What’s In It For Me?

Honestly… nothing directly, unless the community owner pays you to vote for them, either directly or with prizes.
I must admit I am not a big supporter of offering prizes and gifts to encourage participation. As an example I can encourage you to join the Collective Thoughts Community on MyBlogLog, but I am not going to offer a specific incentive.
I have found that most sites offering prizes to achieve a specific marketing goal, having achieved their objectives, abandon the communities while moving onto other targets.

Have you gained benefit from using the community? If so you should think about giving something back freely.

They Make Money From Me Already

Most social communities ARE free, but still have some level of monetization

• Advertising many people generally ignore
• User data they might in some way exploit
• Link juice they exploit for other commercial properties

The income earned by many communities wouldn’t be sufficient to pay for extensive commercial advertising, thus they have to rely on other methods.

Viral Growth By Word Of Mouth Marketing

Whilst you might think many of these communities, especially the more niche sites are raking in huge amounts of money, ultimately many of them grow only through word of mouth marketing.
The money they make is sufficient to cover server costs, and sometimes staff wages, but there is very little additional funding to cover paid advertising unless they have gained some significant additional funding.

Many communities grow through various forms of viral marketing, such as inviting friends by email, widgets on blogs etc, and many mercenary webmasters might look on that as being a sufficient (and often short-lived) contribution.

I Gave Up My Screen Real Estate, Isn’t That Enough?

I have been a strong supporter of various blogging communities for a long time, and am often criticized on their effect on page loading times, the amount of screen real estate they take up, and what benefit I really gain from supporting them.

Ultimately the biggest gain is being part of a community, the fabric of the web and the blogosphere that holds things together, a conduit or hub of the community rather than an end point.

It is hard to measure community, it is also hard to measure community spirit.

Giving Something Back

Think about giving something back to the communities you find most valuable, whether it be MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, Blogcatalog, Sphinn, Mixx, Digg, PlugIM, Facebook

You can nominate your favorites over at Collective Thoughts and of course you can duplicate your nominations, or vote for something different on all the blogs accepting nominations

From every single one of those communities I have possibly gained more traffic than I have given them in return, though it is very difficult to judge exactly when you start gaining traffic, and maybe that isn’t really the point. You can’t easily track RSS clicks to a site unless you destroy the SEO advantages of syndication by having nice clean links and ultimately you hope for people to discover you once, and then subscribe.
As you send people to a particular site, just like when you send people to a useful blog post, you don’t lose them as readers, and more often than not you get traffic back in return.

I posted these traffic numbers over on Tinu’s blog in a comment, but thought I would share them here as well.

• MyBlogLog – I have received 2600 visits directly from MyBlogLog since November, and that increased a fair amount once I hit the top50 communities which only happened fairly recently. I would also gain a small surge each time I was included as a hot member. I have never used their broadcast facility, and only rarely send messages to other users.
• Bumpzee – I am very active on Bumpzee running one of the largest communities (No Nofollow), and it really is only since I started investing time in building that community that I saw a major benefit other than for networking and discovery. Bumpzee has delivered … 3700 visitors in total.
  Remember that is over less time – I joined Bumpzee in January, and it was not until April that I started my community there.
• Blogcatalog is another community that I have been actively involved with for a number of months, and I even do a little consulting with them. The biggest driving force of traffic for Blogcatalog is without doubt being highly active on their forums, and I don’t have that much time for forums, but I have received a healthy 985 visitors in total, though many of those visits are from people who use Blogcatalog for bookmarking their favorite blogs. This is traffic since April, so half the time compared to MyBlogLog.

It is strange how communities develop from different directions

Blogcatalog Solving Problems – Adding Features

One of the biggest requests Blogcatalog received was that people were looking for more categories on the main discussion forums, or for a place where they could have a more focused discussion regarding a specific niche topic. Blogcatalog are now beta testing group discussions.

Currently you can only start a group if you are a contributor, but soon that restriction will be lifted. Any member of Blogcatalog can however participate in groups.

Bumpzee No Nofollow Community & Lack Of Bumps

A recent discussion on Bumpzee highlighted a problem, but I am not yet sure of the answer.
The NoNofollow community is fairly cohesive but people are not necessarily bumping stories even if they appreciate them.
It only sometimes takes 2 or 3 bumps to appear on the widgets, so just you and the author is enough, yet people don’t bump, but they might stumble or sphinn instead.

