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 747 | Comments (4)

Top 10 Expert Authors by RSS Activity

As you may know, you can subscribe via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to the RSS feed of any the over 47,000+ EzineArticles expert authors. This allows you to track your favorite authors (or yourself) via your RSS reader of choice or you can display in real-time your articles on your website (title, byline, summary and a link to the full article).

Here are top 10 EzineArticles experts by number of views to their individual RSS feed last month:

Here are the top 10 EzineArticles experts by number of humans who pulled their RSS feed last month:

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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on March 13, 2007 at 5:28 am

Views 714 | Comments (3)

Speciality Search Provider

For today’s blog entry, I went searching to see which blog entry out of 855 entries to date received the most views. It was this one with 3,341 views (Add EzineArticles Search To Your Browser).

Three months later after that blog entry about how EzineArticles can be searched from your favorite FireFox 2 or IE7 browser, we’re now seeing 14,176 searches last month alone and on track to see 200,000 search queries in 2007 from users who search EzineArticles directly BEFORE they land on our site (saving them time). Way cool. :-)

Those who use our SSP services (it’s an autodiscovery thing that is part of the OpenSearch standards) have essential access to EzineArticles from their browser search box and we’ve been tweaking our ability to deliver better search results based on feedback received. Have you tried this feature yet and what did you think of it?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on March 7, 2007 at 9:49 am

Views 535 | Comments (1)

RSS Marketing Interview with Rok Hrastnik

My friend and EzineArticles expert author Rok Hrastnik interviewed me yesterday for his 2007 edition of his RSS e-book. He gave me permission to share his questions along with some of my answers:

1. Could you please give us an overview of how you are using RSS for your marketing purposes?

We’re not using RSS for marketing purposes as the primary goal, but rather we use RSS for pre-qualified visitor traffic-attraction purposes.

EzineArticles has RSS feeds for every category and one for every single expert author listed on our site (45k+). For a select few publishers in a closed test, we also have a keyword RSS feed. Lastly, we’ve made our RSS feeds compliant with the browser standards that allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds very easily.

2. What general results are you seeing from your RSS marketing? Have you seen it drive traffic from the RSS search engines, drive new subscriptions … ?

I’m not certain it’s driving new subscriptions, but I do know that after search engines and email alerts, that our RSS feeds drive the next highest level of traffic to the site daily. This comes largely from a combination of RSS readers who subscribe directly to a particular set of feeds and from niche publishers who add the respective EzineArticles RSS feed to further add value to their web visitors. Example: A Yoga website could add our Yoga RSS feed to display automatically the freshest Yoga articles on their site. They win because they expose their users to a more complete set of information, we win because this drives highly desired and qualified traffic back to our articles and our authors win because they get more exposure.

3. What does it take to manage such an incredibly large number of RSS feeds? What system are you using?

Since 2003 we’ve been developing our own CMS (Content Management System)… So, it’s all done in-house and it’s full automated.

4. Could you please take us through your implementation process step-by-step?

How we implemented our RSS feeds would most likely be of no value to your readers who don’t have the benefit of an in-house CMS development team. I can tell you that we’re only scratching the surface of how RSS feeds will be used to grow the site and attract more qualified visitors.

We have not begun educating our publishers on how to intall RSS feeds in their own website as this varies widely depending on which CMS they are using. Most of the CMS engines today have RSS modules but I’m not sure they are as flexible or customizable as they should be/could be.

5. What are the key learning points you’ve learned through your RSS experience that you can share with other marketers?

• Have them… meaning, get RSS feeds up on your site immediately if you don’t have them.
• Test them often and make sure they work.
• Only offer PARTIAL-FEEDS. I have yet to see any good arguments for FULL-FEED RSS feeds.
• Watch for funny character-sets that can break RSS feeds… and pay close attention to the mechanical quality of your article SUMMARIES (because this is what the RSS reader sees).
• Use your email newsletter to educate your audience on how to use your RSS feeds.
• If you accept user-submitted content, give them the ability to have their own RSS feeds so they can display them also on their own website.
• Autoconfigure your RSS feeds to be browser aware so those with RSS-intelligent browsers can bookmark your RSS feeds.

6. How well does RSS work with e-mail marketing?

A better question to ask: How well can you use e-mail marketing to convince your users and publishers to use your RSS feeds for their and your benefit?

