Let's put our "shady" hats on for a second.  What we're about to do isn't technically illegal, but it's slightly spammy:

We created a Content Mill to crank out tons of articles!

Sometimes this year I decided I wanted to get 10,000 visits per day on KopywritingKourse whether or not I published an article or not.  This means the traffic would have to come through organic search (Google, Bing, Yahoo) and clicks from referring websites.

Why 10,000 visits per day?  Because it's a great stream of traffic that allows the business to grow without direct input.  Based on the current numbers, here's the projected email signups for KopywritingKourse if we hit 10,000 organic visits per day:

On low days 3% of organic visitors signup to the email list:

10,000 X .03 = 300 free email signups per day.

On high days 5% of organic visitors signup to the email list:

10,000 X .05 = 500 free email signups per day. 

Getting 300 - 500 people a day to subscribe to my email newsletter is great, especially if those customers come to me organically (which means FREE)!

If the pace of new articles and traffic continues, by the end of this year KopywritingKourse should theoretically hit 10,000 organic visitors per day with no changes.

HOWEVER, I wanted to figure out some ways to maybe "boost" the delta acceleration of the traffic. So I asked myself:

"How can I 10x this growth?"

One of the conclusions I came to was building a Content Mill.

A "Content Mill" is a system designed to pump out a shit-ton of articles.  This could mean either a huge network of paid writers, or unpaid guest posters.

A content mill doesn't care if the articles are good, it just plays a number game to get articles ranked.

How A Content Mill Works:

Let's say a content mill can create 100 articles in a month, here's how it plays out:

• 100 articles are published per month.
• 10% of those articles "bubble to the top" and start ranking in the search engines or gain social traction.
• 10 articles now rank well in the search engines or bring in organic clicks.

Now this may seem like a silly way to publish since 90% of the articles are failures, but if you think about what Forbes, Business Insider, and a bunch of other "large media brands" do....it's exactly this!!

• Explanation how Forbes Contributor Network works.

• Explanation how Business Insider Contributor Network works.

Forbes recently put out a note essential tip-toeing around saying, "We need more eyeballs so we can sell more advertising!!"

"In the past few months there’s been a drastic move toward ad viewability — in other words, advertisers only paying for the ads we can prove that people see. In addition, advertisers are increasingly buying premium ads for new content, not old.

To keep pace with these changes we need a reset on the way we’ve paid our contributors. Starting April 1, 2016 we’ll pay the same rate we now pay per visitor to content that’s within 90 days of publication. We’ll pay 25% of that amount for visitors to content more than 90 days old."

Basically what they're saying is:

Networks like this that have large "contributor networks" pump out 1,000's of articles PER DAY.

These brands will have something like 20,000 contributors required to publish 4 articles a week.  This equates to 80,000 articles a month, or over 2,500 articles per day.

Let's say only 10% of those articles break out of the mold and gain some traction, that's 250 articles per DAY that get traction!

Nevermind the fact that 90% of the articles suck ass, these large publishers still get 250+ articles a day from their contributor network alone that get a fair amount of publicity!!

This shows that creating a Content Mill isn't necessarily the most efficient way about creating hit articles, but it's definitely a model that has worked for SOME companies.

So.....let's try making our own Content Mill! (Kontent Mill)?

Let's make our Kontent Mill!

As a side-experiment I decided to create a little Kontent Mill.

I knew for sure that 90% or more of the articles produced would suck at first.  But that's part of the game: Playing the numbers.

In 4 easy steps I had a content mill up and running that didn't require me to write anything at all:

STEP #1.) Target relevant traffic and keywords.

Getting 10,000 hits per day means NOTHING unless people are signing up for the email list or buying products from me. If it doesn't bring me money, then I don't care. This means I don't want to attract the WRONG CROWD.

If I write clickbait articles on recent celebrity divorces, that will surely get some clicks, but it won't bring the right audience.

So the traffic needs to be targeted to the fields of marketing, sales, and copywriting.

I paid someone on Fiverr.com to fish me up 50 articles related to writing and copywriting (kind of like I did here). I got back a big ole list of keywords:

So I knew WHAT to write, but writing that many articles by myself?  YEESH!

STEP #2.) Get other people to write the 50 articles ($445.25).

I already got stuff to do bruh....so I can't be the one making all these articles! If I wanted the Kontent Milll to post 1,000 articles per year, there's no way I could do that myself. Therefore I cannot be the one initially making the articles.

Instead I hired someone to be the organizer of all the content, and gave them a blank check to go hire writers on Fiverr to do the writing.  I've used Fiverr before to do a myriad of different tasks include got a blog post written on Fiverr for only $5.50, and it worked quite well.

Checkout a portion of the orders we placed:

We tried to keep it cheap and get only $5 gigs. We used several freelancers multiple times, and sometimes ordered extra fast delivery. Total cost for articles was $445.25.

I ain't gonna lie, if I had to write all these boring-ass articles I would've blown my brains out.

Thankfully there's people out there who will trade a small amount of money to pump out an average to low quality post for $5.00, and they completed every single article for me!

HOORAY TO THROWING MONEY ($445.25) AT THE PROBLEM!

NOW......the quality of these posts kind of sucked balls.  And rightfully so!  We were paying people on Fiverr the lowest acceptable amount for each article, so you're not gonna get brilliant work done.

I was pleasantly surprised that not one article came back to us with plagiarism (we used this plagiarism checker for each article). I for sure thought 50% of these would come back positive for plagiarism and be unusable. They all came back legit-looking enough.

