I’m not a fan of spam through this site’s contact page, and I become even more aggravated when I receive the same spam message twice within 3 days, as was the case with messages received from TheArticleFactory.com
Both messages contained the exact same message:
Hi, If you need articles for your website make sure you come visit us at the Article Factory. We have an excellent team of writers and we always deliver fast usually within hours. And we have a special right now for you to try out our service for only $1 an article!
The subject lines between the two spam contacts were slightly different with one labeled “Articles for $1” and one titled “$1 Articles”
Both messages came from the same email address: articlewriters35@yahoo.com with one coming from “Peter” and one coming from “Ralph”.
Although I would rarely, if ever, patronize a company that uses my contact form for spam purposes, I did go to The Article Factory to check out the site and was not impressed.
I guess you get what you pay for. $1 an article, even with a 5 article minimum purchase, is extremely cheap and the lack of quality in their sample articles illustrates exactly why. Some articles are short and some have lousy grammar. I tend to butcher grammar myself, but I’m not trying to sell you articles, even if they are only a buck a piece. 😉
Their FAQ is pretty straightforward but does raise a few questions.
Q: Why is it 1 keyword per 5 articles?
A: That’s because our main business is providing tons of content in bulk. Our articles are the lowest price online. You can make separate orders for more keywords. All articles will be random content on the same keyword.
So, in reality, you’re ordering 5 articles for $1 each. There’s certainly nothing wrong with having a minimum order, but again I see some serious questions as far as article quality goes.
FYI, “tons of content in bulk” doesn’t necessarily translate to quality content, nor does it necessarily translate to quality traffic or conversions.
Q: Whats a good keyword??
A: Its very important to choose your keywords wisely. We take your keyword and provide you different articles on the same subject. Your keywords should be short 1 or 2 word keywords. PLEASE NO LONG TAIL KEYWORDS OR “RARE NICHE” KEYWORDS! GIVE US COMMON KEYWORDS!
If a long Tail keyword is provided we withhold the right to shorten it to provide better content
Choose a good keyword like this:
Good Keyword: HGC Diet
Good Keyword: Wedding Planner
Not like this:
Bad Keyword: HGC Diets before my wedding
Bad Keyword: Wedding planners in Italy
Why do they restrict clients to keywords that aren’t long tail? I’d guess that it is because there would be far too much effort and research required to create articles which could be passed off as “quality”
Long tail keywords are actually much easier to rank for and can drive much more targeted traffic, especially for those of us in the affiliate marketing niche.
Let’s take for example The Article Factory’s versions of “good keyword” HGC Diet and “bad keyword” HGC Diets before my wedding.
Take a minute to do a search on both keywords and see the results and which sites you would be competing against. Like most people, I searched in Google.
Using the shorter HGC Diet keyword, you are going up against some heavyweights like WebMD, Doctor Oz, Yahoo, and the Mayo Clinic. Unless your site is already pretty popular, this is going to be much more of an uphill battle than if you used the bad long tail keyword, which doesn’t have quite the same stiff competition.
Even if it’s only $1 per article, wasted money is still wasted money. 😉 If you want to outsource article writing, you’d most likely be better off hiring a freelancer for a little more money and targeting more reasonable keywords to rank for.
The Article Factory states that its articles are
perfect for link building or filler for your websites
Filler, sure. But low quality, generic articles won’t be linked to by legitimate sites. Now, if you’re a blackhat running PBNs(Private Blog Networks), perhaps investing in hundreds or thousands of these types of articles might be worth looking into.
Final Thoughts
Spamming through contact forms soliciting clients is a pretty lowbrow form of marketing your services. If you’re great at content, wouldn’t it make sense that you could rank well enough by writing quality content to not need to go this route.
Feel free to read the sample articles at The Article Factory and decide for yourself just how “quality” the articles appear to be.
Trying to go the cheap and easy route rarely leads to success, and that’s exactly what buying articles from there would be attempting to do.
Although I can’t seriously recommend them, their articles are cheap enough for most people to test them out and see if anything comes of it.
In the long run, however, you’d be better off learning how to create your own content(maybe even using spam for the subject matter ;)) or outsourcing to a better quality site.
As for The Article Factory: spammers in my opinion, not necessarily scammers although some might feel otherwise about a site that spams in order to sell low quality, cheap content.
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2 Comments on "TheArticleFactory.com: spam, scam, or what?"
I ordered from there, they were not to bad for the price, they do at least deliver.
Thanks for the comment and feedback Jess.
I didn’t have much doubt they would deliver.
“Not too bad for the price” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but seems to go along with their articles being more about content for content’s sake instead of anything actually decent, interesting, or really uniqeu.
Thanks again and best wishes.