The sad truth of it is that a lot of people have a very short-sighted view of article publishing, and don’t realize that it can be utilized for much more than just a cheap backlink for their sites. By seeing article publishing as just a means to cheap backlinks, they justify submitting garbage articles, often written (or spun) by software, and that aren’t readable by humans at all.

I’m not writing this to pick on anyone’s strategies or methods, but as an editor for Content Caboodle who, like all of the editors here, is willing and eager to help authors get more value from their efforts, I feel it’s part of my job to inform people who submit those type of articles that they are wasting all of their article publishing time, which can never be a good thing for any person or business.

The bottom line is even if it only took someone 10 seconds to have a software program spit out some keyword rich paragraphs, if those paragraphs don’t make for a readable article when you submit it here for review, then they’ve wasted that 10 seconds, plus the time it took to copy and paste the article into our submission form.

A Better View of Article Publishing

Sure, backlinks from author’s resource boxes are a primary consideration when publishing articles, but reaching new groups of human eyeballs with your content and perspectives should be equally important to you.

And it isn’t just the traffic from the article directories like Content Caboodle that you have a chance to impress with your articles, but also the traffic from thousands of eZines and Newsletters out there that often use “well written” articles from sites like ours as filler content.

To demonstrate how writing the best articles that you possibly can could benefit you, I have a real-world example to offer.

I’m personally into exotic pets. I love animals, and I’ve always enjoyed having very unique pets in my home. and I belong to several eZines and discussion groups that focus on exotic animals/pets.

Over the past 2 years I’ve seen numerous articles taken straight from Content Caboodle and with the proper attribution links attached, used in several of those eZines/Newsletters and linked to from multiple discussion groups. In fact, the articles of one author here at Content Caboodle, TamanduaGirl have appeared over and over again.

And what’s really interesting is that TamanduaGirl only has 5 articles published on our site, but they are each very well written, highly informative and incredibly entertaining. And because of that, eZine and Newsletter publishers gobble them up because they know their subscribers will love the content.

With only a handful of articles (and we all wish TamanduaGirl would publish more soon), this author has reached tens-of-thousands of real human readers directly on our site, and I’d be willing to bet twice as many or more from the various eZines and Newsletters that have reused those articles.

Not too bad for publishing just a handful of articles, huh?

While at the same time, we also have authors on Content Caboodle who have submitted dozens and dozens of articles, but have reached just a couple hundred readers with them on our site, and in all likelihood haven’t ever had their articles reused by eZine/Newsletter publishers.

The difference is strictly in the quality of the articles

You don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer to get great results with your articles online, you just have to put in a minimal effort to make them informative and entertaining. The web is full of “noisy content”, fluff pieces and even software spun garbage. That means that there is a ton of competition for mediocrity out there, but it’s also an opportunity for you, because it also means that with just a little bit of effort anybody can make their work stand out from the crowd.

Read your own articles before submitting them and ask yourself, “being interested in this topic would I be glad to have found and read this article, or would I feel cheated by it?”

If you truly believe you would be happy to have found and read it, then your article is ready for publishing.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article publishing

Often they don’t understand yet just how content rules the web, and sometimes they wonder about the use of ‘duplicate content’ and SEO efforts.

We know that most of the publishers reusing articles from our directory are eZine and Newsletter publishers who see Content Caboodle as a valuable place to find additional content for their publications–and for them there’s never any concerns or questions about ‘duplicate content’–they just want good content on topics in their fields to provide to their subscribers.

But there’s a growing number of webmasters recognizing the value of repurposing articles too, so we thought this was a good time to talk about the uses and benefits of doing so.

For starters, providing additional quality information on topics related to your website will build trust and authority for you/your site with your visitors. Whatever field you’re in, there’s likely a treasure of great information available for use that you don’t have to spend your own time writing from scratch when you reuse an article from Content Caboodle.

These articles will provide you with additional pages of content to offer your site visitors on topics they care about, and often also gives you the chance to look at topics from different perspectives from your own, which your visitors will also appreciate as “one size fits all” never applies online.

