Wango, I have a feeling you commented on the wrong post, as it appears you meant to comment on the post on EzineArticles.

In reference to your comment though, my unhappiness is definitely not misplaced. I don’t need anyone to publish my material for free. I charge no less than $.20 / word for work elsewhere (and even that low is rare), and I have more than enough clients that I don’t need EzineArticles. I’m using them only as a test with bum marketing, which I think was clear in my past posts. There’s no issue of “impatience” either. It sounds like you’re mistaking a marketing tool for a “real” publication. My complaint isn’t that I didn’t make any affiliate earnings through them yet… that obviously takes time. My complaint is that their editors are beyond clueless, and that’s frankly not acceptable when it results in wasting the time of others. I’m also not sure what your pipeline comment is about… this isn’t a client. And as a matter of fact, most of my clients pay up front these days before I even start writing for them… I don’t generally have to wait around for payments.

If anything, EzineArticles should be enormously more professional than they’ve been when they’re the ones monetizing thousands of dollars in free content. Their links aren’t worth as much as they were in the past… there’s no question about that. My sites also have always brought extremely high quality links naturally without them (and much better than them), so they’re not being used for the sake of link-building. They’re also never going to be a significant contributor to my income because of their links. I earn a nice living consulting. I write on the side, and even that part-time income from writing likely won’t be surpassed by them.

Honestly, hearing people naively jump in supporting them for backlinks just reminds me why I stayed away from article directories for so long, instead investing my time in a real content business, earning equity by publishing to my own sites. And frankly, each day that goes by, I’m thinking that’s the way it’s going to stay. Giving professionally-written content away for someone else to monetize, and then having to deal with their incompetence wasting even more of my time that could be spent elsewhere on top of it is just stupid.

If nothing else, thanks for helping to make my decision all that much easier… my time’s too valuable to waste it on a site like EzineArticles, when there are simply better options out there to achieve the same goals.