From the Desk of Janet Barclay

Several years ago, I started to include guest articles in my ezine, in addition to or sometimes instead of my own articles. Since I’m all about being organized, I wanted to archive them on my website by category so my readers could easily find them again in the future without having to keep all the newsletters. I quickly found this to be rather labour-intensive, and asked one of my colleagues in the website industry if she knew someone who could develop a program for me so I could just post the articles and have them automatically formatted and added to the directory. She advised me that this would be cost-prohibitive, so I continued what I was doing, but didn’t really give up on the idea.

Last year I learned that Article Dashboard offers their software as a free download. I was thrilled to pieces, and didn’t even mind paying someone to install it for me. It took me a bit of time to customize it to the way I wanted it and to copy and paste all the articles I already had on my website (after obtaining permission from the authors, of course, since this new system allows others to use the articles as well). Now instead of spending time every month looking for articles, whenever I come across one that I think is suitable, I invite the author to sign up, and I’ve had no trouble getting new articles on a regular basis.

Too good to be true? Unfortunately, yes.

Challenge #1 - Comment Spam

One of the features I was excited about was the ability for readers to post comments on the articles. Unfortunately, the only comments ever posted were ads for Viagra and other medications. I had to disable this feature.

Challenge #2 - Inappropriate Submissions

Even though my Submission Guidelines clearly state that "The theme of OrganizedArticles.com is "Maximizing Your Time and Space" and all articles submitted should fit into one of our established categories," I receive an ever-increasing number of articles related to health, child rearing, dog training, travel, and many other categories - many of which are of very poor quality. In an effort to resolve this problem, I deleted the offending authors, only to discover that this does not prevent them from submitting articles. Instead, the articles now come up with a blank author name.

My second attempt to get around this problem was to remove the link to the Sign up page, and instead ask authors to send me a sample of their work, and if I thought they were suitable, I would send them the link. Unfortunately, there are a number of automated article submissions out there (likely the source of most of the inappropriate articles I’ve been receiving) who already know about that page, so I still get new people signing up.

What was intended to be a time-saver for me has ended up a time-consuming exercise in frustration. I wasn’t that familiar with blogging platforms when I set up the article directory, and I’m now thinking that would have been a better choice. Not only would it would put me back in control of the content, without having to fuss with formatting and indexing, but it would allow me to assign multiple categories to articles where appropriate. That may very well be my next move.

If you haven’t yet checked out my article directory, be sure to visit OrganizedArticles.com.