It seems to me you wouldn’t have a business if it weren’t for authors submitting articles to you for free… so why make it harder on them and drive many of them away?

A lot of these rules seem arbitrary- if someone has a site about World War 2, are they supposed to update it often with all the new WW2 news?

I also don’t see the need for contact info on content sites that don’t sell anything. How insulting you demand that of site owners, yet call squeeze pages evil…

If your Adsense checks are getting too big, this seems like a good way to deal with that.

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These are reasonable requirements and just another step forward as Internet Marketing matures.

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Chris,

I didn’t say that I or WE call squeeze pages as evil… I said that “Squeeze pages can be perceived as evil by some users.”

I use squeeze pages from time to time for various marketing projects, so I’m going to be the last person to call them evil.

Also, we’re not demanding anything from our authors on this landing page quality scoring idea… it’s just that, an idea that we’re floating.

Scott,

I agree that we should always be thanking our lucky stars that we have the contributors that we do. :-)

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All,

So far, we’ve learned a lot on this issue from your feedback.

It’ll be 2007 before we can act on any of this because it’ll take us at least 2 months to create a broken/dead link identification, verification (that it’s not just a transient outage), reporting to the author, and correction process routine.

Right now, our only actionable 2006 priority on this issue is to help our authors fix the articles that have truly dead links in their resource box.

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My question would be whether all this is required on the landing page or just on the site itself. I offer a contact us page on my website, but you won’t find contact information on the landing page itself.

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I’m a newbie to the Internet, and to all the intricacies involved. As a builder for many years, then a Bonus Surveyor, checking various kinds of tradesmen etc, I picked up some knowledge of the skills required along the way. Due to ill health, I had to give that up, and started writing–3 books published, 1 at the publisher’s, and another 1 on the way. I read about online articles, and thought that it would be nice to share some tips with readers. I don’t have a website, but I’ve got no hidden agenda. I honestly didn’t know that there was money to be made out there.I did put my email address once in my resource box, but it was deleted. Now it seems that people like me might be banned from writing foe Ezine Articles. It would be a pity, as I enjoy reading other articles, whether they have website addresses or not.

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Donnie,

Sorry, not true.

Whether you have a URL in your resource box or not will not have ANY impact on whether we will accept your content or not.

In fact, EzineArticles experts that don’t include a URL in their resource box are doing us a favor by eliminating an exit click possibility and they are most likely submitting original content that was never published before elsewhere, thus driving up the unique content ratio that makes EzineArticles.com an even more valuable place for everyone involved.

Putting your email address in your resource box IS allowed; even though it’s never recommended. We don’t want to be a catalyst to help the spammers who might try to harvest your email address so they can spam you and then sell your email address to their fellow spamming clients.

The reason I said that authors who have a URL in their resource box are perceived as a higher quality is because their profit motive is clear to us and their intentions for writing are more obvious. If we have to struggle to understand why a person is writing an article, it greatly expands the amount of human labor required to review and approve the content… and thus, we’ve learned that authors with a URL in their resource box are easier to trust than authors who don’t have a URL in their resource box.

We’re glad you don’t have any hidden agenda’s :-).

I took a peak at your articles and they’re great!
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Donnie_Graham

I’m certain we’d have no problem with accepting hundreds or thousands of articles just like them.

For everyone:

Last night as I was preparing for a guest teleseminar event, I recorded 16 minutes of thoughts on this topic to try and clear the air of misunderstandings:
http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2006/11/landing-page-quality-follow-up-mini-podcast.html

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I am new to most of this and so far am just happy with putting the link to the one webpage that I am working on in my signature.

However, I plan to write on a variety of topics, and not just send people to one web page to try to sell them something.

I enjoy writing, and want to submit more articles but it is intimidating to think that my website is going to be judged if the content does not match the articles.

Other than that I am to new here to write more of what is on my mind.

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Hey there. I certainly would hate to see you (heck–us–as an author, I’m part of the network!) lose good content because authors are feeling too intimidated to submit. But I’m still behind ANY and ALL quality control you’re willing to do. The better the articles and resource links on the network, the better I look for being on here too. I wouldn’t even mind if you added qualifications for the landing pages that had to do with layout, organization, and even asthetics.

Frankly, if you raised the bar so high that I no longer made the grade, I’d simply make whatever changes I needed to in order to be included again. The more my “Expert Author” status means to people, the better it is for me–because it also means more to editors, publishers, readers, consumers, etc. Your good reputation raises our reputations, and vice versa.

So go ahead, raise the bar. It’ll still be a heck of a lot easier than getting published in quality print magazines–I figure that gives us a lot of room to work with.

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I don’t know how anyone can compare ezinearticles.com to a print magazine! Magazines typically PAY the authors for their articles, and it’s a lot more prestigious to be published in a magazine than on a website.

Frankly, I wonder if that last comment was written by an employee of this site, since it’s so syrupy sweet.

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The post from EM was NOT an employee of EzineArticles.com.

EM told us that her domain name is (MindUnbound.com).

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What is with people? See something complimentary and think it’s fake.

I’d say that EM really does have a “Mind Unbound” but I’m not so sure about some other people! I’m with EM.

I do think it’s fun to occasionally write about something different, but if the rules change and that’s not OK, then so be it. I will still appreciate the opportunity to submit articles to you.

Thanks!
Marte

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LOL, no not an employee. Just a writer out sick today–joining in the converstion because I’m bored out of my mind lying here all day, but I’m too sick to work on anything important and too awake to sleep.

And you’re right that it doesn’t compare to print, but EA is still a moderated third-party publisher, which is a lot more prestigious than publishing stuff on your OWN site. My input is for more quality control to make EA’s “Expert Author” status mean more. That’s all I’m saying.

And now back to my DVR…

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Why thank you, Marte. You’re a sweetheart! :)

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These guidelines look good to me. The only other thing I can think of as a visitor to a site that makes me exit quickly are: slow to load and difficult to navigate.

I would appreciate the feedback that all of this would offer.

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You know what? This is your site, and if you want to implement quality controls, then you should do it with no argument from anyone. We should all thank you and be glad to be associated with quality because it reflects well on all of us who are accepted as members.

I personally think we as authors are shooting ourselves in the foot if we take people straight to a squeeze page without giving them an opportunity to get acquainted.

How many people do you lose by being heavy-handed?

I also agree about the contact info. After being burned a few times, I just plain will NOT do business with any site that doesn’t have a name and a phone number where I can find it easily. If someone wants to hide, go for it… but get a different customer, ’cause it won’t be me.

One concern, however. For those of us who have been posting for quite a while and have had changes in our web sites, autoresponder hosts, etc. Is there a simple way to go back into old articles (en mass) and change the resource boxes to reflect current information?

I’m hanging on to a subscription from an old autoresponder just because of those old articles.

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It is tremendously important for authors to provide a quality website to back up their quality articles. But what about the quality of the publishers who are picking us up? I’ve been less than pleased with some of the “publishers” I’ve seen picking up my own articles lately. I’m not personally of the belief that all publicity is good publicity… I’m curious what others think about this.

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