SES NY 2007

This week I’m in New York visiting clients and attending Incisive Media’s Search Engine Strategies 2007.

The major players are well represented in exhibits as well as panel experts and if Google & Yahoo didn’t have people on the panels, the quality of the sessions would have suffered. Thankfully they sent quite a few of their managers and various engineers and business leaders.

This was my first time attending this conference as I didn’t think I’d be able to learn any actionable best practice strategies, but I was wrong. One of my primary goals in attending was to make sure we’re helping the major search engines to efficiently find our members content while ignoring content that shouldn’t be indexed (example: the *print an article* view). Our long-standing SE strategy has been to simply add lots of fresh high-quality content, provide a fast and positive user experience and make decisions to ensure long-term success (skipping all short term fads).

It was good to hear from many pay-per-click advertisers talk about the type of quality they want from their PPC investments. Remember the quality landing page thread from last year? Many of the same concerns are still important to providing a positive user experience. The last thing we want is poor quality content leading to a poor quality website as it violates the trust of our users and those who bring traffic to our members content.

We’re not involved in paid search abritrage (the act of creating revenue by purchasing traffic on a PPC basis and then immediately selling it through affiliate marketing or other revenue means), but it’s clear that the most egregious offense in terms of advertisers and end-users are MFA’s (Made For Adsense) sites. If you’re an author that drives traffic to a MFA site, this is your early wake up call that you need to find a way to add unique value with your site beyond the ads.

(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 12, 2007 at 11:13 am

Views 684 | Comments (4)

Vicheka Lay - Author Spotlight

Cambodian Lay Vicheka is a Production Manager of Search Newspaper and Manager-General of Cambopedia Translation Co. Ltd. and an expert in Cambodian laws, politics and related human rights laws, social issues…and he also writes to help advance the awareness of his country (he’s 1 of 5 EzineArticles expert authors from Cambodia).

Lay sent us this testimonial yesterday:

“Ezine[Articles], where my personal improvement does not need an instructor” Submitting articles to Ezines has provided me great opportunities to express my concerneds, interests about the world, as well as to practice my written knowledge. Since having a great deal of articles listed in the Ezine, my application to different workplaces has proved me a successful one. To be precise, my article submission to Ezine[Articles] has bettered my Resume. Lastly, since Cambodia is not acceptably known by other countries, Ezine[Articles] has provided me the opportunities to make this country resurgent, as well as promoting what we have here in Cambodia, that the world never knows.

Thanks Lay Vicheka for being an EzineArticles expert and sharing your perspectives. For those who are not familiar with Cambodia, it is a tropical country about 69,900 sq. miles (181,035 sq. km) and has a population of over 13 million.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 10, 2007 at 8:18 am

Views 477 | Comments (6)

Email Ticket Tracking For Member Support

For the past month and a half, our developers have been working on rolling out our own member/author support email ticket tracking system. Sure, we could have licensed someone else’s software or ASP solution, but where’s the fun in that?

This is a system we should have developed a year ago, but better late than never…and because we wrote it, we’ve already innovated with features that will prioritize visually incoming support requests and allow for an eventual huge inventory of stock responses to the top hundred questions. 176 support replies already flowed through the new system…

Some of the goals of this new system are/were:

• Ensure a 100% reply to all emails that require a reply
• Designed to standardize our responses regardless which team member is working the support queue
• Allow for manager quality control & stat reporting so we can define the various levels of speed that replies will be given
• Allow for an escalation procedure for sorting out important vs. urgent issues
• Allow us to tag the majority of support emails with the respective accounts of each member to provide a new person working the support queue to see a more complete picture of the issues.

By the middle of May I’d expect the system to be evolved from the present day roll out. We’re processing about 50% of the thousands of emails that come in monthly –> into the new ticket tracking system.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 9, 2007 at 7:48 pm

Views 702 | Comments (4)

Authors With More Than One Expertise

This past week we sent a little over 3,000 emails to a very select list of our Platinum level authors who do not have their author bio’s or author photo uploaded yet, giving them an easy instruction list of how to do it and what’s in it for them (more exposure, 5 additional self-serving links, etc).

The number one reason that a solid handful of Platinum expert authors have told us that they don’t intend to upload their author bio is because they are experts in more than one unrelated niche and they don’t want to confuse one of their niche audiences with their expertise of another niche.

Solution: Authors With Multiple Brands - Secrets To Managing Multiple Topics When Writing Articles

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 7, 2007 at 2:17 pm

Views 391 | Comments (3)

Platinum Members Who Bounce Emails

We’ve made a decision that Platinum members should not be allowed to continue to have Platinum membership if the email address they have setup with us comes back as a hard undeliverable. The new membership status is called:

Suspended - Bouncing Email

Over 200 authors today are losing Platinum status this week because they bounced mail in the last month to us.

To help these authors, we’re utilizing the new EzineArticles Inbox system to notify them that their account is suspended and we’ll give them simple instructions how to easiliy get their account re-instated by providing us with a new email address that does not bounce or come back as undeliverable.

