There are several reasons this can happen, and our system sends an email notification containing the specifics in each case, however we thought this was a good time to give a general overview of our processes so you can better understand them.

The first and most obvious reason is when it’s found that an article which slipped passed our editorial reviews is in violation of any of our submission guidelines, including if the content violates another person’s copyright.

Beyond that, getting an article published with Content Caboodle requires that it pass through 2 manual reviews. It used to be a single review, but we have been able to expand our editing and review staff to the point where each article is now given a general review, and then a final review by a senior editor prior to publishing.

However, passing these two reviews simply means that your article has met the minimum requirements for publication as per our submission guidelines.

Once live on our site, your article is constantly monitored in a number of ways to see if it is passing the “reader sniff test”, and when an article appears to be failing this test, it may be pulled from circulation.

Basically, what we look for and try to measure is whether or not readers who visit your article find it valuable, entertaining, or insightful. That’s the “reader sniff test”.

We have a very intricate system in place for measuring this, which encompasses everything from direct and active user engagement (article reporting, comments, social mentions) to involved calculations that are made against the article traffic data, using factors like incoming links, average time readers spend on the article page and much more.

The bottom line is, we strive to provide an excellent service to both readers and authors here at Content Caboodle, and while our submission guidelines are the minimum requirements for publishing with us, they shouldn’t be viewed as the end goals by authors when creating their articles.

We would rather encourage all of our authors to focus on building trust and authority with the readers who will view their articles by creating high quality, valuable content. It will server you better in your endeavors, and help to keep Content Caboodle a valuable service for all.

One final note, if one of your articles is pulled from circulation you may edit it and resubmit it for publication. However, we suggest you first review that article and try to understand why it wasn’t connecting with readers, maybe you can correct the problem or perhaps writing a new piece instead will be a better use of your time.

Technorati Tags: articles, submission guidelines

The truth is, our editors and submission reviewers have always been good at weeding out articles which were machine written, and users who were employing automated submission programs, but still there was a rise in the number of catches we were making and that’s what prompted our public announcement of a crackdown.

As a result of that announcement we received a ton of positive feedback from members, and even more from visitors.

I have to stray off topic just a bit here to say we have an exceptional class of visitors coming to this site and reading our member’s articles. They are both inquisitive and engaged, as displayed by the insightful questions they ask in our article comments areas, and the comments they provide when using our “Report This Article” feature any time they feel an article is misleading, abusive or violates one of our terms of service or submission guidelines.

From all of the feedback we’ve received in the last few weeks, a number of things have become clear to us.

1. Many of our members and regular visitors are very passionate about their use of this site–that’s a great thing
2. The majority of articles which displease our readers, despite conforming to our submission guidelines, tend to be on the shorter end in terms of word counts, and often push the boundary of informative vs. sales pitch–this is bad
3. An overwhelming number of articles that readers have indicated they dislike are related to Internet Marketing and Making Money Online–this was predictable

So, as we’ve always done when our readers and members take the time to give us their opinions and ideas, we took all of this feedback into consideration and have updated our submission guidelines as follows:

1. All articles must now contain a minimum of 450 words. This rule itself will not force submissions to be of higher quality, but it will weed out some of the low quality gibberish from those who aren’t concerned at all with providing quality content, and it will make the job of spotting poor quality submissions even easier for our reviewers.
2. There will no longer be any second chances for members who break our rules and use automated software to write or submit their articles. We have tried to be lenient in the past, especially when the violation was only in the submission process, however time and again these members simply became repeat offenders, so now, just as with anyone who uses automated means to inflate their page view counts, we are taking a Zero Tolerance approach with all automated software use in any interactions with our service. Anyone caught using automated software for any purpose related to our site or service will have all of their articles removed from our system, and their account terminated.
3. All articles related to Internet Marketing and/or Making Money Online will now receive a double review process, first by one of our regular article reviewers to ensure it meets our standard submission guidelines, and if it passes there it will then be sent to one of our senior editors for content review where it will be scrutinized for accuracy. By that we mean if you claim you can push a button and make millions of dollars in your article, you had better provide proof to support your claims, or we will not accept it for publishing. We do not want to ban these topics outright, but our service is not the place for publishing misleading or false information. Our senior editors will use their own judgement to determine if the content, tone and claims in these articles will provide value to our readers or not.
4. Health related articles which make medical claims of any kind must include citations or reference links to recognized or authoritative sources which validate those claims, or they will be declined. It’s acceptable and encouraged for writers to state their personal opinions or theories in an article, however when you do so it should be clearly evident that it is an opinion or theory, and not be stated as fact without supporting evidence. In other words, it’s fine to say that the latest Watermelon Diet helped you lose weight, but if you claim it also helped thousands of other people lose weight, or that it cures Cancer there had better be some corroborating evidence to back up those claims, and you must link to that evidence from your article or resource box.