By reusing other’s articles you’re giving additional value to your site visitors, which will encourage repeat visits, positive word of mouth advertising, and help you to solidify yourself and/or your site as an authority presence in your field.

Next, there are ways to reuse articles that are completely legitimate, within our Terms of Service, and that will provide you with SEO benefits without any need to worry over the dreaded (and widely misunderstood) ‘duplicate content’ issue.

Lets say that you want to create a page (or blog posting) on your site about “Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets”, because they’re related to the field your site covers. But there’s a small problem, because you aren’t an expert on Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets, what can you do?

You could spend hours or days researching the topic so that you can write expertly on it, but that’s a serious investment of time. Or, you could hire a freelance writer to write the piece for you, but for a quality piece that’s going to require a serious investment of money (and maybe time as well depending on how fast the writer you hire is). Or, you could find a quality article that covers Blue Thing-a-ma-bob Widgets here on Content Caboodle, read it to ensure the quality of information is right for you and your visitors, and then build a web page around that article in a way that will make the new page your own, provide value to your visitors, gain SEO benefits and comply with our Terms of Service for reusing articles.

Here’s how that can be easily accomplished: After reading the article and deciding it’s a good fit for your site, you write a couple of leading paragraphs to summarize the article and add your own thoughts or opinions to it, then you follow those leading paragraphs with the full article and author’s resource box (as per our Terms of Service), then either end your page, or if you’re so inclined you can even add a couple of follow-up paragraphs to remark on the article and perhaps spawn some comment discussions (if you’re posting to a blog) with your readers.

By adding your own content before (and possibly after) the article on your page, you add value and provide plenty of unique content for SEO purposes, and by utilizing the article in full (including the author’s resource box) you comply with out Terms of Service for reusing content.

So you see, with a quick search on Content Caboodle and a couple of sentences of your own, you can build a full page covering nearly any topic for your site and visitors in a very short amount of time.

There are many more ways that a creative webmaster can legitimately reuse article content from our directory, add value to it and benefit from it, we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg here to point you in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: content, free content, reuse articles

However, over the last few months there has been a large increase in the number of authors and marketers who were trying to exploit our liberal policies in attempts to “game” search engines and even to “trick” our readers with misleading and sometimes hidden links in their articles and resource boxes.

The overwhelming majority of our authors are good people submitting articles that are often entertaining and typically legitimate resources, but those few bad apples try to spoil things for everyone and we had to act to protect the interests of all our users.

Content Caboodle provides a great opportunity for authors and marketers to gain exposure for their topics, products and web sites. I took a screen shot of our stats a few mornings ago when we posted the updated Submission Guidelines to show this:

Traffic stats taken on January 6, 2010

That image was taken on the morning of the 6th, but you can see that we’re getting over 6,000 visits per day which account for an average of about 20,000 page views daily–and the majority of that traffic comes from the 3 major search engines in the form of people looking for information or entertainment on a wide variety of topics.

That means that publishing your article(s) with Content Caboodle is a great opportunity for exposure and establishing authority in your market; but it also means that we have a responsibility to all of those “reader” visitors to not subject them to sub-par content or articles that were designed to be misleading or manipulative.

This is why we made the few, minor additions to our Submission Guidelines that we did. As we explained in an email that was sent earlier this week to all registered authors, we reduced the number of live links allowed within article bodies from 3 to 2 because the intention of allowing links in the articles was so that authors could point to external resources for evidence or descriptive purposes. In body links were never intended to be for commercial or SEO purposes, that’s what the resource box is for.

And while most authors have respected this policy, what we found is that those who did would only place 1 or 2 links in their article bodies, while the few authors who tried to abuse the in body links would place the full 3 allowed links.

It was obvious to us that we could still allow legitimate authors to place in body links in their articles and deter malicious attempts at link dumping by simply reducing the number of allowed in body links to 2.

Another change we’ve made was to stop accepting articles on a couple of specific topics, such as gambling and Ugg boots for example. This was not done in any attempt to censor opinions, we want Content Caboodle to remain an open venue for the exchange of ideas and information, but statistical analysis of our traffic trends along with extensive feedback from our user base made it clear that the readers who visit our site have little to no interest in articles on certain topics, and feel that those articles offer very little value to their experience with our service.

