Problem Articles 30 Day Purge Rule

Currently, there are 16,499 articles in a Problem status. These are articles that are suppose to be savable… meaning, they weren’t hard rejected by our editors, and with only a little bit of author attention, a high majority of them could be saved and accepted/published.

When our members receive a PA email (Problem Article), they fall into two very easy to identify camps:

New Rule: Articles that are flagged as having a problem status will be auto-purged in 30 days from the date our editors send the auto-generated email to our member asking them to fix a small problem so we can accept them. In addition, we’re building in an automated follow up reminder email to help encourage our members to fix the article, fix the relationship, so we can move forward together.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 30, 2007 at 9:29 am

Views 521 | Comments (10)

Deleted Articles Now Used To Compare

When articles are submitted, we check them in real-time (and with a finer check in post acceptance) against your current articles submitted & accepted. This comparative check is done to help prevent you from submitting articles you’ve already submitted on purpose or accident…and to prevent members from engaging in rewriting their own articles (something we think is evil).

This week, we’ve added another phase in this process by including comparative checking your new submissions against your deleted article submissions.

That means, if you delete an article that we previously accepted and try to re-submit it again, we’re going to reject it on the basis that you appear to be gaming the system. We have created a manual review process for the times when this happens by innocent mistake (which we know will happen).

As you may know, we compare article submissions against ALL submissions currently live on the site. There is coming a day in the near future that we will compare new submissions against ALL deleted submissions back to our first day of recorded history.

If all you do is submit quality original articles, this is a non-issue. :-)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 29, 2007 at 12:17 pm

Views 546 | Comments (13)

My Cash Content Formula Replay

Listen to the replay from last night’s free teleclass on how to profit from content:

My Cash Content Formula

Had a lot of fun last night with my guest expert, Cathy Stucker, author of Cash Content Formula. One recurring theme I heard over and over again as I listened to the replay was the need for massive amounts of action…and not waiting for the content, article or product to be ‘perfect’ before getting it out there. Hope you enjoy the replay.

Fast Action Bonus: Acquire your copy of Cash Content Formula [<–with this link] by the end of November 2007, and you’ll receive Cathy’s BONUS: “Quick Content Course” [before the rest of the market gets it] that includes a PDF on how to overcome the top (4) obstacles when writing new content, a video demonstration that shows you in real-time how to generate ideas for articles, and a one-hour teleseminar with Cathy that will walk you through the article writing process.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 28, 2007 at 11:51 am

Views 2,134 | Comments (27)

User-Gen Comments Stats

I had our dev-team create some new report functions so that I could review the current status of the comments flow being left/approved & rejected by our editorial team.

In the month of November, 1,434 comments were left on articles… 303 were accepted (21%), 907 were deleted/rejected (62%) by our editors, and 10 were rejected by our members/authors.

It’s important to share that comments approved and deleted between two dates and time don’t always correlate with the submitted comments due to small lag times between submission and acceptance/rejection.

Year To Date (YTD), 16,437 comments were left on articles… 6,102 were accepted (37%), 10,490 were deleted/rejected (64%) by our editors, and 107 were rejected by our members/authors.

The high rejection rate by our editors has me concerned, so we’ll be adding top rejection reasons for our editors to select each time they reject so that we can make sure the rejections are in line with our comment review positions.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 26, 2007 at 7:43 pm

Views 482 | Comments (32)

Free Teleclass On Profiting From Content

Interested in discovering how you can move from being a “writer” to becoming a true profitable “content producer“?

You’re invited to join me this Tuesday night November 27th from 7-8pm CST for the last FREE teleclass that I’ll be offering in 2007.

I’ll be interviewing someone who is earning a 6 figure income from content and has literally written the Cash Content Formula.

We’ll be covering rich topics together such as:

• How is content defined anyway? How should I think about content?
• What are some of the best ways to make money from content?
• Insider short-cuts to profits through quality content?
• Advice for article authors who want to make more money from their content.
• The (3) biggest mistakes that content producers make and how to avoid them.
• How to start profiting from content…where to start or advance first?