On a closing note, we aren’t adjusting our policies to make things harder for writers. In fact, by following our guidelines it will make it easier for writers to provide higher quality articles for readers, and to establish themselves as authorities on their topics.

Technorati Tags: articles, submission guidelines

Our editors have recently noticed a massive spike in submissions of obvious automated nature. While our submission guidelines remain very liberal, we do not allow machine-written content nor automated submission software to be used for mass submitting of articles.

Unfortunately, some of the people using these tactics apparently think their use of spin-text machine-written content and automated submission software is undetectable. We are partially to blame for this misconception as in the past our policy has been to simply decline such submissions without public comment.

The truth however, is that almost 100% of machine-written articles and automated submissions are detectable, and this posting serves as notice that going forward not only will we continue to decline these submissions, but we will begin banning all accounts associated with them without notification or warning.

Our actions may seem harsh, but the reality is we must do this to protect our service for the upstanding members who submit quality articles and our visiting guests.

Over the past week, more than half of the articles that our editors manually reviewed were obviously machine-written or auto-submitted by repeat offenders. We can not continue to allow our editors to spend so much valuable time on illegitimate submissions as it takes away from the time they can give to our members who play by the rules.

For that reason we will have a zero-tolerance policy going forward with regards to machine-written content and the use of automated submission software.

We will not disclose all of our methods for detecting such submissions, however we will share some of the most obvious reasons red flags are raised to help our legitimate members avoid undue scrutiny by our editing staff.

1. Does your article make sense? We understand that English is not the native language of all our members, and we have always maintained that slight grammar errors or broken English was acceptable provided that the meaning of the article was clear for readers. That hasn’t changed, however if we see a sentence such as “Did you often frequently sometimes seek and look for…” then there’s a good chance your account is about to be banned.

2. Don’t use automated-submission software. Believe it or not (at your own peril), almost all of the automated article submission programs on the market leave a footprint when used that we and other content sites can easily see. Just because some article directories don’t take the time or bother to check for these footprints shouldn’t lead you to believe they don’t exist, they do and we’re watching for them. If we see them in your article, your account is in jeopardy.

The bottom line is every single submission made to Content Caboodle does get reviewed by a human editor before going live on our site, and our editors as well as our software are very good at finding the rule breakers. We run internal tests on a weekly basis to test our editing process and constantly add rules and measures to improve the accuracy with which illegitimate submissions are caught.

As stated, in the past our policy has been to quietly decline such submissions, but going forward we will also ban the accounts associated with them to stop the repeat offenses to ensure our editors have more time for our valued members.

Technorati Tags: automated article submissions, machine-written, spin-text

To put that into perspective, the overall average CTR for author’s resource box links is just over 4%, and there is also a fair sized group of authors/marketers who regularly get between 10% and 15% CTR’s.

Obviously, seeing one author hover around the 40% mark for so long we wanted to speak with him and ask his secrets.

Unfortunately, he has been reluctant to agree to any sort of interview or profile piece because as he puts it, “the nature of Internet marketing is so cut-throat, the minute marketers see someone doing something new or interesting that works they pounce on it and beat it to death.”

We certainly understand his position, and would never ask one of our members to ’shoot themselves in the foot’, but in further talking with him he did agree to share a few general pieces of advice on how he writes his articles and resource boxes and gave us permission to quote them here on the blog.

There are some real nuggets of gold here, and they come from somebody we can verify is ‘walking the walk’ and getting results, so read, enjoy, and take action for yourself:

1) Tabloid titles rule. There’s a reason that tabloids and magazines use the same type of titles month after month, they just work. Use list titles like “7 Ways To…”, or juicy and sensational titles to grab attention and get readers to your articles. Just make sure you deliver in the article on what your title promises.

2) Think of the summary area as a place for a strong sub-title. With most article sites, what you use as the summary will end up being what the search engines use for the link description in the search results, so if you have an attention grabbing title, use the summary space to expand on it more and hook readers in from the search listings.

