Jennifer writes:

I’m curious as to what you do all day at work. What’s your schedule like? What do you specifically do? Is it flexible or do you work off schedules and stuff?

Article question… why does EzineArticles.com allow titles such as “Dog Training – 10 Rules for Dog Training”.

People that do that are obviously stacking a keyword in the title and it looks dumb. I understand why they do it, but why not force them to just say “10 Rules for Dog Training”?

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Jennifer,

Lately I’ve been restless and I come in at 11pm at night, work till 2:30 or 3am; go home, come back at 7 or 8 or 9 and then work till 3:30-4pm; head to the gym, family time and then work for a little while longer or repeat all over again. I’m a little over-connected with 3 notebook computers that bridges my daily experience, iPhone and broadband installed in the trunk of each of my vehicles (Cradlepoint EVDO WiFi routers with Verizon).

The one thing that is non-negotiable with my time is fitness time late afternoons usually; and I make time for family balance daily.

My schedule is not rigid and quite flexible thanks to the excellent team we have built over the years.

What specifically do I do? Today my duties ranged from reviewing payroll to accounts payable, reviewing new products that are in the development pipeline, writing recruiting ads for the new positions I expect to fill in October, writing copy for the newsletter & this blog, reviewing budget forecasts, twittering (including a few personal tweets), meeting the new people on our team (There are 5 people who started Monday that I feel ashamed to share that I haven’t met yet), to responding to new partnership requests to identifying new partners or clients we should be engaging, to reviewing statistics & reports, tracking support tickets from members, shipping additional EzineArticles mugs to people who complain their spouse or BFF took theirs, to reading member feedback, checking out who the new Premium members are to whiteboarding, to problem solving (usually in the form of question asking rather than solution providing), to reading & tracking competitors and trends that might impact our future or our members future.

The general themes that drive all of my activities are speed obsession & positive user/member experience advancement; employee satisfaction; and are we finding small incremental ways to innovate daily.

Lastly, the question you had on Dog Training; There are far worse aggressions that we’re clamping down on than this type of keyword abuse.

[Reply]

Jennifer writes:

I’m full of questions. You may regret allowing me to participate in this open mic thing with you. :)

I don’t remember where, but recently you put up a graph showing EzineArticles.com traffic stats.

It appeared that the highest traffic days for EzineArticles is mid-week. I guess my question is… what are the 2 highest traffic days at EzineArticles?

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

The link for that is found in this blog to the right nav lower. EzineArticles Traffic Stats by Alexa.

We’re honored to be at an Alexa rank of 288 today (that’s a 3 month avg, so technically, we’re at 234 as of yesterday but it fluctuates). If you look at the graph, you can see dramatic fluctuations on our traffic intra-week but consistent when viewed over time.

Monday’s are typically the peak traffic day and Saturday’s are typically the low point each week.

After Monday, Tuesday/Wednesday & Thursday tie for 2nd highest traffic days.

[Reply]

Mary Kathryn Donachy writes:

I have been learning so much from the info you send. I feel I’m still in the middle of things. Will you be continuing this powerful education for us for awhile? I don’t have a specific question yet, I feel you are going along in baby steps for me so I am able to digest an issue at a time. Just hope you can keep it going for awhile. There’s a lot of wisdom in the way you are doing this.

Mary

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Mary,

I don’t intend to do another one of these “Open Mic’s” until sometime in 2009.

I intended to give a solid 4-6 hours to this blog post over the next 12 hours or so and then let it become part of the archive (that’s a gentle way of saying I intend to close the thread sometime in the next 12-18 hours). If you’ve got a question or want clarity on a path or anything else I can help you with… Now’s the time to tackle me with it. :)

[Reply]

Kathy Koch writes:

Thanks for this opportunity. I’ve always wanted to know what EzineArticles.com is doing in Green Bay, Wisconsin, of all places. I used to live there, working as a professor at UW-Green Bay, and I’m having a hard time picturing such a powerful resource being based there. Green Bay has its advantages, but it’s not the tech or literary center of America! Why Green Bay?

I’ll be there in April. Could I stop by to take a look around?

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Kathy,

After Brett Favre (I call him “Jet Favre” now) left, I’m not sure why we’re sticking around either. ;-)

There is a church here in Wausau, Wisconsin that had a sign posted: “God will never leave you for the Jets!”

