This is an actual question to anyone who writes and publishes online. Please post your answers in comments, I really am interested in what you have to say.
I have seen that the majority of the people I’ve read here on YCN and other sites all belong to more then one site. So, how does one decide which piece is published at which site?
Right now I am trying to publish current works at 3 different places. Here on Associated Content (part of the Yahoo! Contributor Network), HubPages and Triond. I find that I am struggling with the decision of where to post what. HubPages unfortunately, does not allow for duplicate postings so if I decide to post there, it can ONLY be there.
Triond wants your work to be original but does allow for publishing the work elsewhere. (At least that is how I read the Terms to be.) Therefore what I post on Triond, I will often re-post on Associated Content a day or two later. At first this seemed ideal to me, but then I realized that not posting the original content to AC first made me ineligible for being published at other Yahoo! partner sites. Being published at any of the various Yahoo! sites tends to mean a lot more pageviews, and therefore it is something I desire to happen.
There is also the fact that I already have a faithful following on Yahoo! Contributor Network which pretty much guarantees me a certain amount of pageviews for every article I publish here. Whereas on HubPages and Triond, the following is only just starting to build so my pageviews are a dismal single digits. In fact, my last publication on HubPages, which I fully expected to be a good hook for pageviews, has not had a single view in the last 7 days.
Triond is even worse than HubPages. I have a few “friends” on there, but the pageviews for the last couple of years (yes, years) have added up to a whopping 29 cents. I have yet to even make a payout for Triond because of this.
Here on YCN, even though all my work is published on Associated Content, my pageviews are 10 times better, probably even more like a hundred times better. Not only do my newest articles get read by my followers (thank you!) but the pageviews continue to count up even on my oldest works.
These results lead me to conclude that things published on Yahoo! Contributor Network have more of a tendency to get read by passers-by. Meaning that people searching a topic are more likely to see your article as a result and then read it (or at least click and view it.)
At the same time, I wonder if I’m simply not allowing enough time for HubPages to show its true results. I am thinking that I would need to post a new article (or Hub as they’re called there) every week since it seems to put focus on more active accounts. If this is the case however, I will be hard pressed to write enough stuff for both HubPages and Yahoo! Contributor Network. (I think I am giving up on Triond, again.)
How DO you decide?