Content Caboodle Blog

Author Levels Explained

Some of you have already noticed that we recently changed the way a contributor advances from Basic Author to Premium and then Expert Author status. We wanted to take a moment to explain why the change was made, and how it is better for you now.

In the past we used a very simple method for advancement that was based on participation and popularity. The more articles an author submitted, combined with the more page views his or her articles received determined when an author became eligible for the next level.

While well intentioned, that system has one serious drawback, which is that it encouraged a few contributors to seek higher levels by submitting quantity over quality, a sort-of shotgun approach to article publishing.

We don’t want that. It’s not good for our editors who then spend additional time reviewing low quality submissions, it’s not good for our visitors (your article readers) who come here for seeking solid information or entertainment, and it’s ultimately not good for the author who is then represented by low quality content.

So, what we have decided to do is place the emphasis where it should be, on quality content submissions.

To do this, we’ve now set it up so that as one of our editors is reviewing a submission, if they are impressed with the effort that the author has put into creating an informing or entertaining article, they can instantly elevate that author to the next level in addition to approving the article for publishing.

This is NOT a judging of grammar or writing styles. What our editors are looking for is articles which simply cover their topic thoroughly, and are obviously intended to inform or entertain human readers.

What this means is that if you create good content, you can rise in author levels with a single submission. And of course, if someone creates lesser quality articles that are written strictly for search engine bots or to obtain backlinks rather than for human readers, that person could be stuck at the Basic level forever.

It is all up to you!

Here are just a few tips to help you create more appealing articles for readers:

• Cover your topic in full. Don’t write “teaser” articles that end with ‘visit our link for the full story’
• Try to connect with and engage readers on a personal level with your articles
• Include images or videos in your articles that compliment or support your article topic
• Proofread your articles prior to submitting them
• Use a spell checker
• Follow our simple submission guidelines on links and formatting

All you have to do is demonstrate that you’ve made an effort to submit the best article you possibly could for readers to consume. Show that you invested just a couple minutes to avoid basic mistakes. Our editors aren’t looking for Hemingway writings, just a sign that you paid a little attention to the details of your article is all it will take to make an impression and advance.

Technorati Tags: articles, author levels, quality

Posted in For Writers |

10,000 Registered and Contributing Authors

It’s a special week here at Content Caboodle because we’ve just surpassed the 10,000 registered and contributing authors point!

10,000 Reigistered and Contributing Authors

This achievement is really all yours, so Congratulations!!!

A lot of people said we were foolish to try to improve upon the normal “article directory” model when we launched Content Caboodle back in 2007. We were told that our CPM (pay per 1000 impressions) payout rates for writers were too high, unnecessary, and would eventually bankrupt us. We were told that we couldn’t compete against the established article sites for traffic or to get eZine and Newsletter publishers to come here looking for content to use in their projects.

We were told a lot of reasons why Content Caboodle couldn’t, and wouldn’t last…

But we knew something that all of the nay-sayers were overlooking. We knew that if we fostered an environment where content creators could earn a fair rate for the lifetime value of their work, and visitors could be assured a pleasant experience with helpful and entertaining content, then we knew that we could make this project work and benefit everyone involved from the authors to the visitors and to ourselves.

And we have, with your help and participation… so I sincerely mean it when I say “Thank YOU!” to each and every one of our contributors.

Stay tuned for some more exciting Content Caboodle milestones which we expect to reach over the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags: article directory, authors, content caboodle, writers

Posted in General Interest | 1 Comment »

Don’t Waste Your Time Writing Bad Articles

For every article that we review and accept here at Content Caboodle, over 35,000 to date, it seems like we review and reject 2 others; and it’s not as though our submission guidelines are very strict compared to other article publishing venues.

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

Posted in For Writers |

Improve Your Website Authority & Customer Service With Our Content

We have had quite a few contacts over the last couple of years from site owners, many of them ‘newbies’ to web mastering I assume, asking us “what the benefits of using articles from our directory on their site would be?”

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

Posted in For Publishers | 3 Comments »

Why We Had To Update The Submission Guidelines

For several years now we’ve maintained a good relationship with all parties who use the Content Caboodle service. From authors to readers and also web site and eZine/newsletter publishers who reuse the fresh and valuable content from our database. We struck a nice balance right at the start with liberal guidelines and terms of service that were friendly to each group of users.

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

Posted in For Writers | 1 Comment »

How Do You Create Your Titles?

Many authors publish articles online as a form of marketing for their products and websites. That’s a tried, true and accepted practice in the online publishing realm.

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

Posted in General Interest |