There are some great upsides to this area including the quality of the team we’re able to attract, lower cost of housing, a nice new airport expansion recently, and plenty of food/entertainment options. Population is about 200k-250k in the county & surrounding area.

Sorry, we don’t give tours at this time; but someday should we build our own headquarters *.plex I’m sure we may open it up to visitors. I will take more photos of the place and perhaps a video before the year is over to give you a good feel for the place. Watch this blog for details.

[Reply]

Christina Sponias writes:

Hi Chris!

I have many questions too!

I read your first answer. I think that it’s very good that you spend also time with your family. Do you have children?

Now, my first question about article writing and marketing:

How many live articles does an author need in order to have a traffic beyond 1000 visitors?

And, when will I receive a mug or pad, or whatever from EA? I never receive anything! Not that I really mind, but why? Greece is not so far!

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Cris,

I know some folks share a lot of personal stories about their family life. I’m not one of those. My cat is fair game though and his name is Fluffy. He’s a Maine Coon.

Article traffic: The typical article attracts 20-250 visitors per year and a typical CTR is 1-12% for the URL in your resource box.

If it were my goal to attract 1,000 unique visitors per day from my articles alone, I’d focus on reaching the 500-2,000 article inventory range and evaluating performance from there.

I see you’re at 465 live articles right now and your CTR is a bit better than the norm. Congrats.

As for the mugs: We’ve tried shipping them overseas and they arrive broken too many times. I’ll see what we can do about getting you a Mouse Pad. Make sure your postal address is correct and updated in your Account Profile. A lot of the experiments we did with members in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand came back undeliverable even after we used 3rd party address verification… plus was pretty expensive when our members in general I think would rather have us divert limited resources to increasing article review speed.

[Reply]

Jennifer writes:

Hmm, I never got a mug… but I think my address is wrong. You probably still have my Florida address and not my Texas one. Shucks!!

Next question(s)…

How many editors do you have now… 40+? Also… how many articles does EzineArticles approve each day on average?

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Jennifer,

How many Editors do we have: Dozens.

How many articles do we approve daily? Thousands.

[Reply]

Ellen Violette writes:

How do you connect EzineArticles to twitter?
And why would people want to do that?

My clients are asking and I need clarification.
Thanks.

[Reply]

Christina Sponias writes:

I better ask you my second question now and I guess I won’t ask more because I have many messages to send to my contributors and individual ones, depending on their case… I don’t have time to make a list with questions for you and you have many other questions to answer!

Anyhow, my second and last question is: why do you allow authors that write articles with many grammar and syntactic mistakes publish their articles? I’ve read a few horrible articles and I felt ashamed for them. How can your team allow such horrible articles belong to EA?

I’m a foreigner, so I have to pay a reviser before I submit my articles. I respect the English language. I believe you must oblige all authors to do the same.

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Cris,

That’s a fair question. We do reject thousands of articles monthly for poor grammar, spelling & sentence structure. That said, our opinion is that the majority of our experts are experts in their chosen field with only a small handful being experts in article writing.

You are smart to hire a reviser or someone to review your articles before submission. I wish more of our members do this including the ones who have English as their native tongue! :)

[Reply]

Christina Sponias writes:

Thank you for your previous answer. I saw it while I was posting my second question!

I love cats too, but I never had one.

[Reply]

Shirley Bass writes:

Hi Chris,

I see you are answering a few personal questions. I am wondering how you did in the race you ran this past weekend?

I saw the announcement on Twitter, but not the results.

Shirley Bass

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Shirley,

I ran the 13.1 mile half-marathon in 1 hour 55 minutes and 45 seconds for an average pace of about 8:46-8:50 per min/mile.

[Reply]

Shirley Bass writes:

EzineArticles is impressive. You keep the authors coming back, not just because it is a reliable source for getting articles read, but it is something you do. What is one of your secrets that has made EzineArticles what it is today?

Shirley Bass

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Shirley,

In no particular order:

• Speed.
• User-obsession.
• Integrity.
• Daily Innovation.
• Long-term focus.
• Permission-based email.
• Smart team behind the scenes. :)
• Always wanting to give more than is expected.
• High quality expert authors who enjoy associating with their peers.

