Something that every article directory should have is an article publisher page. A page that makes it easy for anyone who wants to publish an article to grab the HTML code of the article, ready to paste into their web site.

Articles are of course very important to an article directory, but equally as important are article publishers. People who come to the site looking for articles to use as content for their web site or newsletter.

Without publishers to pick up and use the content submitted by the article authors, the value of submitting articles to an article directory is diminished.

The value of submitting articles does not just come from the traffic and back links on the article directories, it should also come from traffic and back links from web sites, e-books, blogs and newsletters that use the articles as content.

An article directory that attracts article publishers is a good place to submit your articles.

Making it easy for publishers to use the content is a must for any article directory… So why have we only just added this and why are we only just beginning to focus on attracting publishers to the site?

Well, actually we have been focused on attracting publishers for a long time. The moderation system and article rating system was designed for publishers. We had to get that right and cover the older (unmoderated) content with newer higher quality content before we could focus on bringing publishers to the site. The reason we have founds and deleted over 100,000 sub par articles in the last few months was for article publishers.

There are a lot fewer article publishers than there are article writers, so competition to make your article directory attractive to article publishers is high. The most important thing you need is high quality articles!

If the content displayed is sub par (a lot of the older content is/was), then there is little point asking people to come to your site to find content. They are not going to stay or come back. The directory has been greatly cleaned up,  the content we publish now is always of reasonable quality and the best articles rise to the top.

We’re ready to start attracting publishers.

The HTML code of each article is now available through the new article publisher page which is linked on each article through a link next to the “onlywire bookmark tool”, under the article body ad.

All a publisher has to do now is visit this page and copy all the code from the article body box and they are ready to go. The text and printer friendly pages will be in place by the end of the week.

We will be doing a lot more to put the article content  in front of publishers from now on.

Respectfully,

Dan Blackburn

We have just updated the rss feeds across the site to include a link to the authors profile page… This link only appears if you have activated your profile page.

All feeds are 100% W3C valid and syndicate perfectly now. Before this update, we had a minor problem with text encoding. Hyphen would appear as &ndash, quotes would appear &lquot or $rquot and apostrophe would appear  as &apos in the feed reader. Fixing this little thing in the feeds could make a big difference.

Most people who are used to using feed readers are used to seeing this problem and forgive it (it happens a lot) but still, that does not stop the feed from looking less than professional. The problem is even worse when syndicating articles to a blog.

Take a look at this simple web design blog which  I just set up to demonstrate syndicating articles from the web design category to a web design blog. You’ll notice that all the excerpts look perfect now.

You’ll also notice that NONE of the authors that I have syndicated here have an active link to their profile page. That is because they have not logged in and activated their profile page in the members area.

It’s really worth logging in and completing your profile page.

The Web design blog does not look too great yet anyway, but imagine if every ” ‘ ! ? / – or & used in the article snippet was encoded badly. How bad would this (s)blog look then?

Example…

Though just about anybody can create a web page using some of the software tools available in today&aposs marketplace &ndash software that will generate your web pages and their &lquotdesign&rqout for you &ndash there is a large difference

It looks awful doesn’t it?

A lot of people like to use targeted RSS feeds to supplement their blog content, not only does doing this provide more value for the reader (as long as it is a good feed), it also brings more traffic. If you know what you are doing, it’s hard not to get traffic to every blog post you ever make at an active blog, whether syndicated content or not. Some days you just do not have time to write something yourself. Before now, using Article Content King feeds in this way was not really an option before now.

Our feeds already get a lot of traffic (around 50% of site traffic is feed traffic according to Awstats). This improvement should bring even more feed traffic as people who wish to syndicate our articles to their blog can now safely do so without compromising the look of their site. People who have been put off by bad text encoding in their feed reader will not be put off any more. Fixing this little thing could make a big difference.

If your profile page is active, some of that traffic could end up at your site!

Important Read This (new rule in the King contest)

When you activate your profile page, we want you to use an image! There are too many “No Profile Image” images on the top author page. It’s good to see more faces appearing every day, but not enough authors are uploading a pic or really using their profile page to full advantage.

It makes the site a look a lot more user friendly when you add an image. The no-profile image makes it look less user friendly. So please, add an image. Let people know what you look like. You’ll have more chance of finding a friend if you do.

I’m serious about this… so serious that I am making a new rule in the king contest!

New Rule in the King Contest — Unless you have uploaded a photo of yourself, you cannot win a prize!

Also, it’s highly recommended that you add a link to your twitter profile on your profile page in the “widgets” section. If you add a link to your Twitter profile, I can easily send you a message to you (and my 14,000 followers) when you move up the rankings or if you win a prize. If I tweet @you all my followers see it (and my Facebook friends too). This could be a lot of friendly traffic for you.

