200 New Themed Logos

We’re testing a new concept to solve a problem that can’t easily be solved:

EzineArticles has ~100k expert authors who know and understand what EzineArticles is, but in any given day, we’ll have 100k users before the sun rises who don’t know or understand what EzineArticles is?

ie: We don’t have a very consumer-friendly facing brand that encourages repeat visits or brand loyalty by way of the EzineArticles name.

So we came up with this ambitious idea to theme-up all 569 categories with an EzineArticles logo that included elements of the niche that those articles will be found in. This way a user might perceive that the logo and the theme match visually…and perhaps they may even start to think of EzineArticles as an online magaZINE for the niche they are viewing articles on.

Some examples include:
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 14, 2008 at 7:41 am

Views 219 | Comments (25)

Viewing EzineArticles At Work

If you’re one of the few unlucky folks who try to view EzineArticles.com at work, and get this blocked message:

There is a work around! It’s called a Proxy service…or you could just call your boss/IT department and ask them to stop treating you like you need web surfing supervision.

Resource: Websense Web Filtering - Does It Really Increase Productivity?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 6, 2008 at 2:23 pm

Views 183 | Comments (1)

Happy Cinco De Mayo

This is not an American holiday today, but more than 50% of our countries population might argue that it should be.

I was just in the SF/SJ Bay area last week and it seems like this event is a major fiesta celebration with Latino rock bands and plenty of Mexican food dishes to taste test.

For us here in Wisconsin, we’ll enjoy some Margarita’s, Tequila shots, Daiquiris, or Cervezas (beer) with chips & salsa.

Resources to catch you up on what Cinco De Mayo is about:

• Ole to Cinco de Mayo!
• Cinco de Mayo For Kids
• Cinco de Mayo: A Time for a Festive and Entertaining Party
• Cinco de Mayo Menu Ideas for a Colorful Cinco De Mayo Celebration

EzineArticles Factoid: 86 of our Expert Authors are from Mexico.

Do you celebrate Cinco De Mayo and if so, what do you do?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 5, 2008 at 11:35 am

Views 235 | Comments (3)

More Expansion

We’ve run out of physical room in our 2,500 sq. ft. office… so this week we had to get creative to “create more space” for the next (4) hires.

The room in the photo was our office supplies & marketing staging area where we assembled our EzineArticles Platinum mug care packages. We rented a storage shed down the road to house all of our mug supplies and empty Dell boxes. Our Accounting Manager took one of the office supply cabinets and our Managing Editor took another in her office.

Instant new office for hires #29, #30, #31 and #32.

In our local North East Wisconsin job economy (“Silicon Cheese Valley” I like to call it), we’ve had a steady stream of quality job applicants. The plus side to our area is that housing is very affordable ($800 USD a month gets you either a mortgage on a new home or rent on a 2 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 stall enclosed garage home), most have a (4) year college degree, pretty good work ethic; and the downside is that we end up having to teach or train new developer applicants on our platform vs. finding pre-trained talent and the lack of proximity to Silicon Valley is less than ideal.
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 29, 2008 at 7:53 am

Views 452 | Comments (16)

USA Presidential Candidates Content Face-Off

Here in the USA, if you turn on any news station, they have been obsessing over the past year on which political candidate will be our next President.

We thought it would be fun to see who’s winning in terms of article content submitted to EzineArticles.com to date that mentions the candidate.

Sorted by alphabetical order:

Hillary Clinton

• Total Articles: 106
• Total Views: 18,181
• Total URL Clicks: 195
• Most Viewed Article: Insights on Infidelity From Hillary Clinton’s Book
  by Ruth Houston. 1,492 views, 0 comments, 5 URL clicks
• Most URL Clicks Article: Background On Hillary Clinton
  by Jeremy DenHartog. 1,215 views, 0 comments, 23 URL clicks

John McCain

• Total Articles: 34
• Total Views: 2,106
• Total URL Clicks: 23
• Most Viewed Article: It’s a War, Senator McCain!
  by John St. Michael. 213 views, 0 comments, 0 URL clicks
• Most URL Clicks Article: John McCain - About Turn on Ethanol
  by Emma A Johnson. 179 views, 0 comments, 5 URL clicks

Barack Obama

• Total Articles: 126
• Total Views: 19,884
• Total URL Clicks: 647
• Most Viewed Article: Barack Obama’s Numerology: Will He Be Our Next President?
  by Keith Abbott. 2,152 views, 0 comments, 137 URL clicks
• Most URL Clicks Article: The Truth About Barack Obama
  by Amit Thard. 2,037 views, 0 comments, 210 URL clicks

(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 21, 2008 at 9:51 am

Views 449 | Comments (20)

EzineArticles Buzz

For fun, we created a mash-up of Blogspot, Twitter, Technorati, Digg and YouTube to show a snapshot of how or what people are discussing relating to EzineArticles.

• The “Buzz” about EzineArticles

Any suggestions for how we could better display & aggregate the buzz that is generated by EzineArticles members, fans and friends?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 13, 2008 at 6:14 am

Views 358 | Comments (11)

Send To Friends - 900k Pages Removed

Thanks to AJAX technologies, today we introduced a new way for our users to more easily send an article recommendation to their friends.

To use this new feature: Just click on any article and click on the “SEND TO FRIEND” tool within the Article Tools located in the upper right corner of all articles.