Note: in the following example I selected to randomly choose niches just to aid understanding, not to single anyone out because

The problem is that whilst the community is strong as a horizontal market with many shared beliefs and goals in building a community, only a fraction of the members are going to be interested in a vertical niche such as parenting or fiction writing.

The community on Bumpzee really needs to grow larger to gain sufficient members in a niche, followed or nofollowed blogs, for the niche sites to stand out.

Bumpzee grew from the original Affiliate Marketing community and there is plenty of overlap with the Dofollow cummunity. This frequently results in affiliate marketing articles appearing on parenting blogs which have joined bumpzee for the dofollow community.

The solution is to grow the number of parenting blogs in the dofollow community, or to grow the number of members in a dedicated community for parenting blogs.

Who is responsible to grow the number of parenting blogs to improve relevance?

In my mind it is a shared responsibility, Bumpzee need to maintain a stable and inviting platform, and parenting blogs need to promote Bumpzee to their topical neighbours.

MyBlogLog Decline In Usage?

It seems like eons ago, but around December/January when this blog had less than 100 subscribers, a full 7% of my traffic was coming from MyBlogLog, and the community was very active. I established many new relationships during that time with other bloggers who remain some of my hardcore readers, and who I can frequently count on for the occasional link, Stumble, Digg or Sphinn.
Some bloggers still use MyBlogLog for browsing occasionally, in fact many do and I even take the occasional stroll, and it may be that you grow beyond the biggest benefit or have problems with the way they make changes.
Once you have found your place within the blogging community and have an established readership, and a bulging feed reader, you end up going increasingly directly to the source.
You still see the same familiar faces on the widgets, but you know who they are, and quite often they are visiting because you have just visited them, and left a comment, but they might not visit you through the MyBlogLog interface.

This blog isn’t extremely high traffic – whilst feed subscriptions grow, that doesn’t necessarily increase page views a huge amount. I don’t have any front page Diggs to totally destroy any stats I might have. I can still remember the people who sent 10 or 20 visitors to me, and gave me a few new subscribers.

With total page views (counted in Google Analytics not the totally unreliable AWStats that reports 6x as many) of 192,000 over the last 10 months, and discounting a lot of clicks I have made from Mybloglog to some of my articles from the stats (I can’t use IP blocking), MyBlogLog accounts for slightly more than 1% of my direct traffic.

However I have only had 897 MyBlogLog clicks leaving the site, some of which are mine as well, so it might be that only 1/3 of the traffic is what I would regard as “browsing” traffic, people actively using the MyBlogLog widget for discovery, which takes new traffic down to 0.3%

The more you get involved with the communities the more you get in return, but that takes time, just like many forum communities.

If you are the only knitting blog using Blogrush, you will get poor traffic, but you will probably get some. There needs to be enough blogs in a category to achieve adequate distribution.

There might be a slight decline among people who have moved on to other blog networking communities for one reason or another, but overall MyBlogLog is still growing. What has declined is my own activity, and the amount that active involvement affects my total traffic.

Parallels With Blogrush?

I have sent far more traffic to Blogrush currently than they have sent to me? I am not worried about that in the slightest, it is very early days.

If you are the only one with a parenting blog using Blogrush, you are going to get very little targeted traffic.

You have a few choices:-

• Rip it off your blog and declare it as a load of junk
• Not put it on your blog and just sit back and do nothing
• Place it on your blog and suffer in silence
• Place it on your blog, give constructive feedback, and try to build your topical community.

One of the good things with Blogrush is that there is a relatively low time commitment in using it. You can just place it on your blog and do nothing, you might get a few visitors.

Can you imagine Stumbleupon if no one hit the “Stumble” button?

Can you imagine the “qualified traffic” you would receive if you were the only web design site currently listed?

Whilst you might not think of Blogrush as “community building” because there are no faces, and you click directly through to the article on the site, if there isn’t currently a topical community for your niche blog, you are not going to receive as much targeted traffic.

Are You The Hub Or The Spoke?

Discovery is a pretty powerful thing when you use it to leverage other networks. Being the first to discover a blog that happens to be created by one of your readers, and then stumbling it can bring about some strange reactions.

The story is up on Sphinn and on Andrews local search blog. I didn’t realise it at the time but Andrew is actually one of those less vocal regular readers of my blog, and even signed up to Blogrush under me.

• Do you think I am likely to stumble his content a little more?
• Do you think Andrew will remember to stumble my posts occasionally?
• Will we find an occasional way to link to each other when topics cross over?

