Creating New Article Site - Where does EzineArticles Go Wrong?

I'm starting a large project, just picked up an amazing domain name and have funding to get this thing rolling in the next few weeks. I am looking for different points of views on where sites like EzineArticles.com go wrong. My site will be an article site similar to Ezine, but it will be more upscale.

- Required Article length will be longer.
- All submissions will be run through Copyscape or similar to try to maximize uniqueness
- Anti spam features in place so that tools like SENUKE will not work on it
- Among a few other features

But I don't know it all and am looking for suggestions on what you think could be done better or what would be an improvement feature to be added.

We are going for a top notch high quality site that will gain more authority and trust over sites like Ezine. We are also going with a minimalist approach (think Google.com vs Yahoo.com in terms of a minimalist site vs a busy site).

How about implementing some Adsense rev sharing? People only used ezine for links, if they thought they could earn it might encourage them to publish quality.

Verification, submission processes, and you're going to need a high pr. I'm interested in posting some articles whenever it's up and running. Feel free to share URL or pm some time.
Do know that there are 1000s of article sites and you are going to have to go full time long term to see real success.
How will you monetize?

Sent from my YP-G1

Also, how are you going to moderate the articles? You'll have to hire some editors,

Problem with EZA was that the articles were there mostly for the link in resource box, users were submitting low quality articles, similar (not Copied) articles that were saying things in a bit different way,

Revenue sharing is a great idea,

What comes to mind for me is maybe IP restriction, only 1 account per an IP? It may take up a lot resources though.

meathead1234 said:

How about implementing some Adsense rev sharing? People only used ezine for links, if they thought they could earn it might encourage them to publish quality.

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Yeah, squidoo offers rev share through ebay and amazon widgets.

The problem when you do rev share with adsense is that you will inevitably have people who go and click ads on their article pages to try to 'earn' revenue, and then adsense gets pissed at you and you lose your account.

One idea we had was to add a 250x250 box on the side and let the author give his own ad code specific for that placement for his articles. Problem then is you need to moderate the ads they do so they don't sell pharma or porn, etc...

Rev share or rev participation is definitely one way to entice people to use your site, it's a fine line to implement it correctly though and not cause yourself tons of headaches in the future.

If you want true quality, you need to do more than just run the articles through copyscape. You need actual human editors who have extremely high editorial standards. If I started an article site, I would require authors to cite sources. No fluffy BS articles for the purpose of a link, regardless if it is unique or not. Just my thoughts.

pallyD said:

Verification, submission processes, and you're going to need a high pr. I'm interested in posting some articles whenever it's up and running. Feel free to share URL or pm some time.
Do know that there are 1000s of article sites and you are going to have to go full time long term to see real success.
How will you monetize?

Sent from my YP-G1

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Yes, the idea is to make the verification process for creating a new account a real pain in the ass. For the regular users who create one account it should not be an issue for 99% of them. For anyone who tries to game the system it will be a pain to try to create 100's of accounts.

There are three keys to creating a successful site (I believe) in this market for us.

#1 is having a great domain name that people will remember, sounds professional, instills trust, and stands out from the crowd. I think we already have this.

#2 proper marketing to attract your userbase. Our marketing plan is still in beginning stages. We'll definitely be going to facebook, twitter, pinterest, route to generate interest.

#3 providing benefit to the userbase. The site will not have a high pagerank initially (though we hope by only having premium content the PR will grow fast) so we will need to convince people who submit at first that the PR will come. We tossed around having some sort of rev generation for the users. We also tossed around allowing the first 1,000 accounts to be premium accounts for life (i.e. similar concept how ezine has premium accounts and base accounts). It feels like ezine attracts people looking for SEO value or pushing affiliate links. While we want to attract them, we also want to attract the every day regular person who probably has not heard of article marketing. Haven't come up with the right reward to attract that userbase yet though.

themidiman said:

If you want true quality, you need to do more than just run the articles through copyscape. You need actual human editors who have extremely high editorial standards. If I started an article site, I would require authors to cite sources. No fluffy BS articles for the purpose of a link, regardless if it is unique or not. Just my thoughts.

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Definitely. Copyscape is to check for uniqueness across the web. There will be human proofreaders which will check for grammar, quality, and usefulness. The way we see it, not 1 spun article should make it by a proofreader. Not 1 article whose intent is to push an affiliate link should make it through. High quality content only.

No ezine level quality. No ehow level quality.

Our site will not have as much content as the other sites, but the content will be 10 fold better.

You can go onto ezine and type in "watch sports online" and see the shit that they let people post and ezine will tell you that each article is manually reviewed. Spun crap. Half of it makes no sense. All of them pushing affiliate links. And then when they get coined as a content farm and bumped down in Google they cry about it and act like they don't know why. We want quality over quantity.

I would actually start this out with a question...

What is the goal of the site you are building? Are you trying to be like Ezine? Like Squidoo? Like IB, Hubpages, Weebly?

There are not many more models to choose from but an adaptation of them could work.