I’m sure I’m missing a few of our secrets here, but don’t want to give the competition too many ideas. :]

[Reply]

Shannon writes:

Hi Chris. I’m not sure if you can answer this, but I’ve been thinking about it, so I’ll give it a whirl. I just became a premium member and I love the increased speed of everything. As far as scheduling, right now I am using it to ensure I have a continuing flow of articles. Tomorrow my son has a field trip that I am chaperoning so I wrote extra articles over the last few days for release tomorrow and I love being able to do this.

I’ve read people debating about how to best schedule articles, but I’m sort of lost on this. I am relatively new to article writing and marketing, but I had always just asumed that if I did my homework and researched / wrote on a topic well that the article would do fine no matter when it was released (or if I had other articles released in the same day.) I always just wrote and submitted articles as I had time and didn’t worry too much about the rest.

But seeing the traffic stats that you just posted, now I am starting to rethink my go with the flow method. I know you can’t share other author’s strategies or ideas behind this, but am I naive in thinking that a well written article will be fine no matter when I submit or schedule it?

I want to use my premium membership to it’s full advantage, but I’m happy enough with the speed and flexibility it offers me without over thinking it. Am I just making this too hard? Just wondering if you can share any insights or advantages to a more strategic approach?

Thanks for taking our questions. It’s very helpful. Shannon

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Shannon,

Glad you like the new Article Release Scheduler feature that is still in beta, but appears to be working excellently.

Despite the fact that others who spend giagantanormous amounts of wasted time figuring out how to game our system for maximum traffic game; In the big picture of things, I’m not sure it matters WHEN specifically an article is Published.

I do know that we get stressed out around 4:59pm CST each day when Premium members hammer us hard with new submissions when we’d prefer them to just schedule the release rather than expect us to stay later every day to get their last minute article submission reviewed. They are trying to be the last article in the category view over night.

BUT, This is going to change today thanks to a Premium member who made an argument that our logic is wrong. Watch for an announcement on that later this week. Essentially, the article date used for the Category View is going to be the SUBMIT DATE, not the APPROVED DATE. This will prevent members from submitting their articles endlessly with hopes to game us to get back included in the recent new articles in the Category View.

[Reply]

Shirley Bass writes:

Thank you for answering my questions.

There is one thing no one can take from EzineArticles and that is your personality and ability to make the authors feel welcomed.

That is something I will always appreciate about EzineArticles, among the many other things.

EA certainly does give more than expected.

With Gratitude,

Shirley Bass

[Reply]

Shannon writes:

Thanks Chris – that does help. I’m sticking with the way I’ve always done it – just submitting the articles when they are ready – and prescheduling them on the days when I have to be away, which is a GREAT feature. I try to have everything done by the time my kids are home from school anyway. But otherwise, I suspect I’m better off spending my time writing and researching my articles to boost my inventory rather than worrying about scheduling them. It’s worked well for me so far – why make it harder than it needs to be? Thanks again. Shannon

[Reply]

Jennifer writes:

Chris, you’re the best!! Thank you for being accessible.

Ok, onto a problem that is plaguing me here.

I’m being ambushed by plagiarizers left and right. Over the last 5 months I have had somewhere around 25 “author names” plagiarize me.

I know you think it’s an honor and I shouldn’t worry about it, but I can’t let it go because of the principle of the matter.

My question is why does EzineArticles sometimes ban a person who plagiarizes me, sometimes temporarily suspends them, and other times just lets them re-write the article even though it’s already a re-written article OF MINE?

Is there a degree factor when deciding this… like what degree did they plagiarize? I noticed 2 of the people who plagiarized me had 100’s of articles and they weren’t banned… and I suspect they got a lot of those articles by plagiarizing.

I just wish your team would ban these people without remorse or put restrictions on them.

I just caught some guy today who ripped off 3 of my articles and he only has 10 articles. Great start for him. It’s a time burden for me. I feel like I’m being ganged up on.

I know 1 on 1 these people really can’t do much damage over time, but altogether they are able to put a dent into some of my articles’ traffic.

HELP!!

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Jennifer,

Over time, no content thief ever rises to traffic power.

You must decide for yourself how many hours you want to invest in fighting with people who rip your content.

As for members plagiarizing members: It’s on a case by case basis. There are many levels of review here…and it all depends on the history each member has with us. We take a lot of data into consideration before making a decision; with our prime directive being that we don’t take risks on content.

Whether a member is suspended, terminated or banned… is something that we often aren’t able to share.

