Yesterday I was approached by Rich at WebProNews with the request that they be allowed to republish some of my content on their site. I was initially quite flattered by the offer as they feature some of my favorite bloggers including Steve Rubel, Wayne Hurlbert, Robert Scoble, Jeremy D. Zawodny, Andy Beal and more.
Once the flattery wore off (after all we’re all just blokes sitting in front of computers) and I gave it a little more objective thought I began to sort through a few costs and benefits of going with this approach. I emailed the five bloggers above for their opinion and ended up seeing it like this:
On the upside
- Builds Profile – getting your name out there and building profile is probably the biggest benefit of this partnership. WebProNews is a widely read website with some quality contributers. The common theme in the advice that the bloggers I approached gave was that this was the best aspect of it.
- Inbound Links – each article that they use of mine has a number of links back to the blog of the author and other projects that they are working on. This of course helps with SEO.
- Google News – WebProNews gets picked up by Google News which again takes your posts to a larger audience and gives you further reach.
On the downside
- Off site readership – One of the things that my blogging colleagues advised was that there is a risk that my readers might come to my blog less because they can read some of the main posts elsewhere.
- Duplicate content – My main initial concern was that my content is being duplicated in more than one place. This is not looked upon well by Google.
- Increased chance of those you’re writing about finding your posts – Steve replied to my email with the caution that what is written gives you a wider exposure which brings an increased chance that it will get found by those you write about or those that disagree with you which might bring criticism. I guess is the cost of increased traffic any of any variety…
After summing up the advice of the WebBlogPro Bloggers and considering the goals and objectives of ProBlogger I’ve decided to allow them to reproduce some of my articles. My page on their site is here (two articles so far). Already it has brought me a few new visitors – a couple have even made contact via email from it which is encouraging.
If you’re here from WebProNews – welcome – I hope you stay around and contribute to the many discussions happening through my blog already.
Lastly I’m interested in my regular reader’s opinions of this move. By no means is it a permanent thing – I’m assured I can end this at any time and whilst I might ‘own’ or ‘edit’ this blog I believe its actually more than just mine – you all have a part to play and I’d like to hear your opinions and reflections on how I run it. So if you’ve got two cents to add about whether I should or shouldn’t let them publish my stuff speak now!
The name sounded familiar. And what do you know, I have articles there!
http://www.webpronews.com/authors/jongales.html
Just Mac stuff. Every so often I get an email from em.
Congratulations, those articles look sophisticated what with your portrait and everything ;-)
Congrats, Darren. That’s awesome.
I say go for it. Watch your stats and Adsense and if you see a steady decline you can end the relationship. But my bet is that you will see an increase in traffic and Adsense because people will come from WebProNews and bookmark you or add you to their feed reader.
Congratulations, Darren! Except I think you broke ’em. Their main site’s just spinning wheels in my browser and not getting anywhere.
Oh well, I guess they’ll sort themselves out.
Congratulations, I think this really can increase your profile. WebProWorld is a respectable source. And like John said above, you can always end the relationship if you find it’s not working for you.
Just don’t sign a contract unless they’re going to pay you! :0
Content is powerful as usual, and you have top-quality content. I say use them to get more readers…they’re using you for the same thing. Everyone wins.
Looks like you decided to stop letting them use your content?
I’m still mulling it over: they take a fair number of my articles ( http://www.webpronews.com/authors/aplawrence.html ), and I do get traffic from that and (I assume) new readers, but it is a little uncomfortable..
Funny thing is: they never approached me. They just started taking stuff. I only found out because their re-pub’s started shoeing up in Google News Alerts. My policy allows minor use with attribution, but they were not attributing as I wanted them to – they didn’t have a direct link from my article to my website, which I require – , so I complained, and they changed that immediately. So.. I’ve let them keep doing it..
One one hand, I do get a little annoyed that Google Alerts happily picks up my articles when Webpronews publishes them, but otherwise I’m not important enough to notice.. considering the number of articles they’ve used, that stings a little :-)
I’ve never checked to see if one of those ever got a good Digg rating.. that would REALLY fry my bacon. Honestly, I almost don’t want to know – that would be hard to swallow.
On the other hand I see a dozen or so referrals from them every day – that’s hardly earth shaking, but it adds up.. that’s several thousand people per year I might not have ever seen without them. On the third hand (I normally keep this one hidden because it scares children), that’s an small percentage of total traffic: a dozen or so out of 6,000+ daily visitors can’t be doing that much for me, can it?
I just do not know :-)
Maybe you’ll do a follow up article on how and why you decided not to allow this?