Article Problem Resolution

Article Writing & Marketing Insights

Article Problem Resolution

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Systematizing Article Problem Resolution Emails Helped Create 22.7% Increase In Accepted Articles This Month!

When we first started the article approval process, whenever an article didn’t match our editorial guidelines…I’d snap off an email to the author and let them know what they needed to correct.

Somewhere around February of this year, the load exceeded my time to keep up with the personal emails and our Associate Editors were treading water just to keep up with approving the quality articles.

One month ago today we began sending automated emails that were customized by problem status type. In the last 30 days, 1,193 articles didn’t meet our editorial guidelines and they received 1 of 15 different problem resolution emails designed to explain the problem and give a suggestion on how to fix it.

What’s been the net effect of this change?

Problems are getting resolved and while about 5-10% don’t agree with us when we send them their pink slip (problem resolution email), most are quick to fix the article or delete it from our queue.

In the past, the Problem Resolution queue had built up into the 600 articles sitting on the dock melting.

Today, the problem resolution queue is at 473 — but more importantly, we’ve been able to help many hundreds of authors to get their article accepted. In the past, we might have just deleted a ’so so’ article that didn’t meet our guidelines. Now, a larger chunk of authors get a chance to make it right and most do.

Also important to note is that the 473 that are stuck in a problem status queue right now are fresh! The old problem status queue had many articles from 3-7 months ago yet and we realize that as time goes on…the chances of them getting fixed by the author goes down.

Currently, there are no articles in our problem resolution queue that are older than 60 days. We’re not auto-pruning them yet, but manually keeping an eye on it. Soon enough, that will be automated to remove an article where the author doesn’t fix it after being notified.

My gut feel is that this process alone helped contribute to the increase in articles accepted this month. Today, we’re at 7,982 articles accepted for August with 4 more days to go in the month whereas July 2005 we had only accepted 6,504 in the first 27 days of the month. That’s 1,478 more articles got accepted month to date! Nice, eh? I love it when an innovation helps more people get value out of our site.