Here is the "Article Submission Guidelines for Associated Content: Submission Guidelines 1. All content must be created by you. No exceptions. If your content has been published elsewhere, make sure you still own the copyright to it and the byline matches your real name or penname on your AC account. Refer to the Independent Contractor/License Agreement for more information. 2. Content needs to be at least 400 words in length (exception: poetry). 3. Content must exhibit correct grammar, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation and follow our formatting guidelines (see below). 4. Use a strong, descriptive headline with each submission. Think: What words or phrases would a web user enter to find the content via search? While a headline "The Best Day of My Life" might be true, "Getting Married in Fiji" would be a more discoverable headline. Click here for more advice on Creating Headlines. 5. While we encourage you to promote yourself and your business or services, please no excessive self-promotion. We don't want to publish infomercials. Also, do not include an "about the author" or other promotional plugs that are unrelated to the content. 6. Content shall not be pornographic, obscene, defamatory, abusive, contain hate speech, encourage illegal or discriminatory conduct, or infringe on the rights of a third party. The forgoing is NOT an exhaustive list, and any determination of whether content violates these guidelines shall be made in the sole discretion of Associated Content. 7. Content shall not be related to, be about or contain links to websites with content related to programs offering incentives to click links or ads, read emails, or surf other websites. This would include, for instance, autosurf sites, pay-to-read email networks, and sites comparing various pay-to-click programs. 8. Content shall not promote or link to online gambling sites. 9. Content shall not promote the sale of term papers or student essays in any way, including but not limited to linking to websites that sell term papers, offer term papers for sale, and writing about strategies to buy or sell term papers. 10. We encourage you to link to your other AC content within your text and multimedia text descriptions. Links to external sites must be relevant to the content. Please use the hyperlink tool in our text editor to link a word or phrase from your text to the website address (URL). Affiliate links are not allowed. 11. You must cite all sources that were used in creating your content. Whether you refer to a statistic from a government website or quote someone after a press conference, attribution must immediately precede or follow within the content. (All content must be original, too. You can use other sources for facts and information, but you may not simply rewrite published content.) Associated Content is rejecting my articles stating " it is excessive self promotion". It has three back links - all to my site with the keywords I want to promote, linking to the particular pages on my site. Here is my question- what constitutes excessive self promotion? I am wanting to use the articles for back links first, traffic last, I don't think there is much traffic potential here as I am writing about lingerie and since all of these sites don't want pornography or adult content so the interest level is not real high. How do you promote with "excessive promotion"?
I've had that happen a few times going through Article Marketer for distribution. I wrote articles about teeth whitening in a particular city and they rejected it due to excessive self promotion. I had to reword the article enough to not promote the "teeth whitening" services in that city as much. It looks like you're selling lingerie, right? They probably don't want too much promotion to buy lingerie from your site but would rather accept general info about "sexy lingerie". Just my thoughts.
just try to write about anything, like giving some kind of advices to the readers, if they really like your article they will follow the links
and great guidance btw, its very important to know this now that SEO is very strong with article submission
Yes, I think djfunk is right. I guess it is called soft sell, write about what you know, don't hit the reader over the head with a bat and avoid "excessive self promotion". Kinda sounds like a std or something you need to take medication for. To get rid of that excessive self promotion take zanatrix for sudden blathering about what you sell and no one else really gives a spit. Sold only at "see text links below" just kidding.
lol.. good analogy. Yeah, some article directories can be kind of stubborn when it comes to product-related articles and avoiding too much promotion.