Authors get to spread their words of wisdom across the web for free, and create search engine friendly backlinks, often from directories with very good page ranks. Provided publishers follow the rules, they will also have their own links in front of a lot more eyes.

Publishers get to grab free content from a choice of hundreds of directories to use on their blogs or websites without fear of copyright infringement or other problems further down the line. Great time saver for busy webmasters, and often great content that helps them grow their readership.

Article directory owners achieve good page rank and a lot of traffic from both Publishers and Authors, plus keyword soaked content for any keyword you care to imagine. What is more, far greater potential on the pay per click advertising and any other kind of advertising that they place at their sites . Furthermore they can build an op-in list extremely quickly from membership signups, a list to which they can market their own and affiliate products and services,

So, with all that going for the business that has become known as article marketing, all in the garden should be rosy right?

Well, you would think so - there are very few, if any, forms of marketing that deal an all round fair and beneficial hand like this, and yet, there are rumblings that all is not well in the article marketing arena. For anyone reading this, I'd like you to consider the following, no matter in which of the above mentioned groups you number yourself.

There is a disturbing trend among some of the higher ranked directories to start charging "membership" or "submission" fees to the very people who did all the work to put them where they are today. Without authors, directories would be nowhere. Yes, your service is valuable to the authors, no doubt about that, but it is their content that brings your traffic and therefore the potential for you to make money.

I know that with the introduction of article submission software, directories are dealing with higher numbers of articles than ever before (more of that in a moment) and that to a degree you are becoming victims of your own success but biting the hand that feeds smacks of greed and I for one will never submit to a directory that considers it has a right to charge me for my work. $10 for the privilege of giving you something that your site can't do without? Please. Don't tell me there are not other ways to control the quantity and quality of submissions - you can ban constant offenders for example (maybe it burns to lose even one opt-in address though?). I hope you see the reasoning on the greed angle - money does not equal credibility or whatever other lame reasons people might give to defend it - if your hosting costs have increased because of increased bandwidth usage, that's a tough one. Like I say, victims of your own success. You can't pass that cost on to your suppliers, and at the very least your ethics are questionable if you try to do so.

So how about authors? Well, since people began to latch on to this good thing, article production has stepped up hugely but inevitably, quantity has far begun to outweigh quality, and many directories are unhappy about having to wade through illiterate dross from people purely interested in trying to make a fast buck. I sympathize with this, and say to anyone who wants to write content - it is not purely an exercise in keywords and the great god Google. If you submit useless and worthless drivel, nobody wins - your articles will end on the cutting room floor where they belong. Burying the directories in poorly written, grammatically mangled, ill disguised ads, helps no-one. You are wasting your own time and everyone else's. And authors, take a stand against money grubbing directories by simply ignoring them and letting them fall alongside the dwindling page rank which is sure to follow - the one they believe gives them the right to stiff you.

And so to publishers - most of whom are honest and abide by the rules - but for those that don't, bear this in mind. You can pretty much edit article content any way you see fit, but by copying the content in the first place you have agreed to leave the author's resource box completely untouched - that means no disabling hyperlinks, changing the anchor text, or deleting any part of those few lines whatsoever. If you really have a problem with that, well, write your own damn content! I certainly urge all authors to report abuse of their rights whenever they see them. I appreciate that it's sometimes impossible because some publishers delete resource boxes and also any reference to the directory from which they have now "stolen" articles. Publishers, it's free, you don't need to steal it, so please, give those authors the meagre few lines of real estate on your sites that they are owed.

So wise up folks - the original idea still works and if it ain't broke don't fix it. Unless you all behave like grown adults and retain at least a little integrity, honesty, some good old fashioned values and show respect for your fellows in this game, your little cash cow will soon be on it's knees and you can crybaby all you like about it after it's too late.