Content Investment and Returns

By ‘content investment’ I am referring to purchasing written content for your Website.

With Websites (See virtual real estate post) I always recommend building bigger as opposed to several sites and domains. Once your site starts building trust with search engines, mainly Google, you want to keep expanding on the same domain name. So as long as your topic is not too tight you can usually continue to find new material to add to the site.

On my largest and oldest Website I test different types of related content to see what brings higher returns. Lately I have tested sections and content on areas of study, job types, information on different countries and also scholarships (scholarships in Spanish, areas of study and job types in English and country information in both languages). My tests are done just with Google AdSense to monetize pages.

I have a very good writer who does excellent work for just $5 per article. He lives in the Philippines. In fact he has now hired a small team to deliver more articles.

So basically I am building my virtual property for more passive cash flow. (It is much easier and less hassle than real property!) Here are some rough results:

Country guide - monthly cash flow: €500 Euros/month – total invested €3150 – yearly return: 190%. This section has been running for a while and is consistently bringing it that amount.

Job/Career type articles – monthly cash flow: €35 Euros/month – total invested €443 – yearly return: 94%. This section is only a few months old so pages need time to settle and get more traffic from search.

Areas of study articles – Monthly cash flow: €25 Euros/month – total invested €320 –yearly return: 93%. This section is also only a few months old.

As long as you keep building on the same domain, all the pages of that domain should continue to receive a steady flow of traffic from Google. Of course, results will change depending o many factors.

I have other sites that struggle to get traffic and spending on content doesn’t produce the same return. But again, if you have a site well positioned in a niche with good advertising volume (most niches) investing in content brings great returns as you can see. It beats out just about anything.