For example, if a title is “7 Ways To Lose 7 Pounds This Week”, then a good summary (or sub-title) would be something like “These methods aren’t the usual suspects and 3 of them will surprise you”. That’s a strong hook on top of a solid title.

3) Make a personal connection right away with your article. I’ve always been taught that you start a writing with an opening statement about your topic, but that doesn’t work very well online. It’s better to start by talking about a person, or group of people, who are using or affected by your topic. This creates a personal connection with readers, your article becomes a story and they want to know what’s going to happen to the people. Whatever your topic is, if you can make a real person the subject of the article it will resonate better with readers.

4) Give facts, figures and sales messages in tiny chunks through the body of the article. Use short paragraphs, and remember that people take in the first and last idea of each paragraph better than they do any ideas in the middle, so put your wow facts in the first and last sentences of paragraphs, and bury the fluff and any contradicting ideas you want to gloss over in the middle of paragraphs.

5) Longer articles work better than short ones, but keep the body text in short chunks and full of white space. A 1000 word article is better than a 400 word article, but you have to keep the paragraphs short, about 100 words each.

So, a 1000 word article should be about 10 paragraphs, or better still, 10 paragraphs and 2 bulletpoint lists. Online readers like to skim text, by keeping everything short you allow them to skim and still get all of your major selling points or the heart of your message.

6) End your article with an update on the person or people you mentioned in the opening. Readers want a conclusion to ‘the story’, so tell how the person or people have been changed or affected by your topic, whether it’s a product, a service, or an idea doesn’t matter, it works either way.

7) Write your resource box as if it were a P.S. [postscript] to your article. Forget about you, nobody cares about your backstory or experience, and telling them won’t get you any clicks to your links. Instead, now that you’ve wrapped up the article by telling how your topic changed someone’s life, create a question in the reader’s mind of how their own life could be different with your topic, then offer a link “for more information” or “for more about topic”. It shouldn’t sound like a sales pitch at all, but rather be offered up as a choice the reader has to make for themselves.

By posing the question first about how your topic could change the reader’s life, they’re already stimulated to know more about it, so then it’s best to present the link as a choice between getting what they want and walking away from what could be. So long as the reader doesn’t feel pressured or like they’re being sold to, this works great.

8) Finally, write for quality over quantity. It’s easy to think that by writing tons of crap articles and saturating the web with them you’ll get better coverage and results, I used to think that too, but the opposite is true. It’s easier to write 2 articles per day than it is to write 10, but you have to put a little more time and thought into those 2.

Still, I could write 10 cheesy articles per day that get me 1 or 2 daily clicks each, or I can write 2 articles per day that get me 15 to 20 daily clicks each, there’s no decision to be made there. With less writing and work as far as researching topics and submitting articles goes, I’m getting more traffic now, and that traffic converts better for me on the backend because I’ve established some trust with visitors when they first meet me through my quality article.

It’s a hard shift to make, I was there and I worried that my traffic would drop off the map when I cut down to less articles with higher quality, but I found the opposite happened so I say go fo it.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, articles, traffic

To see the data, simply login to your account, and then click on the “My Articles” link under the Member Links heading near the bottom of any page, and you’ll see a page like this with your articles listed on it:

Keyword Stats View

Under your “Approved Articles”, any that have been found via a search engine will have the keywords and number of times each keyword was used to reach your article(s).

Please keep in mind that this system only began collecting data as of December 30th, 2010, so it may take a while before you start seeing keyword stats for some of your articles, and some articles which aren’t ranking in the search engines for whatever reason may never display any keyword statistics for you.

We hope this new feature will be of use to you, and as always welcome your feedback on it or any other features you would like to see added in the future at Content Caboodle.

Happy New Year!!!

Technorati Tags: analytics, articles, keywords, stats

This has us very excited, and it’s all due to the hard work of you, our participating authors and marketers, so from all of us here at Content Caboodle, “Thank You!”

You may have seen our announcement just a few months ago, at the end of May 2010, when we reached the 10,000 registered members point. That took us 3 years from our launch in 2007 to reach, and yet in the 6 months since we’ve grown by another 150% to reach over 25,000 members.

There have been some bumps along the way, the growth spurt did catch us unprepared and we fell way behind on article reviewing and approvals for several weeks, and while we’re sorry for the inconvenience that caused many of our authors, we are glad you stuck with us through it and we did turn it into an opportunity to bring on a whole new crew of editors and make some necessary changes to our system that have greatly improved our service for all now.