There is no way that a member should be able to rip another members articles and submit them to us because of our anti-derivative content detection. If you’ve got proof, send to us and we’ll investigate or use your examples to help us improve our detection.

[Reply]

Jennifer writes:

Hi Chris,

About what you said here… “BUT, This is going to change today thanks to a Premium member who made an argument that our logic is wrong. Watch for an announcement on that later this week. Essentially, the article date used for the Category View is going to be the SUBMIT DATE, not the APPROVED DATE. This will prevent members from submitting their articles endlessly with hopes to game us to get back included in the recent new articles in the Category View.”

I’m not sure if you’re referring to 1 of my suggestions, but I’m glad you mentioned this. I made the point that I see people “recycling” old articles to get back in the most recent list. It’s a waste of your editors time to have to reapprove these type of articles.

To prove my point of it being a burden to EzineArticles, I was going to recycle hundreds of my articles over a short period to show you what a waste of time/money and burden it would be to your editors. I’m glad that is going to be fixed.

I don’t think people should be allowed to edit their articles after a short grace period of 1-2 weeks. They should be frozen and locked in. This way your editors don’t have to touch it again just because someone is trying to get extra traffic to an old article.

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Jennifer,

It is fixed about 20 minutes ago.

I totally agree with you and have considered that often. May be forced to make the decision in the coming future for many reasons.

[Reply]

Christina Sponias writes:

It’s sad to see poor article near good ones! Sometimes I read excellent articles at EzineArticles (when I have time to do that ‚¬€ or when I’m on a hurry but something in an article makes me stop and read it).

Most EzineArticles articles are very well written, but there are a few cases that made me wonder if they were reviewed by your team before approval!

What you said: ‚¬“our experts are experts in their chosen field with only a small handful being experts in article writing‚¬ surprises me! Editors that are not experts in the English language, but only know about the article’s subject are not well qualified to judge the article’s level. I don’t know if you can find editors that would also know very well the English language!

On the other hand, I really cannot believe that an editor doesn’t see mistakes that anyone can see. For example, if an author repeats a keyword three times in a sentence, it is obvious that this is not a good sentence and the repetition is done on purpose. I know you have now a way to count the number of keywords that are in an article, but even if the number of keywords in the entire article is ok, how about the repetition of them in the same sentence?

My main category is depression. Once I read an article written by another author that had a paragraph like that: ‚¬“If you suffer from depression, you have to treat your depression and be a happy person, without depression. You have the right to live without depression‚¬.

Do you need to be an expert in order to see that this is bad written? At least the use of an ‚¬“it‚¬ instead of the repetition of the same word in a short sentence should be demanded by your editorial team.

Now, I’m caring about this matter and I sent only two messages, to two contributors! I have to read their messages first, remember their case, etc! and instead of doing that, here I am participating so much of the blog conversations again!

But I’m happy because you are answering so quickly to our questions today! You usually answer the next day! if you care about them!

[Reply]

Samantha writes:

I missed it this time! When will be the next time that you will be offering an open mic Q&A session?

I was going to ask about making money off of articles by placing in-text links or ads that generate CPC revenue or sales conversion commissions.

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Samantha,

In 2009 sometime I’ll do it again.

The EzineArticles value proposition is that you are able to submit unique original articles of content in exchange for highly qualified visitors & traffic/exposure back to your website.

It’s about lead generation; traffic attraction & media exposure.

Once we deliver our visitors to your website, it’s up to you to figure out how to convert them into revenue/money.

How many visitors do we send our members? It’s over a MILLION per week leave our website and go to our members websites. If you want more of this traffic pie, submit more articles.

[Reply]

Jennifer writes:

“There is no way that a member should be able to rip another members articles and submit them to us because of our anti-derivative content detection. If you’ve got proof, send to us and we’ll investigate or use your examples to help us improve our detection.”

They don’t take my articles word-for-word.

Tomorrow I will send to EzineArticles my proof on this recent guy who plagiarized 3 of my articles. I need to sort through my articles to find the exact ones.

The proof is overwhelming (as with the others)… I can spot my re-written articles a mile away.

I can tell you how these plagiarizers are beating your system. They take my 2-4 main points and reword them (perhaps with article spinners) or they alter the main points into something that is totally false and bogus.

Then they just add useless fluff to the intro and closing that’s “original” or less plagiarized.

[Reply]

Rafael writes:

What makes a good resource box? I mean, what should you say in a resource box to “sell the click?”

