I have a 14 year old website with PR4. Over the past year, article submissions to the site have increased to a point it's hard to manage the time to moderate each article. I'm thinking about starting to have a fee attached to each article posted. What is a reasonable fee to charge to have original content posted to a PR4 website? www.411homerepair.com/diy/
I would say start around $15-$25 being that it's a PR4 and all. Not that PR really matters but many use it as a gauge. If you have high traffic though, or as it increases, I would raise the price. Whatever you decide, let me know. I would be interested for my construction biz.
@indyonline.......$15 is o.k. once he gets established and well known, but he needs to go lowball to start off with to attract fees no? P.S. but of course after 14 years one could argue that the site *is* already established I suppose. But going from no fee all the way to $15 will meet with resistance. Soften the blow by lowballing then *slowly* increase as you go along.
In this case, yes, I would consider this established with almost 900 articles and Google indexed with over 900k products. I like the idea of starting slow. Maybe with $10. I have 15 very active guest writers and I'm concerned about losing the content, but most likely will need to hire someone to do the moderating.
I wouldn't start low myself or recommend it. Especially for that site. I would agree with 10-15 if the people are supplying the article.
You can start $20 for 1 link under the post as author info (guest post), if it is promotional like post charge $30-40 and if its purely based on review type posts (with 1 link inside the post body) ask them over $70 per post. Most importantly don't allow any spam type or poker or medicinal etc related links even if they interested to pay high.
I only searched for two of your older articles but both came up on a number of sites. If you see your site as something of an article directory, most of your competitors don't charge writers to post. You mention PR4 as opposed to traffic. By using that as the basis for this conversation, it would seem you are thinking more like someone creating an article directory. I also noticed quite a few of your category pages were not ranked. Anyone submitting an article then would be unlikely to see any of that green bar on their article. From the stats on your articles, it would seem your strength is garnering traffic. 800 reads on several of the articles is something worth promoting. If you've got folks writing all/most of your content, it seems like you have free labor. Why would you want to do anything to turn them away? Perhaps you could allow your existing writers to post for free and anyone new, who would like to submit something, would have to pay? Keep in mind, if you start accepted paid placements, you might attract negative attention from Google.
The reason for the idea of starting to charge is that it's taking about an hour a day to moderate the articles. Yes, in the past duplicate content was allowed, but now we want a quality site with valuable content. I would venture a guess that someone paying to post would provide better content than free. As for having different values for each member posting, my CMS system doesn’t' seem to have different values to assign for each article writer, but it was a great idea. I sent out a notification to the writers that we will be having a nominal fee going forward. About 5% responded with request to post free. We'll need to decide if it's worth losing a few writers, to gain some cash.
UPDATE.... I started charging $5 for posting articles and $10 with postings without thumb images. A lot of the regular posting people stopped posting. A few new old and people post with the $5 fee without issues and I would say it's worth it... but.... I spend more time asking people for payment and follow up as I was doing the admin of formatting the post. After 2 months, I still having people ask for free postings. It's annoying!
considering that biggest article directories don't charge for articles and have a higher PR, I doubt that charging your writers is a good idea, what you can do is to improve your website revenue by ads and hire "moderators"
Do the "biggest article directories" really have any value in page rank since they are so common? The site makes about 80% less revenue since the market took a crash.
no, but on this home repair site, the amount paid per click has gone down. Other verticals that advertising revenue went up.
i would consider diving website users to two classes - premium and classic and give premium users (that pay something for premium account) something additional or just hide ads/banners from site for them, or something, they appreciate
http://www.subrion.com/ does offer contributors the option to add their adsense ID to get ad revenue from their posting. Interesting idea. Thanks.