Monetized Niche Publishing With Pipeno

Pipeno is a beta publishing platform. Pipeno is (going to be) fully featured. Pipeno will be polished and well-rounded tool. Pipeno has a range of pricing options. Pipeno is starting to sound like an Apple product. Perhaps it should, because Pipeno really is an interesting and comprehensive offering. Read on to see whether Pipeno is what you need to start your own news-blog, e-Media network, or just to share pictures of your cats with the world.

Overview

First off, let’s talk about what Pipeno does. Pipeno is a scalable publishing platform designed to enable users to monetize their blog or social media website. It provides a content management system allowing users to avoid the headache of coding or implementing their own.

Pipeno offers three pricing options: Plus, Premium and Enterprise, priced at free, $14.50 per month and $799 per month respectively. Each option provides more or less features than the others and we’ll talk a bit more about this later. For the purpose of this article I’m going to have a look at the Premium option which offers a 30-day free trial.

Pricing

Pipeno’s Plus plan offers a basic setup for creating and distributing content, whether free or paid. However, certain features are not available to Plus users, or are restricted. For instance, the Plus option only allows for 5 staff members and doesn’t give you compensation management features for paying your staff members.

The Premium option is a step up, and has significantly more features than the Plus option, including optimization for mobile devices, book publishing tools and allowing for a custom domain. Likewise, the Enterprise option has even more features than the Premium option, though at nearly $800 a month it should.

The Enterprise option is designed for large social media companies looking for a complete professional solution, whereas the Plus and Premium options are more suited to smaller individuals or groups looking to neatly manage their output.

Getting Started With Pipeno

The sign-up process isn’t at all complicated; sign-up links are to be found on the pricing page. After clicking the link you’ll be asked to either log in or create an account. The account registration process is really quick, you just need to enter your name, email, a display name and a password. You’ll be sent an activation email shortly.

After activating your account with the link in the activation email you were sent, you’ll then begin setting up your first Pipeno powered website. By default you’ll choose a subdomain of pipeno.com, but this can be changed later on. After filling this form out you’ll be asked to log in to PayPal and confirm a recurring payment if you chose the Premium option. If you chose the Plus option, you’re all set up and ready to go.

For those wondering about the 30-day free trial, you aren’t charged for the first 30-days and you can cancel at any time within that period.

The Pipeno Dashboard

After you’ve completed your sign-up you’ll be taken to the Dashboard of the website you just created. You will be presented with a number of empty empty graphs. When you’ve got your website up and running these will show you detailed statistics about readership and web-visitors.

At the top is a menu bar which gives you access to all your tools as a content publisher. There are also tabs near the top right which let you change between your option sets. For instance, in order to write an article for your website you’ll need to be on the Writer tab. To schedule who will be writing what in the future you’ll need to be on the Editor tab and to recruit editors and other staff members you need to be on the Publisher tab.

At first this can be a bit confusing, but it does allow you to mentally and physically seperate your responsibilities on your website. It also makes for better delegation of duties when you’ve got a number of staff members—each person’s responsibilities are clearly marked out.

Writing An Article

Let’s have a look at a few basic tasks and how easily they can be accomplished in Pipeno. Taking the scenario of a tech-blogger who wants to publish their first article with Pipeno, the first thing we need to do is create a category. To do this, under the Publisher tab we navigate to Structure then Categories.

We add the name of our category, perhaps ‘Gaming’, and click the plus button. There we go, we’ve created a category. Now we can go ahead and write an article for it. To do this we head over to the Writer tab and click My Articles then Write.

We can then give our article a title, a quick summary and then write the full article. Pipeno allows the article to be spread over multiple pages, so readers don’t get “leaning tower of text” syndrome. When the article has been written credits can be given to sources, the article can be tagged, and then placed in the appropriate category.

Of course, Pipeno allows uploading photos and videos and has view modes specially designed for these. A nice little feature here is the ability to delay the publishing of an article, useful if a writer works ahead of schedule and doesn’t want to worry about remembering to publish articles some way down the line.

Monetization

Of course one of Pipeno’s enticing aspects is its monetization (and future monetization) capabilities. Unfortunately at the time of writing, Pipeno had not yet fully deployed its monetization options so I was unable to test them. If you’d like to find out more about how you can make money with Pipeno, the Monetization FAQ has the answers.

Summary

Pipeno is a promising platform and has plenty of fantastic features in the works in addition to the many features we weren’t able to cover in this review. To see more of what Pipeno can do, visit their Features page.

Overall, I think it’s clear that Pipeno is going to be an excellent tool for anyone with a blog or social media website to manage. I really look forward to seeing it in a more matured stage and it would certainly by among my first choices.