More views to your profile page, means more potential views to your articles. Article views increase article score and accumulative article score is what decides the winners of the King and Prince contests. Just the fact that I can “Tweet” well done to you, could be the difference between winning a prize and not. So you’d be wise to add a Twitter button, feed or link to your profile page.

What are you going to do next?

Unlock this extra traffic or not?

You can log in here

OK, I have decided to do it, so before I change my mind here goes… I am going to show you a specific product search where I am totally dominating the first page of Google with the SAME article in positions 1, 2, 3 + 4. On a search term where 3 people are PAYING for the top spot.

The chances are that because I am doing to this, the rankings will be gone tomorrow. Showing other marketers your rankings always gives them the kiss of death, however this is a ranking that I do not mind losing.  The article that I have ranked here is not a very good sales tool at all. In fact, it is quite a negative review of a recently released “Article Spinner” called Article Mass Control.

You probably heard of it, it launched with a bit of a bang!

As an article directory owner, I hate article spinners. I think that they undermine the true purpose of article marketing. Given the choice of an article that has already been published at 300 other article directories and an article that was written by a robot, I will take the former every time!

Article Spinners are also, as this post proves, not needed. There is no such thing as a duplicate content filter IMO.

In fact, article spinners just fill the Internet with junk, often illegible articles that no-one wants to read.

The duplicate content myth began (I believe) when people misunderstood a story that renowned SEO expert Brad Fallon told.

It seems that one day, Brad’s programmers created a page that contained ALL of the content on his Wedding Favors site. As a result of this, he lost ALL his search engines rankings. Google found the new page and did not think that it needed to list any of the other pages anymore. It had all the content it needed on one page so it dropped the rest.

A duplicate content filter DOES exist on the same site. i.e. Two pages with exactly the same content on the same site will not both be indexed, but a cross site duplicate content filter… I have only ever seen evidence that it does NOT exist.

Here is some more of that proof. I do not expect these rankings to stick now I have told you this. So here is an image. Check the search today and you will see that it is not faked. And that there are several people paying Google for the keyword phrase “Article Mass Control”.  (Check without quotes and I am still on the first page twice).

Click the image to go to the Google search.

I’ve just added a pretty cool update to the article pages, it did not take hardly any time or effort at all so I thought I would share it with you. In case you want to add it to your site too.

With a quick copy and paste, I added Google translation graphics to every article and automatically translated them into 9 different languages. This means that every article you have submitted or will submit in future will be available in 9 different languages. I do not know if this will increase traffic or not, but believe there is a good chance it will.

If you want to add this feature to your site, it’s dead easy. All you need to do is copy and paste the code below onto the page you want to translate, where you want the Google translation with country map graphics to appear.

<form action=”http://www.google.com/translate”><script language=”JavaScript”><!– document.write (“<input name=”u” value=”+location.href+” type=”hidden”>”)// –></script><input value=”en” name=”hl” type=”hidden”><input value=”UTF8″ name=”ie” type=”hidden”><input value=”" name=”langpair” type=”hidden”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”French” value=”en|fr” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/img/ 43/1633/320/13539949_e76af75976.jpg” width=”30″ name=”langpair”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”German” value=”en|de” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/img/ 43/1633/320/13539933_041ca1eda2.jpg” width=”30″ name=”langpair”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”Italian” value=”en|it” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/img/ 43/1633/320/13539953_0384ccecf9.jpg” width=”30″ name=”langpair”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”Portuguese” value=”en|pt” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/img/ 43/1633/320/13539966_0d09b410b5.jpg” width=”30″ name=”langpair”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”Spanish” value=”en|es” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/img/ 43/1633/320/13539946_2fabed0dbf.jpg” width=”30″ name=”langpair”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”Japanese” value=”en|ja” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/img/ 43/1633/320/13539955_925e6683c8.jpg” width=”30″ name=”langpair”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”Korean” value=”en|ko” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/img/ 43/1633/320/13539958_3c3b482c95.jpg” width=”30″ name=”langpair”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”Chinese Simplified” value=”en|zh-CN” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/img/ 43/1633/320/14324441_5ca5ce3423.jpg” width=”30″ name=”langpair”><input onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” title=”Arabic” value=”en|ar” type=”image” height=”20″ src=”http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/ 3709/485/1600/arabic-flag.gif” width=”30″ name=”langpair2″></form>

Because of the way wordpress is coded, the code above may not work until you replace all the ” with proper ” (not fancy quotes).

We have implemented some new article submission restrictions today, designed to help speed up the article approval process and further eliminate “article spam”.