Now I am sure I might have come across Andrew’s blog sometime in the future, if someone else had come across it, or maybe he had submitted an article to Sphinn or gone on a linking spree, but Blogrush in this particular case provided a bridge that might otherwise not have existed.

The Value of Blogging Communities

This is just a clinical look for those sterile types that are just crunching numbers rather than looking at relationships.

• Conversational Bloggers are linkerati
• Conversational Bloggers are often sophisticated users likely (but not always, bribery helps lots) to subscribe without paying them with free gifts
• Bloggers typically leave useful content in comments, and might return to carry on the conversation

To the sterile number crunchers I would point out that whilst those seemingly horrible figures such as 1% of traffic from MyBlogLog might seem meaningless, I would estimate that I have gained 70% of my subscribers from my involvement in these communities, either directly or through the relationships I have built.

Might I have gained that traffic regardless? It is possible, if you are really a believer in destiny. I am more a believer in hard work.

I do know I could set up a squeeze page and pay for traffic, and have 2000 email subscribers for less than $1000, but they wouldn’t be the same.

It is much easier to launch a new blog or a whole business if you already have the attention of a reasonably sized audience.

Update

Adding a Grazr widget to aid in the discussion. With Grazr you can import and OPML file to display feeds. There are lots of other widgets that do something similar.

Over the last few months I have rejected over 100 blogs to the No Nofollow / Dofollow community on Bumpzee, and all but about 20 were because they didn’t have nofollow removed correctly from their comments.

Fortunately about 30 of those subsequently either contacted me to have this explained to them, or fixed the problem and then notified me that things were resolved.

Lots of people for some reason don’t get back in touch with me.

Requirements To Join The No Nofollow Community On Bumpzee

These are the requirement on the submission form

This community is for family friendly sites that support the Do Follow, I Follow, No Nofollow movement.
Blogs can be on any subject, but please do not submit blogs with NSFW content.

Please ensure all blogs contain original content, and have comments visible that clearly demonstrate that nofollow has been removed.

Of the 20 sites rejected for quality reasons a few were splogs, one was effectively a single page sales letter, and a fair number were datafeed sites or didn’t have enough original content.

I have also had a couple where their comment system was totally broken

Rejection Message

When people are rejected, they receive the following message

Your blog cannot be included in the community.

Most sites are rejected because they haven’t implemented some form of dofollow correctly, and sites are checked before inclusion.
It is not possible to resubmit after changes have been made to fix a problem.
If you are rejected, fix the “no nofollow” requirement, and then send a personal message to the community administrator for inclusion.

Thank you for your submission.

Some people probably had removed nofollow, but then performed an upgrade to their blogging software and forgot to enable a plugin, or maybe changed theme and forgot to make corrections.

YADL (Yet Another Dofollow List)

There seems to be another Dofollow list making the rounds.

Out of curiosity I visited the blogs linking through, and every single one I checked was on blogspot, and didn’t have nofollow removed correctly.

How To See Nofollow Links At a Glance

If you are using Firefox as your browser, just install the search status plugin which shows nofollow links using CSS highlighted with a pink background.

Policing the Neighbourhood

I do visit blogs in the No Nofollow community, in fact I am sure like many members of the community I spend more time on dofollow blogs than any other.

I am actually trying to find the time to do an audit, to ensure that all members continue to comply although it would be appreciated if people performed a self-audit occasionally, because it is easy to forget to switch a plugin back on, or forget to modify a theme after a change.

This is something in your own interests, after all if you display a badge in your sidebar, and it is no longer true, you are deceiving your audience.

Some things Blogcatalog currently do different to MBL

1. The front page heavily promotes and rotates bloggers, though one small section is for their supporters, most of it is free
2. They introduced tags before I had even spoken to them, though they were somewhat limited.
3. They were pulling in content snippets from blogs rather than just 3 titles before MBL
4. Blog Reviews and voting widgets that control listings, in addition to how active you are control your rating and thus your placement
5. Listings By Category
6. Listings by Country
7. Listings by User
8. Shout-to-Shout
9. OPML for Communities you join
10. Links to related blogs
11. Links to related bloggers
12. Ability to manually change the display order of your communities and friends (to show your best friends)
13. Ability to report something as spam without using email
14. Real tagging based on content linking to content (not fully implemented yet)
15. The forums…
16. The forum widgets
17. Auto thumbnail refreshes
18. XML-RPC
19. Full contact details including a toll free phone number
20. Tag based feeds
21. Related tags
22. Manual Inclusion (moderation by hand)

That doesn’t cover what Rose feels is copied, the main social features that are similar to many social networks with friends and communities, and the widgets… that is what I was referring to as being cloned in my original review of Blogcatalog.

