Principles of X - Article Template

Searching for new article format ideas? Look no further than what I call the “Principles of X” article template.

Here’s how it works:

• An article title that lets them know they will be learning principles of something.
• Introductory paragraph that explains why your principles are important to the reader along with any social proof claims that can support your statements.
• A sub-head that describes your top principles along with why each principle is important.
• A closing paragraph that wraps up with either how to get started at applying the principles outlined or a helpful tip to help the reader overcome any objections they might have to understanding or applying one of your principles to their life or business.
• Insert your benefits driven Resource Box

Examples of various ways I’ve seen the “Principles of X” template implemented:

• The 7 Principles of Business Integrity
• Learning The Basic Principles Of Marketing
• Fast Muscle Mass Building-The Ten Success Principles
• 9 Principles To Live By - To Be Mentally And Emotionally Strong!
• The 34 Principles Of An ExtraOrdinary Home
• 7 Leadership Principles That Can Change the World
• Do You Know The Basic Principles of Winsor Pilates
• The Principles of Interior Design
• 5 Principles of Attraction for the Entrepreneur
• Six Principles of Successful Investing

There may be no ‘right’ way to do this template as you can see that some give a number to their principles, some call them “The Principles” (as if there were no other principles on the matter), some call the “Basic” or “Universal” principles, but they all usually give a numbered list with sub-heads that make it easy for the eye to see and read the principles outlined.

How can you apply this to your area of expertise?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 30, 2007 at 7:37 pm

Views 968 | Comments (12)

Bonnie Murphy - Author Spotlight

EzineArticles expert author and Chief Fitness Officer Bonnie Murphy caught our eye because of something smart she did with her website. She used social proof to highlight her expertise as accepted by sites like ours and others. Check it out for yourself: bfitandwell.com

What else we love about Bonnie: She’s an expert in her field serving mature women who are seeking the benefits of personal fitness and her original quality article submissions spans 2005, 2006 and 2007…and that shows consistency. In addition, Bonnie has uploaded a professional author photo and uploaded her author bio…further enhancing her credibility as a true expert.

Nice job Bonnie! :-)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 26, 2007 at 6:00 am

Views 479 | Comments (5)

Article Writing Stopwatch Strategy

Writing quality original articles is a great investment of time and when you use the “Stopwatch Strategy,” you’ll be amazed at how much time you can shave off the process of writing your next set of articles.

The Stopwatch Strategy: Get yourself an inexpensive stopwatch or desk clock. Become aware of your article writing baseline by simply timing how long it takes you to write, edit and then upload an article. Challenge yourself to shave 5-10 minutes off the process until you’re down into the 20-40 minutes per article range.

Why this strategy works: It helps to bring your focus on the task at hand. When we do research or have multiple interruptions, it becomes very difficult to write efficiently. Using the stopwatch strategy, you honor your time more effectively by being consciously aware if you’re on task or not…and then returning your focus to the task at hand to accomplish writing your next quality original article in less time.

If you write 250 articles in a year and you’re able to shave off 10 minutes per article due to becoming aware of your production rate, that becomes 41.6 hours you’ve just reclaimed that can be used to write more articles or go do something else you’d like to do.

Have you ever tried this strategy and has it worked for you?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 25, 2007 at 2:18 pm

Views 966 | Comments (49)

Administrative Professionals’ Day

Today is “appreciate your Admin Assistant Day” (formerly known as Secretary’s Day) and I’d like to recognize April, our Admin Assistant and Accounting Manager.

Here are some of April’s personal favorites:

• sunflowers
• spending time with family
• visiting exciting US cities…Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas to name a few
• manicures & pedicures :-)
• finding the perfect pair of running shoes and running more miles every run
• movies-Ebert and April anyone?

April takes care of our accounting, human resource duties, marketing assistance (April is also responsible for all of the mug mailings that go out each month to new Platinum authors), monthly reporting and she helps remove details off my plate so I can have the time to work more on new product creation, member relations and troubleshooting obstacles that are in our growth path. When you’re a very small company, we all wear many hats and I appreciate April’s flexibility.

Here are a few articles by our members about today’s holiday:

Have you appreciated those who support you today?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 25, 2007 at 8:40 am

Views 436 | Comments (8)

Member Support Phase III

The next phase of implementing our new member support tracking system is possibly one of the most painful because it means the elimination of email-based direct communication in favor of a closed direct web-based communication system (via the EzineArticles INBOX).

The challenge is that 100% of member support needs to funnel into our web-based email tracking system for it to be effective, allow for quality control and escalation rulesets for problem resolution priorities and management reporting.

What the change will be like: support @ EzineArticles as an email address will turn into an autoresponder that will encourage members & users to either log in and contact-us with a web form or use the public contact-us web form if they are not a registered member.

When a member sends in a query via their EzineArticles INBOX, they will get a reply to their inbox. They can then reply to the email and the thread continues until the problem is resolved.

(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 24, 2007 at 12:17 pm

Views 420 | Comments (3)

Member Support Phase II

Two weeks ago, we announced a new email ticket tracking system designed to provide more accurate support to our members while preventing losing any support requests through the cracks. 1,046 email tickets were opened up in the last two weeks, but less than half of the load is going through the ticket tracking system (see blog post in the near future about phase III).

