Creating A Multi Author Editorial Style Website

[Asad]

I have been cranking away at one project for the past year or so, publishing content daily and building out my back end. It has gotten to the point where I am tired of hearing my own voice and reading my own writing!

I want to change the way I work and shift from being the only voice on the site to bringing in other writers. I look at sites like Huff Po and they have legions of writers across every subject and demo.

Here I am cranking out content and occasionally paying writers, when I could just have the entire community around my topic contributing content, and adding new perspective.

I was thinking about cold emailing a few thousand of them who have published content elsewhere. My site has a respectable and legit social media following and I am clocking about 70,000 page views per month from 55k uniques. I am sure thats better than what some of these Medium writers are pulling in.

My question to you all is this: How would one go about recruiting these content producers? How would you incentivize your poaching efforts if you had to 'steal' these writers from elsewhere?

 

[Ryuzaki]

The next issue is going to be having editors' making sure there's some standard of quality being published. You'll have to pay them.

Cold emailing might work but to seed things so you can show the other producers that people are contributing might be to set up a /guest-post/ page and let people get some links out of the deal. You'd seed it with a ton of SEO type people and anyone like that could go under some made up persona acounts so it looked like you had a handful of powerhouse writer on your hands (instead of a ton of one-time posters).

It'll be all hustle between getting writers and promoting hard enough for others to know they exist, as well as outreach. It can obviously be done.

The issue is the incentive. With SEO guys you can give out the backlink. But what about anyone else? There's a lot that'll do it just for their own portfolio and resume, but what about the rest?

I've dreamed about something like this too, since they days of Squidoo and Hubpages and EzineArticles. Seems like easy money until Panda smacked them and they had to come up with technical SEO solutions and start having an editorial standard.

 

[Boy]

You could try to make it seem like an exclusive thing to be a part of. Make people qualify to get the privilege of writing on your site.

Is it hyper-niche or a general site? B2B or B2C? There are so many other factors that can play a role in how I would do outreach.

 

[samo]

Agreed with @Ryuzaki that in most niches, you'll probably have to pay for their writing! That being said, if you're doing something educational/career-focused (I have a side-project that's mostly focused on open-source software/web development), you may be able to get a few writers just by virtue of the following you mentioned. Kind of specific to my niche, I guess, but I've been able to get a number of writers who are fairly new to coding to write on my site just because they need somewhere to put their stuff. YMMV, of course