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

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

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