It’s no secret that we love WordPress as our content management system. There are just so many things that you can create and do with it, not just blogging! In this particular case I created an article directory, Free Craft Articles, using WP to manage the authors and submissions.

I’ve managed quite a few article directories and they all have their ups and downs. I’m actually looking at converting one of my other small directories into this format as well. It’s clean and provides better SEO for the articles than the average free article directory script.

You can add adsense and other monitization methods easily,as well as customize the loko of the site with a large amount of flexibility. If you’re a WordPress user you know how many free themes are floating around out there, you can use any of those or even custom build your own design like I did here.

I started off with a magazine style theme, you might recognize it since it’s actually the same theme base that we have right here on Easy Wahm Websites. Amazing how a few tweaks and changes can take a theme and turn it into something completely new and different.

After the design was done I added a few plugins. Mighty Adsense is definitely recommended here to make it easy to put ads where you want them to go. I put a tag cloud on the side, added some terms of service, a few affiliate links to programs that I highly recommend and ta-da an article directory was born.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but it was fairly easy. To allow submissions you just change the settings to allow new authors to register, then they simply “write post” and publish …. what’s nice is as contributors their published material doesn’t go live until it’s been approved by an admin, that’s you or your virtual assistant, so you don’t have to worry about spam slipping through the cracks.

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