Signed By Company Name

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Question from a reader named Eli: Hi Chris, I’m looking to take article writing to the next level and I wanted to ask how often do you see articles that are signed by groups, organizations, or websites? In other words, the articles don’t have a specific name of an individual and does this hurt the potential distribution?

Eli: Yes, it hurts distribution because people like to trust people, not nameless/faceless companies when it comes to the personal or intimate connection between reader and writer.

Besides, we don’t accept articles signed by a company name or user group, regardless as to if they are for-profit or non-profit.

About 1 out of every 35-50 or so new accounts come in as company names or what we would call, ‘invalid author names’ when compared against our publicly posted editorial guidelines (See Section 2.c).

2.c. YOUR FULL AUTHOR NAME: You must include your first and last name as the author of the article.

1. Your AUTHOR NAME must have a First name and a Last name.
2. We do allow “First name – Last initial” or “First initial – Last Name.”
3. We do not allow two initials for your AUTHOR NAME.
4. Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
5. We do not allow company names to be your AUTHOR NAME.
6. We do not allow email addresses to be your AUTHOR NAME.
7. We do not allow adjectives or nouns or descriptors to be part of your AUTHOR NAME.
8. You may NOT include your title after your AUTHOR NAME unless you hold a doctorate-level degree (Dr., MD, DDS, PhD, etc.)
9. We do not allow religious titles before or after your name.
10. We do not allow more than ONE author name to have an account. If your article was CO-AUTHORED, then please put the CO-AUTHOR’s name in the RESOURCE BOX and we will manually add them as a Co-Author to your article BY-LINE.

I hope this helps. Any questions?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 17, 2006 at 6:41 am | 9,866 views