Why this feature rocks:

• Instead of having a page of content that was only dedicated to helping the SEND TO FRIEND tool work, we were able to shrink the size of EzineArticles by 900k+ pages. We gave up some ad revenue to do this, but our research and feeling is that we don’t want to make it difficult for the search engines to find the right main URL for each unique quality article.
• The user-experience is enhanced as it’s faster now. No need to load a new page to get a job done.

You like?
(Continue Reading…)

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 11, 2008 at 12:43 pm

Views 415 | Comments (5)

Google Secret: filetype:pdf

Next time you’re surfing Google, try this:

Search for your keyword or keyphrase and then add “filetype:pdf“.

Example: “writing articles filetype:pdf”

Essentially, it shows you all results that are in a PDF file type. Reason why this rocks: Many awesome whitepapers are in PDF form only and viewing a PDF file in HTML extrapolation doesn’t always look right.

Examples:

• Writing Features
• Writing a research article: advice to beginners
• Twenty-Five Writing Secrets

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 5, 2008 at 1:55 pm

Views 326 | Comments (4)

Ask Christopher Knight Day

I’m unable to respond to everyone who writes me directly, but here are a handful of common questions asked in the last few weeks:

Mark writes:

“how to write a good article that can really make people think i am a very smart people?”

Chris Knight Responds:

First, hire someone to proof your articles. If you’re not going to capitalize the first letter of a sentence to me or capitalize your “i”…or use improper sentence/grammar structure… you’re going to need an editor to fix your work before you submit it anywhere. You will be judged by your ability to write in proper English. No one will trust your words or think you are smart if you can’t put a simple 500-1000 word article together without spelling/grammar/sentence structure mistakes.

D writes:

“how i never wrote any thing in my life can u help me please”

Chris Knight Responds:

Uhhm, just do it… and judging by your question mechanics, you’ll need an editor anyway to help you. Start some where. Put your thoughts down. Article title, 5 short paragraphs with a lead sentence in each paragraph and 3-5 supporting sentences that reinforces your first sentence of each paragraph… Read the article writing articles to pick up the basics for free. Better yet, subscribe via email or rss to the Writing Articles feed to be emailed daily with lessons. Lastly, join our free 12-part e-course.

James writes:

“Sorry I don’t have a question at the moment. However, I just wanted to thank you for granting me Platinum status. Such an award makes the task of writing all that more worthwhile.”

Chris Knight Responds:

Glad you earned it!

A ‘different’ James writes:

“I was told that there were some company’s that allowed free articles on there site. Is this true or have I been misinformed and if so,is there any way that I can obtain a list.”

Chris Knight Responds:

I’m not sure I understand your question, but do a Google search for “article submission sites” and you’ll find a laundry list of sites you can send your articles to. I just wouldn’t trust 99% of them… but most people have to go through the experience to see for themselves. Sorry, I don’t provide any lists of article sites because most are transient at best.

Samantha writes:

“My biggest question is - Will you come and write something short on my blog? LOL I’m serious because I love you and I am a freelance writer who constantly promotes ezine articles. This is my blog - [DELETED] and you can help me get traffic, which helps me sell articles, which helps you because I submit them all free to ezinearticles for my clients….*big, genuine, puppy dog eyed grin designed to convince you.* Thank you thank you thank you and I will sing your praises the world over if you help me!!! Oh, and a *batting eyelashes.*”

Chris Knight Responds:

In my “Brian the dog” voice… Uhmm.. WOW. … ok, seriously, sorry, I can barely get this blog published frequently.

TB writes:

“Hello, I have been wandering what is the traffic source percentage breakdown for an article? If an article I write gets 100views how would you break down where it came from? 30views from direct ezinearticle readers, 40views from search engines..etc. Thanks again for this great reseource!”

Chris Knight Responds:

Yeah, I bet you misspelled “reSEOurce” on purpose, eh? Sorry, we have not disclosed the exact percentages, but a good chunk comes from repeat visitors, 3rd parties such as search engines, social media sites, RSS feeds that are on high traffic niche sites, our own email alerts that goes out to millions of permission-based members monthly, and forwards to a friend.

Eduard writes:

“How do I submit my articles?”

Chris Knight Responds:

Create a free membership account here and send in your best quality original articles.

Gentle Note/Request: Please don’t use the AskChristopherKnight.com site to ask member support questions. I’m the last resort after our team has failed you. Most members seem to contact our support team and then me redundantly and it creates more work to sort through the questions to get fast/accurate answers back.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 3, 2008 at 9:03 am

Views 341 | Comments (21)

Public Member Support vs. Private

Right now, 100% of member support is handled privately. It is the right way to do it as this protects the privacy of our members and allows members & users to ask us questions without fear of the public finding out that they asked or reported an issue.

However, that level of privacy and intimate 1:1 support has a price: Slow response for members + Increased labor load for us.

As of this morning, we’re 921 member and user email support tickets behind….and that number is climbing daily despite us throwing more labor at getting answers to member and user questions. We’re 5-6 days behind in responding to emails vs. our target of next business day response for all queries.

Idea: I wanted to float a concept that I’ve seen catching on in other venues for member/user support that might help us and our members help each other faster:

What if we offered a public version of member support that we’d make searchable so that over time, it would become a super FAQ?

Upsides/Downsides? Your thoughts?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on March 28, 2008 at 1:27 pm

Views 495 | Comments (21)

BLOG COMMENT POLICY
© EzineArticles.com - All Rights Reserved Worldwide.