MBL has a lot of unique features as well

1. Tracking (huge)
2. Auto join of sites you visit
3. Most popular links in your communities
4. Automatic display of your most frequently visited blogs
5. A lot more additional social networks and more control over who sees them
6. When they were just doing tracking, they used to have an affiliate program
7. Until recently having a company blog was a unique feature
8. As you have pointed out, legal documents, but so many sites don’t have it, though that isn’t an excuse – ask Techcrunch where their’s is?
9. Tell A Friend
10. New neighbors
11. Thumbnail editing (when you first subscribe)
12. Coauthors
13. WordPress.com support
14. Myspace Support
15. Owned by Yahoo and running on shiny new servers
16. User generated tagging
17. Suggestion Board
18. Yahoo Groups Mailing List
19. No advertising
20. Avatars By Comments
21. Click counters (really part of tracking)

Most of the above were present in Blogcatalog before I was giving them any help, and most of the advise was just re-emphasising things I had suggested to MBL and Bumpzee previously.

Don’t look at the number of points, as many of the MBL features are quite major differences, such as tracking, and some of the Blogcatalog features are interconnected.

Mass Broadcast

As announced a few days ago, MyBlogLog have modified their mass broadcast feature so it is possible to opt out of email messages. Previously there was almost universal concern over abuse.

There are still some differences in execution – MBL broadcasts can be public or private. BC broadcasts are all private.
BC broadcasts include a group discussion thread for the broadcast message.

Eric

Eric is off to take a well deserved rest and spend some quality time with family.

Over the last 7 or 8 months I have had some fairly intense discussions with Eric, in both good times and a few stormy interludes, including one 2 hour chat on Skype once things had calmed down a little.

I sincerely wish him all the best for the future.

My Integrity Under Question?

Rose seems to think somehow I am being in some way biased towards Blogcatalog, or looking at them with… hmm… “rose tinted glasses” seems to be a suitable expression.

This is partially to do with my open disclosure that Blogcatalog have offered to give me some financial compensation for all the ideas I have been offering them for free, most of which I had also given to the MyBlogLog team in the past.

As examples of the free information that both have had the benefit of, here is my original MyBlogLog wishlist and my forward thinking ideas of what should be possible with the MyBlogLog API.

Tim Nash a while back at Hackday in London had a chance to actually get hands on with the MBL API and it will be interesting what people create with it.

Having an API is a logical progression for Blogcatalog as well.

It is actually quite strange that my integrity is somewhat under attack at the same time as Eric, probably the person I have interacted with the most at MBL is departing.
I know that Tod, John and Steve have also spent time reading my suggestions in the past, but most of my interaction was with Eric and Rafer in the early days.

I still have some historical connection with Robyn, as I was reading her blog well before she joined the MyBlogLog team, and she was reading mine.

The fact that I have some minor financial interest with Blogcatalog has in some ways prevented being able to help MyBlogLog more interactively which is a shame as lots of things had been discussed although they may not have come to fruition.

At the same time the long term success of Blogcatalog is heavily linked to that of MyBlogLog, to the extent that if MyBlogLog is highly successful, Blogcatalog will also have more success.

If anything I am inclined to promote all 3 competing services, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog a lot more, and in equal amounts.

Just because one service has decided to give me some financial compensation doesn’t mean I am handcuffed from helping the others, and all email correspondence I have had with each site developer has remained strictly confidential.

I have deliberately not included Bumpzee in this comparison because it would just confuse things. In many ways Bumpzee is offering very similar features, but the implementation is very different.

“An incoming tide raises all ships”

Update

As is always the case, things can still be overlooked even if you try to be as comprehensive as possible. I am adding things in bold to the bottom of the lists as I spot them.

If you can think of some things that I have missed that should be included, and aren’t covered by a more global point raised, please mention it in the comments and I will be glad to add it, and give you some link credit within the post.

