Our War With Affiliate Marketers
Most affiliate marketers don’t write original content and if they do write their own articles… their articles are thin, regurgitated Frankenstein article spin-written by some software program… only to flip our end users to a clickbank site (ie: they added no value in the process).
Affiliate marketers fall into one of two camps:
- ~90% who have decided to scale their craft into hundreds and thousands of articles have become highly efficient at writing keyword loaded copy while making sure that their articles seldom deliver on the promise made in the article title…because if their articles delivered on the promise they made in the title…they fear our end users would never click to their website.
- ~10% are in it to share genuine expertise with original articles that came from their background…and they are doing this gig to explore a phase in their business life where they are trying to figure out how to convert traffic into dollars so that they can build their own products to sell. This is the type of affiliate marketer we welcome and even on some days, call “ideal.”
Our position and reason why it’s “war” and personal:
We want our million+ daily end users to leave with a positive experience. Delivering thin non-original articles only to flip the end users to a long sales letter page that further promises the moon and stars for only $49.99 does not always deliver a positive end-user experience.
Last month we cracked down on penis enlargement articles and rejected thousands of them that over promised and massively under-delivered. This month our Editors have been instructed that any article that is ‘thin’ in originality AND the end destination URL is an affiliate link; we’re going to reject for “Non Substantial or Not-Original-Enough Content.”
No, we’re not going to over-react and make a big move here. We’re talking about the subjective decision where the article missed the mark by 5-15% vs. where we would have previously accepted the article and let it pass.
We didn’t get to our current success together this many years by thinking ‘short-term’ oriented and the fact that our Editorial standards raise every single month should not be a shock to anyone. It’s the way it’s been since day one. Affiliate marketers who submit thin non-original articles are wasting their time submitting to us.
Lastly, some tips about how to get your affiliate-link-included articles accepted:
- Be sure to read section 3 if you haven’t already in our Editorial Guidelines.
- Do not increase your word count for word count sake. More words that say nothing is not better than fewer words that say nothing.
- Insist that your ghostwriters (if you use them) must blow you away with original ideas, seldom thought about solutions, unique perspectives and not the same crap every other article already says about a particular topic. RAISE THE BAR.
- Keep the spammy looking article titles to a minimum if at all. Hype does not help get your article accepted faster. Know we’re checking your article body to make certain that you deliver on the promise(s) made in your article title.
- Don’t submit 10-1000 articles on same rehashed topic with only the words and tips re-arranged. Our anti-derivative software is being continually tweaked to reject this behavior.
- Be proud of your articles. Most affiliate marketers don’t fight us when we reject their articles because they were not worth writing home to Mom about in the first place.
Hope this helps. :)
If you’ve got tips or advice as to how we can discourage affiliate marketers from wasting their time submitting thin non-original content to us, we’d like to hear it. Our end goal here is to raise the quality of the perception the marketplace has of the type of articles they can expect to find within EzineArticles.com. This focus also helps us look good to those who refer traffic to our members’ articles.
UPDATED Oct 25th 2009 2:30pm CST: Comments have been closed for this thread as it’s going in circles now. New posts will be shared shortly on what we learned from the exchange and the data we’ve been studying.
Yeah, a lot of those PE articles were “stubby” on value!
October 1, 2009 at 10:41 AM[Reply]
Oh dear — I’m not even sure where to begin on this one. We recently went on a rampage to remove similar sort of articles from our site, and there were words in there i’ve never heard of…
October 1, 2009 at 11:20 AM[Reply]
Nice one, Chris
How small of them…
October 1, 2009 at 1:31 PM[Reply]
“Last month we cracked down on penis enlargement articles and rejected thousands of them that over promised and massively under-delivered.”
Kind of like the target market for those products? More than a little irony there, I think…
October 1, 2009 at 3:53 PM[Reply]
Chris, pleased to see you have raised the bar on PE.
Where are we going with this?
October 1, 2009 at 4:50 PM[Reply]
But if the article persists on the front page longer than 4 hours, you must seek immediate medical attention.
October 1, 2009 at 5:01 PM[Reply]
Well done, Allen
October 1, 2009 at 9:46 PM[Reply]
Oh, my gosh. Thanks for this laugh, I needed it!
October 2, 2009 at 10:07 PM[Reply]
Me too… I’d the last laugh when John wrote:
Kind of like the target market for those products? More than a little irony there, I think…
:D :D :D Can’t stop laughing at that one huh? :D
October 24, 2009 at 11:22 AM[Reply]