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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 26, 2007 at 12:48 pm

Views 1,233 | Comments (59)

The Nerd Handbook

Michael Lopp (Sr. Engineering Manager at Apple) has this great piece called “The Nerd Handbook” that is worth a read.

As I was reading his Nerd Handbook…highlighting the fact that Nerds live for working on “projects”… you could have easily substituted “article writers” for “nerds” because many of us who write articles view them as ‘creative projects’…

Lastly, Lopp has many interesting pieces in his “Writing” section. If you wanted to check out his latest book: Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 25, 2007 at 10:55 am

Views 456 | Comments (7)

Article Editing To Become A Premium Feature

I had hinted in an earlier blog entry that we’re moving to the day that editing articles will become a premium feature due to the intense volume of edits (well over 8,000 this month alone) that are commercial interest driven (nothing wrong with that) instead of added value for the user driven (such as improving the information value or credibility of the article with an edit).

We’ve been burning many internal discussion hours to sort this out and I wanted to share with you what we’re thinking so far:

1. Every article submission will automatically be given a (1) free edit credit to be used at any time during the life of the article. We’d hope that this credit would be used to improve the quality of the article, fix a typo that no one caught, add an extra insight to the article, etc…
   
   
2. We’ve determined that the page mutation rate would be too steep and unnatural if we allowed every premium member to do global resource box changes with the click of a few buttons. Our estimate is that in the first month of offering a global resource box change premium feature we’d hike from 8,000 articles being edited in a month to easily over 100,000 mutating. This is a trust and credibility issue with our users and traffic referral partners.
   
   
3. We have many business-class premium features in the planning stage for more than 2 years now and we’ve come to the realization that we must release the first feature in order to get this ball started. The first premium feature will be article edit credits combined with priority review for those edits (meaning fast review speed).
   
   

Questions:

For those who want to edit their articles beyond the (1) free edit per article, would you rather pay per edit with a pre-paid pack of edits (same concept as buying pre-paid cellular minutes) or would you rather sign up for a subscription service on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis that would include various levels of edits per price point or unlimited edits (same concept as buying a cellular service plan with a certain number of minutes/edits included per month on a subscription basis)?

Any other concerns or issues you think we should take into consideration on this new premium article edit feature?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 21, 2007 at 12:10 am

Views 558 | Comments (21)

Blog Innovation

Sometimes it’s the subtle improvements that we make that seems not worth mentioning, but when you add up all of the tiny innovations, you’re left with a big result in terms of a positive user experience.

Yesterday, our developer team implemented a way for you to see whenever myself or someone on the EzineArticles team comments in the blog as it’ll be highlighted in a light color. The purpose of this is to make it very clear when someone is speaking on behalf of EzineArticles vs. someone who is not an EzineArticles representative making a comment.

I saw the feature showing up in other blogs and thought it was brilliant because it made it very easy for me to spot the opinion within the conversation that I wanted to track. Hope you enjoy this small subtle improvement and if you run a blog yourself…you may want to implement this feature.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 20, 2007 at 9:16 am

Views 504 | Comments (21)

EzineArticles is 8 Years Old Today

On a chilly November 19th in 1999 EzineArticles.com was born. Today marks our 8th birthday. :-)

Frankly, today snuck up on us and we’ve been so busy behind-the-scenes that we didn’t plan any big party or promotion to celebrate this milestone.

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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 19, 2007 at 3:33 pm

Views 768 | Comments (50)

October 2007 Email Stats

Last month, we sent 1.4 million permission-based emails to 68,928 members (6.8% growth over previous month) across 435 new article email alert lists to promote your newest article submissions.

Out of the 435 niches we send email alerts for, 423 of them had positive list growth, (3) had no growth and (9) had list attrition. The bottom 12 included Teleseminars, Auto Racing, Insurance, Pets, Home Improvement, Archery, Long Term Care Insurance, Shopping Product Reviews, Teleselling, Cricket, Disability Insurance, and Customer Service.

Top 3 niches by email member list growth were Shopping & Product Reviews: Gifts, Charter Jets, Anniversaries, and Speech Pathology with each of these 4 having more than 70% month over month list growth.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 13, 2007 at 9:15 am

Views 530 | Comments (3)

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