Magazine editors store un-used queries in a “slush pile.”  This gives them an area where they can pull from ideas submitted to write articles for their mags.

But on the Internet, this “slush pile” takes a very different form, one that is actually kind of weird when you think about it.

I wonder, what would a blogger think if he/she had to pay $1.00 a word to have a blog post written for content?  Would we have the same Internet we have today (content mills, autoblogs, and some other low-level content) if that was the “standard”?

I don’t think so.

What about article directories?  What if the standard was to get your byline AND get paid 50 cents to $1.00 a word to submit to Ezinearticles?  Hmmm…

Sure, your content would have to be high quality, but overall, the Internet landscape might be different if there wasn’t low-level, low-pay/no-pay content being so easily distributed (obviously, not all low-paid content is low-level, but writers should hold themselves to higher standards IMO).

And obviously, if you have your own blog, you wouldn’t pay yourself to write your own content, but to leverage and scale the blog, guest posts could be paid for, product reviews would fall into a different category, and overall, I think the Internet would be far better off.

So, think about this today, are you writing for the slush pile (I have in the early days)?  Are you an editor that pays $2 – $5 an article “just to get content”?

I say, let’s raise the bar everyone.

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