Your URL Clicks Divided By Total Articles

What are your total URL Clicks received divided by the total live articles in your account?

This percentage would show you how much traffic your articles are generating on average, each…or would they?

First, feel free to comment on this blog entry and share what yours is… but let’s take a closer look at the 8 ways this CTR (Click Through Rate) number can be skewed or perhaps not as important as you may think.

1. It’s not accurate because LENGTH OF TIME is a variable we currently don’t provide - ie: monthly cut-off data.
   
   
2. It’s only partially in your control. You can only optimize so far and then you’re at the mercy of market interest.
   
   
3. It doesn’t factor in how much traffic your EzineArticles generate from sites and ezines that syndicate your content. This is a major factor for most.
   
   
4. Forget about scoring a high CTR percentage. Consider for a moment the URL Clicks CTR compared to your total article views… What would you rather have: 1000 article page views and 50 clicks (5% CTR) or 7000 article views and 210 clicks (3% CTR)? Me? I’d go for the lower CTR and higher total clicks delivered!
   
   
5. Different niches provide different CTR by nature.
   
   
6. Instead, analyze ALL of your articles and look for individual article patterns to see if you can draw actionable conclusions as to what type of content matched with what type of compelling resource box offer creates the best overall desired performance. ABT! (Always Be Testing!)
   
   
7. Never lose site of the most important user: Your reader! They can sense ‘thin’ content in a few milliseconds…and they are gone. Obsess over your readers and the URL clicks will take care of itself.
   
   
8. Worry less about scoring big numbers with a handful or articles and instead focus on covering your niche expertise in greater article volume & depth. Too many members focus a core chunk of their energy on over-optimizing existing content when they could focus the same energy on expanding their article inventory.

Your Thoughts?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 8, 2008 at 3:46 pm

Views 129 | Comments (5)

EzineArticles on Twitter

I’ve decided to separate my personal life on Twitter from our EzineArticles business life.

Follow EzineArticles on Twitter, and we’ll follow you:
http://twitter.com/EzineArticles

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 7, 2008 at 10:32 am

Views 96 | Comments (0)

Premium Business Class Speed

Does it drive you crazy that your articles aren’t reviewed instantly by our editors?

We’ve been considering this for 2 years now and it’s time to introduce a premium level of business class service for members who want a faster experience with EzineArticles.com. Before we release this, we’d like your input.

Here are some of the details of what we were thinking:

• Deliverable: Priority article review. Your submissions would go to the front of the queue and our editors would review your articles BEFORE any non-premium level members submissions. Instead of waiting days to a week+ for your articles to be reviewed, most would happen same or next day (Mon-Fri).
  
  
• Being a Premium level member would not guarantee any editorial favors. This is purely a speed-of-service priority thing. Our editors would not know if you are a premium member or not as our article review back-end systems manage which articles are loaded in their daily review queues. It would also not grant any membership level advantages (ie: It wouldn’t help you get from Basic to Platinum any faster).
  
  
• Deliverable: Priority email support. Your email tickets to our Member Support center would go to the front of the queue.
  
  
• This would not deliver higher personalized service nor is it article writing & marketing training of any kind. You’re simply buying a speed pass to the front of the line with your questions sent to Member Support.
  
  
• Most likely would be a reasonable annual fee with an introductory charter discount for the first members who become clients.
• PayPal subscription services will be the payment method.
• Most likely would not come with a written SLA (Service Level Agreement) because we’d have to price it too high to guarantee a level of service. Instead, we’d price it to be attractive for the masses of our most active members with hopes that the value received far outweighs the price paid… to encourage annual renewals of the priority review & support service.

What issues should we consider as we price and bundle/package this EzineArticles Premium membership speed/service?

What kind of additional fee-based premium services would you like to see us offer?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 5, 2008 at 1:03 pm

Views 1,018 | Comments (82)

How To Be Unique

Juanita writes:

How to be unique when almost every topic has tons of articles about it already out there?

Could you imagine if Burger King said to themselves, “Hey, we can’t compete because there is a McDonalds on every major intersection corner…so let’s give up.”

Nonsense!

Every expert has a unique viewpoint on most every topic or issue within their niche. If they didn’t, they’d hardly be an “expert”, right? Your job is to share your unique perspective on every issue and sub-issue within your field of expertise.

What to do:

• Forget for a moment that there already is a high ’supply’ of articles already in your niche.
• Chances are pretty high that the ‘long tail’ within your niche has been ignored or under-served.
• I recommend writing 40% of your articles for the ‘head’ of the long tail and 60% for the ‘long tail’ itself.
• Stop researching what everyone else is doing. Think for a moment about the problems and issues your clients, vendors, and employees or stakeholders face. Now, write to solve those issues.
• Revere your uniqueness. No one on Earth sees or evaluates your niche like you do. Share your unique viewpoint.
• There is so much ‘thin’ content out there that it makes it very easy to immediately rise above mediocre content.
• Create an article content creation plan that chunks down various areas of your niche that you’ve deemed critical to cover.
• Poll your members, clients, prospects, whatever and ask them which areas of your expertise they’d like to hear more about.
• In the end, you’re competing against yourself. When you write compelling quality article content, your words and profile will immediately rise to the top.

How about you? What kind of advice would you give Juanita?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 2, 2008 at 7:31 am

Views 611 | Comments (22)

Your Amazon ISBNs

We have updated the members area update bio page and the public extended bio page to utilize a new service from Amazon to provide information about books. The old service was discontinued.

