Vince Samios

On a daily basis I’m looking at how to monetize web properties. I’m personally quite intrigued by EzineArticles somewhat lazy approach to making a buck.

As a paying premium member, I personally fail to see the value in a rather expensive monthly subscription to speed up the approval process of new articles, which is the one and only benefit.

It makes squat all difference if my articles go live in 1 day, or 7. During the course of my EzineArticles career, with thousands of articles posted across many different accounts, there was only ever one time when the subscription had any value to me.

I hijacked a TV Advertising campaign for the new Dido album. The silly fools behind the commercial created a vague video intended to go viral, which instructed viewers to type something into google. The phrase was uncompetitive, so I wrote an article about it and posted it on EzineArticles. I wanted it to be up ASAP so I paid for a membership. My little trick worked and my article took the top spot for the contested phrase.

There is one very simple way in which EzineArticles could provide some real value to premium members without jeopardizing any of its philosophies or standards which have enabled its enviable success. I made my suggesting via twitter and was very promptly informed that it wasn’t on the cards.

On a side tangent, EzineArticles twitter presence is exceptional! I have received a very prompt reply to every direct message I have ever sent, including having my IP white listed when I flew into cambodia as it had been identified as potentially scraping the EzineArticles site. This is HIGHLY COMMENDABLE on EzineArticles part, but I digress…

My suggestion to EzineArticles, which would improve the value of a premium membership to the point where they would likely see a stream of new subscriptions, is to have a page dedicated to “Premium Articles” which is linked to from the EzineArticles Homepage with a do-follow link. The effect being that new articles would hang around on a high PageRank page for a longer period of time, hence receiving more value from the power of EzineArticles.

Effectively it would just be a mirror of the EzineArticles homepage, containing both categories and a list of the latest articles, but only containing articles submitted by premium members.

This would add value to a premium membership, and it would be something I would pay for.

A benefit for us: Increased Value
A benefit for EzineArticles: A LOT more subscribers, hence money.

I personally can’t see a reason for EzineArticles not to pursue this concept.

I would like to thank EzineArticles for the quality of service they provide - the one and only reason behind its success is the strict manual quality control.

One last thing - Some of your proof readers reject articles based on UK/AU spelling - In my experience just resubmitting unchanged articles normally gets them approved.