RSS Feeds: The Concept behind 'Post Your Own Articles'
People who have had websites for any great length of time, either static or dynamic (like blogs), know that the combined efforts of multiple people will always be more powerful than the efforts of one. The popularity of certain social networks proves it. The concept behind Post Your Own Articles is to take that kind of effort and channel it in a different direction.
Building Your Online Authority
One way to get ahead on the net is build an online authority for your name, your website or your particular objective. Continuously writing informative articles is one way to get the process started. Doing so on a new, single-author website is time-consuming and requires a lot more effort than doing it on a multi-author website.
If you are left on your own, even on a multi-author website, your chance to be successful may end up being a case of hit or miss. If you already have the background knowledge you need, you will probably be successful. If you don't, you won't.
This website, a multi-author blog, will be guided by someone who already has the necessary background knowledge and that person just happens to be me. I will not attempt to build my own ego — I have learned everything I know from the people out there with the right knowledge. Yes, there is such a thing as learning to do things the wrong way and there are plenty of people out there that are more than willing to lie to you.
This website is your opportunity to either build your online authority from scratch or reinforce your existing authority.
Pen Names and Pseudonyms
Using fictitious names, as in pen names, serves to provide a means of anonymity. Writers throughout history have used fictional names and the practice has served them well.
Why would anyone want to use a pseudonym instead of a real name? There are countless reasons including bad reputations under one name and not another. Aliases are legal in the real world (if you don't believe me, research the law in your own area) and I see no reason to place an unnecessary restriction against them in the online world.
Promoting Relevance
There are more "garbage" websites on the Internet than there are good ones and more seem to pop up every single day. Like pimples during puberty, they don't seem to go away.
I encourage, through this website, relevant linking to the good websites while prohibiting links to the bad ones. Only by following this practice will the "cream rise to the top". When you're searching for something on the Internet, you're looking for the most relevant information related to your search phrase. The last thing you want to see is a spam blog at the top of the results.
Making Money
As a new domain and a new website, this website will take time to establish its own authority with the search engines. The more articles written and the more people involved, the quicker the process will take place.
When this website starts drawing at least 100 unique SEARCH visitors per day, you will be allowed to place advertising on your articles — old articles as well as new. By keying on search visitors, this website will be much more powerful than any similar site and without all the fluff.
Adapting to Change
The search engine landscape, as well as the Internet landscape in general, is constantly changing. It is my intention to change this website to take advantage of changes when those changes will make the site more powerful or allow it to make more money. Needless to say, some changes are geared toward social sites and aren't worth messing with on a site like this.
Nevertheless, I am always open to suggestions. Use the contact page — that's one of the reason it exists.
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This is merely a placeholder comment so that FeedBurner has something to chew on. I don't like being shown up by "Mr. WordPress", so it simply had to be changed.
Hi RT!
When you stated that once the site receives 100 unique search visitors per day, that article writers will be allowed to place ads in their articles, can you clarify if that means advertisements in the form of something like Adsense, Amazon affiliate links, Clickbank links, etc and/or advertisements in the sense of allowing a link back to ones own site in order to get some link juice? I'm guessing the former?
Thanks!
AdSense is the priority. Other advertising will be handled case-by-case as I make sure certain pieces of code are in place. A link back is not really advertising.
Great now he wants us all to build article directories, jimminey crickets RM, why'd you have to go and start this idea.
First it was build a blog, next it was build a bunch of blogs,then it was build an authority blog, now its an article directory.
When is reccess doggone it?? I'm tired of homework and just want to play.
Ok now that that's out of the way, nice site RN when would you like me to start slamming you with articles?
I promise to try and cut back on all that foul language I've been using in this comment box.
You'll know if I'm really upset because the language de-evolves into things like crud and grumble.
Mary, Fay, Benjamin and whatever name's I've used in all these various places I've ended up.
You're silly.
It's RT dagnabit, not RM, RN or even RQ. I think you're just trying to push my buttons. Phew!
Anyway… not article directories. The category layout is the only thing that resembles article directories. Everything else is just like any other blog except… I moderate everything.
RT: How do you make money in all this? I mean I see you can add your own articles, and enjoy the benefits of the sites overall page rank once that builds up. But you will be putting in a lot of work relative to those benefits…
Trust me, Dave. I will make money. The larger percentage will go to contributors, but I will still make money. How much money I want to make is irrelevant. Nothing from nothing is nothing, but 10 percent of $10K is nothing to sneeze at.
I suppose if you get one ad per page as your own or something. I ask because I had planned a similar site at researcharticlesonline.com. I was also looking at some other similar concepts, only with a twist that I would be happy to share with you but not the whole world. I looked into Google's adsense api for sharing revenue (like Hubpages or Infobarrel does) and they require the site to have 100K pageviews per DAY before you can enter that program. And I might be wrong, but can you mix different adsense ids on the same page? so if the contributor has their adsense on the page, then you have to go with something else, which I guess is easy enough to do. So for my site I had been thinking basically of just what you have done here – letting the users do whatever they want on advertising as long as they do not link to bad neighborhoods, and then reserve for myself one top of page ad maybe, and just stick to affiliate products or other non per click ads. My only issue was working out systematic methods of making sure I was not getting duplicate content and not having people link to bad neighborhoods. Just looking at the links and checking Copyscape seemed like that might not be enough.
BTW, I have been to the Philippines – it is a wonderful place. You are very lucky to be able to live there. I went to high school in Singapore and really miss that side of the world.
If you are interested in discussing any joint projects then I would love to hear from you and share some of my ideas with you. I am a decent web programmer, and a reverent student of the Griz.
I'm surprised more people don't know about this: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/07/sharing-your-ad-space.html
I haven't decided which way I'm going to do it. It may be per post sharing or it may be switching to my own every X page view.
Hi RT,
So that's what you've been up to! I'll take a while to read through the requirements, but I expect you'll see me back here.
Maybe I'm being a bit dumb here, but I still don't get it.
The only difference I can see between this and any other article directory is that you (eventually) will allow my Adsense pub ID on my articles and that you will moderate stuff better than the average article directory.
Is that it?
How many article directory administrators know what the search engines are looking for? How many of them are willing to make changes that may cost them money while putting more money in the pockets of the contributors? How many of them have SEO experts as friends?
The main difference is that I care about your success as much as my own.
Ok there is something else I can't find, how do you edit a post that you made? I only get the option to "view" posts not to edit them.
Man I'm going to have to update my review again. It's getting kind of long with all the things that I can't find here.
I never was crazy about WordPress but I'll learn eventually, just have to keep asking questions.
You can't edit a post once it's been published. If not published, you should be able to edit while viewing.
BTW, as to sharing: bestcashcow uses the header (and maybe footer) for themselves. You get to display your own ads (typically adsense) alongside your articles or posted links.
There is another site articlep.com (I think) that has a method of showing ads 60/40 or something like that.
Frankly, I don't see a lot of revenue from them, but at least bestcashcow has some authority passed on through the links.
One thing, do you currently allow authors to install their own tracking code whether it is the Goog or something else?
I don't have it set up yet. I have a friend building a plugin that sets up 75/25 sharing so that you can change the codes on your previous articles along with the new ones. I'm not sure, but I think it will be on a per post basis, which can be a pain if you have a lot of articles.