Lisa writes:

I’ve made regular use of these opportunities. lol The staff never act like they are tired of hearing from me. :)

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Dave Haslett writes:

I sent you some ideas on Facebook in June (as a comment) and never heard anything from you. I thought they were pretty good so I’m sending them again in case you missed them.

You were asking about how to get more people to take up the Premium service. Here are some suggestions to make the premium service more tempting (to me at least):

(1) Link the title suggestion tool to the article templates, so it automatically generates article outlines, complete with the right density and placement of keywords. It would still need a knowledgeable writer to write the article, but it would speed up the process hugely, and be well worth paying for.

(2) Provide lots more title suggestions for premium users – there’s very little in my subject area at the moment – and of those that are there, a couple of them are mis-spelled so I can’t use them.

(3) Employ an editor who’s a keyword/SEO guru (must be a total genius!) who could comment on/suggest changes to each premium article, title and resource box to get the maximum results.

(4) Provide a way for premium users writing about the same/similar subjects to find and talk to each other easily (if they agree) for joint ventures, collaboration, etc.

(5) Seek out ezines, newsletters, websites, blogs, etc in defined subject areas and encourage them to reprint articles – they could subscribe to an RSS feed that only features *premium* articles in their subject area (you’ll tell them why the premium articles are best – approved by top editors, etc). Reward those sites in some way for reprinting them – perhaps with some of your promotional goodies when they publish their 3rd article or something. That way they’ll get into the habit of doing it.

Hope that helps.

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Marc, Product Marketing Manager writes:

Thanks for the excellent feedback, Dave! You’re right, these are good. Sorry for missing them back in June. You’ll be happy to know that some of these ideas are already projects in the works and others have some real merit – we’ll look into them further.

August 17, 2010 at 1:08 PM

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Dave,

Thanks! Some feedback from your suggestions:

1) This will NEVER happen on purpose. We never want to participate in creating auto-generated software designed content. I’ll agree it would be helpful and many thousands of our members would love that, but it’s also fundamentally wrong because it means your intention is to *only* write for the search engines without any thought about your end reader, being 2nd in priority. In the long-term, if we don’t satisfy the million+ visitors who surf our site daily, we won’t keep the current market leadership we have together.

2) We’re working on expanding this and you can expect to see a fresh supply more of these as we head into 4th qtr. Also, any spelling errors are unintentional… and perhaps we need to create a “report this bad title” tool… Hmm.. will consider it.

3) Interesting suggestion. We are considering creating a higher level of service beyond Premium that would do this, but haven’t worked out the details yet.

4) Great suggestion and one that we’re thinking about.

5) Sounds like cat herding. :) A small newsflash though: Premium members aren’t always submitting high quality content… and we’d never back or do extra promotion for low value content…just because it comes from a Premium member. This is similar to how we don’t cut Premium members any editorial breaks or exceptions… but are more willing to invest the time needed to educate a Premium member how to fix issues instead of a templated response because we’re under time pressures when addressing thousands of weekly support tickets.

August 17, 2010 at 2:19 PM

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MJ Schrader writes:

I would like to see a change in the search engine. Many websites have a Google search engine that allows users to search the site or the web. Since I send my blog readers to EzineArticles to get articles, I would love for them to be able to search my articles for what they need.

My blog readers could then search in the articles I have written. This would give both of us more publicity as they would get the content they desire with your links and mine. The search also does not seem to be quite as effective as I would like, but that may not be something that is changeable.

Thank you so much,
MJ Schrader

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guild wars 2 gold writes:

I want to know that, except for the submition the articles, other styles will you open? such as the photo share, press release, boomarks etc?

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Marc, Product Marketing Manager writes:

We don’t typically comment on “works in progress” but I’ll share a few items with you …

We’re currently evaluating whether or not including photos with articles would be a good idea. We’ve been soliciting input from our Members here: http://blog.EzineArticles.com/2010/07/your-images-photos-in-your-articles.html

Other features and upgrades are always in the works, so keep your eyes on the Blog for future updates.

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leon Noone writes:

G’Day from Down Under,
I first submitted an article to you in April 2008 Without reservation I can say that you author support and assistance makes you a delight to work with. How I wish that other article directory services were as supportive as you are.

Could you clear something up for me.

About a week ago I sent a request through the Author Support icon, asking whether i would receive an Article Performance Report for July.
On 13 August {#499219] you replied telling me to click a link for an answer.

I clicked and found my self on my Author Page.I couldn’t find an answer on that page. I sent a reply email which was returned “no reply” So I sent another email through author support, explaining what had happened.

