Kelly Ballard – Author Spotlight

EzineArticles Expert Author and intuitive guide and healer, Kelly Ballard is today’s Author Spotlight.

Kelly specializing in helping others to discover positive solutions for immediate change in their lives. Through workshops, private sessions, mentoring programs and meditations, Kelly uses a variety of techniques to release blocks, enabling people to experience their most abundant and prosperous lives today.

In her article, Overcoming Blocks When Meditating, Kelly uses her expertise to identify common obstacles faced by her clients that halt their meditation progress and offers her guidance to help overcome those obstacles. She is very accessible in her writing, using understanding and positivity to gently nudge you in the right direction to overcoming those hurdles and progress with the meditation practice.

Kelly Ballard – 5 Ideal Author Credentials

1. Uses her expertise to inform and enlighten
2. Formats her articles with numbered lists and easy to read paragraphs
3. No URLs/links in the article body
4. Extended Author Bio and Photo uploaded
5. No blatant self-promotion in the article body

An EzineArticles Platinum Member since May 2007, Kelly has 45 active articles with over 8,000 views. Her informational articles can be found primarily in the Self Improvement and Women’s Interests categories and she also shares her expertise in the Book Reviews and Arts and Entertainment categories.

Thanks Kelly Ballard for being an Expert Author and a positive force in the EzineArticles community!

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 30, 2008 at 2:05 pm

852 views | Comments (7)

Building Your Fan Base

HUGE NEW FEATURE RELEASED: Your EzineArticles readership fans can now subscribe via email to receive alerts whenever you have a new article published.

There are two places that we’ll be permission email list building on your behalf:

1. Your expert author URL (example)
2. Your extended expert author bio URL (example)
   • You must have your author photo and bio uploaded in your profile in order to have a public extended expert author bio URL.

Important notes about how this works:

• Email alerts are sent once per day in a summary format.
• Subscribers can follow more than one author at a time, but will get one summary email.
• All subscribers must confirm their opt-in request (double opt-in).
• The template is similar to our category email subscriber alerts.
• We’re not providing it yet, but every member will see their email subscriber count totals in their stats box soon.
• We will never be sharing who specifically subscribes to your email alerts; nor will we sell or rent these addresses.

There is nothing you need to do to enable this feature. It’s just one more way we’re adding value to your EzineArticles membership by using our millions of weekly visitors to subscribe via email to be alerted whenever you have a new article accepted.

Let us know what you think of this new feature?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 29, 2008 at 12:15 pm

1,400 views | Comments (14)

Value of Referrer Data?

QUESTION: If you knew the source of the traffic that helped deliver traffic to your articles listed with EzineArticles, what specifically would you do with that data?

ie: If we invest the ability to provide the data behind the source of traffic for every article you have listed with us, what actions might you do with that data?

I’m not talking about the keyword and keyphrase data; I’m talking about which sources of traffic brought visitors to your article including both internal (email alerts, RSS, widgets, etc) and external (search engines, social media sites, blogs/sites that link back, etc.) sources.

I’m not convinced our members will do anything positive (submit more articles, increase the quality of your articles, refer more of your friends to EzineArticles) with the traffic referral data but I’m open to your arguments for why we should provide this data?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 28, 2008 at 10:43 am

802 views | Comments (35)

Category View Date Change

Previously, articles in what we call the “category view” were sorted by APPROVED DATE. This is the last date an article was approved on. Some members figured out that all they had to do is edit their article, have us review it, and they were able to bring their old article to the front of the line in the category view.

Now, articles in the category view are sorted by original SUBMIT DATE with a secondary sort by article ID. This prevents the above gaming of the system.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 25, 2008 at 7:32 am

678 views | Comments (18)

Article Writing Open Mic

Today, the open mic is yours. You can ask any question that is on your mind about Article Writing, Article Marketing, EzineArticles, and anything in between?

For the next few hours, I’ll do my best to answer your questions. Before asking your question, be sure to read our blog comment policy, specifically that we don’t allow resource boxes or URL’s to be included in blog comments.

Are there questions I won’t be answering? Yes, all of the questions you think I won’t answer, I won’t be… but everything else is fair game. :) Got it? Let’s go, who will be first? What is on your mind?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 24, 2008 at 1:13 pm

1,201 views | Comments (60)

Clustering When Article Reviewing

There has been some chatter about how we cluster articles to be reviewed that I’d like to clarify our position about why we do what we do.

