Easy Reader is a WordPress plugin that lets your readers open an easy to read version of your blog posts. When your reader clicks the “easy reader” button, she’ll be shown a stripped down version of your post.

Download: Easy Reader
Demo: Click the easy reader button above. It’s bright and green!
Tested: WordPress 3.0+, but should work with earlier versions.

When you built your blog, you probably found a theme that looked good and matched your unique style. That’s great! That’s what blogging is about. But all that styling distracts your readers from your content and slows down their reading speed. This is especially true if your theme uses small, mystifying text.

Easy Reader means that you can keep your blog looking the way you want it, while still giving your readers the ideal reading experience.

How much time do your readers spend reading your blog posts? Lets say you have a medium sized blog, with 200 reads per day. Assuming that a typical reader will take 3 minutes to read the average blog post, your readers will spend about 10 hours per day reading your content.

Lets say that 20% of your readers take advantage of your Easy Reader feature, and it cuts down their reading time by 10%. This means that you could save your readers 12 minutes every day. That’s a total of 3 days saved over a year!

Making a Difference

So every blogger that installs Easy Reader is potentially saving 3 days of their reader’s time. That’s time they could spend making a difference in the world – working on opensource projects, spending time with family or working in the community.

After you install Easy Reader on your blog, contact other bloggers and suggest they install Easy Reader too. Better yet, write a post about Easy Reader.

It’s something small, but if we reach the goal of having Easy Reader installed on 10,000 blogs, that’ll save the world 83 days of reading time – every single day!

Setting It Up

After you install the plugin, it’ll automatically put an easy reader button at the top of each of your posts. You can configure how and where Easy Reader displays this button by going to Settings > Easy Reader in WordPress admin.

Another useful feature of Easy Reader is the share buttons at the bottom of the Easy Reader window. This allows your readers to take the logical next step and share your post after they’ve finished reading it. You can choose which buttons Easy Reader will display in the settings panel.

If you want ultimate control over where the Easy Reader button appears in your post you can set “Insert Easy Reader Button” to “Never” and use the easy_reader_button function in your theme.

easy_reader_button($color, $size, $class, $return)

$color is the colour of the button. At the moment your options are ‘green’, ‘blue’ and ‘grey’.
$size is the size of the button. At the moment your only option is the default – ‘normal’.
$class is any additional classes added to the button container.
$return if this is true it’ll return a string instead of print it. Defaults to false.

Future Development

This plugin is still at version 0.1. As I work towards version 1.0 I’ll add more features and clean up existing functionality. If there’s anything you’d like to see in Easy Reader, please let me know in the comments.

Over the last month, I’ve been experimenting with my sharded concept model. It’s a model for identifying and creating enormous content sites in untapped niches. It’ll help you think of thousands of article ideas and estimate how much revenue each article will generate.

This model also makes SEO easier. You can focus on optimizing a single key phrase. Every shard will benefit from your SEO on every other shard. The beauty is; it’s not all or nothing. Each shard is a distinct opportunity to rank well.

Using the sharded concept model also forces you to do due diligence. It is a business plan for content sites.

These are examples of sharded concept ideas.

• Stuff to do (concept) in individual cities (shards).
• Reviews (concept) of restaurants (shards).
• Marketing strategy reports (concept) of individual companies (shards).

Step 1 – Finding a Shardable Concept

The most crucial step is finding a shardable concept. When I’m trying to imagine a shardable concept, I usually start by picking the shards. Once you have a list of shards, it’s easy to brainstorm a concept.

These are examples of shards you could use:

• Cities
• Tourist attractions
• Dog breeds
• Job titles
• Movies

Let’s use job titles as shards for this example. There are over 14,000 job titles on Freebase. That’s enough to make a massive content site.

Now we have to choose the concept. Write down a few of your shards on a piece of paper and consider what information people might be looking for that relates to all your shards.

Use Google’s Keyword Explorer to help you come up with ideas and check if there’s enough search volume on each concept-shard.

These are a few concepts related to our job title shards and the search terms people would probably use to find them.

• Salary to expect in each job – “job title salary“
• History of each job – “job title history“
• Getting started in each job – “become job title“

Any of these would work, but I think information on how to get started in different jobs would create the most value. Let’s use that as our concept.

Step 2 – Getting a List of Shards

Freebase is the best way I’ve found to collect a list of shards easily. They have a clear API to export their data. You just need to find a category that contains your shards, then export the titles of all Freebase topics in that category.

If you don’t know how to program, just comment here and I’ll help you create the list.

Step 3 – Researching Search Volume

Your next step is to see how many people are searching for your shards’ keywords. Use Google’s Keyword Explorer to check each shard-concept combination.

For our example, we’ll find the search volume for the phrase “become job title“. You should get values like this:

• Become Accountant: 27,100 searches
• Become Laywer: 74,000 searches

Copy pasting the search volume for every job is going to take long. All 15,000 job titles will consume 85 hours of your life.

