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

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

Registered Contributors as of Oct 2, 2010

Just four months later now, we currently have 16,774 registered and contributing members. That’s an increase of over 675% in the last four months.

We’re delighted over this incredible growth, however it has caused us some minor growing pains that we wanted to discuss openly, and explain what we’re doing about them so that you know any recent changes or degradation in the service that you may have noticed are going to be very short-term and we will have everything back on-track and on schedule very soon.

The first and most obvious issue has been a slow down in submission reviews. With so many more contributors comes a lot more daily article submissions, and we honestly weren’t prepared for such a dramatic growth spurt.

We have now brought on seven new associate editors. The first four completed their training yesterday (Oct. 1, 2010) and will begin reviewing live articles on Monday, Oct. 4th.

The remaining three all begin their training on the 4th. The training course we have is an intensive week long learning process, so they will be ready to begin reviewing live articles on Monday, Oct. 11th.

Based on the number of articles per day each editor is expected to review, we calculated that we would need four more editors to keep up with the new levels of daily submissions. We decided to bring on seven right away so that we could also clear the current backlog of articles waiting to be reviewed, and become ahead of the curve as our growth continues to avoid future backups.

Another issue you may have noticed (many of you have contacted us about it now) is that on author’s profile pages the total number of Page Views being displayed is inaccurate if you have more than 50 published articles with us.

This is a glitch in the programming that happened when we updated our site design, however it has not affected author’s payouts and we do have the accurate totals for every author’s Page Views on record in our management system.

What’s happening with this glitch is that our site only displays the most recent 50 articles that any author has published on their profile page, and instead of displaying the author’s total Page View tally, the page is only displaying the total Page Views from the 50 displayed articles on the page; which is why this only affects authors with more than 50 published articles.

The reason we haven’t corrected this yet, despite knowing what the problem is, is simply that our web programmer is also a part-time editor with us, and recently we’ve had him working full time as an editor to help with the increased submission rates.

The Page Views display is a minor annoyance, but doesn’t have any major impact on the service so we have felt his time was better spent continuing to review articles for authors until we could get our new editors trained and working on live articles.

With the four new editors joining the team this week, we will be able to get him on this issue and it should be corrected in a few days.

There have been some other minor things here and there as a result of our sudden growth, much of it affecting what goes on behind the scenes for us, such as editors working more overtime than they really ever should to try and keep up with the volumes.

By no means am I (or are any of us) complaining about any of this. It’s a wonderful thing to see the fruits of your labor suddenly flurishing. We simply wanted to make you aware of what was going on currently, and what was being done about it, so that you would know we will be back to normal shortly.

We truly appreciate the participation and support we’ve received from our community of authors, and I hope that shows in the amount of extra work and hours everyone here has been providing to ensure the service didn’t fall too far behind.

We also apologize to all for the backups which have occurred, and hope you won’t hold it against us going forward. Given our history, this recent growth spurt of 675% in four months was completely unexpected and we were caught with our pants down. We have addressed it as quickly as we could and have taken measures to ensure in the future we can get new editors on-board and trained in a much more efficient manner and shorter amount of time to avoid this happening again.

Technorati Tags: backups, growth

So, if you have unsubscribed from our news and announcements mailing list, why might you have still received our latest mailing?

This question was asked of us by an author today after we sent an announcement mailing this morning. He was understandably upset at having received email from our list mailing after he had unsubscribed from the list several months ago, and accused us of forcing SPAM upon him.

So, what happened?

Well, it turns out that at some point in the past few months this author tried to login to submit a new article and couldn’t remember his account details, and instead of having them sent to him through our web form, he just went ahead and created a new author’s account…and BINGO, as a newly registered author with an account that hadn’t unsubscribed from our mailings or requested not to receive them, he was added to our Author’s eMail List and received our latest announcement.

I Told You We Don’t Send SPAM

There was a similar case in the past where it turned out that a marketer had created multiple accounts to keep their niches/markets separate, and then unsubscribed from our mailings with some but not all of their multiple accounts, resulting in some of their addresses still being subscribed and receiving our news and announcements.

