Problem Articles Automation

Last week as I was out of the office (Colorado Springs for a week long USA High Performance Racquetball Camp), our team began implementing the automatic notification emails whenever a problem status is selected for an article submission.

Worded differently: If we reject an article, it’s gone…but for the articles that have potential but only missed a small editorial guideline issue, we now send custom generated emails for each of the problem status types (less than a dozen at the moment).

The goal here is to help authors in the same week to 10 days that they submit an article so that we never go more than a few weeks with problem articles collecting digital dust waiting for attention.

After a few more weeks of improving this new service, we’ll begin the automatic pruning of problem articles that are neglected by their author if not fixed within 30 days of notification. Ideally, I’d like to be able to send a 2nd notice before we begin that 30 day count down, but this will have to go in phase 2 of this problem article resolution strategy.

Any further suggestions?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 25, 2005 at 9:28 am

Views 518 | Comments (5)

Peak Usage Times

To help authors know when the peak times are so that they can avoid any sluggishness with our system, here is our current peak time of day chart:

This chart is based on Central Standard USA Time.

Here is our usage chart by day of the week:

NOTE: The slow times from 2am to 5am CST may look deceiving as we schedule almost all of the heavy database updating during this time segment… which means it might look like we have very little traffic during those times, but we run the most CPU intensive punishing jobs for server maintenance during that time segement so that we can operate faster during the rest of the day.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 15, 2005 at 9:56 pm

Views 530 | Comments (0)

Article Inventory

Google has 8,058,044,651 web pages indexed in their search engine inventory as of today.

You know what that means? The more pages they have in their inventory, the more they can sell advertising on the search results.

How many articles do you have in your article inventory?

You know what that means, right? The more articles you have in your inventory = the more targeted traffic and leads you can generate for your business.

If you don’t know, find out now. Every article you have is an agent of yours and you must not waste your agents. Get them into production for you by putting them into further distribution or syndication.

Ohh yeah, and SEND IN your agents to us and we’ll put them to work for you. :-)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 15, 2005 at 2:20 pm

Views 527 | Comments (0)

Create Leads & Traffic = YES

Article Marketing, as much as you may have been lead to believe, is the perfect LEAD CREATION tool before it’s the perfect SALES CREATION tool.

If article marketing was a “SALES TOOL” as the primary ROI purpose from your investments in this type of strategy, we would have millions of authors listed and not 8,000+.

Truth of the matter is that article marketing is a qualified lead generation system, a targeted web traffic creator, it’s a public relations tool to help you build credibility in the marketplace and an SEO tool to help you build credibilty and trust with the major search engines.

Those who screw this up, pitch and sell themselves hard in the title, body and then they bore us to tears with huge resource boxes filled with every sales pitch they can think of, will find themselves banging their heads on the wall wondering why it’s not producing the results that are possible if they would shift their thinking to “lead generate” instead of “sales pitch.”

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 14, 2005 at 10:22 pm

Views 189 | Comments (2)

A1 Domains

Did someone miss the memo?

Lately, I’ve seen about 50 new authors send in new articles that listed their domain that begins with A1- something.

Did they all miss the memo that the Internet is not indexed like the Yellow Pages? If your business was dependant on the yellow pages, you would name your business A1-something to get at the top of the listings.

Since no one should ever use the Yellow pages any more thanks to http://local.google.com/, it’s time to stop creating domain names with A1-something.

As far as I know, having an A1-domain will not give you any special rank advantages in the search engines or the …yellow pages. ;-)

Make sense or am I off base here?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 14, 2005 at 11:38 am

Views 523 | Comments (5)

IP Juiced

Wanna know what I’m juiced about today?

We’re undertaking changing the behind-the-scenes to our system to help us understand our members by IP address and the relationship by IP address that each author has to each other. :)

Example: This past Sunday, someone we’ll call David from Canada created 15 accounts with us, all under bogus names and information, but the one thing that was constant was his IP address.