The new restrictions we have applied are as follows

1. No-one shall have more than TWO articles awaiting admin approval.
2. No-one shall have more than FIVE articles awaiting member moderation

These restrictions will ensure that your articles will be approved more quickly and we will no longer have runs of several articles published by the same author in the moderation queue and “recently approved articles” list.

It is also our hope that these improvements will motivate more authors to moderate articles, as doing this is sure to move any articles you have waiting in moderation higher up the list of articles to be moderated. Moderating articles yourself will remove the “articles awaiting member moderation” restriction more quickly and enable you to submit articles again.

If you have any comments, please leave them below

Thanks

Dan

At Article Content King we are constantly striving to improve our article directory for all  authors,  publishers and visitors. Our efforts are paying dividends.  Over the last 30 days alone the amount of search traffic that comes into the site has increased by more than 300% and Ad income from the site has more than doubled.  (If you have your own ads displayed on the site, you will probably have noticed this too). The new DMOZ listing (finally) is also testament to how the site has improved.

Traffic (especially search engine traffic) is up and so is income, this is despite us publishing a LOT less articles than we used to or perhaps it’s because we publish a lot less articles than we used to.  Our submission rules and moderation system is strict to say the least. Only around 10-20% of the articles that are submitted to the site, are approved for member moderation, and not all of the articles make it through there.

The system has put a lot of people off… In most cases, these were people that we wanted to get rid of because their standards did not meet the standards of the site — selfish marketers who are focused only on getting a backlink… not delivering something to the reader.

The majority of the authors that we have left (or at least one ones that we publish) are focused on delivering something to the reader. They aren’t thinking about “seo backlinks” when they write an article, they are thinking, “How can I get the readers of this article to want to follow me”.We are now growing with this kind of quality content every day.

This is why traffic has increased, this is why income is up and this is why everyone will make more money from the revenue sharing aspect of the site.

So I am sorry if our approval system has frustrated you, but clearly it’s working!

I have just discovered something quite fantastic… Google Friend Connect. For a while now I have been wanting to add the ability for visitors to comment on the articles published at Article Content King. Well now that can! All thanks to  Google Friend Connect. It took less than 5 minutes to implement accross the entire site and cost absoultely nothing.

How cool is that?

To leave a comment on the article you are reading, just click the “comments” link on the Google Friend Connect  social bar and leave your comment or type into the comments box on the article page.

You can even post links to you tube videos and other sites for further reading. It’s very tidy and really quite cool.  The latest activity appears on the Social Bar itself, site wide. When you comment, everyone visiting the site at that time gets to see it, but the comment itself is attached to the article you posted it on. You also get a link to your Google account profile in every comment you leave.

These new features have just been added to the site I am the only one in the sites community right now. It feels pretty lonely in there, so please visit the site now and join the comminity and comment on the articles you read. All comments are set to be approved instantly, spammers will be banned quickly.

Yes, I know that many people have been saying that DMOZ links are not so valuable any more, but it’s still nice to see them finally accept our site after trying to get it listed since 2006. I have yet to see just how beneficial this link will be as we have only just recently been added, hopefully it will spawn many more links into the site and help to drive more traffic into everyone articles.

You can see the listing here in the publishing services category.

I wish this had happened back in 2006 when everyone was screaming from the roof tops about how important getting listed in DMOZ is,  but quite franky Article Content King was not worthy of being listed back then. It was full of junk, unmoderated content. A far cry of the site it is today. It’s nice to get some acknowedgement that what you are doing is getting noticed. The fact that a real person at DMOZ has visited the site and decided that ours is a site that people should visit, makes me feel great!

This is news that benefits every author with articles submitted to article content king.  The more traffic and reputation we receive the better it is for everyone.

A couple of weeks ago I set up a twitter account to publish a daily digest of articles published at article content king. Doing this has been very successful, surprisingly so. Yes, you too, would (very) be surprised at how many people actually click though to read the article on the site, after seeing a link to it posted on Twitter.

Because it has been so successful, we have decided to take it to the next level and Tweet your articles as they are published. As well as publishing the daily digest, the article content king twitter account will now also publish a direct link every single article that is published.  That means that every article you have published on our site, will be Tweeted. Not only by the article content king account… but by a couple of friends too. They too have the feed plugged in to their twitter account to automatically publish links to the articles that we publish.

You can help to drive more traffic to YOUR articles from twitter, by following Article Content King. The more followers the account has, the more traffic we will drive to everyones articles.

Remember, at article-content-king, when your articles are viewed on the site… you earn advertising credits!

Get some free traffic from article content king & twitter  Just follow me.