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As the owner of 3 tutorial directories,
I have noticed that over the past few months the increase
in crappy so called photoshop tutorial sites has skyrocketed.
These sites are sites that produce almost no useful tutorials
and are stickly created for the purpose to generate money.
I would list some of these sites here, but I do not want
to give them a free link.
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At first glance it would appear to be a lot of work to write
tutorials for money. For one you would have to be efficient in
photoshop and produce a tutorial that is useful and people would
want to read. Second it takes a time, a lot of time, to write
well written tutorials. I know, I've written my fair share and
though I will admit some of my tutorials are better then others,
I've always wrote them so that others could learn new techniques.
Third, you need to advertise your site so people can find your
tutorials.
So if it is so hard why are there so many of these crappy sites?
Simple, these tutorials are not useful, but they still make money.
These sites read a tutorial from somewhere else, then produce
5-10 tutorials using the same technique. For example, the gel
effect, a very useful tutorial that comes in handy with website
design. Now a well written tutorial should teach you how to create
this effect and how to apply it to different areas. What these
crap sites do is show you how to apply this to one area. Example,
"how to make a gel button", "how to make a gel
bar with text", "how to make a gel WinXP button".
Taking 1 technique and creating 10 tutorials from it, it sure
saves alot of time and increases productivity.
That alone would not make these sites succesful if it wasn't
for all the tutorial directories online. You can write 1 tutorial
and submit it to 20 directories which will bring in literally
1000's of visitors over a few days period. Write 2-3 tutorials
a week and you can have a site that had 0 visitors one day and
5000 the next. Many of these site you cannot even see the tutorial
without scrolling down past the ads.
So what do we do about this? Being the owner of 3 tutorial directories
I have gotten to my boiling point with these sites. So I will
be no longer be accepting repeat tutorials or tutorials that do
not provide real content. These sites all use the same basic layout
and are very easy to spot. I will only be supporting graphic community
sites which write there tutorials to better the community.
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