Website articles work.  They provide valuable, often interesting, and frequently compelling information that help turn surfers, browsers, and “looky-loo” shoppers into buyers.  Articles — high-quality, relevant articles — also make websites a more attractive search-engine “buy” because adding them satisfies the engines’ preferences for “fresh, rich” content.

So the question is not is an articles section on a website a good idea.  In most cases, it rather obviously is. What the question really is, is this:  Where do articles come from?

Hhhhmmmm.  Does the stork bring them?  Noooo …  Do you clip them out of books and magazines and glue them onto a page in your website?  Not unless you want to risk getting sued for copyright infringement and penalized by search engines for stealing content that isn’t exactly legit.

Well, then.  How about fast-food content mills where you select a topic from a menu, shout your choice into a plastic clown’s mouth, and pick up your article at the next window?  Is that where you get them?

Yes, you can get articles at the local Spam-In-The-Box or Copy Chef, but GoogleBot and its cousins at the other engines know the selections even better than you do.  Specifically, they know how many thousands of websites are running those identical poorly written, dollar-menu articles and how totally generic and non-specific to your website they are.

Putting junk food on your site will not get you a higher search-engine page rank, it may even erode the one you already have.  Grease burgers and kangaroo meat won’t impress your customers either, they’d almost always rather have prime beef.

Frankly, the only way to get really quality articles on your site is to either write them yourself — assuming you’re a good writer acquainted with the latest SEO copywriting techniques — or hire a qualified professional to custom write them for you.

Let’s assume that you majored in creative writing in college and spent three years as a junior copywriter at an ad agency before deciding that what you really wanted to do in life was operate an online jewelry store.  In other words, you’ve got more than enough chops to write your own articles. Now the question becomes, is it cost-effective for you to do so?

To find out, let’s walk through a create-an-article scenario, kind of a war game that uses words instead of guns.

Here’s our objective:

• Create a new and unique 350-word article on the history of cufflinks.
• Reveal when cufflinks were originated and how they were used.
• Highlight the significance cufflinks represented in identifying certain events.
• Establish when the personalization of cufflinks with monograms began.
• Construct the article with content that is optimized for customers and search engines alike.

That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?  Only 350 words.  And we’ve got a broadband internet connection. No need to travel all the way to the New York Public Library and spend three or four days behind the lions doing research.  It’s a snap.

Maybe, but there are two strings attached.  One:  You have to find and use multiple sources for your historical information because if you take it all from one or two sites Google and the other search engines are likely to tag it as duplicated content.  Two:  As is the case with most article topics, there is no “one” or even two or three websites or books that contain facts covering all the aspects of this article.  In-depth, or at least, medium-depth research is required.

Shall we go to work by trying a search for cufflink history?  Wow, look at all those jewelry companies that have pages of corporate history online.  My, there seem to be hundreds of museums and custom jewelry makers selling replicas of old cufflink designs.  And all those eBay vendors who seem to think the Lucky Strike cufflinks granddad got free with a carton of cigarettes during the Depression have real “historic” significance.

How are we ever going to discover if the first cufflinks were made in Babylon or ancient Egypt by sorting through this mess?  Guess what?  We’re not.  We’re going to have to refine and research and refine and research indefinitely until we get an answer.  We may even have to search every period of history we can think of — from the Victorian era back to a thousand years B.C. — using “cufflinks” as an added search term.

And that’s just the beginning of the job.  Consider talking about the significance cufflinks represented in identifying certain events.  Did Hannibal reward his hard-working elephant wranglers with celebratory cufflinks after they successfully crossed the Alps? (He didn’t.)  Did Ronald Reagan present his top one-half-of-one-percent campaign workers with solid-gold commemorative cufflinks after his re-election campaign? (He did.)

And how long would it take you to find those things, or a few other examples like them, out?

Have we gotten to monograms yet?  And the invention of French cuffs, without which the use of cufflinks would probably have disappeared before the beginning of the 20th Century?  And when were double cufflinks — two identical buttons connected by a chain — first used?

Unlike a true war game, the article-writing game is basically single-player.  If you want to work through the cufflink scenario, you don’t need our help.  We can, however, give you some scoring guidance.  If you can do the research to write a really killer cufflinks article — one that meets the requirements listed above — in under 12 hours you’re an expert.  Unless you’re getting rich selling jewelry, you probably should go back to your ad agency career.

Of course, that ten or 11 or 12 hours is just the research time. You still have to write, edit and proofread the article.  Say, 16 hours — two full work days — for the entire job.

Now, at last, the real questions.  What would you have to give up, in terms of income lost and work undone, to take two days out of your business week every time you wanted to add an article to your site?  And what is your time as CEO of your online business worth?  Is it worth more or less than the salary you would get cleaning shower stalls at Motel Six or flipping pancakes at iHop?

Or, to phrase the question another way, what is your annual gross income?  If you earn more than $40,000 a year, your average daily workday income is about $156.  If you devote two days to writing an article, it’s costing you over $300 and, almost certainly, creating a backlog of other work that will make the next day or two more difficult than they have to be.

And, unless you are the skilled professional — or at least semi-professional — wordsmith and SEO expert described earlier, the completed article is unlikely to work as well, sell as hard, improve your rankings as much, as one written by a full-time copywriter.

Hire a professional or write it yourself?

Good question with an easy answer.

Hire a professional and devote the two days you save to taking care of your real business — running your website.  Or, take the two days off and go fishing.  Either way, you’ll be making much better use of your time.

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