Specific Disclosure: I have been providing a lot of free ideas and feedback both publicly and in private to the 3 main (imho) competitors in this niche, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog, and all 3 would probably look on me as one of their largest supporters, in spirit if not in traffic (I can’t compete with Techcrunch).
With Blogcatalog I have to note that the arrangements are now slightly more formal in a consultancy capacity from which I may receive financial compensation

SEM Isn’t a Neglected Niche

PlugIM has been going reasonably well for quite a while
Bumpzee has lots of communities that are SEO / SEM / Marketing related

There are also a number of other marketing and blogging bookmarking and news sites that I have seen though didn’t seem to have quite as much traction.

Sure, SEO, SEM etc isn’t very popular on sites like Digg unless you have a very cultivated audience, and even then you have to have an insane amount of credibility in the the eyes of the general Digg population to stand a chance of not being buried.

So if it is not availability of suitable social networks for the topic maybe it is…

Sphinn is a Better Technology Platform?

Sphinn is running on Pligg

Well at least Sphinn is sometimes running on Pligg…

PlugIM is also running on Pligg, but from what I can see, other than cosmetic differences such as adding all your other social networks, and possibly “stalking” (I haven’t looked at that closely), the version of Pligg used by PlugIM is much more heavily customised.

This includes:-

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (though this isn’t collected from the content)

Categorization of content just doesn’t work – there is a big difference in SMO with the purpose of gaining links, and SMO with the aim to gather email or RSS subscribers for Direct Marketing.

Bumpzee on the other hand is a custom platform – it still has a few bugs, and quite a few features missing. If it received a similar amount of attention as Sphinn seems to be getting, I am sure the guys at Bumpzee would spend a huge amount more time on it rounding off the features.

Ultimately Bumpzee currently blows Pligg out of the water for features unless Pligg is heavily customised.

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (picked up automatically)
• Lots of Widgets
• Multiple interlinked communities

Sphinn has no technological advantage, in fact it might be looked on as inferior

Attention Wars

Lots of people in the SEM community have attacked Jason Calacanis for Mahalo his (in his own words) “viable Google co-exister”, and Guy Kawasaki for Truemors.

Danny Sullivan was one of the heavy detractors.

The only reason Sphinn might be successful is Danny Sullivan & Attention

Deja Vu anyone?

Hardly anyone in the SEM community would give a damn about Sphinn if it wasn’t launched by Danny. I have seen Pligg sites heavily criticised by many SEO/SEM specialists.

When Danny Sullivan announced Sphinn, he stated:-

By no means do we envision Sphinn as replacing general news sites like Digg. We just think the story submission model can work and be powerful in a specialized area such as search, as well.

By the way, we’re not the first to try this for search. In February 2006, The Search Engine Press was launched, then John Battelle kicked off SearchMob in September of that year. Since then, we’ve had others appear, including BUMPzee and ISEdb Scoop. We’re happy to join them!

That was actually only the second time Bumpzee had been mentioned on Search Engine Land.

I can only assume that Bumpzee wasn’t gaining exposure on influential SEO / SEM blogs because of some kind of disclosure problem, or not wanting to promote a future competitor, or a future competitor owned by a strategic business partner.

PlugIM has never been mentioned, though it does pick up Danny’s content from Search Engine Land.

At least Sphinn can’t be accused of copying some of the better features on PlugIM.

Critical Mass

Sphinn now exists, and will likely capture the attention of a large proportion of the SEM / SEO community, because ultimately most people involved in SEO / SEM in one way or another are attention and link whores.
Danny certainly has a fair amount of attention, and a lot of other people in the industry with attention are also promoting the site, at least a little.

It will continue to grow as long as Danny keeps driving traffic to it, but he is not even doing a very good job of that.
Guy Kawasaki leverages his own traffic to drive people to Truemors with an RSS feed above the fold on the front page.
Search Engine Land currently only has a link in the top right corner, and no voting buttons as standard.

I also noted that SEL has MyBlogLog removed. Does this mean they are going to try to make Sphinn more “social” with widgets as well?

Unfortunately Sphinn is a very category centric niche voting site – I don’t see it’s population growing beyond the aggregate subscriber base of Search Engine Land and SEOmoz.

Market Segmentation

With Sphinn, the guys from Search Engine Land are effectively claiming their own little kingdom in social news, unfortunately whilst it might be good for Danny to enhance his own attention, and maybe drive traffic to a number of sites that deserve some limelight (I have noticed Meg, Lyndon & Maki doing well), I am not sure this is such an ideal situation.

There are various groups of people involved in SEO / SEM who don’t even acknowledge that the others exist. The same is true of internet marketing and affiliate marketing.

