New Feature Code-Named Rake
I love it when our team whips out new features and today’s newest feature is an improvement to the EzineArticles new article email alerts service:
Later this morning when the 435 new article alerts get delivered as usual, at the bottom of the listing of new articles will be the top 20 articles that were added in each category (1) year ago today. If there weren’t 20 new articles added a year ago today for each category, then it’ll serve up whatever number was added a year ago today.
What is “Rake”? The idea is to leverage the 20 links in an ezine principle that states that ezines with 20 links or more get more click throughs than ezines without 20 links while delivering our subscribers with access to articles they most likely have never seen before. TV shows do it all the time, it’s called a re-run. :) If you’ve never seen the article before, it’s new to you.
In addition, we’ve added a rule on this that I call “Clean Rake” because we’re auto-generating last years top up to 20 articles based on the category they are in right now rather than the category they were in when originally approved. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but many of our newbie editors don’t always get the category right the first time and within 6-72 hours or so after an article is approved the first time, our QC team will catch it and re-classify the article appropriately. That means in a year from now when today’s newest articles get promoted a 2nd time (assumes this new feature is a success), they’ll be promoted in the correct category.
Nicely done EzineArticles team!
So now you are using re-runs in a positive way! I love it when we can use strategies from other businesses in our own.
Just don’t adopt the Disney policy of “retiring” a classic movie only to re-release it later!
Catch you soon!
Jeff
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