What’s even more fun will be when we can chart the IP addresses matched authors to begin to understand who is related to each other and who is gaming the system vs. legitimate multiple authors sent in from services like SubmitYourArticle.com.

Eventually, I can see a time where we will be able to rank our trust in an author based on their IP address. Just another tool to help us understand or authenticate who each author is or might really be.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 14, 2005 at 11:05 am

Views 518 | Comments (3)

Allan Gardyne

Aussie and Associate Programs guru Allan Gardyne is in the house.

I’ve been following Allan’s AssociatePrograms.com site since he started way back in 1998 I think.

His site has been sending us a handful of new members every quarter. Thanks Allan! If you have a moment or you are an affiliate marketer, check out his Associate Programs Forums as he has about as many forum posts as we have articles listed and over 5500 members!

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 14, 2005 at 9:32 am

Views 519 | Comments (0)

NEW: Basic PLUS Membership

A brand new membership level has now been created to help article authors who have a hard time reading, understanding or interpreting our posted editorial guidelines.

It’s called: Basic PLUS (Allows 25 More Submissions)

Essentially it gives the author the acknowledgement that their first 10 article submissions were ‘good’ to ‘ok’ or even ‘great’ but there is some element they are missing that didn’t allow us to approve them to Platinum Unlimited status.

Basic PLUS members will be given 25 article submission credits to prove they can follow our posted editorial guidelines. If they follow them, when the 25 are used up, we will re-evaluate their account and any notes we left on the account for possible upgrade to Platinum Unlimited status.

If it’s not obvious yet, the base criterial for whether we upgrade an account to Platinum Unlimited status is whether they have followed our posted editorial guidelines or not.

There will be no public identifiers for the Basic PLUS members, even though we will be identifying each submissions internally as having come from a Basic PLUS member (to ensure that priority goes to Platinum members first, then Basic PLUS members, and lastly BASIC members).

Easy access to Platinum Unlimited status has been halted and the bar has been raised with this new buffer membership level between Basic and Platinum.

Always open to your comments or feedback on this new membership level.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 13, 2005 at 11:30 am

Views 521 | Comments (1)

English for India

Dear Article Authors From India,

Every day, 3-15 new EzineArticles.com accounts are created by someone from India.

Most grasp the English language so well in every respect except for one problematic consistent mistake:

A large majority fail to put (1) space after the period and (1) space after the comma throughout your articles.

What’s up with that?

So far, I can only count a handful of authors from India (out of almost 500+ submissions from authors in India) who know how to properly punctuate the English sentence structure with respect to (1) space after the period and comma.

If you live or work in India, please spread the word that English at all times as a language, has one space after the period and one space after a comma. Always. Always. Always. Always. Always.

Here is what a sentence would look like by the typical author from India:

If you live or work in India,please spread the word that English at all times as a language,has one space after the period and one space after a comma.Always.Always.Always.Always.Always.

Short of banning all submissions from India (crossed our mind a few hundred times due to the excessive and consistent PUNCTUATION mistakes made by authors from India), we do delete about 80% of accounts that come in from India solely based on this mistake.

We can tolerate a spelling error or a simple grammar error as most articles are not perfect, but we can’t accept articles that have no space after each period and comma.

Help us accept more articles from authors in India by always including a space after every period and comma in your sentence structure.

Thank you.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 13, 2005 at 9:52 am

Views 539 | Comments (5)

Alt Authors Photo & Bio

Last night we quietly uploaded a new version of our proprietary software that now allows each alternate author to have an extended author bio when viewing their expert author URL and an author photo in the extended author bio URL.

Previously, only the primary author name of an account could have an extended bio and author photo and any alternate author names or pen names setup in an authors account were denied the ablility to have an extended bio or author photo…until now.

So, if you have 1 or more alternate author names setup in your membership account, log in and click on MEMBERS PROFILE, and then you’ll see a way to update the extended author profile AND author photo for each alternate author name in your account.

The other feature enhancements we added last night are all invisible to the end users as we beefed up security.

Innovate Innovate…

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 13, 2005 at 7:59 am

Views 532 | Comments (1)

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