Don't Be Afraid To Find A New Platform For Old Stories

For those who don't follow me on Facebook, I'm currently in the middle of what I've dubbed The Great Reshuffling. For many years I had an archive of content on the site InfoBarrel, and it earned me a small be respectable check every month or so. As the traffic to the site started to go down, and maintenance became less and less common, I stopped posting there. I instead headed over to Vocal, where I wrote a bunch of new content, and found it paid significantly better.

Now that InfoBarrel is taking ads off their site, and more or less going into a state of suspended animation, it's time to begin the process of moving the popular pieces out of that old archive, and into the new one.

Don't mind the grunting... this stuff's just heavy.

This is something I've been steadily doing since about last May or June... however, this is not the first time I've been forced to do this. So I figured I'd share the experience, and what fellow creators can learn from my many moves.

In The Days of Yahoo! Voices...

When I was in college, a friend of mine told me about a website that allowed writers to create whatever sort of content they wanted, and it would pay them based on their traffic. Sometimes they'd even qualify for an up-front fee, depending on the article, story, etc. in question. I was always looking for some side money, so I signed up, and gave it a try. So I put up articles, short stories, etc., and eventually I got enough views that I was earning roughly $2 for every 1k views my work got. And when a new article might generate 10k to 15k views, that was pretty nice work for a side hustle.

I even put up a couple of the steampunk short stories that acted as the basis for New Avalon: Love and Loss in The City of Steam.

Which has the first few tales for free, if you haven't read it yet, by the by.

The original website, whose name I can't recall for the life of me right now, was bought by Yahoo! It then became Yahoo! Voices, and for a few years I kept building my archive and making what earnings I could on it. And, for a bit, it seemed like I was going to be able to shift it from a side hustle to a rent-paying level of earnings... of course, as soon as I started pulling down triple-digit checks, that was when the site sent out a notice that it was closing down and deleting everything in its archives.

Shit.

I detailed this at the time in Improved Initiative Needs Your Help! over on my gaming blog. But once I lost that archive of 400+ active-and-earning articles, I had to figure out what to do with that mound of content. Not all of it was great, but a lot of it had been pretty popular. So I started looking around for a new home to get it back on the market. There weren't any websites at the time paying a flat fee for traffic, so I initially started putting my old articles up on Hubpages. I was just starting to make progress on the pile after a few months when, as you might have guessed, things went south again. As I detailed in the Part Two update, no sooner had I caught my breath and gotten into the swing of things again than Google kicked me off their AdSense platform. So now there weren't any websites I could host my old content on, or write new stuff for if I expected to make any money off those efforts.

After asking around on some forums, I found there was a way to host your content on InfoBarrel, and to make money off the site's total take, rather than off your personal AdSense account (which, again, I no longer had). I'd had an InfoBarrel account for years, but hadn't updated in a while... still, when I logged in, it was glad to have me back. And for a year or so, it worked out pretty well as a new host for me. I got the real gems of my old archive back up, and started adding new content. Then InfoBarrel rolled out their 2.0 version, and suddenly traffic plummeted. What would previously have generated thousands of views was now barely getting a few hundred, and instead of a check every month I was getting one every three to five months. After trying new tactics and waiting on updates that never came, I threw up my hands and walked away. Now, as I alluded to at the beginning, I'm once again moving a lot of my content that's on InfoBarrel over to yet another new home.

Why? Why go through all of that effort one more time when it's already been through half a dozen websites? Well, because good content never really dies, even if the hosting sites do.

Evergreen Content Has No Shelf Life

If you drop by my Vocal archive and check out the recent posts, you're going to see a variety of topics. There's going to be life hack guides like How To Make An Apple Cider Vinegar Fly Trap next to silly listicles like 9 Super Powers Your Cat Has. And mixed in there you'll probably find some celebrity trivia, like 5 True Facts About James Earl Jones. There's also a lot of stuff about tabletop gaming, for those of you out there who like rolling funny shaped dice.

You know who you are.

The key to a lot of this stuff is that it's not going to go out of style. It's not movie reviews, where the film will hit big, and then fade into obscurity a week later. It's not a how-to for a car that's popular now, but which no one will own in the next 7 years or so. Most of these articles are evergreen, and they're always going to be relevant to a certain demographic.

And you know what I've found by moving them over? People are still reading them. They may not be reading them in the thousands, but my daily view count has been steadily creeping up since I started shuffling over those old posts, cleaning up the language and polishing up their look. It means my archive is steadily growing every week, and that I always have something recent (if not exactly "new") to promote on social media. It's mostly a copy-and-paste job, but it's paying dividends.

That's the point I'm trying to make. If you put in the time and effort to craft something that matters, don't be afraid of finding it a new home when the old one falls apart. Whether it's a blog that closes up, a publisher that shutters its doors, or fiction site that shuts down... you put work into that story. Don't just let it sink... there are people out there who haven't read it yet! Clean it up, slap on a fresh coat of paint (and possibly a new cover), and put it back in general population.

The results may surprise you!

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!