Some of the earliest newsletters date back to the early 1700’s and were often political in nature. Some might even go so far as to say the earliest newsletters were filled with propaganda because the same information was not found in more reputable publications.

The 1800’s saw a reduction in newsletters, but the often rebellious nature of many newsletters would not allow the genre to remain dormant. By the 1900’s newsletters were once again on the rise and their importance began to be noticed and their acceptance began to grow.

Many individuals began to notice there were certain issues of interest that mainstream newspapers would not print. Perhaps their reluctance was due to a fear of retaliation or the fear of offending certain prominent members of a community (many of whom were paying for advertising).

Newsletters were important because they provided information not available elsewhere. They may not have been considered prime journalism. In fact, they were often filled with spelling and grammar errors because many who were interested in presenting an idea were not the best equipped to write about the issue.

As society raced to the end of the millennium a process known as desktop publishing began to allow more newsletters than ever to be developed. As the Internet grew in popularity the idea that originated with newsletters splintered off into a variety of tangents including forum posts, blogs and ezines.

These web-based newsletters suddenly opened the door for a variety of thoughts to be expressed to a much larger potential constituency.

While many of these ezines may have been op/ed there was also a growing number of newsletters that ventured into how-to, self-help and a variety of practical application ezines.

It seems that either the rebellious nature of the original newsletters has been tamed or perhaps the genre has simply been embraced by those who do not know of it’s rebellious past and simply recognize it as a tool worth using in developing connections with potential customers.

Modern ezines can allow advertising, but they can also serve as a portal to other newsletters, articles or informational pieces that may benefit the reader.

What once served as a means of pushing an agenda is now often used as a tool that genuinely seeks to assist potential customers with ideas and information that the customer considers highly valuable.

Interestingly it would seem the tables have been turned, today’s ezines may be less of a propaganda tool while many newspapers are often criticized for being too political in nature.

Written by Ricco Richardson
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Today, I’d like to compare and contrast 2 of the bigger article directories out there, eZineArticles and GoArticles.

Everyone recommends eZineArticles (EZA) almost immediately when they are asked where to submit articles. It IS the #1 article directory out there at the moment. It was founded in November of 1999 and currently has a PR of 6 with an Alexa rating of 198. 198 is very impressive!

GoArticles was founded about a year later, in 2000, and has a PR also of 6. GoArticle’s Alexa rating is 4,475–still very impressive.

So GoArticles is only slightly behind EZA, as far as popularity. But I believe that’s only because so many people have pushed eZineArticles as the best place to go for article marketing.

I don’t believe that. There are some problems with eZineArticles that I’d like to address today, and you can argue with me if you’d like.

One of the problems with article marketing today is that it is such a popular method to market your niche–any niche–that spammers and lazy marketers have found it a veritable goldmine. They are coming on board like gang-busters, filling the Internet with junk articles and, frankly, littering our information highway with crap.

As a former article directory owner, myself, I waded thru so much spun crap, it was very disheartening. I got more bad articles than I did quality ones! I immediately understood why EZA takes such a hard-line attitude in their approval process! At first I applauded them that hard line.

But then, when I started distributing my own articles, I discovered that EZA is not just hard-line in their attitude, they are quite elitist, as well.

This is a quote straight from the “horse’s mouth,” EZA owner, Chris Knight (emphasis mine):

Best advice I can give you is to move us closer to the front of the line in terms of where you submit content to rather than burning energy to defend your existing content (yet, I must also mention that it’s important that you defend your existing content at least once because we often believe members who just delete a pending article without defending their content are pleading guilty or admitting that they didn’t really write it.

Oh My God! Can they be more elitist? Apparently, yes. Here’s another direct quote from Chris (again, emphasis mine):

Pretty much anyone who admits to or uses an article rewriter is not an ideal member of our site because a real expert wouldn’t need to rewrite his or her own expertise.

Yeah, never mind that there is such a thing as duplicate content and rewriting one’s own articles is, in fact, a good idea to avoid that!

And never mind that if you publish an article anywhere else, it only takes a short amount of time for it to be approved, published and indexed by the search engines. If you submitted that same article to EZA on the SAME DAY as you submit anywhere else, by the time EZA gets around to approving it, it will show up in their dup content checker and be rejected out of hand!

Oh, but submitting a rewritten version of your own article makes you an unworthy author to EZA… a junk-peddling author!

I’m sorry, this is supposed to be a comparison of 2 directories… but I think you can understand why EZA sticks in my craw over this!

Take a breath, CJ…

GoArticles has immediate approval, which, at first seems problematic, because that would allow those truly junk articles to get thru. But just because it was immediately approved, does not mean it won’t be reviewed by the GoArticles team. It will, and if it does not follow their standards, it will be rejected. I think this is the better way to operate. Good authors are rewarded with immediate publication.

EZA on the other hand, takes as much a 5 days to get around to approving articles! Hence the dup content issue is rampant with them if you submit the same article to different directories.

Something else I’ve noticed when comparing EZA and GoArticles is that EZA does not allow bolding or italicizing of keywords in the articles you post to them. GoArticles does.

Why is bolding and italicizing a good thing? Because the search engines see the act of bolding/italicizing as important. In other words, the SE’s think that if a word is bolded or italicized, it must be important and they will therefore use it when categorizing your article! So bolding/italicizing your keywords is SMART.

Apparently EZA has something against article marketing with SEO intentions. If you do so much as a little bit of SEO on your article, you’re not the kind of author they want. Again, an elitist attitude.

GoArticles will allow bolding and italicizing. I credit this one step for my article about rotator cuff care hitting PAGE 1 on Google within hours of posting at GoArticles!

If I don’t stop now, this article will turn into an eBook. So, my favourite article directory is GoArticles.com. I highly recommend you go check them out.

</rant>

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