Example: Basic level author submits an article Thursday, 2nd article on Friday, 3rd article on Saturday and 4th article on Sunday. Today, when their Thursday article comes up for review, all 4 articles will be loaded in our editors queue for processing at once rather than in the order they were received.

This has been the way it’s been since the beginning and here are the reasons why:

1. Improved processing speed: Every members pattern is unique to them in most cases and once that pattern is identified, it’s easier for one Editor on our team to review all of their submissions at once instead of the chance 4 different Editors will review this members articles.
2. Improved consistency in review: If one Editor is doing the review, chances are high they will be more consistent in review opinion than (4) different Editors reviewing this example members articles.
3. Decreased support costs for us: If we reviewed articles in the order they came in with no clustering, members will flood us with questions as to why we reviewed 1 or 2 of their articles but ignored their 3rd and 4th when in reality, we’re just running behind by 4-7 days in review.

In an ideal world, we’re not running behind by 4-7 days for any member; but every time we hire more people… you’all submit a ton more articles. :) BUT, I think we may get ahead this time as (5) new full time Editors started today and will be up to speed by the end of October.
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 22, 2008 at 2:29 pm

760 views | Comments (10)

Include Your Full Name

Resource Box Tip: Always include your FULL Name in your Resource Box.

Failure to include your full name at the start of your resource box tells us that you aren’t interested in a relationship with your reader and only care about getting a click back to your website. Your name as stated in your Author Name (we call it the By-Line) should be restated at the start of your Resource Box for maximum credibility.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 22, 2008 at 2:11 pm

587 views | Comments (5)

Amazon Listings Improved

Many EzineArticles expert authors who have products listed on Amazon.com have listed their ISBN’s/ASIN’s to be included in their EzineArticles Expert Author extended bio. To help bring a distinction between Hardcovers, Paperbacks, and Audio CD’s, we’ve added the automatic updates so that your profile looks better.

An overview example of what the changes look like:

• Recommended Books is now Recommended Hardcovers.
• Recommended Books is now Recommended Paperbacks.
• Recommended Books is now Recommended Paperbacks, Hardcovers.
• Recommended Books is now Recommended Audio CDs.

Here’s a link with a reminder how to update your EzineArticles profile to include your Amazon ISBN/ASIN.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 19, 2008 at 1:56 am

579 views | Comments (9)

EzineArticles Scheduler Enters Beta

You’ve been wanting to SCHEDULE articles for release at a future date & time… EzineArticles Premium members are the 1st to get access to this new service starting TODAY in beta.

Technically, we haven’t launched the Premium membership service even though it’s been live for a month as we continue to test & improve the back-end systems before a formal launch hopefully this month yet.

Premium members have immediate access to the article scheduler service right now. This allows you to save time by submitting a series of new articles, perhaps dozens or hundreds at a time to be released at future preset dates that you determine.

Next week I’ll be sharing more in-depth how this new article scheduling service works, but for now Premium members can try it out at the bottom of your article submission form.

Essentially, your article submissions are reviewed in normal time (means priority speed because this feature is our 1st of many for Premium members), if they are rejected, that’ll happen in the normal priority review cycle (ie: under a week) and if they are approved, you’ll find them under a new tab called “Scheduled For Release – Not Live (yet).”

NOTE: Live existing articles that are edited can not be scheduled as this new scheduler service is only for new article submissions. In addition, the normal email to author, EzineArticles email alerts, RSS feeds and Twitter syndication features are all delayed until the article is released live on the site on the date set by the author.

Open to your thoughts for how this new scheduler can be improved on.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 16, 2008 at 12:10 pm

906 views | Comments (23)

Sort Authors By FIRST and LAST Names

Previously, you could only sort EzineArticles Expert Authors by FIRST name.

Now, after completely rewriting some of the back-end of our database, you can sort by both FIRST NAME *and* LAST NAME; in addition to BY COUNTRY (Most Active Countries).

Thank you to everyone who questioned our logic and requested a LAST NAME sort order.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 12, 2008 at 11:41 am

598 views | Comments (10)

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