If you have read my blog a few times you’ll know that when I start with a disclaimer that I am going to rip someone a new one! So here is my disclaimer.

I really like Ezinearticles and Chris Knight , Ezinearticles and Chris have provided a platform that have allowed myself and hundreds of other marketers to make profits from our sites. Even as I write this I am drinking coffee out of an EZA Mug. Several thousand dollars a month of my income can be directly attributed to EZA. Of course Chris also profits from my articles so it’s a good symbiotic relationship.

I completely respect Chris’s rights to do whatever he wants to do with ezinearticles and change the rules when he feels it’s for the best. Surprisingly that’s not what this post is about .Occasionally Chris seems to say things without thinking them through. Maybe in a bid to lessen the impact of his “War on Internet Marketers” (dare I say that EZA has been built to the position it is today largely by internet marketers?) he posted a video and a post last night about the statistics of the Problem articles they have.

http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2009/10/derivative-content-be-gone.html

The part that make me angry is the following

Get this: Over 142,000 articles are currently in “Problem Status.” Of those, 41% are under 399 words. Compare that to those that are over 750+ words which account for 1-2% of the total. That means you can significantly increase your chances of having your article accepted purely by increasing your word count to the 400+ range. Watch for a full blog post this week with the details on this internal stats study.

Thats the type of stats a politician would quote to justify something that is basically unjustifiable.

Let me explain more, The stats mean absolutely nothing without something to base them on.

142,000 articles in problem stats …against how many live articles?

41% are under 399 words ..Ok but what percentage of live articles are under 399 words?

2% of articles of over 750 words are problem articles .. so how many live articles are over 750 words?

It could be that when we know all the stats that articles less than 399 words are statistically LESS likely to be in problem status.

Additionally no mention of why the articles are in problem status is made. Surely unless it is due to article length then the stats above mean absolutely nothing. How does an article that is in problem status due to a keyword stuffed title have any relevance on the article length?

I realize that Chris is trying to make people improve the quality of the articles and I fully support that, but more keywords doesn’t mean higher quality. I’ve often spent time trimming a 500 word article down to 300 to get the facts across quicker. Unfortunately most people just skim read the articles so the shorter and more concise the article the better. Of course if they get bored they are more than likely to click one of Chris’s Adsense adverts!…hmmm

How about this for a compromise if Chris is happy to move the resource box to the top of the article I will happily write 1000 word articles all day long

There is absolutely no need for Chris to justify the recent rule changes but by using weak statistical data with nothing to support it he is doing himself a disservice.

Before I go there is one stat that would end this discussion right now.. whats the average CTR of 700 word articles against 300 word articles?  I suspect it’s considerably different!

Do you want to change you life?  Do You want to Work where you want when you want? Do you want to become a full time Internet Entrepreneur?

If You answered yes to one of those questions then isn’t it’s time you did something about it?

It’s June 1st today so why not dedicate the next month to laying the foundation of a long term business.

I am not suggesting that at the end of the month that you’ll be able to retire but I am saying that you’ll have a usable system in place that you can build on. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is an Internet marketing career. I’ve been doing IM for over 4 years now it’s only in the past 9 months that I’ve finally got myself organised so that I can work a few hours a week if I wish and still maintain my income.

If you are willing to sacrifice 30 hours this month and $30 then you can succeed.

The first stop you should make is ezinearticles.com. Ezinearticles is a great place to research business models.  There are loads of categories here find one that appeals to you. Once you click on a sub-niche you’ll see a link to the top Authors in each niche. Follow this link and you’ll get a list of the Top Authors in that niche. Now all you need to do is to click on some of their articles and look at where their resource links go.

This way you’ll get to see the business model they are using, and believe me if they have bothered to write lots of articles it is working. Follow the process to the end and see all the tricks and tactics they use

It’s now down to you to replicate the business model.

Even creating your own product can cost less than $30.  The graphics on my Twitter Tips and Tricks Site cost me  $17, the domain cost me $9. I wrote the book in less than a day. Although I am giving away the product at the moment I could start to charge for it or even sell it as a complete business package via a site like sitepoint or digitalpoint.  Check out the graphics at www.twittertipsandtricks.com

Go On do it now!!  Build For Your Future

If you have been keeping up with the latest IM promotions you could well be forgiven for thinking that The definition of free has changed.

To me A Free product means exactly that it’s free, it costs nothing , there is no payment needed. If you tried to access the Free Butterfly marketing promotion yesterday you would no doubt have seen that Free means different things to Guru’s as it does to us humbler marketers.

In the case of BFM 2.0 free meant a $29.95 postage and packing fee.. Wow How expensive is postage in the US?? I got a router and an Ipod fedexed over night from New York To Spain for about the same price. On top of that you signed up for a forced continuity program for a Newsletter which costs $40 a month .. (forgive me if I am wrong with the price I was laughing too much at this stage!).

Good Luck cancelling

I also loved all the email’s that came out about how you are getting agreat piece of $2000 software for free. I hope it’s improved from the buggy program that was released 2 years ago. I am sure I have seen it offered a few times since them for much less.

I hope you asked the guys promoting it if they use this “awesome”  (irony!!) piece of software.

So What am I going to do to try to redress the balance and show you that there are some great marketers out there who actually care about the people who read our blogs and buy our products.

How does this sound.

My favorite fellow marketer goes by the name of Potpiegirl like me she actually cares about people and above all wants people to succeed. So I am going to include a link to an excellent free guide she has released about creating an income from Squidoo. It is well worth a read.

I am also going to show you how to find a sucessful business model that you can copy and improve on.

So first off lets look at the video , it’s just over 8 minutes long but if you follow what I am doing I guarantee that it can change your life. There are loads of successful business models out there so just find the one that suits your circumstances.

Hope you enjoyed that. To grab Potpiegirl’s free book Click Here

Finally I am running an experiment with twitter so if you enjoyed this post please use the link at the top of the post to retweet about it. I’ll reveal my results in a few weeks.

As always comments are welcome.

I had a load of articles I just submitted rejected by ezinearticles. The reason given was that the resource box was against their guideline . I went through their guidelines with a fine toothcomb and couldn’t find any reason why articles with resource boxes that were accepted last week weren’t accepted this week.

My first email to the helpdesk wasn’t replied to , this is the first time I have had this happen to me but I have heard a lot of people mention this problem recently. So after 3 days I sent a 2nd email and had an immediate response.

Thanks for your emails, and I apologize for the delayed response.

I’m sorry for the confusion, but we are no longer accepting links
containing auction items.

Please edit your articles so they do not link to a site containing an
online auction, and you may resubmit for review.

It seems that ezinearticles have now stopped accepting articles for sites that display  any eBay auction listings.  Now I could understand this and support it if the sites had no or very little content. But the sites in question have  several unique articles on them and provide lots of useful information. The eBay ads are carefully selected to be relevant to the article.

There is still nothing published about this and I’ve checked several forums and it seems that some people are having their articles rejected whilst others are having no problems yet.  I’ve even heard of some people who have had some articles go through and others have been rejected with the same resource box.

Hopefully Chris will post about this in the ezinearticles blog so that we can get a proper discussion going about this. It’s one thing arbitrarily rejecting anything with an auction listing (remember an auction listing can be just 1 or 2 items in a site with 10 or more high quality posts) but many of these contain much more content and info than adsense sites.