From the Admin - October 23, 2008

During the three years that our article directory has been operable (http://www.articles4reprint.com), we have never sent an email to our member writers, until this morning.

p.s. On the Article Dashboard CMS, learning the email system is a bit trial and error. Our first message was broken, but we set this message up on our website, just in case our email does not format correctly.

As a reminder, you can log in to submit articles at: http://www.articles4reprint.com/login.php

I wanted to touch base this evening on two points.

1. We have opened a new article directory where you can submit your articles, which does not have as strict guidelines as Articles4reprint. The new article directory only has four rules:
   1. Minimum word count: 500 words
   2. No gambling articles
   3. No references to s-e-x toys or enhancement drugs.
   4. No Iframe content.

   If your articles meet this minimum criteria, please consider submitting your articles also at: http://www.techcentralpublishing.com/

2. If your articles have been rejected at Articles4reprint.com, I wanted you to know the most likely reasons why.

   Out of our stated list of guidelines, we only actively enforce four of those guidelines:

   1. Minimum word count: 700 words
   2. No gambling articles
   3. No references to s-e-x toys or enhancement drugs.
   4. No Iframe content.

   It may be helpful for you to also understand the economics of running an article directory. As with any website, we have a limited amount of hard drive space available to us. So, we must take action to manage our limited resources.

   The first time this article directory was bumping against our account limits, we noticed that we had a database of articles, where more than 60% of the articles in the database had been rejected for violations of our content requirements. Out of +10,000 rejected articles, fewer than one dozen were corrected and resubmitted to us. Out of the eleven articles that had been resubmitted, nine failed to get approval on the second pass.

   It was at this point that we realized that it was fully pointless to keep rejected articles in our database, since few people care enough to make appropriate corrections to articles, especially when they don’t show interest in getting to know the guidelines before submitting the articles. Keeping rejected articles in our database simply meant that we were using a lot of hard drive space on our server, for no good reason or purpose.

   It was at this point that we changed our scripts to delete rejected articles at the time of rejection. If you don’t care to do it right the first time, we don’t care to chase you for corrections.

We would like to publish all of your articles, but our software checks the word count of every article when that article is submitted. If there are only 699 words or less in the article, your article will be deleted immediately. Sorry, but our article submission form shows you an accurate word count as you type in the box. This singular rule check has proven that 70% of the articles submitted to this website are auto-deleted, because writers seem to want to believe that we do not enforce our own rules. Sad, but true.

Why a 700-word minimum word count? Easy.

We have always felt that thinly-disguised sales pitches aggravate readers and publishers alike. We have also felt that the best articles are those that educate and inform their readers. We feel that the best articles tell a story to those people most likely to buy what you are selling, with the emphasis on “story”, “educate” and “inform”.

While some writers do a great job of telling an interesting and educational story in three- to four-hundred words, most people who utilize the shorter article format write junk content.

When we had a 300-word minimum count, 85-95% of all submitted articles were rejected. When we switched to 600-word minimums, our rejection rates dropped to 5-10%. Once we moved to the 700-word minimum count, our total rejections dropped to less than .1% (one rejection for every 1000 articles submitted to us).

This new higher minimum word count permitted us to manage this article directory in less than one hour per week, as opposed to the fifteen hours per week we had spent previously.

We really do want to see your articles in our article directories, but we have certain rules for the purpose of providing a more useful article directory to our audience of readers, publishers and webmasters.

If you can appreciate our approach to managing an article directory, then I am pretty sure that we can appreciate what you write enough to publish it on our article directories.

Thank you for your time today.

Bill Platt - owner

• http://www.articles4reprint.com
• http://www.techcentralpublishing.com
• http://www.thephantomwriters.com

Tags: article marketing, Article Marketing Tips, article submission tips, editorial policies