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Rafael,

Article Marketing 101: The Perfect Author Resource Box

This is the winner you should test:

A Free Report: This could also be part of your call to action or your free bonus report that further enhances your credibility as the expert on the topic of your article.

[Reply]

Christina Sponias writes:

If you give a free report, ebook, etc in your resource box, you immediately acquire subscribers. They subscribe to your list in order to receive the ebook, and this way you build your email list.

This is the best part, because you can keep sending messages to the people that once read your article!

[Reply]

Patricia writes:

Hi Chris

I have a concern. Recently I discovered that untraceable blog sites have been copying articles from EzineArticles.com and using them to connect with advertisers. I would happily furnish you with links if you like.

My articles are copied as well as other EzineArticles.com authors. It is embarrassing to find my name on these sites. I’ve found them thru google alerts of my name.

This makes all of us look bad

I did write to EzineArticles customer service but I’m not sure the replier fully understood the situation.

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Patricia,

I hear your concern…

It’s an issue that has no perfect solution but there is an incredible amount of work done behind the scenes to mitigate content theft.

You can file either a DMCA or Cease & Desist or both against the person. If they don’t respond, you can take up the issue with the web host, citing an AUP or TOS violation.

[Reply]

Mark Thompson writes:

Hi chris,

My question is about the recently introduced policy of rejecting articles with links to sites that had any ebay links or items on them.

This caused some consternation and confusion at the time as nothing was published about it before the policy was implemented. Even after articles were rejected the guidelines hadn’t been updated.

Would it be possible for policy changes like this to be advertised ahead of time. It’s quite disheartening writing 10 articles and having them rejected for no visible reason.

Anyway thanks for all the great work you and your team do.

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Mark,

You’re may not agree with some of my answers here, but in the spirit of this “open mic” I’m going to address your question:

We publicly post a 5.5 pages of our Editorial Guidelines. In addition to that, we have at least that much that is not public to help our editors sort out grey issues. It’s a moving target and the quality bar gets raised monthly.

At the heart of the issue is whether or not we believe our users/visitors will have a positive experience when they visit your website.

EzineArticles is not right nor perfect for every member. We have no aspirations to be right for every members situation. Our version of what an “ideal member” is … is communicated daily with our actions. We put up roadblocks on purpose to discourage certain behavior that we know will cause complaints from our users who are very vocal about what they like and don’t like.

Could you imagine if we didn’t care about our users experience when they left our site to visit our members website? It would be irresponsible of us.

Many of our editors are newbies, it’s true. That’s why every article is reviewed by a second Quality Control Editor who has been with us longer. This doubles our cost and decreases our review speed as a consequence. We catch thousands of mistakes per month that our members never see as part of this internal training process.

The review:
It’s Subjective. That means there is a variance in how one Editor will review an vs. another. If it wasn’t subjective, we could let our Editors go and have computers do the review process. It’s taken us this long to get as consistent as we are.

This month we also met a new milestone where we have Andrea, a full time Editorial trainer who does nothing but train new Editors and re-train existing Editors… all in an effort to improve our article review consistency.

I can say that we’re unfriendly to MFA’s (Made For AdSense) where there are big blocks of ads above the fold and very little unique content. We’re also unfriendly towards data-feed driven sites that appear to offer no unique value or may leave our users confused when they surf the site.

We live in a landing page quality scoring world.

[Reply]

Rafael writes:

Mr. Knight, you are da man.

[Reply]

Jennifer writes:

Have you ever considered some sort of rewards/incentives program to get people to write more articles?

Not now, since you’re getting more articles than you can handle, but sometime in the future.

I don’t know, just as an experiment to see if you get more articles.

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Jennifer,

Yes, it’s been considered often.

Right now, we’re blowing the entire incentive budget on more labor because we have determined that faster article review speed = more article submissions per member per session.

[Reply]

George Chernikov writes:

Chris,

First of all, great initiative! :-)

I just have one question – you said that an average article gets anywhere between 2 and 250 view over the course of one year.

In your experience, is traffic from submitted articles persistent on an annual basis? In other words, based on your observations, would articles submitted in 2008 continue to generate traffic into 2009 and beyond?

Or is the total visitor count of an AVERAGE article with no Google ranking limited to the aforementioned 20-250 views?

