The Honest Way

This is a timely reminder to those of us who write articles for submission to the various online article submission directories and ezines.

Whatever you do, always use articles you have written yourself, or if you do not have those skills and need to outsource to a ghost writer, make sure that the articles you submit are unique and not displayed anywhere else on the internet.

I’m highlighting this point because I myself just ran afoul of “Duplicate Content Syndrome” when I got hold of what I believed to be a brand new PLR package of articles. I submitted one to Ezine Articles after making some changes to the text as the original author’s writing style did not match mine.

Well the upshot of it was that it turned out they were not new and neither were they unique. The editor of Ezine Articles emailed me within a few hours of my submission not only pointing out the fact that I had run afoul of the terms and conditions but also suspending my account with them!

Ouch!

I had to explain what had happened, apologise profusely for my stupid mistake (and it was a stupid mistake because I should have checked the article was ok first) and then delete the offending article from my now precariously sliding on very thin ice account!

Ok, I was lucky. The editor accepted my apology and reinstated my account. But I could very well have lost it through using material that I hadn’t written myself.

Lesson learned!

We all make mistakes from time to time along our haphazard journeys through the intricate windings of this mortal life that some of us devote so much of to the online world. Sometimes our altercations are thankfully forgiven and we are redeemed, sometimes as in the case of Google adsense, we are not.

We know it as the school of hard knocks and the lessons that have to be learned come from our own mistakes, misfortunes and moments of blind stupidity! More often than not we learn from those mistakes and become better people for it.

We’ll still make other mistakes because we’re only human and that’s the way of life, but as long as we learn from those mistakes and don’t keep making them again and again hoping for a different result, then we grow as people and that’s what sets apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Ok, point made, I hope.

Bottom line: Don’t submit anything to Ezine Articles unless you wrote it yourself or outsourced it to a trusted ghost writer or bought it as a “Full rights” article from one of the article sites like Constant Content. Not if you want to keep your account active so you can use it to boost traffic to and gain priceless backlinks for your site and your business.

I hope this saves someone else from the hassle I just encountered!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY