Journal-An article directory, can be it used?

[iwodaveh]

So I finally decided to make this a journal (the main reason I’m doing this is so that I have the motivation I need.. a daily update is a great way to do this)

The deal
Owned a website for 3 years and never bothered to do anything about it at all. Reason I'm posting about it here is that I have to have the motivation to go about doing it.


Background

• 
  I own a website for the last 3 years (the site is this) as you can see the main page is for my content writing services that I plan to launch later on (I did manage to do some business from here, but never got around to actually doing any promotions for it… get to that much later on)

• I'm mainly referring to the link www.malpri.com/articles Basically this was a site where I created a free registration for users and they could post up their own articles there. (Ezinearticles, in other words). I logged in the other day and found that I had over 1000 articles that were pending review by me (since I needed to approve them before they go live)… honestly I was shocked about it, so I decided that I already had the content, now I need to do something about it so that I can get some cash flow in which could then be used on some other websites of mine.

Done so far
Installed some better WP plugins for this to get off the ground


Future plans

• I was going through the ezinearticles site and realized that there are a thousand other sites like this on the web with none as famous as EZA(in terms of PR, juice etc..) what would make mine stand out?

• This got me thinking, rather than creating another EZA site, I could try to blend in some features of hubpages (which eventually would allow users to get a percentage sharing of adsense that I make so as to encourage them to post more….. still working it out, sounds good, but could fall right through!)

• 
  A better WP theme (currently use arras, perhaps something on the lines of hubpages?) still not come up with a good enough theme

• 
  Create a membership site (like how you have premium EZA) the only problem is that I have no idea what I would give them so that users pay for the membership…. More brainstorming required for this

Questions
Monetize: how the heck do we do this?

Keywords: if this were any ordinary site, I could just punch stuff directly into the Google keywords tool and bang, out would pop stuff... but this is an article directory cum hubpages site; what do I use for keywords? Do I use try and rank each page for keywords and then do link building for those, (which would become quite a bit and let’s face it, I'm giving free links for other peoples kw’s) or do I simply concentrate on using stuff like ‘free article directory’ ‘submit your articles’ etc… kinda dull, you know.


What plugins to use?
Basically I was searching for, but to no avail plugins that could do the following:

• Post length (contributors can’t submit an article unless they have 600 words in the article or so)

• 
  Keywords (can’t submit articles unless their keyword is around 3%

• 
  Automatic kw generator (like what EZA does currently… you type in the article and then you get those words which have the highest % to add in as tags/kw’s

Resolutions

• Do not want to create a site just for adsense (of course that is the goal); wanna create something of value so that users come back

• 
  Will not create a site that has all the categories on the home page (like how EZA currently has….)

• 
  Main reason for this is that I try to use myself as a test dummy (when I visit EZA it’s because I always get to it via a direct link to the article, I almost never visit the homepage and browse through the links of the 1000’s of categories present there…) why waste space. What hubpages has is way better, they have images that has higher % of click through

• 
  Concentrate on the quality, it can’t be crap like what EZA does (this is gonna be tough since I'm gonna have to go through all the 1000 articles myself

• 
  Build a reputation online

Will post updates whenever I can

 

[BlogHue]

I'll have a ton of input for you on this, but I am loaded with work right now. Off of a quick glance -

1. Your existing domain is brandable, get rid of your content writing services if you're looking to establish a commercial articles directory. Or if you're ranking and have already built up a strong clientele and cannot afford rebranding your service, find another domain which is brandable for what you're intending with this service.

2. The link to the subsection you posted points to a Missing Page.

3. Your current design sucks - even for an article writing service's website. Either understand and analyze wordpress and find a suitable theme, break it, optimize it, customize and slap it up on the site or find someone else to do it for you.

4. People submit articles to article directories or UGC sites such as Squidoo or Hubpage for only two reasons, either to get the pages to rank and funnel traffic or to pass a tremendous amount of link juice to their own sites. For this you need a solid site architecture and some really really really beautiful onsite SEO. Get your site together and get in touch with Ice2Eskimos on this forum, he knows his shit when it comes to onsite. You will also need to build a solid link profile which is completely whitehat, I apologize but I won't be able to make any sort of suggestions for that. That part is going to be trial and error for you, better build your own properties and test out a lot of sub-tiered links.