Building Bridges

What was really needed was for existing services to be given some attention, which would have the effect of building bridges between communities.
A service promoted significantly by the SEO / SEM and affiliate / internet marketing community could gain critical mass for a news network that allowed content that was more commercially flavoured, and such a community would also attract casual users, linkerati, press and ultimately drive more traffic to good content.

The best option possible would have been to adopt something that already existed.

Not the Same As Blog Social Networks

In my opinion this is not the same as blog social networks, within which Bumpzee also fall, competing against Mybloglog and Blogcatalog.
In theory there are 75M bloggers, and I doubt there are many more than 200K actively interested in SEO / SEM enough to be involved with a social news site on the topics. It is only when you start merging with internet marketing, affiliate marketing and “make money online” that you start hitting the 1M+ audience that is easily possible.

Spinn Exists – Have to Use It

I am already giving Spinn as much promotion as Danny is himself, with a voting link on every page. I want the attention, but hopefully I can also divert some of that attention towards other services that are equally deserving.

The Alexa data is more for future reference as Sphinn has just plummeted after its launch and will take a while to gain traction.

Including 4 voting buttons on a page is dividing attention, although I have removed StumbleUpon because providing a button was reducing any “thumbs up” I might receive.
Ultimately, if I was to remove one of the 4, it would currently be Sphinn.

Giving Attention

It is honestly a shame that Danny and Search Engine Land took this direction. It would have been much better to promote the existing services extensively 4 months ago. By this time they would be booming, and drawing a much wider audience – such strategies have much stronger long term effects.

Of course it is not just Danny – Rand for instance didn’t even mention competing services in his post, and the first mention of the fact that it was running on Pligg rather than “the site itself has some fairly exceptional functionality” was by Carsten in the comments

When you share your audience with others, quite often you get it back in spades. Two posts in a row touching on reciprocity.

I would honestly much rather be bumping or plugging everyone’s posts than using Sphinn, because that would suggest growing cohesion within the industry, and not more splintering.

With that said, everyone interested in SEO and SEM should sign up with Sphinn, and also grab Michelle’s Sphinn plugin

One of the biggest takeaways from Traffic Stampede Secrets that I reviewed a few months ago was how important it was to target the right social bookmarking and networking sites for your own sites, and also to evaluate and test how effective a particular bookmarking button might be.

I have just removed my StumbleUpon graphic that floats on the top right of every post, and the Technorati favorites button that was included in the same place.

StumbleUpon

I love StumbleUpon, I use it daily to find great sites, and my readers love it as well.

So why did I remove it?

I use a lot of tracking, and frequently I saw clicks of the StumbleUpon button, but no corresponding reviews.
Someone will click the button, and decide not to write a review, and then click their stumble button to go somewhere else. People are shy….

In that situation you don’t get a vote even if one was intended!

If someone is using StumbleUpon, they have the toolbar installed. The “Thumbs Up” button is right next to the Stumble Button.

It is possible I will get a few less reviews, but hopefully I will also get a few more positive votes for my content – those people who clicked a graphic and were too shy to write a review.

Thus whilst StumbleUpon traffic is great, the button I was using, because it only links through to a review form, might not have been helping me, in fact it might have been a negative for gaining votes, reducing the amount your best content is shared with others.

Digg

None of my content is written specific to a Digg audience. I try to write good “in-depth” content and generally many of my articles are not appropriate for the mainstream Digg audience.

Those articles that are appropriate appear to hit a well known phenomena, as happened on my article on Digg friends (which wasn’t about gaming Digg) or my in-depth review of PayPerPost Direct.

My recent articles on WordPress SEO, contain far more valuable information than the majority of “SEO Tips” articles that seem to make the front page of Digg.
Digg users often have short attention spans, and seem to prefer Digging shorter articles – I am sorry but I am not going to write short articles just for traffic. If an article needs more words, I am going to use them.

I am going to continue including the Digg button, because eventually I believe some of my content might become more appreciated by a wider Digg audience.

Technorati Favorites

The button was duplicating something I already include in my sidebar. I will still be reciprocating, many people find it valuable and it is my way of adding people to various OPML tools I am playing with.
There wasn’t a need to have the button in quite such a prominent position.

I maintain my Technorati Favorites with EngTech’s Technorati Favorites tool, the version from 23/05/2007 is working currently (see comments) – remember to clean up your favorites.

