 Article Writing & Marketing Insights |
User Suggested Article Topics
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For the past week we’ve been testing a new concept of giving your article readers the ability to suggest new article topics for you to write about. This AJAX feature is located in the upper right corner of every article in the article tools.
So far, we’re underwhelmed with the performance of this feature.
After the 1st week of it being live, we had to add a moderation queue due to inappropriate uses:
- Some used it to self promote themselves, spamming or taunting the author
- Others used it to ask the author write about things we wouldn’t accept if they did write it
- Some reported authors as being bad (we think because it’s so close to the report author feature)
- Some left thought fragments & gibberish that didn’t give enough meaning to be valuable to an author
- Some asked the author to write about topics the author wasn’t an expert in (unrelated niche article topic requests)
…a mess of input.
But, now that we’re human reviewing the incoming article topic suggestions…we feel that our members will get value from the feature enough to continue the testing of it. Expect about (1) business day of delay before valid article topic suggestions show up in your account.
To access the results of these article topic writing suggestions:
- Log in to your EzineArticles account
- You’ll find a link on the left side of your article stats called “NEW SUGGESTIONS.” Click that.
- Find the author name within your account that has any suggestions and click it for a list of the article topic suggestions to date.
This feature may get pulled if it doesn’t generate significant amount of value… but we’ll run it for at least a few more weeks to see how it goes.
Your thoughts?
 Posted by Christopher M. Knight on July 30, 2008 at 8:29 am | 753 views |
10 Comments »
Hi,
I like this idea and think it will give us (authors) the opportunity to give our reader base what they are looking for.
Unfortunately the spammers, as always, will take advantage of this new feature but hopefully the won’t destroy its potential.
I like the comment above to maybe categorize suggestions for all authors to see, this could even be done by the user submitting the suggestion.
Let’s hope this works and the standard of submissions improves.
Regards Colin
[Reply]
Well, I finally got my first suggestion today. I was happy to get it. So, now I am thinking that this feature needs to be in more places. For instance;
The Author’s Profile Page
The pages for Top Authors in each category, by the authors name
More promently displayed on each article
[Reply]
Additionally, is there a way to delete these suggestions once you do write the article? For instance I got one and then wrote two articles on the subject, the next day. Now, I want to erase that suggestion, because it’s completed and wait for new suggestions?
[Reply]
Lance,
We provided a way to HIDE the suggestion instead of DELETE it, but I suppose we could change that to DELETE instead of HIDE.
I don’t care either way… Just thought we’d have less member questions for those who delete a suggestion and forget what they just deleted.
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Maybe modify the feature somewhat to enable everyone to suggest article topics and let all authors browse recent suggestions?
Alternatively, maybe all suggestions made within a certain category (e.g., relationships) would be viewable to authors with articles published in that category?
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