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

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

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

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

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

Web site mentioned in the video, RSS Specifications: www.rss-specifications.com

Technorati Tags: article directories, articles, backlinks

Every month our site has grown in article submissions, site traffic and of course revenue sharing with authors, but February saw an explosion in all 3 areas.

So we would like to wish a huge Congratulations and express a sincere “Thank You” to all of our authors. Your continued participation is making Content Caboodle a better resource for authors, readers and publishers every day.

Technorati Tags: articles, revenue

A Quality Article + Social Bookmarking + Social Community/News Site Submissions = Great Results

While the majority of traffic coming to our site is from search engines, which is a good thing because it shows that quality content will rank well with the search engines, the individual articles that have had the most readers and page views all have lots of traffic coming from various Social Bookmarking and Community/News sites such as:
www.propeller.com
www.digg.com
stumbleupon.com
faves.com
del.icio.us
reddit.com

Just like with search engines, the people who participate in these Social sites reward quality content. However, a word of warning is in order because anyone who tries to abuse or manipulate Social Network traffic is taking a huge risk.

It’s just as easy for members of Social sites to penalize poor quality submissions, or even worse report them to the Network moderators as “spammy” and that won’t only hurt the results for the specific submission being reviewed, but will weaken your ability as a member of the Network to share any future submissions due to receiving a bad reputation. And it’s a known fact that members who participate regularly on Social Networks act fast against perceived “spammy” submissions in order to prevent the Networks from being overrun by purely marketing and self-serving users.

Many of these sites use unseen and unknown weighted ranking systems to determine the overall reach of submissions by each user, so if you become suspected of submitting lesser quality or “spammy” material the moderators can lower your ranking which will negatively affect your future submissions.

And if you are reported multiple times there’s a good chance you’ll be banned from the Network completely.

So, while it’s perfectly acceptable and smart to share your best content on Social Networks, just be sure you’re utilizing them as they’re intended and don’t abuse or try to manipulate them in any ways and you should see great traffic and commentary from sharing your articles there.

Technorati Tags: articles, social bookmarking, social news