5. Wordpress Plugins are not going to cut it for you if you intend to get serious traffic and/or brandability. You'll need a lot of custom coding that will assist you in rivaling what your existing competitors have already figured out (Hint - Social )

See what you can take off of this.

 

[iwodaveh]

Hey BlueHue, thanks a lot for all the advice that you provided

I'll have a ton of input for you on this, but I am loaded with work right now. Off of a quick glance -

1. Your existing domain is brandable, get rid of your content writing services if you're looking to establish a commercial articles directory. Or if you're ranking and have already built up a strong clientele and cannot afford rebranding your service, find another domain which is brandable for what you're intending with this service. I thought of that as well, my one and only concern was that it would mess up my webmaster/analytics codes. What i mean is that currently GA/webmaster points to the main and subdomain separately, If I make the subsection as the main won't I have to start again for GA?

2. The link to the subsection you posted points to a Missing Page. can you simply type in that link.. it works for me

3. Your current design sucks - even for an article writing service's website. Either understand and analyze wordpress and find a suitable theme, break it, optimize it, customize and slap it up on the site or find someone else to do it for you.Yea, I was wondering what else I could use, like I mentioned, currently I use the arras theme on the subdomain (just a thought, it's still called a subdomain right? or is a subdomain only a xx.aaa.com

4. People submit articles to article directories or UGC sites such as Squidoo or Hubpage for only two reasons, either to get the pages to rank and funnel traffic or to pass a tremendous amount of link juice to their own sites. For this you need a solid site architecture and some really really really beautiful onsite SEO. Get your site together and get in touch with Ice2Eskimos on this forum, he knows his shit when it comes to onsite. You will also need to build a solid link profile which is completely whitehat, I apologize but I won't be able to make any sort of suggestions for that. That part is going to be trial and error for you, better build your own properties and test out a lot of sub-tiered links.
Thanks for the info, currently I have no money to pay Ice so I'm trying to do the onsite myself... I found this link online, the diagram makes some sense On-Page SEO Best Practices | SEOmoz

5. Wordpress Plugins are not going to cut it for you if you intend to get serious traffic and/or brandability. You'll need a lot of custom coding that will assist you in rivaling what your existing competitors have already figured out (Hint - Social )
WP was the only thing I could come up with, still trying to find a really good theme though or something that I can add in to make it more robust

See what you can take off of this.

 

[BlogHue]

BlueHue?

 

[iwodaveh]

Update

So what have I done so far? I'm still trying to get the website in correct working condition. I have decided that I'm gonna stick with wp only (seems to be much easier)

Got a few questions on my mind…

Can we use duplicate copy? Turns out most of the articles that I got on my site (under the pending status) are submitted on websites like EZA and others… will G blacklist moi?
Need to search for a plugin that can do this: Number of words in post (for instance contributors have to submit posts that are >500 words and it should suggest keywords too for them so that they can choose those ones if they wish). Do you guys think that customization is required?

Still searching on a theme – decided to use Arras with buddypress (has a section for members in it, so that is good, but I wanted something that could customize the member/profile pages of each user)


Was browsing online through the forum and came up with the following analysis:
A lot of people here on WF make money, and that honestly, got me disappointed, it made me realize that I'm doing something small (while others are already doing really really well) and would have to work so very hard for little rewards. But then, my seconds stuck in and said, “Hey stick with what you doing, it’ll pay off” So that’s what I'm doing, I'm not gonna ditch what I'm doing because others might be earning 200k, (they might have done a lot of hard work) but I’ll be happy when I make a buck, at least.

DON'T GIVE UP

While browsing the forums, came across the adplanner of Google. Any idea what do we use google ad planner for? I did go through it, but didn't really make much sense

 

[iwodaveh]

Just thought that I would pop in here to update the status. Still going strong.
But now I have a question, one of my earlier subdomains (is that what we call them?) Improving English Writing Skills with English Writing Tips and Other Grammar Rules had a lot of backlinks going to it. Since I'm planning of scrapping this tips/ portions and incorporating the articles directly into the main website, can I simply put a 301 on the tips/ subdomain, so that the backlinks don't get affected?