Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar

Yanik had packed his Underground Seminar in Washington DC with 400 guests (including yours truly as one of his secret agent speakers).

Today, 2 people mentioned they could not attend for personal reasons and that means there are 2 seats left. Do you have March 24-26th open?

I was reluctant at first to agree to speak when asked last year because I don’t do ‘underground’ things and therefore thought it would not be a good fit. When I asked other high-profile friends, they vouched and spoke highly of Yanik’s integrity. I also met some of the other speakers (or agents) and began to realize that this event is one of the few that I won’t just be flying in to speak at, but I’m looking forward to being a participant in the audience as well.
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 28, 2006 at 12:09 pm

Views 821 | Comments (1)

OPML, Your Web 2.o Lesson Today

OPML stands for (Outline Processor Markup Language) and it’s an XML format for outlines, however the more common use today is for exchanging lists of RSS feeds between RSS aggregators.

Even with the amazing power that is OPML, only a handful of articles in our entire directory mentions it: What Is This RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom Business? By Meryl K. Evans, for example.

As an Author on our site, what do you need to know about OPML?
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 28, 2006 at 7:59 am

Views 808 | Comments (0)

What is PLR?

Recently we began a campaign to educate authors against the use of private label rights (PLR) articles because you look like a fraud to us, among other issues, such as not being able to authenticate the true legal source of the content.

An author asked, “What is a private label article?”

Answer: Any article that you do not own the exclusive right to the content is a PLR article… meaning, any article that can be branded or labeled under any author name is a private label article.

Engaging in PLR articles is bad because:

1. You don’t know who really wrote them and often times they were stolen or plagiarized works. You are responsible for anything you post under your name or URL and thus it’s a lot like pedaling stolen merchandise.
2. You are not going to fool us and you are not going to fool the search engines no matter how much you mix and mash your PLR articles.

Do the right thing: Don’t buy Private Label Rights articles. Don’t buy products that create or mix and mash PLR articles. And most of all, don’t waste your time or our time by sending them in to us as we are going to reject them.
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 27, 2006 at 4:03 pm

Views 987 | Comments (1)

EzineArticles Exclusive?

A common question we receive is, “I was wondering whether I am allowed to also submit my articles to other article banks or my own website so as to maximise my article exposure, or if doing so would violate your TOS.”

I believe this question is being asked because we require all content submitted to our site to be owned exclusively by the author who is submitting the content. In other words, we don’t accept non-exclusive rights content such as PLR (Private Label Rights) articles.

The answer to the original question:
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 27, 2006 at 2:46 pm

Views 819 | Comments (0)

Hard Line Breaks

Wooooh there Nelly! Ease up and don’t include any hard line breaks in any article you submit to us. For experienced writers, they know this already, but a few folks from the early days still send in hard line breaks in their articles.

Here’s why: Because your article might look bad on our site because we are optimized for no hard line breaks (better to just let each sentence wrap) and more importantly:

Smart publishers have software to change the line breaks automatically and when you decide what the hard line break default should be (let’s say you choose 55 characters per line), you take away power from the publisher to make that decision and thus, you make more work for them having to reformat your article, line by line to fit their editorial standards for hard line breaks, if any.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 24, 2006 at 11:42 am

Views 815 | Comments (5)

Watching Your Fav. Authors

Do you have a favorite EzineArticles.com expert author that you like to watch? You can now subscribe to their RSS feed via your Google or your My.Yahoo personalized home page (or any web aggregator of RSS feeds for that matter)

Here’s how to do it:

1) Identify the author on our site that you want to subscribe to their unique RSS feed. Click on the authors name so you are viewing their expert author view, such as this page: Christopher Knight

2) Notice where the little RSS feedicon is? It looks like this:
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 23, 2006 at 3:01 pm

Views 903 | Comments (3)

Company Name in Title

From the Ask Chris Knight grab bag, this question came in, “Can I write an honest article about the pros and cons of my company with it’s name in the article title?”

My response to him: Hmmm, the easy answer is no.

You are either biased or assumed bias favorable towards your firm (therefore it’s self promotion) and if you are not going to be favorable towards your own company (meaning, you intend to do evil)…well, we would rather not see your article on our site. Hope this answers your question.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 22, 2006 at 12:21 pm

Views 791 | Comments (0)

RSS Publishers

Are you an RSS-aware publisher? Does XML or OPML turn you on?

If so, we launched a brand new segmented mailing list called the “EzineArticles RSS-Publisher“.

Purpose of the RSS-Publisher list is to give tips, implementation strategies, advice, best-case or best-practices, etc. of how to use our RSS feeds in your website, regardless as to which CMS (Content Management System) you have. Join Here (5th list from the top)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 21, 2006 at 11:47 am

Views 877 | Comments (2)

Solving The Complete Problem

If your article solves 100% of the problem that the reader came to your article, there is little motivation for them to click on your website link to find out more about you.

This is precisely why 300-450 word articles OUT-PRODUCE 1500-3000 word articles, in terms of generating qualified leads back to your website. We also know shorter articles get picked up for reprints more than larger articles. Less is more in today’s info-bite world.

Instead, solve a percentage of their problems and let your website be the rest of the answer to the issue you are writing about.
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 20, 2006 at 10:14 am

Views 774 | Comments (8)

Mike Valentine on Syndication

EzineArticles expert author, Michael Banks Valentine recently mused on the question as to whether the duplicate content penalty is worth fretting about or not. Read this article, “Article Marketing to be Destroyed by Upcoming Duplicate Content Filters Employed by Search Engines?

He gives a good history of how this issue came to be, but the nugget was at the bottom of the article: “Your articles are no less valuable to the web community because they are syndicated and that appreciation is displayed clearly when they are used extensively across multiple web sites. Write on article marketers.”

I couldn’t agree more!

If our authors knew how many times per month that high profile reporters and producers from the major networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, and major newspapers) ask us to put them in touch with a specific author because they are doing a special that would like to interview one of our authors… –>our authors would know that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 19, 2006 at 10:18 pm

Views 771 | Comments (2)

BLOG COMMENT POLICY
© EzineArticles.com - All Rights Reserved Worldwide.