Well, it certainly has been helpful tracking everyone here. I’ve had people rip my stuff off, but i’m going to follow Lance & Robert and keep writing. The Satan blooper is a good one, and of course that would get higher ratings! i guess i could work satan in if i “misspelled” satin… and the bride wore satan… (is that a perfume?)

but i must say i think of this as popular writing. the more articles i have the less precious the individual articles are and the more important the message becomes behind what i’m trying to say in new ways about why a wedding ceremony can facilitate a good marriage. i don’t like it when i show up on a dubious massage site, but i’m not sure if the people reading those sites are likely to use my stuff or bruit my name about! (i have had some interesting people sign up to follow my twitter account, however!) sometimes i challenge it, sometimes i don’t. i remember reading my first google alerts very excitedly when i first started writing. wow! someone picked up my article meaningful, meaningful, smut, meaningful smut meaningful. aiii!

every time somebody comments here, i go and look at your stuff. people are doing amazing work. and it’s great to see Lance’s comments up next to people just starting out. i like knowing you’re out there plugging along in a community of writers.

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Shirley, I would confront the creep on his blog. Maybe you’ll embarrass him into changing his ways- but then, I tend to be confrontative about these kind of things.

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Gisele,
Maybe that is the way to attack this problem.

I didn’t want him to rip off all my articles and abuse them, after I had my say. I also didn’t want my name to appear on Google Alerts as being a jerk and unreliable.

I too will take Robert’s and Lance’s advice and keep writing, ignoring the bad, unless it involves my name personally.

Thanks for the advice. I wonder if there is a Google complaint center for undesirables?

Shirley Bass

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Shirley,

I’ve studied this extensively and I can tell you without doubt that Google is not where your complaint should be heard. They are already very efficient at making sure content thieves don’t rise to traffic power over the long haul (and that is their job in terms of this issue).

Best way is via direct contact with the content thief followed by an email, phone call or legal demand letter to the web host. A lot of content thieves are just incompetent rather than malicious.

If the splog is hosted by Google, here is a link to the “report a spam blog” tool.

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It’s a matter of where you want to put your energies. When I first started blogging, I used copyscape to track down the content thieves. I confronted them. They all eventually either provided me with a link or took down the “Satanic” content.

Now I’m not so sure it’s worth the effort. In the time it takes to deal with one content thief, I can write at least two articles. Not that I mean to compare myself with Stephen King, but do you suppose anyone can really rip off Stephen King?(Mr. King, if you’re out there, you of course could enlighten us.) Establish your brand, and nobody is going to be able to rip it off. That probably takes more than 250 articles in six months, though

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Thanks Chris!

Yes, it is blogger that this person is using. I will take care of it now. You gave me some sense of hope.

He completely destroyed the author’s work today with trashy words.

Okay, on to better things now. Thanks again for the help.

Shirley Bass

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I have to admit I was a little skeptical when I read the original post, but I had lots and lots of “material” that wasn’t used in the edits of my various books, so I decided to convert it to ezinearticles.

I’ve gone from 75 to 150 ezinearticles in about a week (counting today’s submissions). My site traffic has doubled, but my Adsense revenue has tripled. 250, here we come.

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Robert is correct, indeed, this has been my conclusion. It takes time to chase these rats around the Internet. They put up new sites constantly. Each day my Google Alert for my name yields 5-10 uses of my articles somewhere. Whether it be print, website, report, patent, cite, blog or AdSense baloney.

Sometimes the sites are taken down by GoogleBlog in a few days, sometimes the culprits are black-balled by the search engines. Sometimes they just stay up until the domain name expires on a temporary VISA; where you get to enjoy a domain name for 90-days. Then they fall off.

Often the sites stay up, but lose search engine rankings over time and the content thief gets bored, does not renew the domain or blog. There must be terabytes of crap out there.

Yes, there are the diehard content thieves that go on and on and on, eventually you are going to have to do something about them. It’s aggravating no doubt, but with all that said Robert is correct. You can spend your life pissed off at these scounrels or you can spend your time on more productive endeavors like producing quality content.

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Here’s a question I never thought I’d have cause to ask, but here goes:

Is it possible to submit too many articles too fast?

I’m getting a nice boost in traffic from the 70+ articles I’ve sent to ezinearticles this week, but I’m not getting very many published. Is is possible 10 a day is too much, too soon? Thanks for all your inputs.

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my republishing numbers are down, although my readership is up. (i’m still awed by Lance’s 466/article!) i’m not sure whether that’s because there are simply more people writing in my field (it’s gone up 1,000 since i started tracking my ranking – from 2,000-3000), or whether i’m suddenly writing non-republishable articles, even though i circle around the same topics… But I remember Chris’s saying that you got more of a boost from submitting a bunch at once, whether that was only reads or also republishing… Chris?

and robert, thanks for the manuscript idea. i’ll see whether i can stand to open it up again! and congrats on moving ahead like that.

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Robert, actually, I have an opinion about this, as over time I have been watching the article pickup counts and the viewer counts. Here is my conclusion. If you are posting to one specific category, I would not post more than 6 per week and 3-days apart. So, let’s say 3 on Monday and 3 on thursday.

If you are posting in several categories, like I often do then you can post 3 at a time in each category and 3 more in each category 3-days later. I have noticed that if I write lots of articles on Franchising, which is normally a very high traffic category, because AdSense pays more in that category, due to the fact franchisors are willing to pay a lot for potential leads and traffic; my findings are if I post 15 in one day, they are not likely to be picked up by other websites as often as if I post them slower.

