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In the next year or so I am opening up a website that targets coders and designers. Some features will be a blog (or blogs), categories to submit stuff and also a forum to help build a community.

As of right now I'm planning and studying/learning how to gain contributers and members to the site.

I was thinking of paying for bloggers ($50+) to contribute blog posts and submissions, but how would I gain contributers without paying them for submissions and blog posts also?

This would be my first big site, so I'm not really experienced with startups so any tips would really be appreciated, if there are any blog posts or guides related to my question please link it!

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3 Answers

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Allowing them to link back to their own websites might be a good incentive. Such links increase page ranks and are good for SEO.

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Many startups and new bloggers are happy to guest post on other related blogs in exchange for a link back to their website. This won't cost you any money. The problem is that they will probably not be interested in doing so if the host website gets very little traffic. So you'll have to build your traffic first. You can do that by:

  1. Writing blogs yourself.
  2. Asking friends and others in your network to contribute to your website.
  3. Finding new blogs like yours that are "desperate", and don't care that you currently have little traffic.
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You could ad $$$ incentives for either posts, or articles. This is tough to do with google adsense if you are a new site, but you can come up with your own ad profit sharing scheme through a platform such as openx.

Make sure to build in social engagement. A points system, like the one on this site could build loyalty. You could award points for age of membership, referrals, articles, ratings, etc.

Best of luck on your venture.

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Ill probably have Ads but not that much. I want to get sponsors like buysellads once my site gets enough traffic. – Trippy Dec 18 '10 at 5:17
Buysellads is not a sponsor but more of an ad marketplace. They are a great place to sell ads, but not the cheapest for buying them. In your case, its a positive because you name your price. – Frank Dec 18 '10 at 5:19
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I still wouldnt pay too much for contributors. If you do something similar to the badge system here, and build a reputation system, you may get people involved just on a basis of building credibility for their knowledge. Nothing is sexier to me than a developer with a high stackoverflow rating. Maybe consider building a system like that, with articles and more, where you also have a director of developers, freelancers, and firms. As a firm, i would like to add articles about security, knowing that our firm will get exposure for our security expertise and in the long run gain profits. – Frank Dec 18 '10 at 5:21
I like the idea of using badges and reputation. That can be a good incentive. – Zuly Gonzalez♦ Dec 18 '10 at 17:16

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