An example of how I use the OPML from my Technorati Favorites is the meme I created on Megite for the Technorati Favetrain.

The only way to be added to this special meme is to add me to your Technorati Favorites, and I reciprocate automatically.

This is how I get to read so many blogs, and seem to appear on blogs all over the blogosphere that have interesting articles.

PlugIM – New Addition

I have been a member of PlugIM for quite a while, and have always found it to be a good source of quality articles focused primarily on internet marketing.

Whilst many people might look on this as some kind of duplication with Bumpzee and the affiliate marketing community there, there is actually only a partial overlap in readership, especially among the dedicated reader base.

PlugIM is very much a niche community, whereas Bumpzee caters for many different communities, one widget fits all.
There are currently hundreds of niche communities which utilise some form of voting script.

Many might look on them as being Digg clones.

If you are a Digg user, let’s be totally honest – do you want the hottest knitting pattern for this coming season (yeah knitters will be thinking about Winter clothing already) appearing on the front page of Digg?

Until Digg caters for all topic areas, there is room for clones. Knitting is probably a bigger niche than Tech industry news.

Now for me, PlugIM is appropriate for my niche, I think it deserves a spot in prime real estate.

I have been waiting a little while to mention Michelle’s PlugIM plugin

When it was first launched it didn’t have the flexibility I needed to position it in the “prime real estate” that I wanted, but it is there now.

It is also very “light” in coding, just 4kb, and I hope it doesn’t affect load time too heavily. It certainly won’t be a factor on single pages. My front page is probably going to change somewhat as I make a lot of SEO changes.

One great advantage of the PlugIM plugin is that once an article is already submitted (which happens automatically because they pick up your RSS feed), you don’t have to be logged into PlugIM to vote, or even be a member.

I am also a marketer – PlugIM is designed for marketers and isn’t selfish – when someone votes on your content, it doesn’t take them away from your website.

Bumpzee

Bumpzee stays

I get a huge amount of traffic from Bumpzee on a daily basis, many of my readers are active users, and I maintain one of the largest communities on Bumpzee for blogs that have removed nofollow from their comments area.

In many ways Bumpzee is more like a social network than a social news or bookmarking site.

Bumpzee is the most multi-purpose voting widget, because the service caters for any niche.

Del.icio.us

I am going to integrate something for Del.icio.us with my next major overhall. I find myself using it more frequently for content I really want to keep a bookmark of for future reference.
It is most likely going to be using Feedburner’s Feedflares.

Netscape

I know a few readers use Netscape, though I have seen only limited usage of it where it has been provided in Feeds for the last 6 months.

Someone browsing your site from Netscape might be doing it with a sidebar with a voting button, so in many ways providing a button is superfluous.

Other Services

I am always on the lookout for services that would be useful to add, which my readers would actually find useful. I can provide lots of different buttons using the hacked version of Sociable I use, if readers are going to use them.

If there is a social bookmark service that you actually use on a regular basis, and would like me to add, please let me know.

Facebook? Well I have included it in my feed for a long time, it doesn’t seem to be used

Other Optimization

I am going to start adding some additional optimization, such as custom greetings for each source of traffic.

The No Nofollow Highs

Last week the No Nofollow | I Follow | Dofollow community on Bumpzee crossed the 100 member mark, and 100 blog mark. This week we are already up to 137 members and 132 blogs. What is more encouraging is that I see a lot of members actually using Bumpzee for browsing blogs.

Some interesting points:-

• 2nd Highest Number of blogs – the blogs were individually submitted to the community
• 4th Highest Number of Members – we could well overtake Jim’s How to be successful community in a couple of weeks.
• Many of the communities already overtaken have been established much longer

There are hundreds, even thousands of blogs I could add to the community, but I would really prefer people make the decision themselves.
Every blog included is vetted. I pick up lots of blogs that don’t have nofollow removed correctly, blogs made from affiliate datafeeds, blogs that are mainly resyndicated content, and even blogs with totally broken comment systems.

There are no requirement to use the Bumpzee widget to be listed, or the voting button, although blogs that do include the voting button do gain more traffic if their readers are Bumpzee aware.

If a blog doesn’t have a visibly active community, leaving comments on a regular basis, I am going to go snooping around and your chances of being included are reduced.

The community didn’t benefit from being the first on Bumpzee, such as the Affiliate Marketing community, and the first managed blogs such as the SEO/SEM, How To Be Successful, and Next Gen Marketing, the later communities I might add also had a few non-member blogs added.

