Another Site Bites The Dust – Why It Is Important To Own Your Own Content
I spent the first three months of my passive income career building up useful articles on highly ranked websites, such as eHow and Today dot com. Each month, my income has grown from these sites and I was truly getting excited about the revenue potential. Yesterday, I posted about the need to have your own website. Today, I wanted to expand on this idea with a few more thoughts.
eHow is in the process of removing hundreds, if not thousands, of articles from their system. It needed to be done since so many of the newer articles published are complete rubbish. I personally lost only four articles but to be honest with you, I cannot figure out what was wrong with them. Perhaps they were not “physically actionable“, whatever that means, but they were decent articles. I have read on the eHow forums of people losing 30, 40 even 50 articles with the push of a button.
Even worse is the fact that the urls for some deleted articles are now being redirected to eHow editors articles. That is just plain unethical in my books. Think about it! You work hard promoting an article, then eHow deletes you content, redirecting all of your traffic to their articles, making eHow money (not you). Very unethical indeed!
Today dot com is not going any better for me. I was one of the lucky people who was grandfathered in to the “old payment” system. I received $1 per post PLUS $2 per thousand page views. While my blog was relatively new, it was bringing in around 100 visitors a day and was generated about 7 comments for every 10 posts. This morning I received an email informing me that my payment plan was being altered, and from now on I would receive only $2 per thousand page views. That is not even worth my time. I do apologize to my faithful readers – all 10 of you 
but I will NEVER create another post for that site.
These two items only serves to reinforce the need for me to create my own business. Doing so would give me complete control over my content, complete freedom to publish anything I want and will allow me to be free from the unethical practices of some businesses.
What about you? Are you creating your own business are you helping someone else build theirs?
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Tagged with: Blog • Passive Income
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You are so right, not owning your own content is a recipe for disaster. Who knows what will happen tomorrow, will your articles be deleted, policies change, server crash or whatever. Owning and publishing your own content provides a bit of safety as well as freeing you from the useless, artificial rules that some sites impose upon their writers. I for one will start publishing my own content on my own niche sites, might not make much money, but at least it’s really mine.
You too huh? – I got both my sites cut from the $1/post program – which to be honest didn’t really surprise me – what did surprise me is that they are still paying for the useless traffic I can drive there for current trend topics! Oh well Google loves the site and its a handy source of backlinks which is why I started there in the first place.
I started off with my own site, got heavily into hubpages – because people actually read my stuff there! – and then realised that the real money is in controlling your own content and building niche sites not massive blogs! Its taken me a long time – I’m a bit slow on the whole marketing concepts side of thing – but I think I am finally starting to make some headway – this passive income is as hard as I’ve ever worked for peanuts – so it better pay off down the track
Lis Sowerbutts (australia.today.com)
Have you checked out Infobarrel.com, I’ve been making pretty decent earnings using their adsense revenue share model and my articles have been ranking quite well in the search engines.
I had a disagreement with Pat from Smart Passive Income back in late 2008 about the need to have your own site where you publish whatever you want. When posting your content on a site like ehow, or whatever else you are at the mercy of the site for your livelihood. You build their site, and when they become big and powerful how do they repay you? They remove your content, link it to their own content and make all the money. What can you do about it?
START your own blog and realize there are no short cuts in making money online.