Content Is Not Worthless

I was reading Jonathan Handel’s column on “Is Content Worthless?”

Ironic considering he writes for a firm that makes most of its profit thanks to “content.” :-)

Jonathan asserts there are 6 factors devaluing content:

• Supply & Demand - Meaning consumers have less leisure time to enjoy content.
• Loss of physical form - Meaning the electronic creation & distribution of content.
• Acquiring content is more frictionless - Yes it is and we’re proud to be part of that technology distribution platform.
• Most content is now ad supported instead of pay per view or subscription - He thinks consumers may demand that all content be free.
• Market forces in technology enable faster creation & distribution of content that traditional media fears due to worries about revenue stream cannibalization. Yep.
• Culture of a new generation hostile towards copyright. This is not a good thing.

Actually, I think the “Supply/Demand” thing is less about the “attention” deficit by consumers (you only get 2-15 seconds anyway) and more about the lack of high quality content. There is a true market demand right now for very high quality, low word count (less than 1000 words) content. Thin content only muddies the ‘content pond’ and makes it easier for us all to spot the very high quality content.

My message: “THIN CONTENT” is worthless and ubiquitous; “HIGH QUALITY ORIGINAL CONTENT” is king and will remain king/queen for a long time.

Your thoughts?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 14, 2008 at 10:49 am

Views 1,056 | Comments (13)

Nearly Perfect RSS Implementation

As simple as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is, not everyone gets it or figures out how to implement it right… I came across an implementation that I thought was nearly perfect and wanted to share it with you.

Check out the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly

What’s so great about their RSS implementation?

• They didn’t scrape every feed we offered and instead, focused only on articles from our Elder Care category that fit perfectly with their niche.
• Because their site is for “Care of Elderly” and because they used our “Elder Care” RSS feed, their audience wins with highly relevant and valuable content and our members win with highly qualified traffic coming to their Elder Care articles!

As a reminder, we have an email list you can subscribe to called “EzineArticles RSS-Publishers” (5th on the list on this page) that we plan on sending a series later this year on how to implement RSS feeds into your website projects. Go sign up today.xml :)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 14, 2008 at 9:56 am

Views 653 | Comments (5)

EzineArticles Demographics and Psychographics

Dear Marketplace:

Help recommend which demographic (common characteristics of a population segmentation, such as age, sex, gender, income, education, family size, geography, marital status, social class, etc.) and psychographics (attitudes and personality characteristics, lifestyle, values and sociological characteristics) tools we should consider using to identify the profile of an average visitor to EzineArticles.com?

End goal is to better understand who our visitors are and what they have in common and why they visit. This information will help us determine which features & tools to introduce and we’ll be able to provide better anonymous data to our advertisers who help keep our service free to members.

A few 3rd parties have tried to remotely guess our profile visitor: Quantcast’s EzineArticles profile, Alexa’s EzineArticles profile, anyone else we should look at?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on August 29, 2007 at 7:59 am

Views 555 | Comments (15)

EzineArticles Delivers Millions of Visitors To Member Websites

June 8th we started on an ambitious project to provide URL Click Tracking reports for our members. July 13th we finally revealed this new feature to our members so they could see the tangible traffic that their articles receive.

Get this: In the last 20 days, we delivered 1,064,285 outbound clicks via URL’s that were in your resource boxes!

To get your share of the EzineArticles traffic referral pie, all you have to do is send in more quality, unique and original articles that meet or exceed our posted editorial guidelines. :)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on August 24, 2007 at 1:26 pm

Views 601 | Comments (8)

Ezine Marketing vs Article Marketing via Ezine Articles

Newbies are confused and I wanted to clear the air on something:

What our members do when they submit articles to EzineArticles.com has nothing to do with “Ezine Marketing.” We are not the ‘Ezine” nor is “Ezine” just a noun that we plucked out of the air as some believe. :-) Really.

Definitions:

Ezine = Email Newsletter

Ezine Publisher = Someone who publishes an email newsletter

Ezine Marketing = Creating, promoting, managing, & publishing an email newsletter.

Article Marketing = Creating quality original articles 250-1500 words that you make available for syndication by others, preferably by others who have niche websites or ezines that are related to your core area of expertise, with the hopes to attract traffic back to your website and generate demand for yourself/your business.

Ezine Articles = A matching service between expert authors looking to share their expertise in exchange for traffic back to their website thanks to ezine publishers who reprint their content without any changes - sent to their email list membership and/or added to their website.

(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on August 10, 2007 at 8:58 am

Views 742 | Comments (13)

EzineArticles on your Cell Phone

Here’s a question for the super geeky nerds who use cell phones for more than just making phone calls:

If you could surf EzineArticles via your cell phone, what would you like to be able to do?

