First off... congratulations on launching. I'd love to see more FourmCoin members take the plunge and start a website. (Yes - I know, I'm letting the side down at the moment
).
I hope you don't mind a wall of text as feedback on your site overall. 1.
Poor user experience because of ads.I do admit to browsing the web with Adblock but if a site requests that I add them to a whitelist in order to use/ access the site, I will. I turned my Adblock off for your site because I wanted to see what it looked like with ads and whether the types of ads you are using are relevant to the articles and your audience. Here's your homepage after a couple of mins. It's stuck. It refuses to properly load.
- [+] Spoiler
To get passed that, I clicked the ugly X and then had to disable notifications. Ad notifications are a particularly poor way of monetizing the site. Short term, you may get a high CPM rate, but you are effectively selling your users to the ad network
forever . You no longer
own those views. After I disabled notifications, a javascript popup had to be closed. Then the grey overlay reappeared which produced a pop up on click.
And - it
keeps reappearing on a timer.
So... I got passed the home page eventually and I clicked on the
Money category.
Another popup on click and another JavaScript dialogue to close (which, by the way, have no text... so they could be running anything). A giant ad breaks the flow of the webpage by being placed above the header section.
I click an article. I get another popup, an ad above the header again, a wall of ads on the sidebar, an ad above the article, an ad below the article and an ad at the bottom of the website. 11 + ads.
I try to make a comment on
Guerrilla Marketing: How to Promote and Market on a Small Budget, and I'm immediately greeted with a popup.
I checked out the community section (trying to find what the article writing pay rates are). I'm greeted with two ads to close and a popup:
- [+] Spoiler
For some reason the community page alone has an extra header ad? Clicking gives me more boxes to close, a popup and a JavaScript dialogue to close off.
Finally:
- [+] Spoiler
Overall, the ads interrupt and break my experience using the website. I think the side bar ads are good but they aren't particularly relevant to the article which will reduce your click through rates. I would remove the popups or limit them to 1 per session. I would remove the notification and JS ads. I would change the locations of the adsense top and bottom ads to be more integrated into the website: perhaps by placing them in the article itself and in between articles being displayed on the homepage.
Obviously, you will have adblock users. Eventually you should prohibit use by ad blockers but ensure the ad experience is more seamless with better targeted and more integrated ads.
Your ad strategy should also involve building up a community and email list. This is another avenue for both marketing the site and articles and a chance to directly advertise to your audience.
2.
Earnings issues.I had a hard time finding how you earn from your site. In the header I saw: "Get Paid to Write Articles" as the headline under the logo text. Eventually I found it tucked away in
Guidelines.
Key points:
- The current rate for 1000 views is $2.
- The payment is made through PayPal.
- Users can ask for cashout once their articles receive 1000 views. User can send an email to **** with “payment” in the subject line to cash out.
It would be nice to see this linked directly from the headline text.
The payment rate is OK although I note that most articles only have a few views at the moment. Writers should realize their views will only build over time.
The cashout method is a little cumbersome and may discourage signups.
An alternative might be to include a cashout form on your forum. People submit a new topic with their cashout request for you to approve. That way they can see that the request has been made and at what time. They won't immediately send followups if you don't reply. You could make these topics visible to staff and the member only.
Another alternative is using a Skype or chat group and having members message or post their requests for to the group. The group could replace the forum as a more active writer community for RationalMind.
3.
Site revenue issues.You are going to have the similar issues to ForumCoin in this area around posting quality and type. Your ad rates are determined by the type of article and user e.g.
- Ad rates for "Funniest Pranks 2018" are going to be a lot lower than "Top 10 Stocks to BUY NOW".
- Likewise users who are tech savvy and visit a lot of sites become ad blind (even without ad block).
You should think about how you want to incentivise writers to produce high quality articles which are also "high earners".
Ultimately, increasing ad revenue and pay rates will help you attract better writers and, therefore, more views.
3.
Where are the guides?It would be great to see guides, available to writers, on:
- How to write a high quality article.
- How to get readers to your article.
- How to find good pictures for your article etc.
In answering your original question, if you have great quality content, sites like: Reddit, Stumbleupon, Instagram and Imgur can be great sources of traffic if used correctly.
I've had thousands of views on articles posted on reddit (and these articles had barely any upvotes). Likewise Stumbleupon produced thousands of views in a month. I've had a decent amount ~30 visits a day traffic from Instagram but the marketing for that and Imgur is much more visual. If you're good at producing visual content or can find and have a good eye for images and visual content then these could be good sources of traffic too.
Ideally, you want your writers to be doing a lot of their own marketing work so make the process easy for them. Before they submit an article, give them links to your guides on how to write quality content. After they submit, get them to share their article immediately on social networks and reddit AND give them guides on how to further promote their work.
Best of luck and I hope some of that was helpful!
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