Spacial Anomaly: A Content Site Writers Who Are "Out Of This World"

As of the summer of 2013, I had been creating content for profit for three years on sites including Yahoo! Contributors Network, Squidoo, and Zujava. I had primarily focused on Squidoo for some time but was finding myself frustrated by certain issues with the site—I'm sure anyone of you who had experience there understands. Between the way some users manipulated the Tier system for ad revenue payout and then the constantly changing content guidelines from HQ, it was becoming a very frustrating place to be a writer.

And while I'd had some good feelings for Zujava and was continuing to write there, hoping to help see the site take off, I felt that site layout was a bit too "cutesy" and not really well suited for articles that, well, didn't fit into a kind of "mommy-blogging" style and subject matter. Rock music concert reviews and classic art discussions felt a little out of place under that smiling cartoon toucan.

So I decided to use my experience with these platforms—and over 15 years experience running websites in general—to start my own content site, Spacial Anomaly. Why that name? Because an anomaly is something different, and unusual. A "deviation from the norm"; that is, I wanted it to be a content platform that was not the same as others.

There would be strict content guidelines enforced from the start, to keep quality levels high (writers must submit an application to join, showing samples of their work elsewhere.) Content categories would be limited to niche/genre topics which, in my experience, tended to get buried under pages upon pages of cupcake recipes, shower curtain shopping carts, and parenting advice on other sites. It would have a cool, sleek layout that would work well with more serious or "geek culture" topics.

That was my mission and how I set about designing the site.

Some of the topics we cover and are seeking more writers to explore include:

• Reviews of genre films, books, comics, music releases, art exhibitions and video games
• TV episode recaps, season reviews and analysis
• Essays on fandom history and meta discussion of fannish topics.
• Tutorials and how-tos on crafting, writing, cosplay, and building fannish websites.
• Introductions to various musical performers, actors and artists, be they historical or modern.
• Interviews with creative individuals producing genre work.
• Reports from fan conventions, concerts, and other gatherings.
• Personal stories of individual experiences within fandom.

As examples, here are just a few of the articles you'll find currently at Spacial Anomaly:

• Being a Convention Dealer: Tips and Advice for Getting Started in the Business
• A Pink Floyd Fan Visits Pompeii
• Remembering Some of Those Cool Vintage 1970s Toys
• Cheap Large Capacity Vinyl Storage
• A Guide to Buying Jewelry Findings, Stones and Materials for the Home Crafter
• Circa Zero's "Circus Hero": Is This What New Classic Rock Sounds Like?
• Stewart Copeland's Orchestral Ben-Hur is a Visual and Musical Triumph
• Early Edition: One of the Best Dramas from the 90s
• Building a Niche Interest Wiki
• Is MasterChef U.S. Ageist?
• 5 Myths About Fan Fiction & Fan Fiction Writers
• "The City War" by Sam Starbuck: Roman politics, intrigue and sexuality

As a contributor to Spacial Anomaly, you will have the opportunity to potentially earn revenue and exposure for yourself in a number of ways:

• Affiliate product links. You are allowed to include links to whatever affiliate sales programs you may belong to (such as Amazon, AllPosters, CafePress), provided your individual submissions meet our content guidelines. Best of all, you keep 100% of all sales commissions you may generate via your links at Spacial Anomaly. There is no revenue sharing of affiliate commissions, such as you would encounter on other sites such as HubPages or here at Wizzley. But you must have your own affiliate accounts to use them on the site.

• Promoting your own work. We encourage writers to use the site to promote their create works elsewhere, such as articles on other content platforms (like here, HubPages, or Goody Guides), books or fanzines you've published, crafts for sale on Etsy or your own website, artwork for sale on Zazzle, CafePress, deviantART, etc. Just be creative and not spammy—we aren't here just to be a link drop, but to hopefully bring exposure to creative and exciting individuals.

• Shared Adsense revenue. If you have your own Google Adsense ID, you will receive 50% of the Adsense revenue generated on the ads within your articles on the site (not the sidebar but the ads within the text of your articles. It might not seem like but, but the more you contribute, the more potential you have to earn! (This shared earning is done via the WordPress plugin Revenue Share for Authors.)

Of course, the full content guidelines can be found on the site itself.  But the basics to keep in mind are as follows:

• Articles must be a minimum of 400 words in length. The longer your article, the more affiliate/product links you are allowed to include in your articles as well (additional links per 50 words.) Content must also meet the requirements and guidelines for the Google Adsense Revenue program.

• Content must fit in to one of the main categories of the site: Art, Books, Crafting, Fandom, Media, Music or Gaming. (So, for instance, a general interest article on Halloween costumes for 10 year olds would not be appropriate. But a niche article on Marvel Universe Halloween costumes for 10 year olds would be totally fine.)

• There is no required frequency for posting by our contributors. You can post an article a day, once a week, once every few months...however often you feel like it!

• Content can be republished from other sites (moved from a different platform, journal or blog) provided you have first removed the content from that original source and made sure the original source is no longer showing up in Google.

• You retain all rights and ownership to your work. Just like here, you can delete it and remove it at any time. However we retain the rights to remove your content at any time should we feel it violates the terms of service of the site. You are responsible for your own backups!

The chart above shows the traffic patterns and growth of Spacial Anomaly since its launch in August of 2013. As you can see  it took until about a year for traffic to really begin to pick up, and a good portion of that traffic "spike" through September of that year was due to strong performance of some television episode recaps (for MasterChef US, which had its season finale that month). However, even since that series ended, traffic has remained at a solid stronger level, shown a good bump around the holidays, and I expect to see it to continue on in a steady way through 2015.

We are still a relatively small site, with only a few regular contributors, but I feel that this cautious approach has been to the benefit of the site overall. More importantly I have definitely found that some of my niche articles which were dying on the bigger sites like Squidoo or HubPages have performed much better traffic-wise on Spacial Anomaly in comparison.

If so, I invite you to please visit Spacial Anomaly for yourself. Check out some of our articles and authors, read the Help documents, and if you're interested, consider submitting a new contributor application. I'd also be happy to answer any other questions you have about the site, either via the comments section below or private message.