Onwards......

STEP #3.) Post the articles to a "Hidden" part of the site.

I didn't want the blog homepage to be cluttered up with enthralling posts such as "Prepositional Phrase Examples."

So we put them in a section of the KopywritingKourse site called "Writing Guides" and put it here:

https://copywritingcourse.com/guides/

Here's all the articles we got made for the Writing Guides section:

• How to write a two weeks notice

• How to write a play
• How to write an editorial
• How to write a postcard
• How to write about yourself
• How to write a sermon
• How to write a receipt
• How to write a journal entry
• How to write an acceptance letter
• How to write a reference letter
• How to write a case study
• How to write a follow up email
• How to write an editorial
• How to write a best man speech
• How to write a response / reaction paper
• How to write faster
• How to write a cover letter for an internship
• How to write a hook
• How to write about yourself
• How to write an opening statement
• How to end an email
• How to start a conclusion
• How to write a cover letter for a college internship
• How to write a letter of recommendation for a student
• How to write a good hook
• How to write a clincher sentence
• How to write a personal mission statement
• How to write a graduation speech
• How to write a critical review
• How to write a book summary
• How to write a personal statement for medical school
• How to write a pitch for a magazine / editor
• How to write a LinkedIn recommendation
• How to write a profile for a dating site
• How to write a sponsorship letter

We actually ran out of relevant articles to write, so we capped out around 38 articles in this section.

We then made another section called "The Glossary" where we defined different writing terms:

https://copywritingcourse.com/glossary/

• Allusion Examples

• Juxtaposition Examples
• Euphemism Examples
• Sonnet Examples
• Prepositional Phrase Examples
• Examples of Alliteration
• Career Objective Examples
• Complex Sentence Examples
• Argumentative Essay Examples
• Allegory Examples

We made 10 articles here before stopping.  A lot of the traffic from these articles would most likely come from high school students looking up a word.

These articles for the most part all suck.  BUT, that's the game we're playing here (and why I forewarned you this "sneaky experiment" to boost traffic is slightly spammy).

STEP #4.) Wait and see what "bubbles to the top."

Any content mill expects that 90% or more of the articles will suck, but if 10% of the articles gain traction (either by social shares, website shares, or SEO rankings), then it was a success.

• If you make 50 articles and 10% stick, that's 5 articles that worked.
• If you make 100 articles and 10% stick, that's 10 articles that worked.
• If you make 200 articles and 10% stick, that's 20 articles that worked.
• If you make 300 articles and 10% stick, that's 30 articles that worked.
• If you make 400 articles and 10% stick, that's 40 articles that worked.
• If you make 500 articles and 10% stick, that's 50 articles that worked.
• If you make 1,000 articles and 10% stick, that's 100 articles that worked.
• If you make 2,000 articles and 10% stick, that's 200 articles that worked.

It often takes 6-12 months for an article to start "bubbling to the top."

For example, this humorous piece I wrote on how to scam people took about 3 months to start gaining some real traction in the organic rankings. Then after 6 months started to take off! It peaked around 9 or 12 months later.

This single post has brought in thousands of visitors, thousands of email signups, thousands of ranking search engine keywords.....all from one post that was free for me to write (although requires approximately 12 hours of work over several days):

Scam Post Lifetime Stats:

Everyday this one piece of content brings me several hundred new visitors.

Everyday this one piece of content brings me email signups.

Everyday this one piece of content keeps bringing in search engine traffic.

Everyday this one piece of content exposes my work to a new audience.

....all for free!

THAT is the power of a good piece of content.

However these Content Mill posts we cranked out were mostly huge pieces of crap.  Let's see how they did:

Results of the Content Mill Experiment:

Now let's take a look at the results of our shit-tastic articles we bought for $5.00 each:

Content Mill Guides Stats:

These stats are horrifically bad!!!!

What's even worse is the bounce rates are SKY HIGH (often 100%) meaning every single person who visits the page from a search engine immediately leaves, and the email signup rates are pretty much 0%!!!  These stats suck suck suck!!!

Even posts I personally consider "not my best work" rack up far better numbers in a single day than all of these combined.

The "Glossary" we made has even more horrific stats.  They're so bad it's actually quite comical:

Glossary Stats:

Needless to say, so far this Content Mill idea has fallen flat, at least in the short term. I still think the idea can work, but it doesn't seem like something to invest more time in at this stage.

By publishing maybe 20 more good articles this year, we'll get to the 10,000/day mark just publishing at our normal pace.

Content Mills tend to work when a higher percentage of the articles gain traction.  In this case the traction rate was so low, and the quality low, it doesn't seem to be profitable to continue.

However for reputable brands like Forbes, their strong brand name allows them to get "guest contributors" that make some reasonably good articles.  Most of them suck, but at least 10% of the articles output are good.

As a much smaller company, it'll be harder for us to get the sheer scale Forbes can get.  Also, our business model isn't dependent on the sheer number of views the site gets.  This means a Content Mill might not be the best model to spend time and money on.

So it's been a VERY short amount of time, however I think there's a solid conclusion I've made for the content mill:

Stop spending time and money on it, and go back to creating few (yet higher quality) posts!

Hopefully you learned something and enjoyed this post!

Sincerely,

Neville Medhora - Copywriting Course Kurator

P.S. What do you think about big content mills?  Like em?  Hate em?  Worked for one? Got questions I can answer?