What Happens to My Article?

For the last five hundred years or so, before the invent of the internet, writing, art and other creative processes whose authorship was a concern to the value of the product, a detailed provenance would be demanded so that its authenticity could be ascertained. Provenance, french for ‘to come from’, was a document tracing a work’s history. Keeping a provenance up to date helped to prevent theft, forgery and plagiarism. The internet has made tracing the life journey of a piece of work difficult, but it hasn’t made it any less valuable or important to the worth of the work one purchases.

Article LifeCycle

We thought it would be an interesting exercise to help our publishers understand the route that their content takes through its creation, editing and publishing. This will give everyone a more thorough understanding of the route that our content takes towards its final publishing.

1. Article is requested by publishers, or author decides on a subject that they think will be interesting for publishers.
2. Article is written by author
3. Authors submit their articles to Constant-Content for review.
4. Article is reviewed for Grammatical, Structural and Topical quality by our editorial staff.
5. Article is then passed through iThenticate plagiarism checking to ensure that it is unique and original.
6. Once the article passes all of these checks and balances it is forwarded to the request for publisher’s perusal.
7. Articles are perused with an eye to the satisfaction of the Publishers needs.
8. The chosen article is then purchased with a specific license type.
9. Depending on the license type, the article is then removed from the article pool so that no one else can purchase that article.

Protect your Content’s Provenance, Protect your Business

By following this rigorous process each and every time, we will help to create a record for the lifespan of an article. All the steps will be recorded and recalled if necessary. This system is designed to protect all of our users and provide transparency in an online of world that is filled with obfuscation. This can also help set a blueprint for Publishers to follow so that they can maintain the integrity of their own work and protect their investment. This careful process will also be invaluable helping to prosecute claims of content theft or plagiarism if the situation occurs.

So create your Provenance. Keep track of your articles, starting with purchasing them through Constant-Content, and then keeping an eye, either through your own methods, or by enlisting our help, to track and protect the lineage of your content.

Contact Constant-Content at support@constant-content.com if you have any questions about how to implement this on your site.

Search Engines Love Content!

How to Make Content Work for You

As an Affiliate or Affiliate Manager one of your most important jobs is developing not only the basic infrastructure to help move your sales from one level of up to the next, but also to give your affiliate sites an edge in a highly competitive industry. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do to improve your affiliate’s sites is introduce original, high quality and informative content. We’re working on a series of articles to highlight how content can help affiliate marketers and how significant the return on investment to develop and execute a plan surrounding the content that you have on affiliate sites.

Quality Scores and Bounce Rates

Anyone running a Google AdWords campaign should know how significantly a good quality score can affect the cost of doing business. Currently the largest factor in the Quality Score seems to be Click Through Rate (CTR), develop a high click through rate your quality score goes up and you’re CPC goes down.   On-page content can have some influence on your Quality Score but perhaps from the content point of view the most interesting part of the of adding content to an affiliate page, is the opportunity to turn people who would otherwise bounce into visitors that stay a while on your site.

Being able to direct people to a page of information that is well-written, informative and on-topic can reduce your bounce rate and effectively give you a higher value for the traffic that a PPC campaign bring to a site. Relevant copy that will capture a reader’s attention and prevent them from bouncing yields a better the opportunity to gain the users trust, engage the user and convert.  A user that bounces is a waste of money, therefore, finding ways to keep visitors from bouncing gives affiliates a greater chance to build a relationship with the visitor and effectively means subsequently provides greater value out of their traffic. The value of increasing your engagement with visitors can not be underestimated!  Where trust has been built through timely, on-topic information there is a greater opportunity to turn traffic into conversions.  Investing in content is a can add significantly to the bottom line and provide a healthy return on investment.  Ask yourself this question, “Who’s more likely to convert, someone who lands on your site and sees one page, or someone who finds what the information that closely addresses their need, builds a trust through a well thought out article and provides a solution.”

Preventing Google Slaps

Thin affiliate sites have been the subject of previous Google slaps and, while it’s difficult to know for sure exactly why Google chose to slap some sites and not others, there are a few pieces of the puzzle that we can draw together.  SuperAffiliateMindset.com has a great explanation of the March 2008 Google slap that came down and  what sites tended to be most affected.  It seems that the sites that got hit hardest tended to be sites that had little content or content that was posted in a haphazard way.  Which really highlights the need for affiliates to support their most valuable sites with regular, high quality, original articles.  The last thing that an affiliate or affiliate manager wants is to be shut down by a change in the way that Google Adwords creating a genuine site that provides top quality articles, linkable articles is a great way to safeguard yourself against any changes in Google’s policy.