We’re going to begin investing in resources to create a custom cell phone version of EzineArticles, but need some direction from the market as to which services you’d like to see us provide in a cell phone friendly format.

ie: Should we be focused on the needs of our end-users who surf the site to find information or should we start our focus on providing members with access to membership status updates in terms of whether their submissions are approved or to view basic summary stats or what?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on June 4, 2007 at 7:42 am

Views 383 | Comments (7)

PressExposure Update

If you’ve followed our growth, you know that we spawned a press releases project because we got tired of rejecting so many hundreds and then thousands of wrongly submitted quality press releases to us. Today, I’m happy to share that our PressExposure.com project has accepted its 2,000th press release: Breast Fed Children Have Better Vision

If you have a press release that you’d like to share, log in to your EzineArticles membership account, click on AUTHOR TOOLS, click on PRESS RELEASE SUBMISSION and send it in. All submissions are human reviewed before they are made live on PressExposure.com. Are we as popular as PRWEB? Not a chance. Is there any cost? Nope. Only exposure and traffic upside for you.

PressExposure Trivia: 44.9% of all press release submissions are generated by EzineArticles Members.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 20, 2007 at 8:26 am

Views 481 | Comments (2)

Use Nobility When Article Marketing

Sometimes it becomes tempting to promote your EzineArticles everyplace you can strategically find to promote them, but in this short article, you’ll discover that a little ‘nobility’ goes a long way to ensuring that no one gets hurt along the way. Let me explain…

Here’s what’s acceptable if you intend to promote your articles on EzineArticles to others:

• Sending a title, summary and a link to the full article to your clients and other permission-based email members on your list.
• Mentioning your newest EzineArticles in your blog (heck, why not load up your EzineArticles RSS feed to do this automatically?)
• Any promotion or announcement on any web property that you own or to any permission-based email list that you own/control.

But, what if you want to promote your EzineArticles beyond web properties that you own or control, such as social networking, social bookmarking or other social media sites? That’s where the concept of ‘nobility’ comes into play.

When you are contributing to websites that you don’t own or control for the purposes of promoting your articles as listed on EzineArticles, it’s important to be noble… meaning, to not promote your URL if it’s clearly self serving (that would be un-noble). Since it’s always self-serving, how do you go about promoting your EzineArticles if you want to?

Answer = You don’t. Instead, only promote your EzineArticles to web and permission-based email properties that you own and let the universe take care of promoting your EzineArticles to the appropriate 3rd party social media sites. When you produce a high enough quanity of quality articles, your content will get picked up and promoted in the appropriate places.

Updated: Butterfly asked us:

Hi Chris, I have 12 articles on EA and have been given the title of Platinum Author, but still can’t figure how some authors manage to gather so many comments. My articles are well written and offer insight or you would not have selected them for publication. My rankngs are good but few comments are submitted. What am I not doing to attract comments?

Answer = Authors who receive a lot of comments do one of two things: 1) They submit a lot of articles and therefore have a higher chance of attracting a comment or 2) They promote their new articles to their clients and/or permission-based email list member and thus drive thousands of eyeballs to view the article with a request for them to vote and comment on the article.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 17, 2007 at 9:41 am

Views 598 | Comments (8)

SES NY 2007

This week I’m in New York visiting clients and attending Incisive Media’s Search Engine Strategies 2007.

The major players are well represented in exhibits as well as panel experts and if Google & Yahoo didn’t have people on the panels, the quality of the sessions would have suffered. Thankfully they sent quite a few of their managers and various engineers and business leaders.

This was my first time attending this conference as I didn’t think I’d be able to learn any actionable best practice strategies, but I was wrong. One of my primary goals in attending was to make sure we’re helping the major search engines to efficiently find our members content while ignoring content that shouldn’t be indexed (example: the *print an article* view). Our long-standing SE strategy has been to simply add lots of fresh high-quality content, provide a fast and positive user experience and make decisions to ensure long-term success (skipping all short term fads).

It was good to hear from many pay-per-click advertisers talk about the type of quality they want from their PPC investments. Remember the quality landing page thread from last year? Many of the same concerns are still important to providing a positive user experience. The last thing we want is poor quality content leading to a poor quality website as it violates the trust of our users and those who bring traffic to our members content.

We’re not involved in paid search abritrage (the act of creating revenue by purchasing traffic on a PPC basis and then immediately selling it through affiliate marketing or other revenue means), but it’s clear that the most egregious offense in terms of advertisers and end-users are MFA’s (Made For Adsense) sites. If you’re an author that drives traffic to a MFA site, this is your early wake up call that you need to find a way to add unique value with your site beyond the ads.

(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 12, 2007 at 11:13 am

Views 534 | Comments (4)

New-RSS Feeds For Comment Threads

Today I’m thrilled to share that we’ve implemented an RSS feed for the comment thread on all articles that have live comment(s) on them. As of this morning, there are currently 7,665 comments live on 5,926 unique articles. [See Example]

What this means for the non-RSS savvy: People who comment on your articles can now subscribe to the RSS feed of the comments of the article that they are either engaged in the conversation or only want to lurk and watch the conversations taking place on a particular article. This helps them to be notified when there is a new comment on an article so they can read it or add to the discussion.

All together this means we’re supporting over 55,000+ RSS feeds (one for every author, one for every category and now one for every article with a comment). As a reminder to those who are hyper-RSS savvy, we do not allow RSS feeds to be syndicated on commercial websites.

Any questions?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on March 28, 2007 at 9:02 am

Views 690 | Comments (4)

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