Below is a post on ezinearticles blog indicating that they are making a stand against anyone using ezine to direct traffic to affiliate sites.

I have never been a huge fan of ezine, they have always ad very strict editors and silly rules and now this proves they are not willing to play the game.  Luckily there are lots of other good article directories out there, many of these were listed here last month.

Most affiliate marketers don’t write original content and if they do write their own articles… their articles are thin, regurgitated Frankenstein article spin-written by some software program… only to flip our end users to a clickbank site (ie: they added no value in the process).

Affiliate marketers fall into one of two camps:

1. ~90% who have decided to scale their craft into hundreds and thousands of articles have become highly efficient at writing keyword loaded copy while making sure that their articles seldom deliver on the promise made in the article title…because if their articles delivered on the promise they made in the title…they fear our end users would never click to their website.
2. ~10% are in it to share genuine expertise with original articles that came from their background…and they are doing this gig to explore a phase in their business life where they are trying to figure out how to convert traffic into dollars so that they can build their own products to sell. This is the type of affiliate marketer we welcome and even on some days, call “ideal.”

Our position and reason why it’s “war” and personal:

We want our million+ daily end users to leave with a positive experience. Delivering thin non-original articles only to flip the end users to a long sales letter page that further promises the moon and stars for only $49.99 does not always deliver a positive end-user experience.

Last month we cracked down on penis enlargement articles and rejected thousands of them that over promised and massively under-delivered. This month our Editors have been instructed that any article that is ‘thin’ in originality AND the end destination URL is an affiliate link; we’re going to reject for “Non Substantial or Not-Original-Enough Content.”

No, we’re not going to over-react and make a big move here. We’re talking about the subjective decision where the article missed the mark by 5-15% vs. where we would have previously accepted the article and let it pass.

We didn’t get to our current success together this many years by thinking ’short-term’ oriented and the fact that our Editorial standards raise every single month should not be a shock to anyone. It’s the way it’s been since day one. Affiliate marketers who submit thin non-original articles are wasting their time submitting to us.

Lastly, some tips about how to get your affiliate-link-included articles accepted:

• Be sure to read section 3 if you haven’t already in our Editorial Guidelines.
• Do not increase your word count for word count sake. More words that say nothing is not better than fewer words that say nothing.
• Insist that your ghostwriters (if you use them) must blow you away with original ideas, seldom thought about solutions, unique perspectives and not the same crap every other article already says about a particular topic. RAISE THE BAR.
• Keep the spammy looking article titles to a minimum if at all. Hype does not help get your article accepted faster. Know we’re checking your article body to make certain that you deliver on the promise(s) made in your article title.
• Don’t submit 10-1000 articles on same rehashed topic with only the words and tips re-arranged. Our anti-derivative software is being continually tweaked to reject this behavior.
• Be proud of your articles. Most affiliate marketers don’t fight us when we reject their articles because they were not worth writing home to Mom about in the first place.

Hope this helps.

If you’ve got tips or advice as to how we can discourage affiliate marketers from wasting their time submitting thin non-original content to us, we’d like to hear it. Our end goal here is to raise the quality of the perception the marketplace has of the type of articles they can expect to find within EzineArticles.com. This focus also helps us look good to those who refer traffic to our members’ articles.

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This may sound silly, but I was genuinely chuffed to be asked. Norb has been intrumental in me making a success of Affiliate Marketing and the majority of the money I have made this year has been from promoting his products. For him to feel that I am doing a good job means a lot to me, don’t forget he can see how many hops I send and how well I convert, he knows if I am doing well or not in relation to others.

Norb sent me a list of questions, including my Top 5 NOTs for Newbies and my Top 5 things for Newbies to follow. The full interview is here but I thought the Top 5s would be useful to quote here.

Q: If you could give newbies five tips on what NOT to do – what would they be?

1) Do NOT start with PPC until you make some organic sales, you need to know that the products will convert before throwing money away.

2) Do NOT expect an easy ride to riches, whatever the Gurus say, making consistent money online takes a lot of time and effort.

3) Do NOT spend too much time reading and not actually taking action. There is a fine line between research and procrastination.

4) Do NOT worry if ezinearticles reject one of your articles and then you don’t get Platinum Status!

5) Do NOT buy domains when you are drunk, you will convince yourself it is great and then in the cold light of day when you check out the competition or the keyword searches it might not so good! My best one has to be when I bought accomod8.com about 10 years ago (thought it was great then realised I was missing a “m”, doh!)

Q: And now the five most important parts of your ‘make money’ ventures that newbies should follow.

1) Pick a high paying niche to start with like Forex, the time, effort and PPC costs will be more worth it than busting a gut for $10-$20 commission.

2) Buy your own domains and hosting, more flexibility, more credibility and more control than free sites. I also use squidoo, blogger, wordpress, synthasite as they rank well in Google results. I find it a good combination.

3) Pre-sell, I don’t think I have ever made a sale by direct linking to a product page, that is not to say that the sales pages are no good, but if you can give an independant view on something and explain benefits I have found it helps.

4) Focus, this is still something I am struggling with, especially with Norb releasing so many good products at the moment. Try and focus on one campaign or product at a time, even if it is for a day or a week. I find myself all over the place and have to reign myself in.

5) Choose products from Publishers who help you (like Norb) and I mean by providing great quality graphics, landing pages, email campaigns, videos. These help soo much with the pre-sell. I cannot believe how bad some publishers are at assisting their affiliates, especially as most give you less % per sale than Norb. They don’t seem to get it, an affiliate sale is one that they probably wouldn’t have had otherwise, so give us a better share and more assistance.