So again, thank you for all your efforts and for sticking with us through some of our growing pains, and we have a special holiday surprise coming to all of our registered members as a small token of our gratitude and appreciation, so be on the watch for that soon.

Technorati Tags: 100k articles, 25k members, content caboodle

Registered Contributors as of Oct 2, 2010

Just four months later now, we currently have 16,774 registered and contributing members. That’s an increase of over 675% in the last four months.

We’re delighted over this incredible growth, however it has caused us some minor growing pains that we wanted to discuss openly, and explain what we’re doing about them so that you know any recent changes or degradation in the service that you may have noticed are going to be very short-term and we will have everything back on-track and on schedule very soon.

The first and most obvious issue has been a slow down in submission reviews. With so many more contributors comes a lot more daily article submissions, and we honestly weren’t prepared for such a dramatic growth spurt.

We have now brought on seven new associate editors. The first four completed their training yesterday (Oct. 1, 2010) and will begin reviewing live articles on Monday, Oct. 4th.

The remaining three all begin their training on the 4th. The training course we have is an intensive week long learning process, so they will be ready to begin reviewing live articles on Monday, Oct. 11th.

Based on the number of articles per day each editor is expected to review, we calculated that we would need four more editors to keep up with the new levels of daily submissions. We decided to bring on seven right away so that we could also clear the current backlog of articles waiting to be reviewed, and become ahead of the curve as our growth continues to avoid future backups.

Another issue you may have noticed (many of you have contacted us about it now) is that on author’s profile pages the total number of Page Views being displayed is inaccurate if you have more than 50 published articles with us.

This is a glitch in the programming that happened when we updated our site design, however it has not affected author’s payouts and we do have the accurate totals for every author’s Page Views on record in our management system.

What’s happening with this glitch is that our site only displays the most recent 50 articles that any author has published on their profile page, and instead of displaying the author’s total Page View tally, the page is only displaying the total Page Views from the 50 displayed articles on the page; which is why this only affects authors with more than 50 published articles.

The reason we haven’t corrected this yet, despite knowing what the problem is, is simply that our web programmer is also a part-time editor with us, and recently we’ve had him working full time as an editor to help with the increased submission rates.

The Page Views display is a minor annoyance, but doesn’t have any major impact on the service so we have felt his time was better spent continuing to review articles for authors until we could get our new editors trained and working on live articles.

With the four new editors joining the team this week, we will be able to get him on this issue and it should be corrected in a few days.

There have been some other minor things here and there as a result of our sudden growth, much of it affecting what goes on behind the scenes for us, such as editors working more overtime than they really ever should to try and keep up with the volumes.

By no means am I (or are any of us) complaining about any of this. It’s a wonderful thing to see the fruits of your labor suddenly flurishing. We simply wanted to make you aware of what was going on currently, and what was being done about it, so that you would know we will be back to normal shortly.

We truly appreciate the participation and support we’ve received from our community of authors, and I hope that shows in the amount of extra work and hours everyone here has been providing to ensure the service didn’t fall too far behind.

We also apologize to all for the backups which have occurred, and hope you won’t hold it against us going forward. Given our history, this recent growth spurt of 675% in four months was completely unexpected and we were caught with our pants down. We have addressed it as quickly as we could and have taken measures to ensure in the future we can get new editors on-board and trained in a much more efficient manner and shorter amount of time to avoid this happening again.

Technorati Tags: backups, growth

Sure, you can write and publish an article online without paying a penny, but to create a quality article requires at-least a modest investment of time for the researching and writing–and isn’t your time worth something? So, for that reason I think it’s misleading and unfair to describe article marketing as “free” traffic.

Perhaps it would be better if everyone started referring to article marketing as an easy source of “premium” or “great” traffic, because that’s where article marketing really shines when you do it right.

With just a few paragraphs of well written and crafted words you can pull in boat-loads of highly targeted, quality traffic.

To demonstrate just how valuable the traffic can be with article marketing, let’s look at an actual example from Content Caboodle. Here is a screenshot from an article published on our site:

Notice that I’ve highlighted the first link from the resource box. The anchor text of that link is “printer cartridges” and this specific link has been clicked hundreds of times by visitors to this article page. I know the actual number of clicks the link has received, but without the actual author’s permission it would be wrong to disclose that here, so we’ll stick with the general and generic “hundreds of clicks” for the sake of this posting.

