Warp Factor 5
I’m sitting here thinking about how EzineArticles.com is going to evolve beyond our current rate of growth… and the single largest obstacle that I see in the way of our growth rate (in terms of daily articles approved into the site) is my desire to not anhilate our real-time email list members that get notified every time a new article is added for the category they are signed up for.
We can solve this in one of 3 ways: (please help us decide)
1) Expand the real-time email alerts when new articles are added so that it’s by SUB-CATEGORY rather than by primary category. This would create over 150+ new email alert lists, one for each channel/category. The idea is to narrow the focus of each list so that our members get LESS volume and MORE relevant emails.
2) Shut down the real-time alerts all together in favor of only the daily summary email alerts. The thinking is that those who get real-time alerts could always subscribe to the individual RSS feed of the channels they have an interest in instead of the real time email alerts. End result is that they would still get real-time alerts, but via RSS instead of email.
UPDATED: Another big bonus to option #2 is that this would greatly reduce our list attrition. The real-time alerts are highly subscribed and highly unsubscribed because the volume is too intense. Bringing everyone to daily summary would solve that problem.
3) Create a new form of real-time or daily summary email alerts that are keyword specific so that only articles that match a specific keyword would be included in such emails. We’ve considered this option for many months and held off on it due to the extreme back-end logic that would have to be added to this functionality to make it viable and not useless.
4) Another option we didn’t consider?
The easy route would be for us to just shut down the real-time email alerts lists or fold them into the daily summary alerts. This would solve the problem within one day and we can then double or triple our ability to accept articles faster per day.
What are your thoughts?
(side note: Warp factor 5 refers to Star Trek… thinking back to the early days when they were learning how to move from warp 2-3 to the big “warp 5″… and in other years, up to Warp 9.x. We’re at that point where we are preparing to enter the next exponential leap into sub-space speed.)
what about a combination of #1 and #2 – I like the idea of even more specific niches, so that is good. could you set it up so that alerts were sent out 2x a day, 12 hours apart?
best
jeff
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