You’ll be able to scrape the search volumes in 2-3 hours if you find a suitable scraping tool. I haven’t been able to find a good one, so please comment if you know of a scraping tool that can scrape Keyword Explorer.

I’ve been using $1/hour workers from oDesk to research the search volume. They just collaborated on a Google Docs spreadsheet. It’s dirty, but it works.

I created the spreadsheet for this example.

Step 4 – Estimate Traffic

You’ll be able to estimate how much traffic your sharded concept site will get using search volume.

Take your spreadsheet and order it by search volume. Look at the top few job titles and search for “become job title” on Google. Go through the top 10 results and check if there are already sites targeting the same sharded concept. How strong are your potential competitors? Do they have valuable information? Do they have lots of back-links? How old are they?

Use all this information and try figure out where you’ll be able to slot into the search results. You might need to ask for help from an SEO professional to get a clearer idea.

If you can guess where you’ll fall in the search results, you’ll be able to figure out what percent of total searches you’ll be able to convert into visitors.

• Top Spot: 40%
• Positions 2-3: 9%
• Position 4-5: 4%
• Lower: 1%
• Off front page: don’t bother
  

From here, you can guess how much traffic you’ll get to each shard. Be safe by aiming low – rely on 0.5% of searches converting into visitors (depending on your SEO skillz).

Sure, you will get traffic from sources other than Google, but let’s rather underestimate traffic. You can always change your assumptions when you get real-world data.

Create another column in your spreadsheet called visitors per month – fill it with values based on your search volume column.

Step 5 – What Is Your Visitor Value?

It’s difficult to estimate visitor value. Depending on your concept, it’ll range from a fraction of a cent, all the way up to a few dollars per visitor.

If you want an accurate visitor value then set up a WordPress.com blog with Adsense ads. Write articles for the 10 most popular shards in your concept.

Buy up cheap traffic using Adwords, then see how users interact with your site. You’ll get a clearer idea of CPM and page views per visitor.

The CPM in your experiment will not be perfectly accurate. Remember, your visitors all found your site by clicking on an ad. They will have higher than average tenancy to click on ads. Count on your actual CPM will be about one third.

Now you can estimate visitor value. If you had a CPM of $55 (which we’ll divide by 3 = $18.34) and an average of 2.3 page views per visitor, your visitor value is 4.2c ($18.34 / 1000 * 2.3 = $0.04217). We measure CPM in thousands, so divide it by 1000 to get earning per impression.

For the search phrase “become accountant” with its 27,100 monthly searches, you can expect to get about 135 visitors every month. That’s equal to $5.69 in monthly revenue.

I consider something viable if I can recover my investment after 18 months. So an article about how to become an accountant would earn $102.43 over 18 months. Creating a quality article will cost about $50. You also have to consider other costs like hosting, marketing and your time, but from the looks of things this is a viable concept.

Create an 18 month earning column in your spreadsheet.

Step 6 – Creating The Website

Be frugal when you start a new site. Use a free CMS like WordPress. It’s easy to use, and there is a lot of cheap premium themes for it. You can create a clean, professional site for under $50.

If you’re going to write the articles yourself, then you can start on your list. Work your way from the top down, creating an article for each shard.

If you’d rather hire a writer, then you need to decide on how much you’re willing to spend per article. Writers on oDesk will charge between $5 and $50 per 500 word article.

You can also decide how much you’re willing to spend on each shard based on your estimated 18 month earning. Make your writing budget for each shard 50% – 80% of your 18 month earning. Hire several writers and have them work on different areas of the list based on their cost per article.

Step 7 – Making it Work

This is what you need to focus on if you want your sharded concept site to explode:

• SEO – Your website is going to rely heavily on search traffic. You’ll attract an audience of people interested in your concept, but you’ll mostly rely on visitors interested in your individual shards. SEO is too broad a topic to cover in this post, but you should focus your link building attention on getting links from sites that relate to your concept. Try get your concept keywords into the anchor text of links to your site.
• Related Content – It’s pretty easy to find a related content plugin for your WordPress site. I highly recommend you use one of these.
• Optimizations – Make small changes all the time and track the effect using Google Analytics. Fix things that don’t work and tweak things that do.
• Have Fun – Try find a concept that you find fun. It’ll take hundreds of hours to build a successful sharded concept site. If you don’t enjoy the concept, you’ll get bored and give up.

In Summary

• Use the sharded concept model to create enormous content sites at low cost.
• Start by choosing shards, then finding an untapped concept.
• Fetch a list of shards from Freebase or Wikipedia.
• Estimate how many visitors you’ll get to each article (shard) by looking at search volume.
• Guess visitor value or use a real-world experiment. Use that data to estimate 18 month earnings for each article.
• If the idea still looks viable, hire writers to create all the articles and publish them using a WordPress site.