In the future, this suspension status will apply to all membership levels as we don’t want to reward authors who we can’t connect with. It’s important to point out that we won’t suspend an author who has a simple transient mail server problem (otherwise known as a ’soft bounce’) because that happens to everyone at some point but only those who have gone lights out (hard bounce) will be suspended.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 6, 2007 at 10:03 am

Views 354 | Comments (4)

New Membership Levels Proposed

We have outgrown our membership levels and it’s time to add some new levels to differentiate the level of trust and quality that each member represents to us and to others. Here are the new proposed membership levels:

Membership Level	Formerly Called	Number of Articles	Represents
Bronze	Basic	First 10	Newbie Members
Silver	Basic Plus	25 (or more)	Probation
Gold		Up To 100	Quality Without Volume
Platinum	Platinum	Unlimited	Volume With Less Quality
Diamond		100 to Unlimited	Quality With Volume

The tentative plan is to keep Platinum members where they are, and begin the process to define how high the quality must be to be considered a ‘diamond’ level member. Speed of approvals will start at Diamond and work our way down to Bronze in terms of priority. The new Gold level acknowledges high quality articles from authors who have no desire to be high volume, but if they were in Gold status after Silver (previously called Basic), they could move to Diamond after 100 articles are accepted.

What do you think so far?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 5, 2007 at 10:43 am

Views 891 | Comments (68)

The EzineArticles Angel

This week we’re introducing a new concept called “The EzineArticles Angel” and this angel will be moderating the EzineArticles forums to welcome new members, answer questions, keep forumspam out, and help bring some of the best member suggestions & ideas to our development team.

We could all use an angel by our side helping us out from time to time and I hope our forum members feel more at home or at least know that someone is hearing their concerns and will work as an internal advocate for their needs/wants, etc.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 4, 2007 at 7:53 am

Views 390 | Comments (6)

Dangers of Geo-Writing Efficiency

Last May, I wrote an article about the strategy of producing hundreds of local niche articles (Produce Hundreds of Local Niche Articles, One For Every City and State / Province In Your Country) to write articles that would appeal to those searching for local information based on the authors area of expertise.

Lately, I’ve seen this strategy used too efficiently. The primary problem is that the quality of the body in many of these geo-targeted articles are too thin in value and many authors used a repetitive template that produced an article that predictably will draw complaints. When I review the articles, I yawn and feel embarrassed that we accepted some of them.

Here are 5 tips to help those who want to leverage this geo-targeted article writing style with integrity:

1. Genuinely research each region or city that you mention for at least an hour to ADD to the knowledge and experience you already have about the area. If you really don’t know anything about the geo-area’s you’re writing about, you’re not qualified to write about it.
2. Do not take the lazy route of spitting the search results of who provides a specific set of services in that area. Your articles should not read like a summary of local.google or local.yahoo.
3. Seek to ADD VALUE with your geo-targeted articles. Regurgitating what already exists in the market adds no value, but weaving your unique expertise and experience into your geo-articles CAN ADD VALUE.
4. Do not keyword stuff your article by repeating the geo-location that you’re writing about. We’ve seen authors stuff their articles with 9-14 mentions of the location and that’s abusive and will be rejected.
5. Find a way to deliver 3 gems of information that can’t be found anywhere else about the geo-area you’re writing about.

Good Geo-Writing Examples:

• You’re writing about digital photography and you mention 3 of the most perfect spots to setup various photo shoots for each of the four seasons.
• You’re writing about the top 3 day spa’s are in a specific region and because you visited each one, you can offer an insight into what types of services are best. Keep it positive and if you’ve got nothing nice to say, this isn’t the medium to say it.
• You’re writing about how to find creative fitness activities in various major cities and you mention a bullet list of sports that are very popular in those regions and the history of why they are so popular in that region.

Do you have any geo-article-writing examples to add or comment on?

Some authors (no implied endorsement intended) who write or have written geo-targeted articles:

• Marsha Maung - ATV trails
• Audrey Okaneko - Scrapbooking
• Jason Gluckman - Hotels
• David Evarts - Skiing
• Gary Ogami - Building custom homes
• Richard Chapo - Wind Energy, Beaches

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 3, 2007 at 7:53 am

Views 460 | Comments (2)

New Feature- Subscribe To Article Comments

To make EzineArticles.com a more Web 2.0 (buzzword drop) site and to encourage a more engaged user-experience, in addition to the RSS feeds made available last month on comment threads we’ve added EMAIL ALERTS that article commentors can subscribe to be notified when new comments are added to any article that they left comments on. [example below the comment box]

As with our normal privacy policies, we will never sell or rent any email address that is used to subscribe to a comment thread. In order to subscribe to a comment thread, a user must post a comment on any article and have that comment approved by one of our moderators. They can unsubscribe at any time from one or all of the comment threads they are tracking. Lastly, this email follow up system is separate from this blog.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 2, 2007 at 9:45 am

Views 623 | Comments (0)

New Category- Flood Insurance

It’s the Spring-time here in the USA and this means lots of rain, crappy weather and for those in low lands or near river banks, the possibility of flooding… and on that not-so-happy note, today I wanted to introduce a new category: Insurance:Flood-Insurance

Most homeowners wrongly think that they are covered for Flood Insurance as it’s usually a separate insurance all together from regular homeowners or renters insurance… but that’s where my expertise ends and I hope yours begins. If you’ve got expertise in FLOOD INSURANCE area’s, we welcome your quality original article submissions.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 2, 2007 at 8:26 am

Views 197 | Comments (0)

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