There are tons of different techniques for promoting your business or website, and one of the more popular ones is by using article marketing. Simply put, article marketing is the act of writing articles about a topic with the goal of getting the readers to contact you or visit your website. I will cover article marketing in more detail in another post, but I wanted to talk about an experience I’m currently going through with a very popular site called Ezine Articles.

Like many other article submission sites, this site relies on authors to log in and submit articles which are then published on site. Anyone can use the article on their site, provided it is not altered and provided the byline is included.

The Failure of EzineArticles.com
Back on March 30, 2006 (YES, LAST YEAR!) I signed up and submitted an article to the site. As I’m a busy guy, I forgot about the article, but came back to the Ezine site recently in hopes of submitting another one. To my shock, I noticed a bright red notice: PROBLEM - Not Live. Trying to figure things out, I saw in tiny font, a notice “Problem: General Error - Please contact us to find out more.” Of course, I contacted them and waited.

It has now been over a week! Despite a message telling me that I’d be “contacted shortly”, I have not heard form a sole. The irony is that they have an autoresponder sending out the following message:

Hi,

Thank you for contacting EzineArticles.com’s author support center.

Every email is human reviewed and our normal response time is within
24 business hours, Monday thru Friday.

Thanks!
http://EzineArticles.com/

Looks like there is a lack of humans or something over there!

Now, I’m just another angry customer. The people running Ezine Articles have failed to establish an efficient customer service platform and people like me have fallen in the cracks. Instead of getting free positive publicity from me about how great their site is, they now have to deal with this post, telling people how they have failed to do what they set out to. People sometimes say “any publicity is good publicity” - that is certainly not the case here!

As the famous quote from Cool Hand Luke goes, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”!

What is the lesson to be learned?
Customer service is #1! If you can’t keep your users happy, especially in this day and age, the backlash can be quick and extremely powerful.

BTW - I sent a trackback to the company’s blog and the blog of the guy I think is in charge. Lets see if they have a response now . . .

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