We just added Google Friend Connect to this blog, its a new feature that Google has just launched, it offers the ability to attract more visitors as account users of Google, Yahoo and MSN can easily add themselves as friends.

The coding is very simply, so we implemented and will report back on the progress.

Follow us on Twitter, twitter has created quiet a following for its on the net, so we thought it was long overdue that we setup our own account and started to Tweat!

We will be adding RSS feeds and other stuff in the new year, so please follow us. Twitter is a sort of social bookmarking site that allows user to monitor what their friends are up to. A number of existing twitter users already refer to us on the site. Its become something of the in thing, so we can’t miss out!

Follow us on twitter

Checking Google blog search today, I notice that there are now over 90,000 references to Article Alley in the blogosphere. Thats some going! A lot of entries seem to be using the Google owned blogger - not sure if that reflects a bias on Google to their own blogger product, or just the fact that its easier to setup and configure than Wordpress.

Anyways I don’t think it matters so much which blogging platform publishers use, just the relative number of posts per day - we seem to be attracting around 100 per week.

We are getting a lot of requests for examples of our own professional article writing service, Helen Cox is one of our in house team and posts under the username of Helen.

Examples of some of her recent articles can be found here

Helen is a graduate Journalist and has worked in the team for the last 2 years. She’s one of our more popular authors and many orders ask for her to be assigned time and time again.

I am not one to watch Alexa, as I know it can be easily distorted by a small group of users, but the last week has seen a consistant upward trend, I am guessing that it reflects the 24,000 article backlog that built up 2 weeks ago, getting through our editorial process.

Alexa is often slated as a tool, but I think its fun and it certainly helps to encourage our in house team.

Last week, we improved the Google Custom Search feature running on Article Alley, it uses Google’s own database to provide search results from the Article Alley database, the results are displayed within a page.

We are already seeing improved numbers and better quality search results, the old Lucene based search features caused excessive server loads, so its been disabled for now.

Since we introduced our article writing service, there seems to have been some confusion about where to submit articles.

The following button has been added to the Navigation to make it clearer.

The Article Writing section is just for ordering articles to be written by our team of editors, not to submit articles to our database. That has always and will always remain free of charge.

Why become an author?

Articles submitted to Article Alley - All the Best News and Articles not only appear on this site, but across our network of sites, getting more exposue and vistors for your articles.

Update your profile and all your article profiles get updated. Access to your articles and editorial status 24/7.

Your own unique web page dedicated to you as an author linked to your articles.
Article submitted to Article Alley are used by 1,000’s of websites looking for content to use on their websites

Become one of the 10,000’s of authors using article alley each month to promote their content

Compete.com has just published their November data, traffic is showing as 2.7% up on the month, which is pretty close to our own Analytic stats.

Third party results are a useful benchmark as we can track how our traffic is growing compared to our competitors. Every year since launch we have managed a compound increase in traffic of over 100%, we are hoping that 2009 will see a continuation of this trend.

A lot of new features are under development and next year will be exciting for our Authors and our Team.

A couple of authors have asked to see our office!  Well its a funny request, but we are always happy to help, since July 2008 we have been in the E-innovation centre.

Its a nice location, with plenty of green space and park areas which is nice for our staff when they get a break, which isn’t so often at the moment.

Over the last couple of weeks a backlog of articles built up, around 12,000 were pending review as of last week, we have a big surge of interest following our November newsletter and its had our team working late into the evenings working through the editorial process.

We are pleased to report that as of today we are back up to date, with both new submissions and article updates.  Also we rebuilt the site cache today so all content changes should be live as of today.

A couple hundred authors have written in asking when it will be cleared, we are answering every mail in turn but now have a backlog of these to reply to!

Sorry again, but its a nice problem to have!

Adrian