The whole format was a bit clunky so our developers made it easier to engage:

To participate, log into the Members.Ezinearticles.com site with your regular username & password, click on PROFILE MANAGER, click on EDIT AUTHOR BIO, select your author bio to edit, and then add up to (3) valid 10 or 13 digit ISBN numbers of books that will be found on Amazon.com. Click SAVE changes. You’ll find the book image, title, author name and link to the book on your extended author bio page [Example].

Notes:

• The members area update also includes moving the Amazon search and clarification of the links.
• We now have a global ‘Search for Books on Amazon’ link above all the ISBN text boxes that will display a better looking, more compact search form. It is displayed to the right of the text boxes instead of at the bottom of the page.
• We added a link underneath each ISBN text box that will allow a user to quickly verify ISBN numbers entered.
• After you are done and click SAVE to update your public extended author profile, we’ve added a quick link so that you can see what the public sees instantly.

EzineArticles/Amazon ISBN Trivia: 1,396 EzineArticles Expert Authors have included 2,327 ISBN’s (2,181 Unique) in their extended author profiles!

If you’ve got an ISBN, be sure to include it in your EzineArticles author profile.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 1, 2008 at 5:15 am

Views 334 | Comments (4)

Articles on Home Page

Ever wonder which articles show up when on our home page?

As articles are accepted/approved & made live, they go into a queue and are rotated into the home page 50 at a time and they stay up for 30 minutes before the next 50 are rotated in. In a 24 hour span, this allows us to display 2,400 new articles.

In the future, the 30 minute rotation window will continue to go down in minutes so that we get through 100% of the days newest approved articles.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 30, 2008 at 3:32 pm

Views 310 | Comments (6)

A Top Ten List

TOP TEN REASONS OUR MEMBERS CAN’T COME UP WITH A NEW ARTICLE TOPIC TO WRITE ABOUT:

10. There’s not a single topic left to write about. Everything has been said.

9. I am currently satisfied with the amount of traffic I’m getting to my website; why would I want more?

8. Too many visitors makes my website slow down to a crawl or it crashes.

7. Joining a community of 95,000+ Expert Authors frightens me.

6. I hate free services that offer massive benefits and very little drawbacks.

5. The Editorial Review Team won’t accept my PayPal bribe.

4. Submitting keyword-stuffed, computer-generated, spun and re-spun, barely-English PLR articles is a better fit for my marketing strategy. NOT!

3. The idea of (2) REAL HUMANS carefully reviewing my articles makes me blush.

2. I find the 569 niche categories too limiting.

1. The cat knocked my EzineArticles mug over and spilled coffee into my keyboard. My “Enter” key sticks.

Have any additional to add to our list?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 30, 2008 at 8:47 am

Views 439 | Comments (25)

2 Self-Serving Active Links

We’re considering a change in one of our longest standing policies in terms of active self-serving links… and we’d like to get your feedback about it.

Currently: (See Editorial Guidelines section 2.f.) Your articles can contain up to (3) self-serving active links, and (3) non-self-serving links.

Proposed: Your articles can contain up to (2) self-serving active links and up to (2) non-self-serving active links.

Here’s are our research and current thinking why this must change:

• Our ideal EzineArticles authors already only use (1) or (2) active self-serving links, so they will not be negatively impacted.
  
  
• Members who write thin-content purely for the active link love will be negatively impacted…something that may ultimately be positive for our users & current/future members.
  
  
• User feedback emails confirm that they think articles with (3) self-serving links looks “spammy”.
  
  
• We want to continue to attract high profile expert authors and many of the highest profile of expert authors tell us they want to be seen in similar company. High profile expert authors almost NEVER include (3) self-serving links.
  
  
• We are certain that articles with (1) or (2) active self-serving links will lead to increased syndication and use by ezine publishers vs. the (3) active self-serving link article. Think about this from the Publishers perspective.
  
  
• Very high profile publishers do not take (3) active self-serving link articles seriously.
  
  
• The collective credibility and perception of our site and our members will climb when the maximum active self-serving link limit is (2). More market trust = more market credibility and higher quality visitors referred to your website.
  
  
• This is the natural evolution of our quality focus. Newbie competitor websites with no market credibility would have to offer lots of active self-serving links to make up for having a very low audience profile. Our high-traffic audience profile is the result of years of raising standards frequently. This is just another one of those standards that the time has come to raise.
  
  
• It’s important to differentiate EzineArticles from spammy looking websites (you know exactly who and the type of sites I’m referring to).

Your thoughts?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 24, 2008 at 4:13 pm

Views 750 | Comments (63)

Original Article Campaign Case Studies

Wanted: I’m writing an article about the trend that many of our members are creating content specifically for EzineArticles as part of their exposure/traffic attraction strategy (vs. submitting content that they already have posted on their own website).

If your article writing & marketing syndication strategy includes writing articles exclusively for EzineArticles because you’ve found that strategy works better than posting articles on our site that you’ve already posted on your site or elsewhere, get in touch with me in the next 24 hours via this link.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 22, 2008 at 1:54 pm

Views 516 | Comments (14)

Queen Elizabeth II

Happy 82nd Birthday to Queen Elizabeth II… and a salute to the 8,754 EzineArticles experts who call the UK home.

• More Info: Royal Birthday - Queen Elizabeth II

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 21, 2008 at 3:03 pm

Views 312 | Comments (4)

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