Disable MS Word Smart Quotes

Today’s Article Marketing Tip of the Day:

How To Disable Microsoft Word’s Smart Quotes:

1. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect Options, and then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.

2. Under Replace as you type, select or clear the “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes” check box.

Why? Because your articles sent into distribution should never have any smart quotes in them so that you don’t look stupid when other people’s servers display the non-ASCII characters in your articles as garbage code.

Example:
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 21, 2005 at 8:16 am | 1,161 views | Comments (0)

Cute Titles Hurt

So I’m reviewing several thousands articles this weekend and it amazes me how many quality articles WILL NEVER receive a tiny fraction of the potential traffic that they could receive if the author would just put some intelligence in the ‘keyword smarts’ of the title.

Today’s article TITLE Lesson:

Keep quotes wrapped around the outside of your TITLE OUT of your TITLE. It’s just a dumb practice that has zero pay off.

Frankly, I just don’t get it. Why would an author try to “cutesy” up their article TITLE by putting quotes around the entire TITLE?

Why add the WORTHLESS baggage of nonsense characters that the search engines then have to deal with… and if a search engine bot is not smart enough to deal with the nonsense quotes wrapped around the title, you just may find your article is ranked lower in the search engines than if you just kept them out of your title all together.

For clarity, I’m not circling any one particular author out as there are at least a few dozen per day that send in articles with quotes wrapped around the entire TITLE.

It’s not in our or the authors best interest to allow this nonsense! ;-) Let’s call it an article traffic killer mistake to avoid.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 20, 2005 at 4:00 pm | 1,066 views | Comments (0)

Problem Status Project

In an effort to help authors understand why we couldn’t accept their article yet when there is an editorial guidelines conflict, we have come up with these initial problem status codes:

2.0 PROBLEM STATUS
2.1 Affiliate link violation
2.2 Self-Promotion / Advertising to Content Ratio Too High
2.3 Grammar, Spelling or Punctuation problems
2.4 Image tags or Javascript violation
2.5 Excess HTML code or bloat
2.6 Author name does not match Resource Box author name.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 20, 2005 at 5:57 am | 690 views | Comments (0)

Platinum Benefits Happening

Those of you who are Platinum with us are experiencing an advantage today that you’re probably unaware of…

We are 3 solid days behind in approving “BASIC” level member articles, but Platinum members have had their articles and their modified articles waiting for re-review done under 24 hours.

There are only 16 BASIC members that have zero submissions remaining on their accounts and they will be reviewed this weekend for Platinum upgrades.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 19, 2005 at 7:45 am | 1,008 views | Comments (0)

Sorry, No Aff Here

Dear Author Universe,

We here at EzineArticles.com love your articles and appreciate every single one that you take the time to produce, edit, and send in.

With that said, it’s important to point out that we do not accept articles with any affiliate links…so please don’t send them in.

It’s our belief that you get a high enough ROI from your efforts to submit your article to us to not warrant needing the affiliate revenue to justify the article submission.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 18, 2005 at 11:05 pm | 1,039 views | Comments (0)

8,681 Email Alerts

Factoid of the day:

Since we began delivering real-time and daily summary email alerts when new articles were published, we have emailed 8,681 unique emails since we started on November 20th.

So far there are 1,431 members on over 40 email alert lists. There is quite a bit of churn in the email alerts in that over 4k folks have subscribed, yet we have less than 1500 aboard yet. Perhaps they are finding that RSS is a better way to manage the flood of emails that our system can create (especially when we get into flow).

Internet & Businesses Online, Business, and Self-Help are the top categories of email alert lists that are heavily subscribed to.
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 18, 2005 at 2:50 pm | 999 views | Comments (0)

Your Article ID

Dear Authors,

As you can probably see from our directory, every single article has a unique numeric ID number associated with it.

We can speed our service to you if you tell us the ID number of the article that you have a question about.

From time to time, authors send us a little over 150 questions a week and we want to speed our service to you by requesting that you tell us the ID number of the article you have a question about.

Thanks!

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 18, 2005 at 1:22 pm | 982 views | Comments (0)

$0.27 USD Per Article

I’m not sure if we should be sharing this, but our current costs are about $0.27 USD per article when our associate editor reviews and approves or rejects each article submission.

Over the next few weeks, we are going to target clipping that down to $0.17 USD per article.

These figures do not include quality control which takes about 4-30 seconds per article and is done by a 2nd editor. Right now, that other person is me, but we have budgeted for a full time Managing Editor and will begin reviewing candidates soon :-).

These figures also don’t take into consideration the cost to acquire articles (author promotion), but I was just keying on the true editorial costs to approve each article submission.

I think one strategy we’re going to test is adding even more automation on the submission process so that our editorial review process can be further automated.

If you have any suggestions about how we can lower our editorial approval costs while maintaining our quality standards, we are very open to suggestions.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 17, 2005 at 5:23 pm | 945 views | Comments (1)

Trackbacks Gone

Curious: Are you a hard core blogger?

As much as I love blogging, I’ve come to the point where it is time to remove the “trackbacks” feature from this blog as it’s generating hundreds of trackback spam emails a week and zero value for anyone.

What’s your position on trackbacks?

Good feature or waste of time? Who is this feature perfect for?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 17, 2005 at 1:29 pm | 965 views | Comments (0)

Works For Hire

Author Legal Begal Discussion:

Lately, there have been many ghost writers that sell their works for hire under a verbal agreement only. We then get a complaint here or there that alledges fraud by one author over the other.

This is a very dumb practice to not put your “works for hire” policies and legal understanding in writing. Only takes about an hour to search the net to find or buy a works for hire template and customize it.

If you are a ghost writer and you have a dispute with an EzineArticles.com author and you didn’t have a works for hire agreement in writing….
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Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 17, 2005 at 10:30 am | 929 views | Comments (0)