I hope everyone enjoyed the interview. :-)
Any RSS questions?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 16, 2007 at 10:01 am

Views 1,220 | Comments (14)

Social Bookmarking Status

Jack writes:

It would be nice if ezinearticles could have an easy way for articles to be social bookmarked.

Here’s why we have not implemented a 3rd party social bookmarking system yet:

• Our members, by their promotionally motivated nature (not all of them, but a minority of members could ruin it for the majority), would abuse the system leading our entire site to become banned by the major social networking partners.
• We’re not certain that anyone that we bestow a several hundred thousand outbound link favor would return qualified traffic back to us worthy of the link risk & economic value.
• We don’t own any of the social bookmarking sites nor have we been invested by any of them. What? You didn’t think there was serious social & economic politics behind which social media site links to which site…

Social bookmarking seems like a much more interesting traffic creation vehicle for low traffic websites because they have nothing to lose by creating a few hundred or thousand outbound links to one or more of the social bookmarking sites (stumbleupon, del.icio.us, technorati, digg, furl, rojo, etc).

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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 4, 2007 at 12:24 pm

Views 684 | Comments (5)

20 Things I Learned In 2006

Thanks to an idea from EzineArticles expert author Benjamin Yoskovitz’s Instagator blog where he proposed a group writing project to answer the question, “What I Learned In 2006″…here are my answers:

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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on December 27, 2006 at 9:40 am

Views 1,056 | Comments (10)

Blog Results in Google News Email Alerts

Google has recently added blog results in their email-based Google Alerts; which means you can now subscribe to blog search results via email (or Google News, the web, etc). In my case, I’ve been a Google Alerts user since they original launched it and now I’m getting slammed with Blog results in my emails, but I can’t complain because it’s had a wonderful additional effect on traffic to EzineArticles.com.

I must not be the only one that has happened to because I never requested blog search results in my daily Google Alerts; yet they are flowing and if you know anything about the syndication nature of our system, you know that many high profile blogs feed from us to enhance the depth of their respective niches… which means, literally, thousands of EzineArticles instances are showing up in daily email alerts that Google is sending and this benefits every EzineArticles expert author in a very positive way.

Unfortunately, it’s made my Google Alerts about 99% irrelevant to my needs for why I originally created the email alerts and this concerns me because I know Google is usually very attuned to their userbase. If too many folks complain or can’t figure out how to exclude the Blog Search results in their daily Google Alerts, they’ll be forced to remove them from the daily alerts unless requested.

In the meantime, it’s added a nice lift in traffic for everyone. :-)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on November 2, 2006 at 10:37 am

Views 719 | Comments (7)

EzineArticles Direct Advertising

Currently, we are not accepting new advertisers directly and have been referring all inquires to Google Adwords and to select “Site Targeting: EzineArticles.com” to get your ads on our site.

In the near future, we’ve been working on plans to open up EzineArticles.com for direct targeting of text ads (with nofollow rel tags to ensure you’re investing in advertising for qualified leads and targeted traffic) in each of our 301 categories. For those who wish to advertise on EzineArticles.com, we’ve setup a pre-launch list that you can subscribe to today to be notified in advance of our public launch: [Click Here To Subscribe To Our Advertise on EzineArticles.com Alert List]

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 29, 2006 at 4:02 pm

Views 1,134 | Comments (0)

Politics of 3rd Party Article Submissions

We are often asked, “Do you accept automatic article submissions from so and so?”

To which we respond, “We do accept automatic article submissions from a select small list of 3rd party article submission service providers, but we have never disclosed and had no plans to disclose who the approved 3rd party article submission service providers are to prevent implied endorsements.”

Here are some of the politics behind our reasons for the above policy and many insights into our thinking on 3rd party article submission providers:

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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on September 4, 2006 at 3:19 pm

Views 1,042 | Comments (6)

Hello WordPress, Bye MT

Effective today forward, this blog is run on the WordPress platform…and for the previous 2 years it was on the MT (Moveable Type) platform. The biggest reason for the change is that WordPress is PHP driven and our tech team can make global changes to the blog whenever we want to add or change a feature…and it won’t take a day of work to update all of the templates. Bottom line: It’s a SPEED issue. :-)
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 4, 2006 at 10:34 am

Views 1,642 | Comments (5)

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