Up To My Eyeballs In Articles

What an hectic week. An enormous amount of articles were waiting for approval on Tuesday and every time I approved some more came in. Most of them didn't have category suggestions so the approval process took longer because I had to figure out what category they belonged in. Some of the articles were pretty obscure which made it harder.

There was such a huge backlog by Friday that I pulled the automatic submission script and started to email members to ask them to post manually, hopefully that will slow things down but not bring things to a standstill. I realised that a lot of my time was being wasted unnecessarily and I was struggling to find time to promote the site or make improvements. My other sites are so neglected they might as well not exist.

Other problems that the automated script brought was that html was being stripped out of the articles resource boxes, that I got fixed with another script. Then I realised that the automatic submission was creating lots of unnecessary categories, for instance doubling up with computer and computers. It also created a main category called Speaking and sub categories under that of religion and online auctions - weird!

I'm now trying to sort out the categories and have already deleted quite a lot. I've decided not to accept any more political articles or articles about weapons. I don't think an article directory is the place for political debate and I don't want links to sites selling weapons on any of my sites. I'm toying with the idea of not accepting any more articles about religion too. I find some of those articles interesting although I'm an atheist, but some of them are just plain preaching and can hardly be called articles. I'll just refuse those for a while maybe.

The only bit of light relief this week was when I looked at the article website statistics. A searchstring that was - how to use covert hypnosis to get women to sleep with you - I laughed when I saw it but now I'm going to search to see if there is anything like that on the site. The thought of some creep using hypnosis to get sex makes me shudder, surely that would be classed as rape. Then it could be BS, and I don't think it's possible. However if it's on the site it won't be for long.

Disaster strikes

It's sod's law that when I think everything is going great something goes wrong.

I was delighted a few evenings ago to see some articles from an old business friend who I hadn't been in contact with for 5 years had been submitted to
www.bb-articles.com through Article Marketer. I'd always enjoyed reading her articles and settled in for a good read. It was great until I noticed that her resource box was incomplete and had no links. I looked through all of her articles and found that most of them were the same.

I was going to email her anyway and make contact again, but I wasn't happy to have to tell her that the resource boxes were incomplete. We both thought that it had been caused by the mass submission from Article Marketer, my friend blasted them and I asked them why it had happened.


Article Marketer got back to me and very nicely explained that my script was stripping out the html. At first I thought that they meant the article directory script but then the day after I realised that they might mean the script that I had bought to enable my site to get mass submissions from
Article Marketer. It's a nifty little script, apart from enabling mass submissions and adding on of categories automatically it also stops the same article from being posted twice and declines articles that are too short or too long.

Anyway I contacted the guy that I bought the script from and he altered it for me. Apparantly he had recently changed it because there were complaints that it was letting through articles with affiliate links in the body and too many links in the resource box. Unfortunately the revised script took it's job too seriously and stripped the html.

The good news is that my new script is working fine, it's different in that I now have to approve every article. That I prefer anyway, I can delete anything that I think are scams and I don't like complete advertorials and can delete them.

The bad news is that there are thousands of articles on my site with incomplete resource boxes. Up to present I've been able to correct nearly a thousand because many of the articles were also sent to my inbox. If there are some that I find that I can't correct I email the individual authors with the links.

I did initially attempt to email all of the authors but there are too many for the email system on my site. I was advised to use an autoresponder but I haven't figured how to use one of them yet. Ok I'm a dummy but I don't like the idea of mass emails anyway.

I'll probably end up going through them all and correcting what I can. I will take many hours but I don't think it's fair on the writers not to have links or contact info in their resource boxes.

Another problem that I had was with the mass input of articles came many new categories. Some of the sub categories have long titles and were overwriting themselves. It made the site look really messy and you had difficulty reading what the categories were.

I found the solution to that problem at AD University. There are some great tutorials on how to customise Article Dashboard sites - and I understand them! Now my home page has just the categories and the messy sub categories have been hidden away from site.

I found another bug in that there is a strange memory error when you click on the top articles link. It can't really be a memory error, more like a tiny script error. I've seen the solution somewhere so once I've got time to look for it again I'll fix it.

Wow nearly 40,000 articles

There have been times when I wondered if I was taking the right step with an article directory, but now I know that I have. Who would have imagined that there would be so many articles within 2 weeks of launching? I certainly didn't and more are still coming in. The articles mostly arrived through joining a company called Article Marketeer who submit articles for you.