I guess it’s a question of whether I can consider EzineArticles as a resource where I can submit valuable and relevant content in return for ongoing traffic – or if it’s something I have to keep submitting to over and over just to stay where I am (like Alice in Wonderland!)

[Reply]

George Chernikov writes:

Another question I wanted to ask – but I’m not sure if you can answer this one…

Are there plans to implement a subscription plan (or benefit) where authors would not have any Google Ads on their article pages?

For some weird reasons, it happened to one of my articles. It was Adsense-free – and the CTR was 75%!!!

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

George,

Have you seen the new article reports that show month by month traffic back to June of 2007 when we started tracking this data by month?

We have not done an exhaustive study yet, but from the hundreds of accounts we’ve eyeballed, it seems clear that the answer is all over the board where some see more traffic this year than they saw last year and vice versa.

I expect that we’ll study this further.

I know this for certain: It takes MORE content every day to stay even than it did in the early days. There is more content competition than ever before and I expect that to remain constant. This varies by niche of course; but is true overall.

As for a Premium service that would disable the ads; sorry, no plans on deck for that.

[Reply]

Michael Oksa writes:

Hi Chris,

I’d like to know if other features are planned for the premium membership, and if there will be a “light” version for say $14.95/month?

Also, do you think Rodgers can take the helm? :)

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Michael,

We were thinking about doubling the price to $197/month once you see the power of the next Premium member feature that will be released in October; It’ll also have a component that will give ALL members access to part of it. Sorry, I can’t share until we release it and begin live testing. I can say it took us all Summer to ready our systems for this feature and we bought 10 more terabytes of storage to help support it.

There are no plans for a low-priced commodity level of service.

I should also point out that our Premium level of services are not officially released even though it’s live on the site during our testing stage. No ETA for when we’ll announce it and no affiliate program is planned for 2008.

As for Aaron Rodgers, I hope he does better than Brett does with the Jets.

[Reply]

Christina Sponias writes:

I sent many messages today! not all of them, though. I was listening to the coming messages in my inbox but I could not see them, otherwise I would have to begin again looking for the part where I was, in the contributors’ file.

However, I noticed that you are not answering!

Another question I would like to ask anyway, (perhaps you’ll answer tomorrow) is that:

Why the article we re-submit after a modification doesn’t appear in the beginning of the category’s page as if it was a new article, but it appears modified in the place of the old submission?

I wanted to ask you that a long time ago, but I never remembered to. I think this is not fair: when we decide to modify something in the article, it must appear in the beginning of the category’s page according to my opinion, so that the readers may notice it.

I usually don’t modify my articles, but sometimes I see that an article is not receiving clicks while I know that it is excellent, so I change its title or its category, but it doesn’t appear in the first page of the category it belongs. It appears back on the page of the first submission, many times a month before the modification!

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Christina,

I don’t answer all emails sent to http://AskChristopherKnight.com/ ; Otherwise, I’d be doing that non-stop all day. I deflect a lot of them to our support team to handle; I ignore a few where I don’t believe I can add any value and I don’t treat these emails as requiring response.

The SUBMIT DATE is what all articles are sorted by as of this afternoon in the Category View. It’s no longer the APPROVED DATE nor the updated APPROVED DATE as this was abused.

Sorry, I respectfully disagree with you… but even if I agreed with you, naughty members have ruined it for everyone by scamming our system by editing their articles so that we waste labor to re-approve them so they can go to the front of the Category View line again. This loophole has been closed forever.

[Reply]

Terri Zwierzynski writes:

Chris, in response to this comment from Jennifer:

“I don’t think people should be allowed to edit their articles after a short grace period of 1-2 weeks. They should be frozen and locked in. This way your editors don’t have to touch it again just because someone is trying to get extra traffic to an old article.”

I think you responded:

“I totally agree with you and have considered that often. May be forced to make the decision in the coming future for many reasons.”

Maybe I misunderstood this…I’m not a high volume writer (but I’m working on it!) but I do have a number of articles that I get good response to, some of which are several years old. Sometimes I want to go back and tweak for keywords, or to update my bio or add a link to a good resource — are you saying we might not be able to do that anymore? I don’t expect my revised article to be put at the top of the list or anything…just would like to continue to have the opportunity to tweak it occasionally.

Thanks,
Terri Z

[Reply]

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Terri,

We’re continuing to allow members to edit their articles and have not chosen the date when this service will end. Greater majority do it to improve their results alone; not with any desire to improve the quality of their articles.

