Jeff Herring writes:

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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Andrea writes:

I think I would appreciate one email a day containing summarized information.

Rather than sending multiple emails a day, wouldn’t it be more effecient to send one email linking to the articles by article title?

From that, I can easily skim through the summarized title list to determine what meets my criteria.

Thanks!
Andrea

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Dina Giolitto writes:

Option 2 jumped out at me right away as being the answer.

In considering this further…

The object of an email alert is to signal content-hungry publishers that new, quality work just came into the category of their interest.

If you narrow that category down to highly-specific keyword matches, then the recipient of the alert gets LESS choices.

Due to the “chaos factor” as I like to call it, you never know when a really excellent article is going to fly in that MAY OR MAY NOT contain the exact keyword phrase that the email alert recipient has designated as his alarm bell.

This site is categorically speaking, perfectly-balanced between the specific and the generic.

Let’s take the category of HOME AND FAMILY- PETS.

Suppose my interests are: boxer dogs, cockatoos, breeding rabbits and betta fish.

As the recipient of the alerts, you are making more work for me if you tell me to check off those four categories instead of just “pets.”

Not to mention, if nothing comes in that matches my exact categories, I get no alerts from you and then I completely forget about your site.

And if instead of “betta fish”, someone writes an article on “Siamese fighting fish,” then I don’t get an alert because my keyword-specific choice was TOO NARROW.

So: as you’ve already suggested, your team may be wasting an incredible amount of energy and effort designing complicated, logic-based keyword technology only to produce what would have happened just as nicely if left up to chance with a more generic category heading.

Am I saying this right?

If you aren’t already doing so, why not embark on an aggressive marketing campaign to get the word out to publishers that this is THE PERFECT place to grab hot content and pop it right into your marketing newsletter/blog/website/etc.

I’m dead serious! How about some good old-fashioned marketing? Then instead of pinging people, they’ll just come to you directly.

You’re kind of like an article supermarket that way. Would the supermarket ever send me an email alert saying a new shipment of eggs came in? No.

I am rambling. Damn, I hate it when I get mired in the details! (Hope this post helped somewhat).

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Michael Russell writes:

Definitely option 2 – daily summary and allow RSS subscription to categories of specific interest.

Perhaps expand RSS categories available or make a keyword search RSS feed?

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Lance@carwashguys.com writes:

Good comments, I would enjoy the email alerts broken into categories. Each category listed in the email. You can put an advertisement at the top. Under each category titles of submitted articles. Then if you click on that, it takes you to the bottom of the email where it is with the 2-5 sentences explaining the article. If not we scan and delete. Also for specific “key word” articles that would be nice. I like the way that American Biz Journals does theirs each week with a specific summary of exact matches. If exact matches, perhaps the whole article is sent. And perhaps you could tell the authors what those specific key words are so we might slightly adjust our articles to fit them. This way they get picked up and we can see what they want? Anyway, you do not have to get that technical, as such a system would blow your competition out of the water and then they will claim you cheated, like they did with Lance Armstrong.

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