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

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

I don’t normally post here, I’m more of the “operations” guy behind the scenes with Content Caboodle; but I spend a lot of time reading almost all of the articles that get published on this site (I’m an information junkie) and something I saw this week literally triggered a lightbulb moment for me, you know, when the lightbulb flashes over your head like in cartoons…and I decided immediately that I wanted to share this with the contributing writers here as a way to make what you’re doing better and easier for you.

Article marketing is a tricky craft. The system is simple, write articles and then publish them everywhere you can to get the maximum exposure for your resource box call-to-action link(s).

Being such a simple system, it leads to a lot of people trying it, typically with very mixed results because they haven’t studied the mechanics behind the craft of writing an article that will entice a reader to take action.

I call it a craft because that’s exactly what it is. It isn’t hard to do or learn, but it’s a vital ingredient if you want to have real success with your articles.

It’s easy to write a couple hundred words on any topic, but if you haven’t crafted those words properly to engage and entice your readers than your message isn’t going to be memorable and those words aren’t going to be working for you or your business at all. They may be informative, but informative alone doesn’t translate into memorable or action from readers.

So, how do you take your words and craft them into something more memorable or that will entice action from your readers?

There are a lot of ways to do it, but one I saw this week when my monthly National Geographic arrived was very impressive and can serve as a great starting point for writers looking to improve their article marketing craft.

Right on page #2 of this latest issue of National Geographic (August 2010), opposite the Index page, is what on first glance appears to be a single-page feature on Cuban Iguanas. A well targeted story for Nat-Geo readers, right?

I didn’t want to step on any toes nor break any laws by scanning the actual page, so here’s a design representation of the layout of the single-page piece:

Layout Design

Now, let me break it down for you:

Single-Page Title: “Wildlife As Canon Sees It” (Canon runs similar engaging ads in every issue of Nat-Geo and has older ones online for viewing at http://www.canon.com/environment/report/wildlife.html if you want to see actual examples of what I’m describing)

Purple Block: a single paragraph of encyclopedia-style description of the Cuban Iguana, giving the necessary specifics on the species and letting readers know what the piece is about

Orange Block: a large, stunning picture of a Cuban Iguana

Two Blue Blocks: a couple paragraphs of conversational-style text covering the traits and life of Cuban Iguanas, followed by a short paragraph on how Canon “sees” the importance of making the world a better place, partly by raising awareness of endangered species (with the implication being it’s easier to raise awareness when you can put a face on the problem, even an Iguana’s face). And concluding with a URL to http://www.canon.com/environment

Red Block: The Canon logo

Okay, now this is a print media piece, so there are a few differences from online content that I’ll go over, but for the most part what Canon has done is create a great article that highlights their product line while engaging the reader on a level and topic that’s important to them.

The “tricky” part, or what I call the “craft” in this is that Canon doesn’t ever mention their products. The word camera never appears in the piece at all.

Instead, what they did is create a piece of informative and entertaining content that highlights what their products do in a way that will connect with the target readers of the magazine the content appears in.

To translate that into a process that could be used online for article writers/marketers, you would first zero in on your target reader by using a title and keywords that will grab their attention.

Next, create a piece of content that doesn’t openly sell anything, but rather highlights the features or benefits of what you want to promote while informing and/or entertaining readers.

Finally, provide a call-to-action link in your resource box that doesn’t say “now I’m going to sell you something”, but rather says “go deeper into this topic here”. If you look at the link Canon uses in their piece, it isn’t “Canon.com/ORDER_HERE” but instead it is “Canon.com/environment” because even the link can make a connection to the target reader of Nat-Geo by including the keyword environment in it.

This is a perfectly formatted piece of “engagement marketing”. I like that term better than article marketing, or information marketing or entertainment marketing, because it can be any or all of those things.

This type of content creation works and can be applied to anything, product or service doesn’t matter, whatever you want to promote there’s a way to do it with engagement marketing and article writing.

For instance, if I wanted to promote a software program that lets users create musical beats, I wouldn’t talk about the software at all, I would write a piece about the fun of creating music and probably include a video (with audio) of someone young sitting at the computer and creating their own beats in just a few seconds (to highlight the ‘ease of use’ of the software as well as the musical capabilities) and hopefully looking very happy with their sounds playing back to them.

Since my real focus of the content is on how easy it is to have fun creating your own beats, my call-to-action would be to a special page on my site which was also intended to highlight that “it’s easy” to make music and have fun with my software, maybe including more videos or even user uploaded clips.

The point is, with engagement marketing you don’t have to “sell” the product or service at all. In fact, you want to avoid anything that could be perceived as selling.

Just highlight a feature or benefit your product/service provides, in a way that connects with your target reader on their own level. This builds interest after you’ve grabbed their attention, and once their interest tips over into desire through engagement they will take action to purchase (provided your site has a clear navigation system).

Give it a shot, try writing some engagement based content, include media if appropriate, and see how it works out for you. If you follow the examples above closely (but make them fit what you’re promoting) I bet you’ll be surprised with the results.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article writing, engagement

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

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

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

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.

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