Neatorama is one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. They cover all sorts of neat, weird and interesting things. A great part of their stories is also sent by the readers themselves. I have been linked from them in the past, and it sent over 3,000 visitors my way in matter of 24 hours, just to give you an idea of their traffic levels.
One problem that they had was the fact that the number of submissions was too high to be manageable, and obviously not all of them could get featured on the homepage.
In order to solve that problem, the recently introduced a very cool and innovative feature, called Upcoming Queue.
It is basically a social media voting section inside their website, ala Digg or Reddit, where the users can submit their stories, and vote the other stories up or down. The most popular ones get promote to the front page. Here are the details of that section:
Your submission is a blog post: Neatorama is a blog and will remain a blog. By writing a blog post instead of a link, you’ll have more than just a few sentences to tell people what your pick is all about.
Equal chance to get promoted to front page: Not a power user? Don’t have a lot of friends that will vote for your submissions? No problem. Besides garnering upvotes, Neatorama editors will be on the look out for good posts to promote, regardless of the number of votes they garner. This will even out the playing field for everyone.
Credit is given where credit is due: This is a personal pet peeve of mine: social networking posts don’t give via or author credits. If you found an interesting item to post on Neatorama via a certain blog, please be neighborly and give it a via credit link. Promoted posts will also have author credit – your posts will carry a link to your blog or website. (We do reserve the right to edit this in cases of spam or inappropriate content).
No burying: Once a post is on the front page, it’s on the front page. There’s no burying or personal vendettas (though we do reserve the right to edit/delete in cases of spam or inappropriate content).
Pretty cool huh? I also think that this idea has a bright future. Imagine popular blogs like TechCrunch or PerezHilton creating similar sections where the users would be able to submit blog posts themselves. It is a win-win situation.
Anyway go check it out on Neatorama, and perhaps even submit a post there.
About Mark Felix
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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