As an experiment I set up an assignment at Amazon Mechanical Turk where I had the workers write an article about their experiences with Internet marketing and their attempts to make money online. I set a minimum word count of 200 with no maximum. There were no keyword restrictions or other parameters; they only had to maintain general topical relevance and not plagiarize from other sources. The pay rate was 50 cents for each article, with another 5 cents going to Amazon as commission for a total cost of 55 cents. I also paid out some bonuses for particularly high quality submissions, but for requesters this is always optional.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the submissions that I received were basically irrelevant garbage, and many more were simply copies of Wikipedia articles. Fortunately I was able to reject these and even block the associated workers from my assignments in cases where it became obvious that they were trying to “game the system” and actually lacked any real ability to write English text. However, at the other end of the spectrum I also had a few workers who clearly went above and beyond the requirements of the assignment and provided me with some genuinely interesting content that was good enough to be posted to a website with only minimal editing. Here are three of the recent submissions that would fall into the latter category.

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The main concern of this disorder is control – the sufferer cannot control his or her feelings of fear, worry, or anxiousness. And so the concept of the new techniques that are being recommended by many psychologists and psychiatrists today is also control – teaching patients to successfully control the said feelings with the use of mind and body exercises, herbal medicines, and other alternative treatments. Here are 5 of the top techniques being used today.

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To give you a sense of the large differences in efficiency between the two models, I have one finance-related niche site that has just topped $800 per month in revenue but contains only 20 pages of content and has not been updated for more than a year (other than approving comments posted by visitors). I also have several other narrowly focused sites that are moving through the $20-$100 per month range with approximately the same amount of content and no new posts for several months.

By contrast this eclectic “Internet marketing blog”, in spite of having over 1,460 posts with daily updates for four years and an average article length of 795 words, has seen its revenues moving mostly sideways within the $400-$500 per month range for almost two years. When we factor in the extra time and money spent on article procurement, daily postings including the necessary editing and proofreading, and attempting to monetize hundreds of pages with many different topics, the greater efficiency of the niche site model in terms of overall amount of revenue gained compared to the total expenditure becomes obvious.

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If you are like most marketing professionals, you are handling an increasingly larger workload, have fewer resources at your disposal, and are constantly looking over your shoulder for the hammer to drop if you don’t hit your targets for each quarter.

As today’s business world continues to look at ways to cut costs and marketing budgets continue to get slashed, many of the most successful marketing professionals are looking to brand a whole new product — themselves.

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