Since then, silence: no acknowledgement, no reply, nothing.

Given the nature of this post, I figured it might be a good time to raise this again.

Regards

Leon

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Marc, Product Marketing Manager writes:

Sorry to hear about that. I’ll have somebody from Member Support contact you privately to get things worked out.

August 18, 2010 at 4:45 PM

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Eric J Smith writes:

For articles in a series, when adding a new article, the ability to select a previous written article and link to at the end of each article…

Article 1 would link to article 2, article 2 links to article 3, article 3 links to article 4 etc…

A simple drop down menu on the article submit page that lists previous articles would work…

Not that this feature should be an excuse for not writing stand alone articles, but it would be good for keeping a reader interested…

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Jose Bulao writes:

I think you are doing very well. I am new to this article writing and from the feedback I get you seem to be the best in the article directories to which I submit articles. Others do not even acknowledge the articles I send them.

Maybe later if I find something significant to comment on, I will certainly send it to you.

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Dan Toombs writes:

I am sure plagiarism is a problem for many authors out there. Lately I have been finding increasing numbers of my articles that have been changed and then republished by black hat SEO firms. Unfortunately many of them are pointing at my competitors’ sites.

Often the changes made to my articles are nonsensical and they no longer make any sense at all. A reader would probably not want to click on these revised article to get more information.

This is obviously done purely for SEO and back link reasons.

Like many people, I do not have enough hours in the day to go complaining to each and every company that publishes my articles as their own. Even when I do mention this to competitors they simply say sorry and claim that they have no idea how it happened.

I would like to recommend allowing a hidden link somewhere in the body of the articles. The like could just be attached to a period or comma.

Anyone wanting to use the articles legally would most likely not have a problem with this.

The link would have little SEO value but at least we could enjoy a few more back links for our efforts when our articles are stolen.

I realise that anyone who knows basic HTML could remove the links, but it will make their job that much more difficult.

What do you think? Does this idea sound as rediculous as the plagiarised articles currently pointing at my competitors’ sites?

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Andrew John writes:

An old mentor of mine once said that the measure of a business was its customer service and how it dealt with complaints. I do not know how deep the pile of article directory companies is but if this is true, EzineArticles is a worthy contender for bottom place.

I am a well-established UK lawyer and writer of legal articles and the like. My belief is that the law should be transparent, well explained and that articles on legal principles with advice for those with legal problems should be made available for all. As a major article distribution site I naturally started submitting my articles to EzineArticles and all went well for a while. Promotion to ‘ expert author ‘ and a free pen.

My regard for EzineArticles was added to when I received an e-mail saying that an article had been declined as there was non original content. Naturally I investigated and they were right. The article in question which explained entitlements to contest a will and pointed out that a challenge had to be got on with as there were time limits contained extracts from the governing Act and quotes from a judge in the leading case. This same quotes had been used by another author in an article on a completely different subject.

This was pointed out and I expected it to be the end of the matter. It was not. Very far from it. Three different people dealing, explained again and again and round and round in circles. The time spent could have resulted in more articles, legal help or people that needed it or anything more useful than hanging my head against the wall.

This and all my other articles are accepted by other directories with thanks and without difficulty. Sadly I have had to give up on EzineArticles as life is short and will be returning my free pen. Hope to see you on other sites, Twitter, Facebook and all.

Andrew John

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Andrew,

You have a legitimate case where our desire to stamp out derivative and duplicate content competes with what is in the best interest of our members and our tens of millions of monthly visitors.

Other competing sites have a different formula than us…in that they accept pretty much whatever comes in.

Don’t know if you noticed, but none of them have our traffic nor do any of them deliver the kind of traffic we deliver to our members. This comes at a price… inflexibility in certain uses of EzineArticles.com…such as the way I think you wanted to use our platform.

If we didn’t have a war on our hands against a tiny fraction of our own members who only want to slam us with derivative and duplicate content submissions by the tens of thousands; it’d be much easier to allow derivative/duplicative content in legitimate (ie: What’s in the best interest of the end user?) articles.

Said another way: Articles that include a percentage of derivative or duplicative content are a liability for the totality of what EzineArticles.com is. ….1/2 of our traffic comes from search engines…and they only view us algorithmically. This hard line policy of us not allowing derivative content is our strategy to keep traffic flowing from these sources.

I’m sorry your needs and ours don’t quite match perfectly… I wish you the best…and appreciated that you shared your perspective.

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