With something like 200 or more new posts flowing in daily, we obviously can't use everything. All posts are read by an experienced editor (we have a great group of content managers for our sites) who evaluates them on basically the same criteria that any professional publication would use:
- Timeliness - If it's happening right now, we're more likely to use it then if it happened last week.
- Freshness - Is this something new or a new slant on something old? Does it tell us something that we didn't know from previous posts in the same category. Have we already used a lot of posts on this topic?
- Originality - Research that you did personally always takes precedence over writing about somebody's else research. If Charlene Li's new survey is up on the site, we probably aren't going to use your post telling us that Charlene Li has a new piece of research. If you can make a persuasive argument that Charlene is all wet or have some new insight on her research, we will use that.
- Accuracy - We don't have the resources to fact check everything but our editors have been at this for a very long time and have a nose for something fishy. We hate getting e-mails from people because you got some fact wrong in your post.
- Style - Nobody expects you to be a Hemingway but we do expect that you can organize your thoughts in a logical, coherent and mildly entertaining way. We take away some points for not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's" and "your" and "you're" or that it's "can you help Robin and me", not "can you help Robin and I." Doesn't disqualify you entirely but everything else better be good.
- Reputation - Not necessarily in larger world; we don't really care if you're web famous or not, but you've established a reputation with us. We never add anyone to our featured blogger list until we've used a number of your posts and you've shown that you are a consistent, reliable content producer.
- Community reponsiveness - When someone leaves you a comment here, you make an effort to come back here and respond to it. This is a way to earn bonus points.
Ok, here's some reasons why we will never ever use one of your posts:
- You are giving us a partial feed or content summary - We don't use summaries because they annoy readers and don't do you or us any good.
- When you added your feed, you didn't upload a headshot or avatar - We hate it when there is an empty box next to someone's name so we just don't use posts without pictures.
- You're rewriting Brian Solis from two years ago - We've read all of Brian's stuff and we have a good memory.
- Your posts are so personal they make us cringe - Fortunately, there are only a couple of those.
- You're passing off somebody else's work as your own - Fool us once and your ass is grass forever.
- Your post is nasty to one of our customers. We are absolutely transparent about this. You don't get to trash our customers on our sites.
- You're giving us spam about Gucci bags and replica watches - Give it up, guys, you're never going to get past our guard.
- You're in the wrong community - Take a look at the box at the bottom of the right side bar and visit our other sites. If the stuff you're writing is better aligned with the content of those sites you can increase your chances of it being used enormously by adding it there. Just log in using the same email address and password you use here and set up the Autopost function on that community.
Questions? Who's Dr. Hook?