For that reason, we determined that it was in everybody’s best interest to no longer accept articles on those specific topics. Authors should see this as a positive. If our readers aren’t interested in a specific subject, it would only be a waste of your time to write and submit articles about that topic here. If you enjoy or need to cover that subject, this lets you know that your time can be better spent submitting those articles to other venues where the readership will be a better fit for your subject matter.

That covers the bulk of the additions and changes we’ve made. You can read the full Submission Guidelines to see what other minor tweaks we’ve added and for a full listing of which topics we are no longer accepting submissions on.

Just as when we started several years ago, these updated guidelines are intended to maintain the friendly balance of providing a quality service to every group of users who visit and participate in our service.

Technorati Tags: articles, links, submission guidelines

However, a lot of people publishing articles for marketing often approach their article writing, and worse, their title creation, as a pure advertising element–and this can lead to tons of lost readers and exposure for your articles and links.

When you have a marketing mindset, you tend to want to write proven sales copy-like headlines. Those quick-witted, trigger word packed little whoppers that are staples in every decent swipe file and have worked for advertisers for years.

The problem is online publishing is vastly different from print and other traditional medias.

Those whopper sales copy headlines work in print because the reader already has the magazine in their hands, so they can’t miss the quick-witted attention grabbing titles of sales copy.

Online however, you don’t have the magazine or newspaper already in your reader’s hands. The primary way of getting a reader’s eyes onto your article is by having your articles rank well in search engines for targeted keyword terms–and whopper sales copy titles are typically counter-productive to good search engine rankings.

To rank well with search engines, it’s far more beneficial to have a descriptive (of the article content) title that contains your primary keyword term.

Using your article body to get your marketing message across works a lot better when you actually get lots of readers to your article, and smart titles rather than sales copy whoppers works better to attract those readers online.

As proof check out the most viewed articles here at Content Caboodle, look over the titles and see how few look like they might belong in the swipe file of a sales copywriter.

One of the top articles is simply titled “Anteater FAQ” and I can tell you that article gets tons of search engine traffic month after month. In fact, it gets volume search traffic for dozens of different anteater related terms every month.

There’s nothing slippery about that title at all. It’s just perfeclty descriptive of the article’s content and has been rewarded with good search rankings because of it.

There is no secret to creating articles that will rank well with search engines. Just write clearly, provide reliable information and use descriptive titles and sub-headings.

Witty and slippery may seem better, but with online publishing where search engine bots are deciding how much traffic you’re likely to get for your writings, clear and descriptive will always win out.

Technorati Tags: headlines, online publishing, titles

So, I thought this would be a good time to mention a few places where you can find royalty free stock images to use. Some of you may be aware of some or all of these already, but I think it will be helpful for those who aren’t.

A little preface is in order however. Every site and often individual images from each site, has their own associated usage restrictions, or terms of use. You must read these carefully before using the image with your articles. If we get notification that an author breaks the terms of use and wrongly publishes media without the proper permissions or without crediting the source properly, our resolution process is to remove the article on the first offense, and ban the author on the second.

Important – one final word of warning, do not link directly to images on these stock photography sites. That violates their terms and ours. Any images you want to use should be uploaded to your own server or service, and linked to from there in your article.

With that out of the way though, there are thousands of images available at the following sites which can be used, following the owner’s and site’s terms, in your articles.

stock.xchng – this is one of our favorites for ease of use as well as the size of their collections. Be sure to read the site’s terms of use, as well as the individual terms for any image you use. The search feature here is really good for finding artistic and often professional quality images.

Free Digital Photos – this one is also a favorite because it has a growing collection of images, is well organized and easy to use.

Flickr – there are thousands and thousands of images on Flickr that have been offered under a CC (Creative Commons) license, meaning if you follow the guidelines of the CC license associated with an image, you can use it to illustrate your article. Flickr also has a special search feature just for finding images released under the CC license, so use that to speed up your searching.

MorgueFile – was looking very promising however had some technical failures recently and has been offline for about 2 weeks. According to the site’s Twitter account they are working on rebuilding the collection database and restoring the site as quickly as possible, so we’ve mentioned this as a source to watch going forward.

