Your Own EzineArticles Followers or Fans
Need your help with a decision:
Soon you’ll be able to allow your EzineArticles readership to subscribe via email to receive email updates whenever you have a new article accepted/published on our site. Essentially, we’ll be helping you create a following or fan base using our traffic to become loyal fans of you and your article content.
We’ve already determined it would not be in real-time but rather a daily summary email would be compiled for each member. If you had 4 or 40 articles accepted in the last 24 hours, (1) single email summary of them would be created and sent to your EzineArticles fan base via email sometime early in the morning the next day.
Think for a moment about the user experience (and not what you’d want as an author). Should we:
- Combine all of the new article alerts for every author that a single email subscriber has requested (ex: A user subscribes to 7 authors he or she wants to track their newest articles – We’d auto-compile all of those 7 authors worth of new article updates in the last 24 hours and present them with a summary of them in one email) or
- Send one daily email summary for each author the member subscribed to? (If a user subscribed to 100 authors to track, they would get 100 emails if all 100 authors had 1 or more new articles published in the last 24 hours)
We’re trying to think ahead on this issue as the structure needs to be designed today for how this feature will work for a few years.
It’s hard to imagine if an email subscriber was a fan of 100 authors, that all 100 would have new articles posted in the last 24 hours as that probably just wouldn’t happen… but given our growth trajectory, I would be surprised if it would be a problem a year from now.
Your thoughts?
Chris, the solution seems clear to me: the fewer emails the better. If I had 10 favorite authors I wanted to follow, I would like to have the ability to get all that information in a single message, not 10.
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