Producing Quality Media & Articles
 

There's something my team and I have been tossing around since December and wanted to get some input from other board operators.

We've put up a new site, which is doing fine for the social portions. However, we've got some sections where we'd like to put up some quality articles. Mainly, this is targeted to one specific region and we want to get some first hand reviews of places to eat, hotels, various entertainment aspects as well as random stuff you don't find your local tour guide books.

To my point and question: Does anyone have any good reference material/links in regards to using a paid review? When I say 'paid' I mean we are buying the article from a independent writer at a certain payment based on number of words in the article. The work, once paid for, becomes the property of our site and is published for the users to read. I'm specifically looking for guidelines as to how much we should pay and what pitfalls to watch out for.

Target Reasoning: Most of our users won't produce quality articles that would attract attention to our site. We also don't use or sell advertising which is the main point of being unlike our major competitor. Thus, using the budget generated from another commercial [revenue generating] site, we'd like to divert some that budget to help support this community site. Lastly, none of us have the time to manage the sites and write quality articles at the same time.

We'll also launch the VB4 CMS with the first few real articles, which will be kind of a test to see how we like it before considering to use the CMS on another site.

If you don't feel like posting material publicly, please drop me a private message here. Otherwise, thanks for reading!

[This is not an advertisement, btw] :p