Review: Constant Content
Constant Content is a new service aiming to bridge the gap between website publishers and writers. How it works is writers join and submit their works for sale, if a sale occurs Constant Content takes their cut and handles payment and delivery. Overall it really makes the process easier for all involved.
One thing I really like about Constant Content is that it is geared specifically for website publishers. Very few sites exist that cater specifically to this group of people, but Constant Content is one of them. Quite frankly it looks like the site was made more or less as a result of the tremendous success many webmasters are achieving with Google Adsense. With Adsense all you really need is content and Constant Content provides it.
One of the most suprising things about Constant Content, for me anyways, was the size of their library. Admittedly this is a new site but they already have a large and capable group of authors working. I was quite surprised at both the depth and breadth of their article database. They have hundreds if not thousands of articles already and their mostly pretty good. They have articles on everything from Web Development to Gardening to Wedding Planning.
One nice feature is that you can request content to be written for you. I did this twice and within 3 days of each request I had atleast 3 submitted articles, that's fast by any sense of the word. In a way it was like a contest, multiple authors submitted work, and I chose the ones that sounded the best. I was also informed that you will soon be able to request changes and customizations to articles after purchase.
Things are not entirely smooth sailing though. While the content selection is large there is substantially more in certain categories than in others. It seems that categories that have received content requests described above have naturally filled out. I expect this to even out over time. Also, many of the articles are basic in nature, meaning they're short and do not go into very much depth. Long in depth articles are more likely to be found useful, and as such are more likely to be included in directories or otherwise receive link. So the short articles are somewhat disappointing.
The site also very much seems to be in beta, many features do not work or do not work correctly, but as with the content distribution I expect that to be fixed over time.
Naturally with duplicate content filters being used by search engines you do not necessarily want to publish an article that has been used more times than the village bicycle. Constant Content tackles this issue in two ways. For one, each submitted article is checked against various database and search engines to make sure it hasn't simply been copied from somewhere else (authors who do this are banned). They also allow you to purchase unique rights to articles, which will take the article off the site so no one else can buy it.
Pricing is mostly fair, but since each author sets their own price, prices do vary. I for one do not mind paying for quality content. Public domain content such as Wikipedia is free, but its also published everywhere so it does not add to the unique value of your own website. Also many free articles found elsewhere exist for nothing more than the self promotion of the author either their a signature nearly as long as the article or through the fact that the article itself promotes the author's business. Now Constant Content does offer free articles, and some of them are of the type I just described, but they are few.
Payment is by PayPal or with Credit Card through 2CheckOut. Delivery is almost immediate. Delivery can come in a variety of forms, pdf, doc, rtf, txt, html, in general though, even with html files, you will need to edit the markup for your website.
All in all I have to highly recommend Constant Content. There are a few glitches in their system still but it mostly works and it's a great easy source of good content for your website. I've personally bought 7 articles from them so far and I plan to buy some more.
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