Turns out that new memberships at Fo.rtitu.de have come to a halt, which you can see from that link that they haven’t had a new signup since May 21st. This is requiring that they take a look at their processes and figure out what needs to be done to keep the online magazine going, meaning some changes are going to take place as of today.
The previous algorithm they had in place didn’t allow many articles to reach the front page, which made a lot of people hesitant on submitting their articles. If you put a lot of work into an article and it never hits the front page, you don’t get paid…much. To remedy this, they are now increasing front page chances to 50% of articles submitted. That gives you much better chances to get visibility and cash.
I think this is a great idea and is sure to get me posting more as well.
I originally signed up for a pro account at Fortitude to get paid for writing, and the strict review process sounded like something that could help me strive to write higher quality content. This is still true for me, but now I see it more as a way to get more visibility to the sites that I link to in my articles. Although the nofollowed links provide little or zero SEO value, they can still drive traffic to the sites of clients or even a few of my own.
This means that from now on, I’m going to look at Fortitude not as a place to make money, but a place to drive traffic to my sites. Because of the registration fee (which I’ve already earned back by the way), only quality articles make it to the front page of the site, so your article isn’t going to get shuffled in with a bunch of crap.
I only have one complaint about Fortitude right now, and that’s the character limit. For some people 3,500 characters isn’t a lot, but this depends entirely on what you’re writing about. For example, they state that they take poems, but how many people write 3500+ word poems? Do you know how many characters this post has right now? 1,672. I’m not even halfway to the requirement.
A quality article should not be judged by the amount of characters it contains. I typically write articles that come out to be around 2,500 to 3,000 characters. It will have everything I want to say and I will not fill it with fluff to meet Fortitudes requirements so most of the time I submit my articles elsewhere or on my own sites. Which is still fine with me, but bad for Fortitude.
I really like the business model that Fortitude has put in place and hope they are able to keep going. There is a lot of really good stuff on there right now from all sorts of different niches, all very linkable. Maybe they should invest in an SEO company who can help them create a marketing strategy for the user generated content everyone is creating for them 😉
If you want to sign up to Fortitude, please do with my affiliate link. I’d appreciate it very much!