Content and Organic Search Results

As Google and the other search engines develop crawlers based on algorithms that attempt to replicate the process of dynamic human adjudications.  As a result there are some very basic rules to constructing content so it’s valuable to Internet marketers.  Content has now moved from the dark days of keyword stuffing and hidden content, and now allows only for a relatively small amount of keywords (2-5% being proper distribution), which reflects the search engine’s desire to approximate the amount word repetition that feels natural to readers.  It has also meant that the quality of the writing, grammar, spelling and authoritativeness of content has become an increasingly significant component of the search engines’ computer generated analysis.  But all the characteristics just listed are virtually useless if it isn’t unique and original.  That is one of the secret sauces in this SEO soup, and it means that to maximize your client’s content value-add it must be new and have not been indexed by any of the search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN place this significance on originality for two reasons,

• self-enforcing theft deterrent, and
• to encourage the relevant diverse growth of the Internet

Not only do the search engines ensure that the best sites are taking the time to create new information for the consumer, but they are helping to make content theft a useless endeavor.

One thing that we are finding is that search engines are tending towards rewarding people who not only provide great content, but provide it regularly.  Being able to regularly post new articles keeps the search engines coming around, regularly so that your content will be indexed quickly and shows that the site is active, perhaps more importantly it shows that the site is a place where people can find fresh news, people like that (and consequently, so do search engines)!

In recognition of the importance that originality plays on the Internet, constant-content has placed considerable emphasis on ensuring that our database is protected from plagiarism and theft. Adding to the security of the archives we have developed a system of licensing to help buyers identify content that may have already been purchased and content that is completely unique.

Fullrights License

Means two things,

• it has never been purchased before and is nowhere on the Internet and has never been indexed in any way by search engines and
• you can treat it as though you wrote it, changing text or crediting its authorship to whomever you choose

Unique License

Its originality is the same as fullrights articles, the only difference lies in the author’s desire to keep their name attached to the article as well they don’t give permission for the article to be reworked.

Usage License

Usage articles are a less expensive way to gain the rights to content even though they do not guarantee the work’s originality. This is a good option for consumers in print media and those who would like to try out content purchasing and are not yet convinced of the higher license’s Price-ROI.

All of our expertise and organization come together to give you content which results in maximizing search engines results, increasing the visibility that you need to provide your clients.

Getting Your Content is Painless

Deciphering a new site and making it work for you can be annoying and a major hindrance to achieving your goals. Constant-Content has made sure that our site is as simple and straightforward as possible. If you have a specific project in mind you can pick your own budget and then make the salient details of your project available to over 18 000 writers. You can then easily manage the submissions through your request dashboard, and sift through the submitted articles till you find the one that suits your needs, while deleting the rest. You can then purchase it right from your dashboard.

To make things even easier you can switch your content requests from public to private requests. This is best done when you have found a writer whose style and voice fits with your specific needs. Utilizing private requests can help manage deadlines, improve your content’s consistency and allow you to more clearly articulate your needs, ensuring that your content is hits the mark every time.

If you are looking for something really quick, you can use our vast library of articles, organized into convenient categories so you can get to the topics that are relevant to you with minimal searching.

Payment can be made using either PayPal or credit cards.

ORIGINAL CONTENT HELPS GROW THE INTERNET

One of the most important values that a good piece of writing brings to a website is its originality. New content expands the breadth and depth of the internet, and as an incentive to encourage this growth search engines heavily weigh the presence of original content into their organic search rankings . If there wasn’t such an incentive we would be inundated with the same perfectly keyword dense, usefully linked and authoritative article on dogs, or computers or beer etc. Varying perspectives and alternative sources of information help keep sites relevant and useful to consumers, which search engines depend on to maintain their own value in a constantly changing landscape.

INTRODUCING iTHENTICATE

As a content provider we understand that valuing and rewarding uniqueness helps to guard against content theft and copyright infringement. Writers live and die by the thin edge of paraphrasing and plagiarism, thus, assiduously regulating content’s integrity must be done at the highest level, for writer’s careers are on the line and buyer’s livelihoods are dependent on it.  As a result of this commitment to excellence, we are pleased to announce that we have just finished negotiating a partnership with iThenticate, one of the largest and most comprehensive intellectual property protection services on the web. iThenticate keeps an up to date snap shot of the internet on its servers which allows for fast, aggregate and complete text analysis, not requiring the software to troll across the available website pages that are live at that precise moment. Not only will this help us more quickly keep an eye on the originality of articles being submitted to the site’s library but request submissions as well.

ADDITIONAL PROTECTION FOR YOUR SITE

Theft from our user’s sites is another deep concern of ours. To protect our written material Constant-Content.com uses sophisticated anti-scraping technology combined with publishing only portions of articles for pre-sale viewing. We will be turning iThenticate’s careful eyes on our archives as well, further boosting our site’s integrity. This means that we will have the ability to run spot checks to make sure that we catch even the most determined thieves who have gotten past our best efforts. Our consumers, often don’t have these safety measures in place, which can be laborious and in fact can mitigate the original reason for purchasing the content in the first place. Over the next couple months we will be rolling out our response to this concern. An additional service option will allow consumers to register the content they purchase from Constant-Content and run those articles though iThenticate. This will allow speedy action against any such theft or the replacement of stolen content to avoid search engine’s site-penalties for publishing duplicate content.

Please stay posted for more information and if you have any questions feel free to contact me at:

David Kool
Product & Content Manager, Web Properties
www.constant-content.com
david.kool@constant-content.com