Specifically, Ezine fails in the following ways:
- Lack of consistency in their review process
- Limited use of plagiarism checking software
- Model dependent solely on user generated content
- Limited social interaction for their contributors
- Over acceptance in allowing spammy, SEO focused content, rather than create content that is memorable.
- Inconsistent decision making process on when to demote, promote, etc. It sometimes feels like it is very subjective when submitting content... Will they like my content or not?!? Who knows! Oh, they did...nope, they dont.
- Lack of transparency when sending back rejected content.

I could go on, but that is a good start.

Let me know if you need beta testers or individuals to send you content as I have a service explicitly geared toward producing high quality content for websites.

Hope this helps!

Shawn

Looks like a project with lot of potential. The main thing that will determine the success is marketing. It would be interesting to see how will you encourage people to register and write in initial stages.

Ezinearticles was battered and hammered during Panda/Penguin. They dont realize and someone really should be out there giving them some advice, that their site is in need of redesign if they are going to survive and future algo updates. They have tried to make some changes but its nothing major. They need to get all those ads from above the fold OFF the site. Their second biggest mistake is keeping the users on their site, bounce rate. Their bounce rate must be so horrible. Most people who visit the site read the article then leave via a link. There is nothing to keep the user there. Click. read, leave. In G's eyes this is a horrible user experience.

Adding to the discussion, my suggestions would be:

Make the links in the first 5/10 articles nofollow and make it clear while signing up. This way you will be able to deter half of spammy users straight away.
While copyscape is one of the barriers, make sure you hire (or maybe promote some of your users) a decent editor to manually read the article to weed out any spun articles or articles that make no sense.
As suggested, putting in rev share is a great way to encourage writers to come up with quality content.
Keep a strict hand on the outbound links from the articles
Make the categories in such a way that 'general' articles are different to that of 'Opinions or News Releases/Commentary'

Honestly, your idea is really great. But at least try a small project like this to gain experience then upgrade to larger project like this once you already have the experimental knowledge.

TheContentAuthority said:

I would actually start this out with a question...

What is the goal of the site you are building? Are you trying to be like Ezine? Like Squidoo? Like IB, Hubpages, Weebly?

There are not many more models to choose from but an adaptation of them could work.


Shawn

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Shawn - thanks for the points you mentioned.

The goal of the site is to provide high quality useful information through the articles of the memberbase. I think what you are driving it is what will my site's competitive advantage be, how will it stand out from the crowd (in terms of to prospective article writers). And this is the crux that we are working on. We want there to be a 'WOW' factor besides people gaining a backlink, or driving traffic to their site. Potential rev share is one thing, but we are still brainstorming on something that will get people talking. I honestly don't have it yet, but what we will come up with most likely make or break the site.

PhaseSeo said:

Honestly, your idea is really great. But at least try a small project like this to gain experience then upgrade to larger project like this once you already have the experimental knowledge.

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I've done many small projects, granted non in this specific niche/market. It is time to take a shot at something big. If I fail at least I tried. And if I succeed I'll get my dream car.

It has to be a specific niche directory. Articlesbase and ezinearticles traffic is slowing down as time passes. Also you must not accept general articles, as it is impossible to get any SE traffic for these.

The ultimate goal in attracting prolific writers is to pull authors who actually want an audience into writing for your site. Article directories are poorly designed for user interaction. All of the content is written purely for the goal of getting backlinks.

I think the design should be carefully thought out to frame the idea that you are a platform for people to reach out and share their knowledge with.

I also agree that the first X articles should be nofollow (or be restricted so they can't post links until they have X articles) to cut down on content spam.

Ezinearticles went "wrong" by allowing dupe content and being too lenient on what content was accepted. They also allowed really short articles which should never have been the case in the first place.

You need to have some kind of Copyscape check before allowing content into your directory. That's a great first step and hard to go wrong after that.

yes we all know for sure that due to low quality articles(or contents) Ezine got kicked by Google, but this doesn't mean Ezine is worse or so, if you are looking to run an article directory there are still some valuable points that you can get from Ezine itself.

Tips to attract authors:

1. Give authors some rewards, awards, or achievable trophies, this will encourage them to stay active and contribute more(publish more articles).
2. Also provide writers with certificates just like what ezine introduced recently.
3. Feel free to try new interactive methods, like allowing authors(registered users) to interact and enable socialization by adding review, likes, comments and even rating for articles and authors alike.(This may be almost new to article directories but will certainly work)(hubpages have similar feature already)
4. Ensure that the interface is attractive and easy to use(basic but important design and development factor)
5. Enable contact option for reporting and new suggestions alike, though its your site, its the authors and visitors who will make it work so accepting their suggestions and replying them is important.
6. Apart from certifications and awards, also encourage inter challenges and competitions among writers to boost output and interest.

Tips to Attract visitors:

1. As most experts said here, reduce or regulate ads, and never use popup adds, as most users feel it as a irritating and some thing such sites are not safe.
2. Categorize properly and ensure that every article is checked for spelling, grammar and copychecked.
3. Last and most important point is never turn purely business minded and concentrated on keeping writers and authors alike, Never love search Engines, just earn the love of visitors and writers, then Search engines will surely run after you and beg for your love.........


Send me the link to your article directory as i would love to write articles for it....... Thanks in advance and i am sure your article directory will soon be one of the greatest and most followed.. All the best... for your valuable effort....