Why Only 3 URLs?

Ralph writes, “I am curious as to why there is a limit of 3 URL’s in a Resource box. This is not a complaint, but purely curiosity. What is the basis for it? is it a problem with email, or ftp, or what? Some directories enforce it, others do not. What’s behind it all?”

Answer: The reason our editorial guidelines only allow 3 URL’s in the entire article that are self-serving is purely a quality control issue designed to keep the self-promotion to a minimum.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 29, 2006 at 5:56 am

Views 888 | Comments (11)

Article Comments Trend

About (3) weeks ago we abolished the “Registered Commentor” system for those who wanted to leave comments on any article and replaced it with a simple CAPTCHA code to authenticate the commentor as a human rather than a spamming machine.

For 2006, in January we had 117 comments, February 148 comments, March 190 comments, and this month… 464 comments sent in so far!

Lesson learned: Open system with CAPTCHA authentication allows 150% improvement in article comments vs. restricted commenting to registered commentors in a private system.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 28, 2006 at 8:02 am

Views 1,096 | Comments (14)

Resource Box Anatomy

All resource boxes are not created equal. While you can’t change your DNA, you can fix your resource box’s gene problem… what? You didn’t know that your resource box has a few chromosomes out of whack? The majority of them do.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 26, 2006 at 7:57 am

Views 1,045 | Comments (11)

Recycle Your Article Electrons

EARTH DAY was this past weekend where we are reminded to care for Mother Earth. :-) I thought this would be a great (and just a little cheesy) opportunity to remind you of the benefits of recycling your article electrons!

What does this mean to you, the expert author? It means today is a wake up call to not let articles that you’ve got sitting on your hard drive (in electron form) go to waste! Let other humans benefit from your articles & expertise by putting a percentage of them into syndication today to attract more qualified visitors back to your website while enhancing your credibility and profile in the market as an expert.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 24, 2006 at 2:02 pm

Views 913 | Comments (8)

Audio To Articles

On Friday, EzineArticles expert author Daniel Hall interviewed me for an audio special on his website that will be released within a week or so… and near the end of the interview we were talking about ways to generate articles without having to struggle (as many do).

As I was mentioning strategies to repurpose old content that was long forgotten, it sparked Daniel to ask and offer this nugget: Wouldn’t it be easy to talk into a microphone for an hour or any time frame, then pay someone to transcribe the MP3 into a MS Word .doc…break the transcription into 350-500 word articles and you’d have an instant set of 5-20 articles to put into syndication. Just add title, keywords, a default resource box and submit.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 23, 2006 at 9:26 am

Views 837 | Comments (10)

Jason and Alan Face Off

Recently Alan Meckler and Jason Calacanis faced off in a WSJ article on whether or not bloggers can make any money with blogging.

Jason contends with an RPM (Revenue Per Thousand page views) of $3-$10 (same as eCPM (Effective Cost Per Thousand page views), a blogger with half a million monthly PV’s (Page Views) could bring in $1000-$5000 USD per month without having to hire an ad sales rep. Alan disagreed with Jason that the average blogger doesn’t know how to or can’t attract half a million monthly page views. BUT!!!
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 20, 2006 at 9:59 am

Views 924 | Comments (5)

MLA - APA and CHICAGO Style Citation

Brand new feature added today! Even though EzineArticles.com is not designed for college students, the reality is that the articles in the directory are getting cited and quoted very often in academicville. The evidence comes from the many college student questions that we receive via email.

To make their lives a little easier, we added at the very very very bottom of the page a complimentary citation listing of how to cite the article they are looking at in MLA, APA and Chicago Style academic formatting.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 19, 2006 at 4:01 pm

Views 949 | Comments (4)

Author Support

A peak into our author/member support system: Only our Managing Editor and myself monitor the incoming emails to support, the contact us forms and the replies to any system generated messages. None of our half dozen full or part time editors read any of the incoming emails to support…

I mention this because I see a lot of authors addressing an editor by number, but the reality is that our Associate Editors do not handle author support and therefore never see you addressing them by number. This is not a big deal as we don’t care what you call us ;-), but I thought some may like to know that our Managing Editor is charged with the authority to handle all author support and myself and our lead network admin monitors incoming emails for big-picture problems that need resources or priority attention.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 18, 2006 at 6:46 pm

Views 772 | Comments (1)

Keyword Wars

I was reading some of the blogs that gave feedback to Yanik Silver’s event last month and one of the bloggers was appalled that 2 or more of the speakers (myself one of them) mentioned inferior keyword research tools.

It’s like if you are not a “Wordtracker zen master”, you are stupid or at a minimum, very uniformed.

The reality is that the long tail is so very long that the free keyword research tools provide plenty of accurate keyword research data for 95%+ of the market. Besides, I’d prefer to not see our thousands of authors to become keyword car-chase pursuit victims but rather only use the data to help them produce quality original content that answers the heart beat of the market, not the DNA sequence of the marketplace.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 18, 2006 at 4:13 am

Views 841 | Comments (5)

Signed By Company Name

Question from a reader named Eli: Hi Chris, I’m looking to take article writing to the next level and I wanted to ask how often do you see articles that are signed by groups, organizations, or websites? In other words, the articles don’t have a specific name of an individual and does this hurt the potential distribution?

Eli: Yes, it hurts distribution because people like to trust people, not nameless/faceless companies when it comes to the personal or intimate connection between reader and writer.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 17, 2006 at 6:41 am

Views 806 | Comments (5)

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