I just wanted to quickly address an issue that has been popping up more frequently. Please do not submit articles that are parts of series. All submissions should act as stand-alone articles for these reasons:

• Customers who purchase one article should not have to purchase another article in order to give their readers the whole picture.
• If a customer does purchase only one article in your series, other customers who want the whole picture will be missing 500-800 words (or however long your articles are).
• As per our guidelines, all articles should have introductions and conclusions.

You may still submit articles that are tied together, just as long as they can stand alone. For example, you might write 4 articles on the subject of container gardening and wish to tie them together as a “guide” to container gardening. You can do this without making the articles rely upon each other:

• Link titles - Container Gardening: Soil; Container Gardening: Types of Plants; Container Gardening: Food and Water Schedule; Container Gardening: Seasonal Containers
• Make sure each article has an introduction and conclusion that does not refer to another article in a series. These intros and conclusions should be original, but they may still be similar in order to maintain continuity between the pieces.
• Make your keywords for each article similar for search purposes, but do limit them to the individual articles.

Hope this helps. Thanks!

Recently, Constant Content has been having problems getting request and rejection notices to authors. If your article has “disappeared,” it means it has been rejected. Typically, an email will detail the reason for rejection. We’re all having to work around this problem while it lasts.

If you aren’t getting your emails consistently . . .

DO – Ask a question in the forum (over weekends, you may have better response time than emailing Support). Editors sometimes see over 100 articles a day, so you may not get a definite answer as to why your article was rejected, but we’ll provide you with any information possible.

If you feel more comfortable emailing support, provide the following information so that we know who you are and what articles you are asking about:

• YOUR PEN NAME
• TITLE OF ARTICLE
• DATE OF SUBMISSION (you’ll have the best results if you act as soon as you recognize there is a problem)
• CLEAR DESCRIPTION OF PROBLEM

DO – Review the guidelines. Many articles are rejected because authors have failed to follow our guidelines. When in doubt, print them out and read them over carefully. The Author FAQ is also a very useful document.

DO – Proofread your article. You may have typos, grammar errors, punctuation errors, or clarity issues. This may be why your article was rejected.If you typically have a problem with a certain aspect of writing, you may want to check your article for instances of this problem first.

DO – Submit your article with a file attached in one of our accepted article formats.

On the other hand . . .

DON’T – Resubmit your article without considering why your article might have been rejected. Doing something over and over again with expectations of different results is a sign of insanity . . . Not only will you not get a different result, but you will drive your editor insane as the attempt to reject your article for the second, third, or fourth time does not thing to change the end result (same article submitted in the same manner). We’re not bonkers yet, but please be kind and refrain from helping to speed up the process!

DON’T – Suffer in silence. We have the forums for a reason. We also have many documents devoted to helping authors submit work that will be accepted by Constant Content. We have submission guidelines in order to maintain a set of standards. We also require that articles submitted be free of errors and exhibit a certain level of quality. If your articles are are generally sound, it may be that there is a problem with your submission process, a guideline has been overlooked, or your article needs one last proofread before being resubmitted. Just ask. The editors will help when possible, but your fellow writers are also a very helpful, friendly bunch.

In addition, as per our guidelines, we do not generally accept personal accounts/narratives. Because they are not considered except in the case of a buyers specifically requesting first-person accounts, please do not submit them.

Thanks!

One of the key features in constant-content.com is the request system.  Up to this point there has only been one means to see new requests.  As an author, you login and click on the “Requested Content” there you can see all the Public Requests as well as any requests that have been sent to you specifically.

We do offer a service to send you an email each time a new public request comes in.  And many of you have signed up for these emails.  This has worked pretty well, although there has occasionally been problems receiving these emails.

That said we wanted to roll out a new way to check up on the latest Public Requests. So, we’ve built a News feed that you can add to your News/RSS reader.  You can find the new URL at http://www.constant-content.com/feeds/publicRequests.xml

This news feed will update whenever a new public request is issued.