There are many more out there, but these are a few of our favorites that we wanted to give mention to for any authors seeking sources of quality, no-cost graphics to work with.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Getty Images Buys stock.XCHNG (plagiarismtoday.com)
• 15 websites offering free stock photos (menson.wordpress.com)
• Fotolia Launches Free Stock Photography Bank PhotoXpress (techcrunch.com)
• Find Creative Commons images with Image Search (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Yahoo Image Search Offers Better Creative Commons Filter for Flickr [Image Search] (lifehacker.com)

Technorati Tags: stock images

Fast writing is almost never great writing, so by no means is this posting meant to suggest we encourage speedily written, low quality articles.

However, one thing that I’ve seen over time in working on my own writings and with others, is that for many people, getting a quick bullet-point based outline written down can help to overcome any blocks or obstacles.

This makes sense I suppose, since the leading cause of writer’s block is often said to be “the blank page in front of them”… so if you can throw between 3 and 10 bullet-points on the page about your topic then you’ve got that blank page out of the way–and in those bullet points you’ve probably got all you’ll need to create the paragraphs of your story.

That’s what works for me at least, and I’ve seen it work for others who tried it at my suggestion, so I hope it helps you too.

Here’s exactly how I do it. I start by considering the topic I’m about to write about. I don’t worry about the specific perspective or position I want my article to take, that’s for later on, right now I just want some general facts, or bullet-points, to get me started.

I try to come up with between 3 to 10, each just one sentence long.

Once I’m done, I’ll go over them, weed out anything that’s week or doesn’t fit the perspective I’m approaching the topic from, then I’ll use the remaining points as leaders for the body paragraphs of my story.

Then I just expand on each point to bring the story to life, and this is where the quality and creativity come out.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Using Article Writing for Basic Internet Marketing (nichetitans.com)
• The Benefits of Article Marketing (wealthyways4you.com)
• Writing Quality Content Increases Website Traffic Here’s Why! (wealthyways4you.com)

Technorati Tags: fast article creation, writing

Several people have asked us for recommendations on free services for hosting a site or blog so that they could utilize the website link available from their profiles, and while there are some great services out there we felt this was an opportunity for us to offer you even more here at Content Caboodle.

So, you can now create your own free blog (no cost and no advertising on your pages) in seconds at http://blogs.contentcaboodle.com

If you create a blog here it will be your blog, to do with as you please. Content Caboodle and its staff will have no moderating nor editing control over your content, with the sole exception of anyone who posts content or media that violates our few terms of use guidelines. Basically, don’t post Warez, Hate Speech or overtly Adult content and we’ll all be happy together.

We’re using the popular WordPress blogging platform for these blogs, which is super easy to use, search engine friendly and there are a ton of “how to’s” and tutorials available free online for anyone who needs help.

There’s currently 5 different themes available for making your blog look the way you want it to, and we’ll be adding more in the coming days.

Current theme options are:

So far we haven’t added any WordPress plugins, however we are open to suggestions on this and will attempt to please as many as possible with our decisions. Obviously, we have to be careful with which plugins are allowed for security reasons to protect the data and postings of everybody using the service, but if it’s possible and our techs feel a plugin is safe after reviewing it we will add it at your request.

If you have any questions please feel free to post them in the comments below. Our goal is to make this service as free and open as possible for you, but we don’t want it to be confusing, so if you’re curious about any of this please ask.

We’re looking forward to reading some interesting blogs soon…

Here’s that link for signing up for your free blog again:  http://blogs.contentcaboodle.com

Technorati Tags: content caboodle, features, free blogs

I have to start by saying if you have an article declined please don’t take it personally. It is not a reflection on you nor any sort of personal judgement about your ideas and opinions.

In almost every instance that a submission is declined it is because the content somehow violated one of our few “Submission Guidelines” in some way and has nothing to do with the theme or idea of the articles.

A few good tips for making sure your articles aren’t declined are:

• Use your best grammar. We know not all of our authors (or readers) claim English as their first language and we do our best to not exclude anyone who submits their best efforts to us. If the idea of your article is understandable we’re not going to decline it because of any minor grammar mistakes, but we do ask that you submit your best efforts in return.
• Don’t write in all caps.
• Don’t use over-sized fonts for your whole article. It’s acceptable to highlight key points in an article with bold or larger text, but don’t do it with the whole article.
• Don’t try to stuff keywords or extra links into your articles and resource box.
• Don’t use automated article writing/rewriting and submission software. Most of the time we can tell right away when something was written/rewritten by software, these programs leave fairly clear ‘footprints’ in the articles or submissions that we can spot, and in the past we’ve been fairly easy going about automated submissions if the article was good quality, however moving forward the decision has been made to decline everything created or submitted by automated software, so don’t use anything that attempts to circumvent our system.

Now, to end this posting on a more positive note, here are a few Do’s that will help ensure your articles get approved and will help to increase the number of people who read them:

• Use images in your articles. We provide an easy to use submission editor that lets you include images with the click of a button and we encourage you to use it often. Over the past 2 years one thing has become very clear to us about articles published here, the articles that get the most views are the ones that are well written, thorough on the topics they cover, and include images. People like pictures and our stats show it.
• Beef-up your author’s profile. You can add an About Me bio blurb, a signature, your website or blog URLs, your Twitter contact info, pictures and more to your profile page, and the authors who use these features get a lot more interest than the authors who don’t. Plus, to get highlighted on our main page Author Showcase you must have a picture on your profile.
• Be interesting in your writings.
• Be entertaining in your writings.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article writing

<a href=”http://www.YourDomain.com”> Your Anchor Text </a>

It looks bad to your readers, and it’s not clickable! You’ve just wasted your chance to get a link and traffic to your site when you do this.

We provide a very easy to use rich text editor on our submission form so that you don’t need to fuss with any HTML code ever, and it’s in your own best interest to use it properly.

Our editors only review submissions to ensure they meet our quality guidelines, they do not provide grammar nor formatting assistance. To do that would require far more time than we have in a day. It is up to you to spell-check and preview your submissions before pressing the submit button.

So do yourself a favor and take the time to double-check your submission (via the preview option) including your resource box before submitting your articles, and make sure that your links and formatting are the wa you want them.

Technorati Tags: authors, links, resource box

First, we’ve set it up so that you may add your Twitter account to your profile. This way readers of your articles who want to read/get more from you can follow you on Twitter.

To add your Twitter to your  account simply login to Content Caboodle and then click on the “My Account” link from thenavigation menu.

Right below your email input box you will find a field for your “Twitter Username”. Just put your username from Twitter into this field, not the full URL to your Twitter account.

For example, if your Twitter account is at http://twitter.com/obannonsleap then you would only enter “obannonsleap” into the Twitter Username field and then press the update button.

A link to your Twitter page will then appear on your author’s profile page here at Content Caboodle. See example here!

The next new feature is an Author’s Articles Widget we’ve created that you may use to display your latest articles on your own web sites and blogs.

You can see an example of the widget here on the right side of the profile.

These widgets are a great way for you to promote your articles on your own sites and blogs to increase readerships, and were designed to be SEO neutral (for those of you who care about Google’s PageRank juice) as the widget is delivered via JavaScript and enclosed in an iframe, the links will not pull any PageRank juice from your pages.

The widget will just give you a way to highlight your latest published articles to visitors to your web site or blog, expanding your readership and reputation as an authority on the topics  you write about.

To use the widget from your profile just log in to Content Caboodle and visit your profile page by clicking the “My Profile” link in the navigation menu.

On your profile page you will see the widget for your account displayed on the right, and beneath it will be a small box holding the Javascript code for displaying your widget. Just copy that code and paste it onto your web page or into your blog (works great as a sidebar widget) and that’s it.

If you have any trouble with this please feel free to contact us and we will assist you with it.

These are just the 2 latest ways we’re working to help our authors expand their reach online, there are more to come in the near future.

As always, we welcome your ideas and suggestions for how we can improve our service for you.

Technorati Tags: articles, authors, twitter, widget