What Will You Do With Your Extra Day?

Every (4) years, you get the gift of an ‘extra’ day. Today is that day, Leap Year. What are you going to do with this gift of an extra 24 hours today that you didn’t have for the past 3 years?

You could fill your day with article writing and marketing activities, or you could just sit back and be entertained:

• How to Propose to a Man in Leap Year
• Will You Marry Me? Why Women Should Take Advantage Of A Leap Year?
• February 29 – How Will I Spend My Extra Day?

Today is a “FREE” day… What will you do with it?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 29, 2008 at 10:16 am

817 views | Comments (1)

Article Diagnostic Center Launched

Dead or broken links in any article in EzineArticles.com is a liability because it creates a bad user experience and destroys credibility.

For over a year, we’ve studied the threat of dead/broken links and after several failed tries at rolling out different ways to address this problem… I’m happy that we’re finally rolling out a new feature in your EzineArticles Membership account:

Article Diagnostic Center

Over the next month, we’re rolling out email notifications to the accounts with the most problems. Until then, if you want to see if any of your articles have broken link problems with them, here’s how you can access it:

1. Log in to http://Members.EzineArticles.com/
2. Click on AUTHOR TOOLS
3. Click on DIAGNOSTIC CENTER
4. Review any articles you have that our automated dead/broken link detector identified.

Now, there are some times when we may identify a link in your articles that is not dead. If that’s the case, you can click on “Report as Valid” option. This will notify our humans to check the links. Upon agreeing with you, we’ll notify you that all is well and thank you.

Automated & Human Review Process

The identification of your links as being valid or dead/broken is automated on a periodic basis. After you update or fix your broken links, our humans will review your submission/fix and notify you after your link fix is approved.

The end goal is to help you fix broken/dead links in any of your articles so that our users have a positive experience and you look better because the link to your website in your resource box works.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 28, 2008 at 8:02 am

1,308 views | Comments (14)

EzineArticles MousePads

For fun, we had a limited batch of EzineArticles Expert Author mouse pads created:

We won’t be selling them, but we will be sending them throughout the year for various promotional events that are in the planning stages.

The first batch went to hundreds of USA-based authors who submitted the most articles in the last year. We have a second limited batch being sent in 2 weeks to EzineArticles Expert Authors in Canada, The UK, and Australia.
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 26, 2008 at 6:29 am

1,060 views | Comments (19)

Update Your Top 10 Most Viewed Articles

This is such a powerful and yet, simple concept:

To Do Today: Update Your 10 Most Viewed Articles With Useful Insights:
**Increase Comprehensiveness by 10-15%**

1. Log in to your EzineArticles Membership account.
2. Click on AUTHOR TOOLS, then VIEW MY ARTICLE REPORTS.
3. If you have more than one author name in your account, click the author name that has the most aggregate article views.
4. Sort by Most Viewed and make a note of your top 10 or so articles by view count or use the PRINT VIEW to print out a friendly version of your most viewed articles.
5. Edit each one of these articles, giving each of them a 10 minute value-added makeover in the article body. Include additional tips or insights that you’ve discovered since you originally wrote the article. Attempt to make each of your top 10 articles more “comprehensive” without empty verbosity.

Reason: The market has spoken with their attention as to which of your articles is most valuable. By editing your top 10 most viewed articles, you’re acknowledging the positive traffic karma that has been bestowed on your articles and adding more unique & useful value for your readership.

When you UPDATE your most popular articles and ADD a sliver of more unique value, you’re pushing the leverage buttons on the forces that have already attracted a lot of attention to your articles.

Suggestion: Don’t be greedy and only update your Resource Box. Can I get a big group “YAWN”? NO! Instead, invest your 10 minutes per article by updating your article body with your freshest insights and understandings on the topic at hand. I have this strong conviction that you’ll be rewarded with even more traffic from our readership and interest in your most viewed EzineArticles.

It makes sense, right? To focus on adding more value to your most viewed articles with hopes that you’ll accelerate your articles exposure rate.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 25, 2008 at 6:38 am

1,583 views | Comments (40)

Inactive Member Audit

You may know that EzineArticles is the platform for over 85,967 expert authors… On top of that, we have tens of thousands of members who have signed up over the years and done nothing.

Last week, we identified a little over 18,000+ inactive members (2004-2007 sign ups) and sent them a segmented personalized mailing inviting them to participate, less lose their account so that the author names they had reserved can be used for members who want to be ‘active’.

The good news: I’m watching a daily email report that shows hundreds of old members logging into the site, updating their bio and author photo and sending in their first set or series of articles.

The bad news: We accidentally included a few hundred members that were active. Oops. Our apologies for this mistake. Normally we do a sampling size and audit our own segmented mailings prior to release. We had a sample size of 40 and thought we were good to go. Turns out our export logic wasn’t correct by a few percentages. Rest assured, none of our active members have anything to worry about in terms of their account status.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 24, 2008 at 2:18 pm

1,162 views | Comments (15)

Nick Usborne – 5 Writing Rituals

EzineArticles Expert Author Nick Usborne recently came out with a guide for copywriters and other commercial writers (like article writers) called: “Writing Rituals”

I’ve reviewed his 45 page PDF (it’s a fast & entertaining read) where he makes an analogy about his brother, the Cabinet Maker [See Cabinet EzineArticles] and how he approaches a cabinet job as it relates to a writing job. What results from the thought process is a set of (5) Writing Rituals.

