The Article Writer

I guess I dwell upon this issue too much, but one of the biggest irritants about writing is finding much of my work lifted from article directories and resold through one of those ghastly looking “AdSense Ready” sites.

I won’t go into the whole “they ripped off my stuff tirade” as attribution is almost always given to me. Instead, I will focus on the entire look and practicality of these types of sites as they are simply ugly and do little to add to the overall look and feel of the internet. As more and more of these types of sites take hold, the amount of good information on the internet is greatly diminished.

I always tell folks to be careful what they reference from any site as the information can be self serving, self promotional, even outright inaccurate. This is too bad as the internet is less and less a great source of original and accurate material and is, instead, being overrun by sites that are set up for nothing more than increasing someone’s pay-per-click revenue.

Venting done.

I hate to admit it, I even think I’ll be misunderstood, but there are several time wasters I encounter throughout the day that can negatively impact my business. Let’s be honest: the internet is a cool tool, but there are enough distractions to it that can keep you from what you really need to do: make money. Here is my short list of things that are real time wasters:

Blogging — Yeah, I like to blog. Love it even. Still, there are times that blogging can become an end to itself. What is my page rank? How do I rate with Technorati? This particular blog is my favorite — I manage 7 of them — but some of the seven aren’t worthy of my daily thoughts. Just thought that you would like to know!

Forums — Going back 8 or 9 years I used to regularly participate on this one particular, not-to-be-named forum. Got into a lot of heated arguments, but I still had some fun. When it all adds up, the only thing I can chalk up to experience is that spending too much time on any forum is a real time waster. Okay, I still like forums, so I control my time usage.

Web Pages — Tweak, I must! There is no such thing as a “done” web page. Maybe overdone! There are times that I simply have to stop making updates and simply go with the page as it is. No one else cares about the javascript, the background color, the font as much as I do. Why sweat it?

Ad Networks — Three years ago I relied heavily on banner ads to help generate revenue. All that work for the occasional $25 monthly check…not worth it!

PPC Schemes — Some plans are better than others. Personally, I haven’t found one that works as well as Google’s AdSense program although the Yahoo! Publisher Network is improving. For 30 consecutive months I have made the monthly minimum payouts with AdSense — even generating that much money in just one day — so it is a good program. Still, I don’t have time to monitor every ad on every page on every site.

So, there you have it. My short list of time wasters. I am sure that there are more, but you probably have already gotten my point.

Well, it has now been a full year since I began to submit articles I have written to the article directories. For many months I exclusively wrote and posted articles to Ezine Articles only, then added several more directories from last August forward.

For the most part the experience has been quite good. I write an article, post it to the appropriate category on select sites, and within days the articles are picked up and redistributed.

I have had some cool looking sites snag my articles, but some real spammy ones to. It is this latter category that causes me alarm, especially when my articles are included in a package with other similar topic articles and resold!

Yes, if you check some of the AdSense ready sites, your articles may be part of the site’s package. I am not sure how you feel about that, but I don’t like my “free” articles being resold nor do I like the look of these sites: spammy.

I have already decided to hold back submitting some of my new material to any of the directories. While I have benefitted by some of the rise in SEO, I really don’t like to see my stuff ripped off and resold elsewhere.

Perhaps this is the beginning of some sort of author backlash. At least with me it will be!