Top Management Story

Writen by Hans Bool

Article marketing is just like a real business; there are the employees or freelancers (authors), the publishing system and the editors (together the internal organization) and there are ... the clients (the readers). The goal is to get satisfied clients.

And there is always a problem. For example the article-parts-problem. This is a normal business problem. An organization should arrange its business between internal efficiency requirements and external (client) demands.

The employee (the author)
Certain authors write their articles in parts, for example – "How to color your presentation (1)," is the first part, followed by "How to color your presentation (2)," the second part. There could also be a third part. This is what I personally like about these sequels; that when I think there is something more to tell about the subject, I just add another article in the same sequence. At whatever moment.

The problem
The problem is however that there could be a time lag between article part one and part two. The article system is placing the articles in a sequential order. Like a normal library, the article directory is ordering the articles per author and on an alphabetical order, but (unlike a normal library) this is not visual for the reader, nor are the different parts linked together.

The client (the reader)
It appears that articles – as they are pure content – are most of all retrieved through the search engines. In which case it could be possible that a client hits an article that is one in the middle of a series – for example the reader gets article two (2) not knowing that there are many more articles. In this case, the reader is in the middle of a short story, that is to be continued, but he would not know where to follow it.

The solution
What you normally see in business is that the employees are guided by the limitation of the system. In many cases there is some kind of an information system and as any system these are always limited in their functionality, because it would make these systems too expensive to solve all possible exceptions. The system is leading the organization in these (and many other) cases. The author in this situation should learn to cut his or her articles up in autonomous parts with a singular start and end. That requires training, but would also require that "broken" articles get rejected by the editors. This will diminish the internal efficiency.

Or, the system should be tailored to the needs of both the employee and the client. In this case the system should search for a sequel and present a little button with the text – "continue reading next part," or "read previous part." This is a more expensive solution.

To solve issues like these you need to balance between internal efficiency and external client demands. Most of the time you will end up somewhere in the middle.

© 2006 Hans Bool