James Kesel writes:

We really need more information as to what is effective and what is a waste of our valuable time. Our current software tells us that we are getting referrals from EzineArticles to each sites web pages but we need to know more details. Knowing what articles and EzineArticle tools are most effective will help.

Jim
cheapsaunasales.com

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Michelle L Devon (Michy) writes:

Very nice addition… however, that 1 on profile views made me feel inept. Humm, maybe I need to promote myself some…LOL

Love and stuff,,
Michy

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Mark writes:

Cool. More tools to help everyone be successful. Thanks

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Easiest way to promote your profile is via adding the WIDGET. You can find this within your AUTHOR TOOLS menu, under CREATE A WIDGET.

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Cassie writes:

Haha, I also have a whopping ONE profile view :)

This is a cool stat to have. It gives a kick in the butt to get us promoting and submitting more. Thanks!

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J writes:

Cassie,

That may or may not be an important stat for you. A lot of times the people looking at your profile are your “competitors” and other article writers CHECKING UP on you to rip off ideas/titles/keywords they see working for you.

About 3 weeks ago I even had someone who totally ripped off my profile, word for word… except changing about 10 words out of over 300.

Chris… a question for you…

Why is it that the “affiliate type marketers” aren’t forced to have “LIVE” profiles?

What I mean is this… you’d think a legit article writer/marketer would want his/her profile up to build trust!

My profile is up and these article re-writers/marketers can quickly look through my articles and see my keyword titles and how many views… but with their profiles… there’s absolutely nothing, you’d have to click their articles 1 by 1.

THEY’RE HIDING!!! Hmm, why is that?

I don’t think that’s fair to people who actually put up profiles.

Suggestions…

1. Either make it so they ALSO have live article links in their profiles with article view #’s even if they want to hide their identity and bio information and put nothing.

2. Make it so the public can’t see the number of article views on our profile pages… forcing them to have to click each and every article if they want to find that information. They’re obviously lazy, so they most likely won’t do much of that.

After being plagiarized by 3 different people with 12+ of my articles in the past 5 weeks, I’m forced to watch others. I’d like it to be harder for them to do that.

3. Have your EzineArticles programs or whatever pay particular close attention to people knocking off the most viewed articles.

Heck, I don’t even put my name to this post I’m so paranoid now. :) Just my thoughts, this place is still 10 times better than any other article directory/community.

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Cassie writes:

J,

Whether I have the option to see how many profile views I’ve received or not, it’s still not going to stop my “competitors” from checking up on me and ripping off my stuff. I had that happening before I could see how many people were looking at my profile. Now I just have an idea if anyone is even looking at all. These competitors and ripper off-ers can just as easily visit the website in my links and steal my content there.

Also, I may be considered a competitor to a lot of other expert author’s but in actuality, I’m viewing their profile to see if I like them, and if I do I’ll continue on to their blog/website/newsletter to learn even more. Or maybe I just want to read the rest of their articles because I really liked them.

There are a lot of jerks in this world who are going to steal our content but there’s nothing we can do about it. Chris and the EzineArticles team are always busy working behind the scenes to come up with ways to catch these guys, but in the meantime it’s nice that additional features are continually added to make our experience here that much better.

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

J,

I think what you meant was, why don’t we allow the public to see all of the associations between author names so that the public could build their own trust profiles like we do behind-the-scenes?

Wait…
Perhaps now I think you’re saying that everyone should have to post an extended author bio page that shows the aggregate traffic data.. ahhh, now I get it.

The extended author bio was a gift from us only to members who cared enough to upload their author photo and their extended bio.

You’re saying we should force everyone to see that so everyone could see all of the traffic on the table… Hmmm, I like that. Let me think on it.

Then you’re saying don’t make it public. Arggh.

Our CASM anti-derivative system already has been tuned to identify folks who are ripping any component of any article off.

The best anti-competitive weapon you can deploy: Ignore them and drive your article count higher daily with new quality original articles. Only a rare few will have the resolve to keep up with you.

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J writes:

Hi Chris,

Not everyone is a “BIG HUNK” of Wisconsin cheese like you, so obviously they might be uncomfortable with an author photo. ;)

What I was hinting at I’ll just say directly… I don’t like it when I have articles shoot past 1,000 views really fast and be on google’s first page almost instantly then have someone easily swipe the keywords, title, content, etc a few days later after they checked up on me through my profile… and knock me off the 1st page with my own information… making my articles DEAD before EzineArticles can ban them and delete the articles.

I know EzineArticles is doing A LOT to prevent this… what I am saying is that there are ways to make it harder on these LAZY INTERNET MARKETERS who are EXPERTS at RE-WRITING (not original writing)… that would be great. :)

I’ve read their tactics at a certain forum we both go to. I know there isn’t much you can do about them going after top 15 most viewed articles, but once they see you have a most viewed article they then go to your profile and look through it for your other HIGHLY VIEWED articles that they missed and then target those as well.

When I’ve been plagiarized in the past, I instantly go to their profiles to look through their other articles. But since they don’t have an extended profile because they’re HIDING and hope to be overlooked as well as too much trouble to expose, it takes me a lot longer to go through and sift out what else they’re infringing on.

So as to my unclear suggestions from before…

1. Either make it so EVERYONE can see everyone else’s traffic stats and articles like how it is with the extended author bio page… OR…

2. Make it so the extended author bio page is the same as it is now, but WITHOUT the article views to the right of each article. This way, people can’t look at 1 single page and check the views on 250 articles in a minute… they’d have to click on each individual article to get that information.

Yes I know this doesn’t prevent plagiarism and keyword stuff, but it HELPS slow down that stuff since we’re dealing with lazy people who wont take the time to go through 100’s of articles individually to find the traffic stats.

Not sure how much time your staff has to devote to plagiarism type stuff, but something like that should cut down your wasted time on that so your staff can focus more on approving articles instead.

I have other easy to implement suggestions to improve EzineArticles that have nothing to do with this. Interested? I can email them to you.

J (who has no EzineArticles mug after 100’s of articles) :(

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

J,

Did you know that you can also give us feedback suggestions from within your membership account? Look at the footer for a new fast feedback option.

We’d prefer to combat derivative/duplicate content submissions directly with software and human filters; and think it would benefit everyone if everyone’s page view data was aggregated for public display…as that would even the playing field.

Let us think on that some more…

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Ok, we’ve thought about this some more and have decided to REMOVE the VIEWS section of Extended Author Bio’s to level the playing field.

We’ll still keep the TOTAL views summary to show the strength that one author has over another in terms of interest attraction; but will not show the aggregate article views to the public until someone convinces us that the positive benefits of sharing that data for EVERY profile outweighs the negative of abuse from members who target high traffic articles to submit similar.

Expect this update to hit the site before the day is over.

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J writes:

OH WOW!

This encourages me to make more suggestions. It’s good to be heard. I’ll send more ideas tomorrow.

Hopefully this encourages more people to make suggestions and be more pro-active with EzineArticles since you value our feedback.

Hopefully the tracking on that change shows a big difference with plagiarism/gaming type stuff saving us all some time… may even affect the number of articles submitted.

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Angela Chen Shui writes:

Thanks for the new author profile views, Chris and Team and also for the fast response to J’s suggestion.

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Lance Winslow writes:

Wow, mine shows 2,500 and that sure is a lot in only one week, I guess this means people ought to be very careful how they portray themselves in their author profile section then?

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