Let’s plan on an end to that service by December 31, 2008 as we could help 1,000+ more members a day if we weren’t re-reviewing articles that were edited that didn’t add any more value for our mutual readership.

We’ve had a lot of members ask us for a mass-Resource-Box change feature but we’ve decided to not offer it at this time due to the fact that it causes an unnatural page mutation rate and it would lead to a lot of very undesirable behaviors by a small minority of members who would sell their Resource Box links (something we have terminated members for when discovered).

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Christina Sponias writes:

Thank you for your answer, Chris! I’m still awake even though it is too late here, but I only have to go to a bank tomorrow at lunch time.

Thank you for your delayed answer for my question about my site. It was solved now ‚¬€ I just wanted your opinion because I trust you while I saw that I cannot trust many other people in the internet!

I understand what you said about re-submitting an article on purpose, only to see it again in the front page!

Now, how about the ‚¬“strange‚¬ paragraphs that your editors ‚¬“let pass‚¬ even though even a child can see that they are horribly written?

Are you depressed? If you are depressed, treat your depression because depression needs treatment. Don’t live depressed; get rid of your depression.

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Cheow writes:

Hi Chris,

Good work for this open mic, really find out a lot more about EzineArticles.com and other useful tips. Really appreciate it.

As for me, I do not have any particular question at the point of time as I am always very satisfied with the service level or EzineArticles.

Good work Chris and Team!

Cheow

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Peter Coughlin writes:

Hey Chris,

Although I didn’t get to ask any questions, I just wanted to let you know that I found this an extremely informative and valuable read, so well done and thank you very much for taking the time to do this.

Regards,
Peter.

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Jennifer Thieme writes:

This isn’t a question, but an observation of my own experience as a READER of EzineArticles (not as an author).

I’m an internet junkie. I’m online A LOT, and always research many different subjects that are interesting to me. Often during my research an article from EzineArticles.com is on the first page of the results.

It used to be that I would get excited to see a fellow author in the results, and that link was always the first link to get my click.

However, over time I found that often the article lacked the depth I hoped to find. Now, when I see an article at EzineArticles.com in the search results, I am hesitant to click it, because experience tells me that it might be a waste of time – it might not have the depth I’m hoping for.

This happens with an array of subjects.

I know that many internet marketers teach that when using articles for marketing, to hold back some piece of information. This is in the hopes that the reader will click the link at the bottom to go to the author’s website for more info.

I find that this stragety leaves me cold as a reader. I do not click the link at the bottom, and as I outlined above, I am avoiding clicking the article if I see it in the search results because I’m developing an aversion based on past, unsatisfying experiences.

This is not to say that ALL articles here have left me cold – not at all. But it’s happening more and more, to such a degree that it’s influencing my click at the search engine results.

My suggestion is to provide depth in the article – satisy your reader! Do not hold back necessary information. As authors we often have only one shot at building trust with our readers. If we fail there, we will definitely NOT get the click at the bottom of the article. Even if we succeed there, we still may not get the click, but at least we have built trust. This WILL come back to us in good ways – it’s inevitable because it’s a spiritual principle.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. :-)

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Jennifer,

I agree and we’re rejecting 3X more than we have in past years due to poor landing page quality or an article body that doesn’t deliver on the promise made in the article title.

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Christina Sponias writes:

I’m glad you are rejecting more articles and demanding more from the authors. This way EzineArticles will keep its level and improve it, instead of losing its audience because of the poor quality of certain articles!

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Edward Weiss writes:

Hi Chris,

I know I asked this before, but I was wondering why there are no social networking icons on our article pages where readers can share/bookmark the articles.

This would greatly increase pageviews for EzineArticles. Just wondering why your team hasn’t implemented this feature.

Thanks,
Edward

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Edward,

There are many reasons… largely due to the overzealous and promotional nature by some of our members…have gotten us banned from a few sites.

The other issue is that the traffic love is non-reciprocal… meaning, why should we give 1.5 million exit clicks to a social media platform if they won’t return the link love.

We are not saying “no” to your request, and I think you’ll like one of the concepts we’re experimenting with internally for another expansion into allowing our members to add value to other social media networks when appropriate. Stay tuned… :)

Thank you for participating in this “Article Writing & Marketing Open Mic” experiment. I’m going to close this thread now and we’ll try it again sometime in 2009. :)

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