 Article Writing & Marketing Insights |
Be Simple and Get Important Things Done
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(6 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
I’m fed up with my rationalizing the loss of agility that we have here at EzineArticles, as the size of our team grows… and along come EzineArticles expert author Jim Estill’s review of Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the 9 Traps of Winning by Robert J. Herbold.
- Sticking with yesterday’s business model
- Allowing your products [or services] to become outdated
- Clinging to your once-successful branding after it becomes stale and dull
- Ignoring your business processes as they become cumbersome and complicated
- Rationalizing your loss of speed and agility
- Condoning poor performance and letting your star employees languish
- Getting lulled into a culture of comfort, casualness, and confidence
- Not confronting turf wars, infighting, and obstructionists
- Unwittingly providing schizophrenic communications
Are you guilty of any of the above business traps?
 Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 19, 2007 at 8:10 am | Views 484 | Comments (12) |
Reporting a Splogger Research
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(6 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
(13) weeks ago, I submitted (4) extremely bad taste splogs that had ripped our members content to Google’s Blogger/Blogspot abuse reporter tool.
What I wanted to find out, was how long does it take their quality assurance team to act on reports of blatant sploggers of the worse kind…so bad that the URL of the blogspot itself was offensive enough to make a reject decision. The answer = 13 weeks.
I suspect we’ll see a faster response from them in the future. The (4) sploggers that I was reporting for abuse in my control group for this informal study did not monetize their activities with AdSense. If they did, I feel very confident that Google would have acted on dumping them in a day or two at most.
Moral of the story: You can feel a little more confident that the above Blogger/Blogspot abuse reporting tool is getting acted on by the quality assurance team at Google.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 18, 2007 at 1:26 pm | Views 487 | Comments (11) |
Twittering Chris Knight?
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(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
If you’re on Twitter, here’s an invitation to follow me:
Twitter.com/chrisknight
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 18, 2007 at 8:13 am | Views 349 | Comments (17) |
November New Article Email Alerts
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(6 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Must be the time of the season, but the stats are in for our November new article email alert list stats and here are the top 5 categories that experienced new member growth:
- Relationships:Affairs - 29.79% Growth
- Relationships:Singles - 19.35% Growth
- Relationships:Communications - 15.44% Growth
- Computers & Technology - 15.17% Growth
- Food and Drink: Soups - 14.74% Growth
Out of the 435 niche’s EzineArticles serves, only (9) had negative list growth. The bottom (3) include Real Estate: Homes - (3.85% Decline), Real Estate: Law - (3.19% Decline), and Health & Fitness: Heart Disease - (2.33% Decline).
All together, EzineArticles delivered 1,389,664 emails to 72,664 (5.4% growth over previous month) permission-based new article email alert members. We’re on track to end the year with 76k list members who receive new article alerts and this is about 24k short of our goal. Always open to your suggestions for how we can improve these email alerts.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 14, 2007 at 10:53 am | Views 460 | Comments (18) |
Article Comment Follow Up Stats
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(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Earlier this year in April, we added the functionality that allows article commentors to subscribe via email to be alerted when someone comments on an article that they have left a comment on.
(7) months later, we have 2,935 unique email subscribers to receive follow up comments on 3,127 unique articles. Not quite as explosive on the growth side as we had expected, but still a significant metric that shows user engagement…and another way that we bring repeat visitors back to your articles. :-)
Now, these numbers don’t correlate directly, but in the same time frame (April 2nd 07 till today), we accepted 4,771 new comments on articles. It’s our belief that allowing users to comment on articles adds more value to our members than it takes (for those who take the protectionism viewpoint that user comments divert traffic away from the author).
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 10, 2007 at 9:17 am | Views 409 | Comments (6) |
Lieurance-King Article Challenge Results
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(7 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Co-hosted by Suzanne Lieurance & Kristen King, with Jeff Herring, The Article Guy, The Lieurance-King Fall Article Challenge encouraged participating freelance writers to write and submit their NEW articles to article directories between November 1st and November 30th.
In no particular order, the following EzineArticles.com Expert Authors stepped up to the challenge and found themselves awarded with their “Golden PJs Award”:
Congratulations to the participants for all of their hard work, and to Suzanne, Kristen and Jeff for providing an opportunity for all participants to shine! Be sure to sign up for their 2008 challenge.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 7, 2007 at 8:58 am | Views 511 | Comments (16) |
38 Percent of Comments Tossed For Being Negative
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(13 votes, average: 4.23 out of 5)
A little more than a week ago, we were discussing how we’re only able to accept 21% of comments left by our users.
That discussion caused us to create a bunch of article comment rejection codes so that we could begin to see what the breakdown is as to why we couldn’t accept 79% of the incoming comments. Here is the first 6 days of December, comment stats (31.2% accepted):
While I don’t feel bad about the “Promotional” comments that were deleted, I’m concerned about the 17.9% of comments that were deleted for having bad grammar… I think we’ll be raising our tolerance of bad grammar on article comments that are substantiative.
(Continue Reading…)
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 6, 2007 at 9:37 am | Views 588 | Comments (25) |
Dead Links Are Expensive
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(6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
When it comes to delivering a positive user experience, any article in EzineArticles that has a dead or broken link is a liability.
BLOG QUESTION OF THE DAY: What should we do with articles that have bad links?
The best option being considered is notifying the member via email and via their EzineArticles Inbox of the fact that they have a dead or broken link with a gentle warning that if they don’t fix the problem within (7) days…that we’ll auto-remove the HREF statement behind their links so that the link is no longer active. Your thoughts?
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 5, 2007 at 8:48 am | Views 539 | Comments (26) |
Bonus 40 min Audio with Cathy Stucker
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(5 votes, average: 4.8 out of 5)
If you were on my last free teleclass for 2007 on how to profit from content with guest expert Cathy Stucker, author of Cash Content Formula, then you know there was a bonus round of more free training given beyond the original 70 minute call [hear the first 70 minutes replay here].
The Knight/Stucker 40 Minute Teleclass After The Show Bonus
Download the 17MB 40 minute MP3 here.
Here is some of what you’ll discover in this 40 min bonus audio replay:
- RSS full vs. partial feeds & the roll of RSS?
- Why “Mashups” have it all wrong.
- Why I think Cathy’s got it figured out when it comes to distributing through Amazon
- Amazon’s Kindle thing, .mobi ok, PDF not ok…but which competitor product will show PDF’s?
- How does Amazon rank search results when you list your products with them?
- Why 1:1 coaching should be your most expensive product, if offered at all?
- What your customers should buy before you coach them
- What my top 7 highest ROI activities are?
- Who should host your email list?
- How EzineArticles delivers a million+ permission-based email delivers a month
- Once you own CCF, what should be your first step?
- What my favorite teleseminar hardware device is and why.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 4, 2007 at 3:02 pm | Views 959 | Comments (6) |
Registered Trademark Circle R?
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(8 votes, average: 4.13 out of 5)
Judy writes in:
May I use a registered trademark symbol in the bio section as part of our company name? If so, what is the preferred HTML code?
Simple Answer = YES, it’s ok to include the ® if it’s for your company name or mark.
Complex Answer =
- Never put this in your article summary as it may break an RSS feed or not render properly in other uses.
- The lowest common denominator way to do the ® mark is by doing this: (R) as that will have no rendering problems on any platform.
- The HTML code for the “Circle R” is:
® and this is another way you could represent it in your resource box.
| Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 4, 2007 at 6:53 am | Views 378 | Comments (0) |
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