Today we’re locked up in a policy decision that must be made and we’d like your opinion to help us decide which way we’ll go.

The Issue: To contact us for support, members currently log in to their EzineArticles INBOX system and send us a note. When we reply, the member receives an email notice that they have an email reply from member support and to log in to read the reply. The dilemma: Why make the member log in to see the reply when we could put it in the email being sent to the member?… if only the decision were this simple.

(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 23, 2007 at 10:52 am

Views 458 | Comments (10)

PressExposure Update

If you’ve followed our growth, you know that we spawned a press releases project because we got tired of rejecting so many hundreds and then thousands of wrongly submitted quality press releases to us. Today, I’m happy to share that our PressExposure.com project has accepted its 2,000th press release: Breast Fed Children Have Better Vision

If you have a press release that you’d like to share, log in to your EzineArticles membership account, click on AUTHOR TOOLS, click on PRESS RELEASE SUBMISSION and send it in. All submissions are human reviewed before they are made live on PressExposure.com. Are we as popular as PRWEB? Not a chance. Is there any cost? Nope. Only exposure and traffic upside for you.

PressExposure Trivia: 44.9% of all press release submissions are generated by EzineArticles Members.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 20, 2007 at 8:26 am

Views 481 | Comments (2)

Write Aspirationally

I bet no one has ever encouraged you to “write aspirationally”… until now. :)

An “aspiration” is the will to succeed or the desire to contemplate [your] dreams in a hopeful manner. It also means biologically to draw in air, to breathe or aspirate…but I really want you to key in on the “to aspire” side meaning of this word.

When you write aspirationally, it means that you are using your words to inspire others, to motivate, to encourage, to coach, and to help the reader feel better about him or herself after having read your article…knowing they can tackle a problem or dream with a higher sense of personal confidence.

While you’ll see this style of writing in our Self-Help section, especially the Inspirational articles, this inspirational tone and intent can easily apply to any article that gives the reader encouragement.

What do you think? Should our experts write more aspirationally or is “aspirationally” just a big dumb word that no one uses?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 19, 2007 at 3:11 pm

Views 593 | Comments (32)

Domain Privacy Slows Trust

Many domain name service providers allow you to have a privacy protected domain registration for a small extra fee. This allows you to hide yourself from anyone who does a simple WHOIS lookup to see who owns your domain. The reasons domain owners do this range from wanting to be deceptive to not wanting to deal with the huge quantity of spam and silly link swap requests that get sent to the domain owners contact email address.

Our article review and quality control team routinely performs domain WHOIS lookups to determine if the author of an article owns the domain name(s) in their resource box. If there’s a perfect match, it becomes easier to trust the author or at least give them a bump in credibility. If a URL in your Resource Box returns a privacy-protected whois lookup, it becomes harder for our editors to trust you/and your content.

Bottom line: If you’re in business, think twice before buying privacy guard or hiding your domain WHOIS data from the public. Your market credibility may depend on it.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 18, 2007 at 1:47 pm

Views 524 | Comments (12)

Use Nobility When Article Marketing

Sometimes it becomes tempting to promote your EzineArticles everyplace you can strategically find to promote them, but in this short article, you’ll discover that a little ‘nobility’ goes a long way to ensuring that no one gets hurt along the way. Let me explain…

Here’s what’s acceptable if you intend to promote your articles on EzineArticles to others:

• Sending a title, summary and a link to the full article to your clients and other permission-based email members on your list.
• Mentioning your newest EzineArticles in your blog (heck, why not load up your EzineArticles RSS feed to do this automatically?)
• Any promotion or announcement on any web property that you own or to any permission-based email list that you own/control.

But, what if you want to promote your EzineArticles beyond web properties that you own or control, such as social networking, social bookmarking or other social media sites? That’s where the concept of ‘nobility’ comes into play.

When you are contributing to websites that you don’t own or control for the purposes of promoting your articles as listed on EzineArticles, it’s important to be noble… meaning, to not promote your URL if it’s clearly self serving (that would be un-noble). Since it’s always self-serving, how do you go about promoting your EzineArticles if you want to?

Answer = You don’t. Instead, only promote your EzineArticles to web and permission-based email properties that you own and let the universe take care of promoting your EzineArticles to the appropriate 3rd party social media sites. When you produce a high enough quanity of quality articles, your content will get picked up and promoted in the appropriate places.

Updated: Butterfly asked us:

Hi Chris, I have 12 articles on EA and have been given the title of Platinum Author, but still can’t figure how some authors manage to gather so many comments. My articles are well written and offer insight or you would not have selected them for publication. My rankngs are good but few comments are submitted. What am I not doing to attract comments?

Answer = Authors who receive a lot of comments do one of two things: 1) They submit a lot of articles and therefore have a higher chance of attracting a comment or 2) They promote their new articles to their clients and/or permission-based email list member and thus drive thousands of eyeballs to view the article with a request for them to vote and comment on the article.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 17, 2007 at 9:41 am

Views 598 | Comments (8)

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