Relaunch of MyWebAuthor

A while back I placed all of my websites on the auction block. While a large majority of my sites sold, a few didn’t. One such site is MyWebAuthor. I was a bit surprised that this site didn’t sell at the time, but in hind sight, I’m now grateful that it didn’t. That site will be taking the place as one of my flagship sites and will be one of the sites that I do the most work on with SEO and Marketing. I’ve made several changes to the site in the process of resurrecting it that will enhance its usability and appeal to those who would use it.

Originally, I had built the site as an Article Dashboard powered Article Directory. This worked OK for over a year; however, there are numerous limitations of the Article Dashboard that I did not like, so I move away from that platform. Now, the site is fully powered by Wordpress with a collection of plugins and code hacks that tailor the site to be most useful for Article Marketers and Publishers alike. Here is some of what has been implemented to make the site more useful.

• Author Adsense – Allows authors to specify their own Google Adsense Publisher ID and share in the site’s ad revenue.
• Chunk Urls for WordPress – This plugin shorten urls in comments so that they won’t break the site.
• DoFollow – Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. Globally set to disable nofollow.
• Google Sitemaps – This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of the site. This will further help with SEO.
• JS SpamBlock and Simple Trackback Validation – Simple, but effective spam management.
• Lightbox JS v2.03.3 Plugin – Used to overlay images on the current page. Authors can use the rel="lightbox" attribute on anchor tags to enhance their articles.
• Notify on Draft Post – Alerts WordPress moderator of impending post for review. Allows poster
  (e.g. Contributor role) to decide when a draft is ready with a simple
  checkbox. Basically, this will help keep me on top of submissions.
• Popularity Contest with the Popularity Contest Widget – This will enable ranking of posts by popularity; using the
  behavior of visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of posts is calculated based on those values. This will gain more exposure to authors who write higher quality articles.
• Related Posts – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. This will help users find the most relevant content.
• Sanitize permalink with undescores – Converts permalinks to use underscores "_" instead of dashes "-". Dashes can be viewed as "minus" in search engine queries. While the usefulness of this plugin is questionable, it hasn’t hurt any site I’ve used it on, so I continue to use it.
• Search Pages – This makes search queries look at pages and posts instead of only posts.
• ShareThis – The new, enhanced SharThis plugin to aide viewers in sharing their favorite content
• Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. This helps authors and commenters stay in touch with comments on posts.
• What Would Seth Godin Do – Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors. For that warm and fuzzy welcome message.

Other enhancements I’ve added include a “Ezine Ready” textarea with “Highlight All” button to make copying the HTML source of the articles much quicker for Article Publishers. I’ve set the site up to use Feedburner to ensure that visitors can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed regardless of reader. Also, I’ve made numerous minor xHTML tweaks to the site to enhance the overall ease of use and SEO.

One of the biggest changes is that I’ve added a custom script for article submission and signed up with Article Marketer. Once the site is approved, this will vastly simplify adding articles to the site for thousands of Article Marketers. This will also ensure a fresh rotation of content on the site. I used Article Marketer in the past with the old Article Dashboard powered site and I was very please with their service. What I like most is their strict submission guidelines. They ensure only quality content is submitted to your site. It is because of this that all submissions that come from Article Marketer will automatically be approved.

I highly recommend that you sign up for an account Article Marketer. In addition to getting your articles automatically approved on MyWebAuthor, you will also gain exposure on other major Article distribution sites. I use there service not only to populate certain sites, but I also publish articles through them. I’ve had great results from using their services.

I’m pretty excited about relaunching this site. I knew it was inevitable given the amount of the traffic the site received during its brief hiatus. At one time, it was one of the top article distribution sites around and received hundreds of submissions every day. I’m going to be working hard to promote the site and to help it surpass its prior achievements. With the numerous benefits of the new platform and all of the work I’m going to be putting into making the site more user-friendly for both Article Marketers and Publishers alike, I believe the site has great promise. I hope you will join me and celebrating the relaunch of this site.

You’ve read my two cents. Now have your say!
Do you use article distribution to promote your website or business?
Did you know about article distribution and duplicate content penalties?