They have 2 options, by email or with a nifty script. I chose the email option because it sounded easier. My mistake, my inbox was flooded with subscriptions and articles and I had to place these on the site. I was going bogeyed with the effort and decided to try out the script. Despite my fears it was easy to install and the subscriptions and articles are coming in automatically now.

I was worried that the automatic members wouldn't visit the site but I am seeing that many are and some are posting articles by themselves.

Another worry is that I wasn't getting to check the articles before they were posted. Article Marketer check them for you but I have thrown some out that I have seen. Either for being unethical or just complete advertorial with no personal experience or advice. I don't see the point in advertorials. Most readers will see that they are just ads and not what they are looking for when they do a search about a subject. Apart from that if they want to purely advertise they aren't getting a freebie.

Many of the articles that I have read are informative and of good quality. That I find pleasing but I have to admit to some cynicism as regards some who call themselves as Internet marketing experts. My cynicism arose when I read some of the articles giving advice about Internet marketing. What I couldn't understand was if they are experts why do they not use keywords appropriate to the articles?

Some just use a couple of words from the title. For instance the title might be 'Put some jam on your bread' they would use jam and bread as keywords. I am not an expert on Internet marketing and am reading the articles to gain more knowledge about that area, but even I know that somebody putting jam or bread into a search engine will not be looking for advice about Internet marketing.

Ok that's a wild example and I will be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. If I'm right then I'm not 100% happy about advice from those who are not walking the talk.

Anyway on the bright side the site is getting lots of hits from unique visitors. More in the last 2 days than in 2 months on my other sites. It remains to be seen if it makes more money. I'm going to be good and wait a while before checking the various advertising sources.

What next? Unfortunately the category section on the home page has been messed up somewhat with the input from Article Marketer. I will be working on fixing that and making some improvements over the next few days. Then I will push the boat out with promotion. I have lots of articles kicking around and will be flooding other sites with them to get back links. That will be stage one and a continuing process until www.bb-articles is blasted all over the Internet. It looks like the Busy Bee is back in spades!

What the heck is phishing?

I got an email from my hosting company telling me that they had removed my site because somebody had phished it. Not 100% sure what that is but I think that it's some cheapskate who hijacks your site and tags theirs on to it to make use of the bandwidth you have paid for - when webspace is so cheap nowadays too. Or it could be some weirdo hiding their illegal site in your pages.

Anyway I read the email a week after receiving it and found that my site was fine because several days earlier I had taken that site down and parked another of my sites on that domain.

All I can say is phish off to the cheats.

Welcome to my blog

What a frustrating week I've had trying to set up my article directory. I'm terrible at understanding technical instructions and had to do many a google search before what I have done so far clicked.

I had 2 false starts when I tried to set a directory up on my own webspace. First of all I tried to install an article beach site and couldn't get it working properly. Then I tried Article Dashboard. I got everything on the site and started to customise but realised that the email confirmation for new joiners wasn't working. After many hours of searches and hair pulling out I realised that a thing called cron jobs exists and couldn't find any mention in my cpanel. I emailed the guy that I bought the space from and was told that they didn't allow cron jobs because of security issues. I understood but when I looked at the advertisement that I bought the space from cron jobs was there large as life.

For those of you who I am baffling with 'cron jobs' it's something to do with the site automatically sending confirmation emails, newsletters and news of posts etc. If you want your own article directory type site then make sure that you get a host that offers cron jobs.

Anyway I wasn't too bothered because I didn't pay much for unlimited space for life and already have something like 7 personal sites hosted there and the ability to host myself. I decided to pay a monthly fee for hosting the article directory with the recommended hosts.

I bought the space and started to publish the site. Every step of the way was more difficult and time consuming with the recommended hosts than with my own space. I finally got there and guess what? I couldn't get the cron jobs to work when I signed up for an authors account.

I joined the article dashboard forum and went through every recommendation posted by users. Nothing worked and I would have been bald if I had literally torn my hair out. I was almost ready to give up but emailed the recommended hosts first.

It turned out that I was using an hotmail account for the test author sign up and hotmail was filtering out the confirmation emails as spam grrrr. I might have thought about that one earlier if I hadn't signed up as an author on the Article Dashboard site and received the confirmation email with no problem. I added the BB-article site to my hotmail safe list and now everything is working great - I hope! Just got lots of customising to do but the site is ready for posts.

What I find strange about Hotmail is that they filter out emails that you want to receive as spam, yet the only spam I have received in that account in 7 years must have come through hotmail selling the address to spammers and scammers. I know that because I used it as a private address for 7 years.