You see, I want other sites to pick up my articles thru syndication, this drives back-links and massive traffic from all different places. And generally all targeted traffic. The article views on this website although I am at 7 million now, are only a drop in the bucket of the total article views or even traffic that I have generated from all the locations of all my articles across the internet.

Now with that said, eventually a “franchising website” will stumble upon my articles in the “Franchising Category” and they will start up loading them, post them at the rate of 3-6 articles a week. Thus the 6 articles a week seems to be the magic number and the rate at which the sites that collect these syndicated articles want them.

Plus most EZINES that collect articles here and there are OH MY GOD a ton of them, generally send out once per week. So, if you post 3-6 they will pick the best that fits their needs or focus of that newletter that week, so you have given them options, which means they are more likely to pick yours than someone else here in that category. Some of these Ezine Newletters have insane followings and 10s of 1000s of subscribers you see. What’s that worth? A Lot!

Another good reason for you to continue to write your quality articles at a smart pace. See that point? Now mind you, I normally do not go around sharing my findings with everyone, but after writing 15,000 articles this is what I have discovered. And therefore a strategy I use.

Sometimes I get lazy and write 15-20 articles on a single subject and post them all at once. This bulks me up in a given category and eventually these articles will find a home (s) but, it’s best to write in 3’s or 6’s or 12’s and then post them at a pace that those needing the content want them. In my opinion.

Now, Chris has discussed the bulk submissions with your current content, suggesting that you just upload it all in one swoop. Yes, you can do this and those articles will eventually find themselves in the search engine and many will find homes. Still, I advise to do 3-6 per week in your category if you want to totally dominate and have awsome traffic consistently over a long period of time.

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Anne,

One thing that we do not talk a lot about here at Ezine Articles is the fact that over-time your articles cook. When they have time to cook they are getting traffic and that adds up. And you must understand I started posting here in 2005 and posted some 1500 articles of previous works that were modified into articles. Then in 2006 and 2007 I went nuts and wrote a mega-amount of articles. It seems all the articles that I originally wrote are all well over 1500 article views. All the articles in 2006 are in the 500-600 range.

Yes, Anne you are competing against others in your field. I have written 1,000s of articles on news and politics and remember we just came off an election year, so that helped. And I have mega articles on innovation, future concepts, science innovation, aerospace invention ideas. Those are esoteric, literally “NO” competition.

Same with Humanities and Philosophy, hardly any, and I write on Business Topics, which has lots of competition, but mega interest and traffic. How to articles for business are picking up due to the economic conditions and small businesses scrambling to make money. I’ve seen huge traffic in careers, human resources, colleges, etc. due to job unemployment rates creeping up here in the bottom of the recession.

The concept of submitting a bunch at once is one that Sean Mize seems to be up to, literally owning the category and putting up so much content that it would be hard for anyone to not get drowned out. Still, his strategy is to “Dump” submit, three times per week. I imagine he owns that category now, thanks to his team of writers from India?

Still, one should note that for someone like Robert to write such excellent and informative articles, he’ll surely get the eyes of the EzinePublishers that include his articles in their newsletters as well. One good article picked up with an Ezine with a huge subscriber base is worth a lot of traffic. Just like getting your company featured in a Wall Street Journal Article.

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Lance, this is very helpful. I have at least 1,000 articles from a book that’s been righted back to me, so I’ll just experiment with various combinations of content submission and see what happens. This process gets kind of addictive, isn’t it?

Shirley Bass, for years and years and years I never got less than 5 stars on Amazon, and then apparently I ticked someone off. He wrote a review listing all of the things my book “should have said,” quoted verbatim from my book! I think there must be a point that you just get enough exposure you meet some bad actors. And I can tell you that if you publish enough books, you’ll have stories about publishers, good and bad. But we all have to deal with the sabotage and plagiarism issues from where we are, not where we’re not. Hope you have so much success with ezinearticles soon you don’t care about the plagiarists.

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Robert, if you join the Premium Feature you can post all the articles now and have them post on the date you choose, it’s a killer feature and highly worth it for your exact use here.

“Spare the Enemy!”

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Ann,

Doing the “BIG DUMP” of articles at once rather than spacing over time nets you more traffic because you have more articles attracting traffic over more days than if you spread the article submissions out over time.

I believe both strategies have value though… meaning, if you’re sitting on a bunch of content, do the BIG DUMP and then also do the submission over time consistency thing if you want the best shot at success.

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Chris, I agree as I have watched my articles enjoy the equivalent of the Time/Value of money and compounded interest. The longer the articles have to cook in the directory, the more value you get over time. I also know that providing content over time at a certain pace really helps your articles and those who run Ezines or online newsletters too. So, we agree that the best strategy is to do both.

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Robert, There will always be the 10% who thrives on turning something good into ugly. We can’t all be of the same opinion. Some are just mean spirited. Some are as Chris explained, incompetent rather than malicious.

I’ve had a few articles in the top 10 on Google, so exposure is more important to me, rather than the content thieves.

Thanks for the wishes of success!

Shirley Bass

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Shirley,

Actually, and while I don’t have evidence to support this claim… it’s my gut feeling that the content thieves being discussed here reflect about .1% of the market place; not anywhere close to 10%.

Can you imagine if 1 in every 10 Publishers was a content thief? 1 out of 1000 perhaps is closer to reality and most likely higher than reality (ie: I think it is probably less than .1%).

As far as percentage of Publisher people who are incompetent; well, that’s certainly past 10%! ;-)

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How in the heck did I miss this great interview until now?? Thank you for the great actionable tips. Took tons of notes and reassessing a few things…

Thanks Again Chris and Ann!

Jill Koenig

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