Who it’s’ really targeted for: People who struggle with procrastination and distractions when writing…that often leads up to intense stress that’s just not necessary. Nick’s 5 writing rituals provides a framework to help this type of individual get from where they are now to where they need to be.

I’m a big believer in everyone having or creating their own “writing ritual” system for success. It’s $29: Writing Rituals

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 20, 2008 at 10:05 am

982 views | Comments (3)

Help For Accidental Keyphrase Abuse

As you may have heard, we’re walking away from members who send in keyword and keyphrase repetition abuse because it provides for a poor user experience and destroys credibility.

This week, we opened up one of our proprietary article review tools so that our members can see what our editors see when our automated repetition-abuse system identifies a potential keyword or keyphrase abuse.

If your article was soft-rejected for keyword/keyphrase abuse, you’ll be able to immediately see the excessive keywords or keyphrases or both are highlighted.

I’ve purposely made the image on the right very small to protect the member who abused a 3-word keyphrase (10) times in a ~390 word count article [that's excessive].
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 20, 2008 at 9:47 am

1,231 views | Comments (17)

Articles Bring Sales Leads

EzineArticles Expert Author & Life Coach/Christian/ & Motivational Speaker Henrietta Elegunde of London asked me:

If your articles are not bringing you sales leads, what can you do to improve this?

It’s a question asked often enough that I asked Henrietta for permission to post her question along with my response here in the blog.

Here’s what I recommend that Henrietta changes on her 22 articles and any future article submissions:

• Immediately cut your article word count in half. Two 550 word articles will usually deliver more traffic than one single 1100 word article.
• People are begging to buy from you; but you’ve made it difficult for them to purchase: If you want to make sales, you MUST have a website URL in EVERY SINGLE one of your resource boxes.
• Consider changing your Resource Box from “Here’s who I am” to more of a “Here’s what I can do specifically for you the reader”.
• Increase your article inventory count. You’re at 22 articles. Sorry, that’s a small splash in the bucket in today’s Internet. Bring your article count up into the hundreds over the next year.
• Expand your Article Title’s by another 30-45% longer. They are a bit short. Longer titles gives you more opportunities to hook interested readers.

Henrietta: Overall, I really like the fact that you’ve uploaded your author photo, your articles are very visually easy on my eyes and inviting to read, and you continually submit new articles over time (consistency is a key to success). I’m scared for you because you included your email address in your articles. That’s not a good idea anyway you slice it because your articles will be around the Internet long after you’ve closed your email account due to massive incoming spam.

All: If you’ve had success converting your article traffic leads into sales leads, which single strategy provided you the most ROI?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 19, 2008 at 2:51 pm

1,139 views | Comments (16)

Is Your Resource Box Missing A CTA?

Today’s article writing lesson is aimed at the Expert Author who is an expert at their craft, but perhaps not the best in the area of Sales & Marketing.

The tip: Make sure your Resource Box has a Call To Action (CTA) in it.

Examples of Resource Boxes with good CTA’s:

• Visit my website at: http://Your-Company-Name.com/ to discover how you can get [insert benefit here].
• Sign Up For A Free Weekly Email Newsletter To Solve More Problems Like These: http://Your-Company-Name.com/
• Get a Free Special Report that gives you 16 ways to build your email newsletter at http://EmailUniverse.com/subscribe/

Skip the blah blah blah about all of your wonderful accomplishments and awards you’ve won. Jump immediately into the benefit the reader will get from you when they do the ONE (1) SINGLE ACTION you encourage them to do in your Resource Box.

Lastly, don’t do your pitch or CTA in the Article Body. The article body is the GIVE; the resource box is the TAKE.

Have you tested various CTA’s and if so, which formula or requested action have brought you the best results?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 18, 2008 at 7:44 am

1,367 views | Comments (13)

Nearly Perfect RSS Implementation

As simple as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is, not everyone gets it or figures out how to implement it right… I came across an implementation that I thought was nearly perfect and wanted to share it with you.

Check out the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly

What’s so great about their RSS implementation?

• They didn’t scrape every feed we offered and instead, focused only on articles from our Elder Care category that fit perfectly with their niche.
• Because their site is for “Care of Elderly” and because they used our “Elder Care” RSS feed, their audience wins with highly relevant and valuable content and our members win with highly qualified traffic coming to their Elder Care articles!

As a reminder, we have an email list you can subscribe to called “EzineArticles RSS-Publishers” (5th on the list on this page) that we plan on sending a series later this year on how to implement RSS feeds into your website projects. Go sign up today.xml :)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 14, 2008 at 9:56 am

1,175 views | Comments (5)

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