise themselves as "article writers."
I think that it's great if you are passionate about the subject and you know how to express yourself and you have actually interesting ideas and thoughts, but I honestly believe that for our purposes the "production quality" of articles will do just fine.
Average Internet marketer would have difficulties to come up with a well written, engaging article. We are not journalists and we rarely possess the skill.
Most of us are not writers and when we are trying to achieve particular results with article submission and have to write large volumes of articles I seriously doubt that the final results will be very impressive from the art stand point, but they will do just fine for our purposes.
It obviously will depend on the niche you are working and therefore the clientele that you have to deal with.
I'd like to think of an article (in our case) as just a format of a sales page (if you don't like using the term "sales page" here, lets call it "a-bunch-of-visual-or-auditory-triggers-designed-to-make-a-person-click-the-link-and-make-us-a-few-bucks") required by the publisher we are working with in each particular case: they accept articles - we convert it into an article, they want video - we convert it into a video file, pod cast - there you go, press-release - we can do it as well.
I still cook complex meals for my wife and when I do some repairs around the house I'm very precise, but for everybody else - "production quality."
