Highlights

  • You retain ownership of your articles.
  • If you have a Google AdSense account, you will get a full 90% of all AdSense ad impressions on your article page(s). (Clickthrough earnings go directly to your AdSense account.)
  • If you are a Clickbank affiliate, you will get a full 90% of all Clickbank ad impressions on your article page(s). (You get affiliate commissions directly for any resulting sales.)
  • If you are a MyHelpHub affiliate, you will get a full 90% of all MHH ad impressions on your article page(s). (You get affiliate commissions directly for any resulting sales.)

Wordpreneur Background/Overview

I’m Eldon Sarte, and I’ve published Wordpreneur for quite a number of years on my own as a “hobby” site, first as a straightforward HTML site and then changing over to a WordPress blog a few years ago. Writer’s Digest named it one of its 101 Best Websites for Writers 2005. It was a Google PR5 site back in 2008 right before I let it all go to pot.

What happened in 2008? I had a son (Daniel), my first. I worked primarily out of my home office and became Daddy Daycare. Time and priorities changed. Majorly. Although Wordpreneur was up, with its large amount of content still drawing traffic, I did not update it except for the occasional post or article. Its PR dropped to 0, which is where it was when I decided to bring it “back to life,” so to speak, earlier this year. It’s now worked its way up to a PR2 and likely on its way up.

Here’s something new though: Twitter. The Wordpreneur Twitter account started getting active about a couple of months ago. And within that short period, it has grown pretty well: As of this writing, Wordpreneur has 6,505 followers and follow listed 163 times. And it’s obviously still growing!

On the blog’s predominantly text “minimalist” theme design: This is entirelyon purpose. The previous layout — an “online magazine” theme design I modified and like quite a lot, actually, something I’ll likely use for other projects or clients — was quite graphically impressive, elaborate, and pretty much like every other site out there in look-and-feel. Didn’t quite match up with my gut and objectives for Wordpreneur.

Besides being a very busy design and layout (now where did I see that before? Oh, yeah, everywhere!), that other theme has one other critical flaw it shares with way too many other blog designs: It’s optimized for banner advertising, in my experience one of the most ineffective forms of  advertising for sites like Wordpreneur.

The Wordpreneur game is words, pure and simple, and as you’ll notice, the current design is mostly text, with little in the way of distractions and other obstructions that prevent us from communicating what we really want to our readers and site visitors.

That goes for advertising as well. The ads Wordpreneur runs — AdSense, myHelpHub and Clickbank — are all text advertisements. It doesn’t hurt at all that in my experience (and that of many serious online marketers as well), text ads are the best performers. They have been for years, and there’s nothing else I see to date that even comes close for our kind of content.

Questions Answered

What am I looking for? Articles of any length, Wordpreneur-related of course! The good news is that, as the “H0w to Make Money Writing” site, topic coverage is quite broad. Browse through the Vintage category to get a good idea of the kind of Wordpreneur readers like to come here for. Also, many of the types of topics you see at EzineArticles (Writing & Speaking) are quite suitable.

Better news: Short is good! Submissions needn’t be long articles at all — many of my recent EGAD posts, for example, like EGAD #38, aren’t even 200 words. Short yet informative is perfectly fine… it may even be desirable for the typical online reader.

Even better news: There really is no limit to how many articles you can submit for consideration (ergo, there is no limit to how many may end up running — good is good, and I’ll run the good stuff, spread out over time of course). Remember, the 9:10 impressions deal works only on your article pages — the other contributors will obviously have the 9:10 thing on theirs — so additional posts will naturally increase your impressions accordingly.

Important: But I am looking for original. Something that doesn’t and won’t appear elsewhere while it’s published on the Wordpreneur.com site. So…

Who owns your posts? Simple: You do. You’ll own your posts, even if they’ve been edited/altered editorially in any way. You won’t be giving me ownership to your work at all. Instead, you’ll be granting me usage rights. What rights I’m seeking (as you’ll see, I’m far from unreasonable or greedy):

  • First Online Rights — I’d like Wordpreneur.com to be the first to publish the post online, in any form. This also means that any work that may have been published elsewhere but not online is acceptable. (Food for thought, huh?)
  • Exclusive Online Rights (for at least 3 months) — This means there’ll be a minimum of 3 months from the date of publication that the post will appear exclusively online here on Wordpreneur.com. Afterwards, you can do nothing and keep it here on Wordpreneur.com, as long as it remains an online exclusive. At any time after that initial 3 month period, you can also pull it off Wordpreneur.com and do with it online as you will, completely at your discretion. Note that this also means that you can publish/sell this work elsewhere during that initial 3-month period, as long as it does not appear anywhere online within those 3 months! (For legal purposes, however, you’ll want to inform your publisher/buyer of the rights you’ve granted Wordpreneur.)
  • Reproduction Rights for up to 15 months after being pulled from Wordpreneur.com — I’d like the right to reproduce your post in any Wordpreneur anthologies, special collections, etc., while it appears on Wordpreneur.com, and up to 15 months after it is pulled. If the “product” is free, no compensation will be forthcoming; if the product is sold for $$$, a to-be-determined royalty on net proceeds will be payable.

Can you link to any of your external blogs/sites within your posts? Generally yes, of course! Having every contributor’s site/blog benefit traffic-wise from this kind of activity is not only an objective, it’s a high likelihood. So, linking to content on your sites/blogs naturally within your posts is expected and encouraged.

There is, however, a fine line between that and “blatant promo fluff.” But I wouldn’t be too concerned about it. All posts will require my (or a Wordpreneur editor’s) approval before being accepted and published.

Note that this is different from the site/blog links that appear in your article bio. You’d be nuts not to have your link there!

How about links to affiliate programs? Unfortunately, no, I don’t think it’d be fair to let contributors promote and link directly to any affiliate programs as an affiliate from posts.

Can you send traffic to your article page(s)? Of course! And with 9:10 impression ratio on your own page(s), I wouldn’t expect you to link to anything but your very own post(s) on Wordpreneur. There’s no requirement, by the way, for you to link to Wordpreneur in any way, although since there’s money and likely other rewards involved, telling folks about your contributions is sensible. It’s completely your call, however.

In case you’re wondering: Every post published on Wordpreneur is automatically broadcast to Wordpreneur’s Twitter followers and RSS feed subscribers.

Once published, can my article(s) be deleted from Wordpreneur without prior notice? I don’t anticipate that this will ever happen, but it’s only prudent that I reserve the right to delete any article(s) from Wordprener for any reason at any time.

Will you edit my article bio? If needed, yes. Notice I call it a bio, not a resource box. And that’s what Wordpreneur’s readers expect to see there, a bio that tells readers who you are and what you do. That does not mean you cannot self-promote, links and all! But the increasingly common practice of nothing but advertising crapola? It’ll get zapped.

If you have any additional questions, by all means, do please contact me!

Let’s Roll!

Couldn’t resist borrowing Todd Beamer’s battle cry. There’s no need to send a query first (unless you want to). When you’re ready to submit, just send your article (plain text or MS Word format) to the following email address:

  • submit [ AT ] wordpreneur.com

Don’t forget to change [ AT ] to @ !!!

You’ll hear back from me ASAP. Thanks!

— EES