If you’re new to News/RSS feeds I’ll give you a short primer.

As with all News feeds you need a reader (or aggregator) to subscribe to the news feed. Many email applications come with feed readers built into them.  There are a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.  If you prefer something that isn’t web-based you can try Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows – integrates with Outlook).

Once you’ve chosen a feed reader subscribe to the Public Requests Feed (http://www.constant-content.com/feeds/publicRequests.xml) and the most recent requests will be delivered to you as they are made available.

We’ve been listening to your woes with Paypal and we’re changing the payment policy so that we can help you to keep some of your money!

Constant-content.com will start offering to do wire transfers for any writers who are owed $500 or more each time we do payments.

There has been some discussion about how much money people end up paying to Paypal to receive Constant Content payments and I wanted to try and clear the air a little.  A personal Paypal accounts is allowed to receives up to $500 USD per month without any fees being applied to the incoming money.  However, if you receive more than $500 in a month you will be asked/forced to move up to a business or premier account.

Once you have a business or premier account Paypal takes 3-5% + $0.30 USD per transaction on any incoming money.

With Paypal sending money is always free.  Unfortunately, wiring money around the world is not free.  As a consequence, for wire transfers we have to charge $15 to each author receiving a wire transfer payment (Hey at least, its cheaper than Paypal).  Paypal’s business and premier account rates it already costs $15 to receive $500 so the wire transfers should put more money into the writer pockets.

If you are above the $500 mark at the end of the month we will be in touch to get your banking details so we can do the wire.

If you prefer to have your money sent via Paypal we are still happy to send money to your Paypal account.

Hopefully, this will be a good change that keeps your money where it belongs… in your pocket.

Now that it’s been established that quality writing is the number one reason customers return to Constant Content, it’s time to discuss what characteristics quality writing exhibits.

Quality Writing:

• Is clear and concise
• Contains no punctuation errors (including commas, semicolons, quotation marks, apostrophes, or hyphens)
• Contains no grammatical errors
• Includes an introduction and conclusion
• Has not been rushed
• Has been thoroughly proofread
• Contains no problems with sentence structure
• Is organized well
• Makes supported arguments
• Offers the reader useful information
• Is engaging
• Is free of common word-use errors

Quality writing is also created in a style that is up-to-date with current standards, contains a minimum of overly used words,  does not insult the reader’s intelligence (but also does not make the reader work to understand what is being said), and generally indicates to the reader that the article was written by a professional, knowlegdeable individual with a good command of English whose goal is to provide interesting and useful information to a chosen audience.

In our desire to improve constant-content.com we did a survey of our top customers to see what is most important to them.  They offered us some great feedback and we will be planning to implement some new features based on this feedback.  New features will come with time, but for now, here’s something that we learned from the survey that will hopefully both enlightening and encouraging.

Here’s the first question on the survey.

Which factors play the greatest role in your content purchasing?

• Topic
• Writing Quality
• Length
• Market Research
• Personal Interest
• Website Genre
• Educational Value
• Key Word Density

The number one answer by a large margin was Writing Quality.  Now, we only gave the respondents the chance to choose one item out of the list, so we know that the other items mentioned also play a role in their purchases.  However, the most important criteria is quality.  Translated, proof reading is important.  Proof reading isn’t fun, but it is important.

To really drive the point home we asked the question,

What draws you to Constant-content as opposed to other content sites?

The answer was again, quality.

If you have been writing with us for ages, thank you for making quality writing a priority!  Please continue putting your best efforts forward.  And for those of you joining us recently, looking for ways to become successful writers, first and foremost, pursue quality. If you’re lost for how to improve your writing, consider reading the Writing Tips blog posts, they cover some of the most common problems.

Quality writing, is what we are all about.  It’s why every article that gets submitted goes to the editor for review.  It’s why we have to reject articles that don’t stand up to the editors scrutiny.

Hat’s off to our editor, who has arguably the toughest job of all, ensuring that the all the articles that are made available for customers are strong and well written.