Now, lets look at the average CPC (cost per click) that Google charges for that particular term:

$6.31 per click. Now, of course that reflects the cost when bidding in Google’s search network more than from content page displays, but even still you can easily estimate that it’s going to cost you over $1 per click for that term even in the content network. You could bid less than $1, but I doubt your ad would ever get displayed if you did.

So, at a minimum of $1 per click in value, and with hundreds of clicks to that link, it’s easy to see just how valuable article marketing can be when done right.

And just by the way, this specific article has a 2nd link in the resource box as well with a different anchor text term, and though it hasn’t received as many clicks as the first link, it has received hundreds of clicks to date too.

The key to this article’s success is that the author spent a little time to create a very good and engaging piece of content that naturally guides readers from the article body to his resource box links.

Article marketing is easy, and it’s a great (but not exactly free) way to grab premium traffic, if you do it right and give quality content then you will get quality returns.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article writing, engagement

So, if you have unsubscribed from our news and announcements mailing list, why might you have still received our latest mailing?

This question was asked of us by an author today after we sent an announcement mailing this morning. He was understandably upset at having received email from our list mailing after he had unsubscribed from the list several months ago, and accused us of forcing SPAM upon him.

So, what happened?

Well, it turns out that at some point in the past few months this author tried to login to submit a new article and couldn’t remember his account details, and instead of having them sent to him through our web form, he just went ahead and created a new author’s account…and BINGO, as a newly registered author with an account that hadn’t unsubscribed from our mailings or requested not to receive them, he was added to our Author’s eMail List and received our latest announcement.

I Told You We Don’t Send SPAM

There was a similar case in the past where it turned out that a marketer had created multiple accounts to keep their niches/markets separate, and then unsubscribed from our mailings with some but not all of their multiple accounts, resulting in some of their addresses still being subscribed and receiving our news and announcements.

The bottom line is we do not force anybody to receive our mailings, and we respect your wishes on email contacts…when you make them clear to us.

If you have received our announcements after unsubscribing from our email list, please check your account(s) to ensure that there isn’t some simple error or oversight like I’ve described above that might explain it.

The member who emailed us this morning and accused us of forcing SPAM on him felt pretty bad about his angry email tone after realizing it was his own actions which caused him to receive our mailing again. He had no reason to feel bad, and we’re happy that we could clear the issue up for him so quickly; hopefully this blog posting will help others avoid the same problem.

But More Important

Why wouldn’t you want to receive our news and announcement mailings?

It’s not like we send them often and clog up your Inbox. We sent one this morning, and the last one went out way back in January…that’s not abusive nor intrusive at all, is it?

And we don’t send out a bunch of fluff or pointless dribble when we do send an announcement. We only contact you when there’s a very good reason to, with very big news to report or special offers of our service that we don’t announce publicly.

So, think about it before unsubscribing because you may just miss out on some great new features or opportunities with us here at Content Caboodle if you do.

If you have unsubscribed in the past but would like to receive our infrequent mailings once again, you can always re-subscribe here!

Technorati Tags: email, spam

It didn’t take long for someone to jump on that and ask us if we were saying keywords don’t matter anymore and that keyword researching is useless.

That’s not what we said (or meant) at all.

Our point was that in the past it was enough to simply target some easy-to-medium keywords with articles and grab good search engine placements in a relatively short period of time.

That’s still possible, but the difference is those quick rankings no longer last for weeks or even days like they used to do.

The search engines have become so good and fast at updating and “dancing” content that now you’re lucky if that quick top 10 ranking piece lasts more than just a couple of hours.

So sure, it’s still easy to get a first page ranking for some obscure longtail keyword if you want to, but keeping your piece on the first page of search results for more than literally minutes has become an incredible amount of work.

And it isn’t necessary if you approach it differently.

Look at the changes that search engines have made over the years. If you watch what they do it becomes easy to see what they want…and it isn’t keyword rich content — It’s content rich content. It’s quality and authority content. It’s content that people are going to read/watch/listen-to and say to themselves “I’ve just found the go-to person on this topic”.

Authors who spend their time creating that kind of content instead of spending it scanning keyword lists for low lying fruit to chase are seeing much better results and returns for their efforts in our experience.

That’s what we meant with our tweet.

If you want to stay up to date with the facts and info we tweet about, just follow Content Caboodle on twitter.

Technorati Tags: authority, keywords, twitter