Does It Take Time For An Author To Get A Following?
Newbie Platinum EzineArticles expert author Keith writes to us this week, “I’m a relative newbie to EzineArticles and want to make the most out of the experience by drawing as many people to my websites as possible…that is the normal qwest by we authors right? Well, I’ve submitted 14 articles so far, had a large number of visitors, but a small number of publishers request my work. So, the question that is screaming at me is: “Why don’t they take my articles?””
He further writes, “Is this a normal process in getting accepted? Does it take writers a while to build up to a following? Am I writing about topics that aren’t popular? Of the 600+ publishers that have visited my work so far only 9 have been taken…isn’t that an extremely low number? How do I raise that number? Are my articles too short ( 350-550 ) or too long ( 1000+ )? What can I do to make my work more attractive?”
Let’s dispell some misconceptions today for Keith and many new authors:
First, if you took a sample of yesterdays total site page views, you’d find 85-90%+ of them were generated by end-users of your information and not publishers… ie: Your prospective clients are the bulk of our traffic.
Second, now that publishers finally have better tools for tracking the RSS feeds of every author they like, those who have been on our site for many months begin to get an advantage because publishers will subscribe to their RSS feed to be alerted whenever they have new articles published with us for reprints.
Third, the ‘is my article too-short or too-long issue is crystal clear: 400-750 word articles ALWAYS out-pull 1000+ word articles when it comes to the number of publishers interested in using your article to share with their audience.
In your case Keith, the fact that you’ve had only 9 folks click on your EzinePublisher link within your articles against 600 page views is very normal…in fact, at (9/600) 1.5%, you’re either inline or ahead of most authors by about a few fractions of a percentage… I just did an informal poll from authors with more than 300k page views and the range was .8% to 2.2%.
Lastly, Keith…my recommendation: Your EzinePublisher percentage performance is near meaningless at this point as you only have 14 articles listed. I’d focus all of your attention on creating and/or submitting a few hundred more articles in the 400-750 word-count range and then revisit this issue. Hopefully by the end of 2006 we’ll have more pattern analysis done to help give you and our authors more tools to figure out how to maximize the number of times your article gets syndicated.
Hi Kieth,
Welcome to the best article directory on the internet. I had fewer publisher pick ups than you have on 20 to 30 articles for my first 8 to 10 weeks. Then I was discovered by a few publishers and my pick up count went over 20 in one day. Now they average about 5 per article and it has been a steady monthly progression from 2 to 3 to 4 etc.
Same thing with views. As we offer readers more choices, they read more of our articles. For example one reader decides to read a second or 3rd article by the same author. In general, there is a link between the writer;s popularity and the ever increasing popularity of EzineArticles. If you tell everyone you know and everyone you don’t know about EzineArticles and what a wonderful public library it is, we all increas our popularity.
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