The bottom line is we do not force anybody to receive our mailings, and we respect your wishes on email contacts…when you make them clear to us.

If you have received our announcements after unsubscribing from our email list, please check your account(s) to ensure that there isn’t some simple error or oversight like I’ve described above that might explain it.

The member who emailed us this morning and accused us of forcing SPAM on him felt pretty bad about his angry email tone after realizing it was his own actions which caused him to receive our mailing again. He had no reason to feel bad, and we’re happy that we could clear the issue up for him so quickly; hopefully this blog posting will help others avoid the same problem.

But More Important

Why wouldn’t you want to receive our news and announcement mailings?

It’s not like we send them often and clog up your Inbox. We sent one this morning, and the last one went out way back in January…that’s not abusive nor intrusive at all, is it?

And we don’t send out a bunch of fluff or pointless dribble when we do send an announcement. We only contact you when there’s a very good reason to, with very big news to report or special offers of our service that we don’t announce publicly.

So, think about it before unsubscribing because you may just miss out on some great new features or opportunities with us here at Content Caboodle if you do.

If you have unsubscribed in the past but would like to receive our infrequent mailings once again, you can always re-subscribe here!

Technorati Tags: email, spam

Here’s the reason why this happens: You cheated!

It’s that simple. If your account is restricted from submitting or editing articles, that means one of our human editors found evidence that you were using some sort of software to submit or auto-submit machine-spun article garbage to us.

We don’t want articles that your software writes. If we wanted software written articles, we would use our own software to write crappy content and not offer to pay others for theirs.

Content Caboodle provides a valuable service to all users, from authors to publishers to the thousands of readers who visit our article pages each day.

Unlike most article publishing sites, we compensate authors for helping us to deliver a valuable service and quality user experience, so of course we take offense to authors who try to push spun-article garbage on us and our visitors.

If your account is suddenly restricted, here’s how that happened:

Every article submitted to Content Caboodle receives a real review by a human editor. If that editor believes there are indications of manipulation, auto-submission or machine-spun writing (s)he flags the article for a second review by one of our managing editors.

A managing editor will then review the article together with one of our software technicians. If they both agree that the article has violated our submission policies and the technician can verify that some form of software was used to create or spin the article, then that article and all other articles pending review by the same author are immediately declined and the author’s account is placed on Restricted status.

We do not take this action lightly. That is why we have the 2-tier review process that involves multiple editors and a software technician. We certainly don’t ever want to falsely place an author’s account on Restricted status, however once a determination is made it is final.

We do not ban authors, and you may still access your account to remove any prior articles that you may have published with us if you wish, but you will not be able to edit articles nor submit new ones ever again from your account.

There is no path to removing the Restricted status from an account.

Once we are certain that an author has attempted to circumvent our guidelines or devalue our service for visitors we no longer want their content submissions, period.

Our policies are not meant to be harsh, but to protect the value of the service for all who participate as authors, publishers, and readers.

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: article directories, articles, backlinks

This is a feature  we’ve wanted to setup for some time, but the coding for it proved to be a little problematic for us, plus every time we began working on it there always seemed to be something related to functionality of the site that would need to be addressed first.

Well, we finally got the author showcase widget completed and online and we hope you’re as happy about it as we are. It’s just one more way for you to draw attention to yourself and your articles.

To get included in the showcase simply upload a picture or avatar to your account  (login to Content Caboodle and go to “My Account”). That’s all you have to do and our showcase widget will begin including you in the random displays.

The widget also pulls the text from your “Signature” on your profile page, so if you would like a little message to appear next to your image in the showcase display just enter it in the “Signature” field of your profile.

We’re always looking for ways to help authors gain exposure for themselves and their articles, so if you have any suggestions for additional features on the site that might be helpful in that respect we’d like to hear them. You can Contact Us here: http://www.contentcaboodle.com/contact/

Technorati Tags: author showcase