The Lows – Dofollow Abuse

I suppose if you model yourself as the internet equivalent of Ghengis Kahn then the idea of charging people to have nofollow removed from their comments would be attractive, but I have noticed that many of John Chow’s readership (the grown up ones with money) don’t appreciate it.

If I was an advertiser buying reviews on Johns Blog, I would worry about how the quality of readership is deteriorating as his readership supposedly increases, though I am sure his readership will appreciate the male enhancement text ads.

Some of my readers have already been writing about this

Chris thinks this is a bit of a perversion of the Dofollow movement and goes on to say:-

Personally, there isn’t a blog on the planet that I would pay to have a followable comment link on, nor would I ever charge for one. Followable comment links are a nice thing to give away, but I just don’t feel there is any benefit at all to buying one. Well, apart from to Johns bank balance of course.

Webstractions gives lots of reasons why you shouldn’t pay for the links, and why you shouldn’t use the plugin John is selling on your own blog.

RT has actually already written twice about it, first of all in one of his drivebys where he said:-

After reading the news about it at Blog-Op and then reading the source article myself at John Chow dot Com, I’ve decided that John’s money-grabbing link whoring has turned me off for the last time. So much so that I’m removing his links from anything I have, including my feed reader. See ya later, John!

He later went into even more depth about John Chow:-

I may not have the best blog in the world (far from it) but I refuse to have it even remotely associated with bloggers that use or abuse their readers in any way, shape or form. Sure, their blogs are their blogs and they have the right to use them anyway they want. I’m sure it won’t bother them to lose just little old me as a reader, but if more people know and more people follow suit, I’m sure it’ll bother them a whole lot more.

The Paper Bull had equally strong words about John Chow

He can call it whatever he wants – but selling a $10 monthly membership to turn off the no-follow tag on comments is about as distasteful a scheme as I’ve seen in a while. Blogs are built upon conversation and are wholly dependent upon comments left by readers who valued the article enough to spend a few moments to tap out a response. Using comments as a means to extract coin is disgusting.

Reputation Management Lesson

Alienating your most valuable readers to gain more 13-year-old kids isn’t good practice.

Tip of the Nofollow / Dofollow Iceburg

Over the last 2 months the number of references to Dofollow shown in Google has increased by 50,000, and over the last 6 months it has more than doubled.
Whilst that is significant, I would love these isolated blogs to become part of the no nofollow community on Bumpzee where they can share their link love, and interact with blogs talking about similar subjects.

Only you can make it happen

That is gaming the system purely for their own benefit.

They might also frequently suggest you Digg their content, or add them to your bookmarks, or we could also add to that list “Add Me To Your Technorati Favorites”, or “Subscribe to my feed”.

What Benefit Do You Get
From Taking That Action?

• Digg – You get very little benefit at all for taking that action, because most A-list bloggers really aren’t interested in reciprocating the favor – if you do it enough to get noticed, you might gain the occasional link which can help you gain readers
• Other Bookmarking – Again, don’t expect any reciprocity even if you write a good post
• Technorati Favorites – The A-Listers in general can’t see any value in the Technorati Favorite System, haven’t reviewed it in depth, and don’t use it extensively themselves, yet they frequently ask you to favorite them
• Subscribing To Feeds – Subscribe to their feed and you are guaranteed success – I am sure many bloggers only subscribe to the blogs of A-listers, because they are the only blogs they can trust to get the best information. The information might be good, but that isn’t going to bring you blogging success

I need to be very clear about a few things

• I still read A-list blogs (in my feed reader)
• I still link to A-list blogs
• I still Digg and bookmark posts from A-list blogs that I think are good

Reciprocity and Benefits in Marketing

In internet marketing some of the most powerful tactics are:-

1. Providing valuable information and benefits upfront, and at a later date converting your warm audience
2. Offering an incentive or bonus for taking an action such as joining a mailing list
3. Joint ventures such as free giveaways where lots of people send their traffic to a particular site, and in exchange have a chance to increase the size of their mailing lists and possibly earn some money form one-time offers
4. Polls and questionnaires to help you respond to the needs of your audience

Unless you have something amazingly unique to offer in the way of information, or something potentially extremely profitable, you are not going to have access to people on the top rung of the ladder.

Reciprocity and Benefits in Blogging

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz often refers to the “Linkerati”, which are those people who can provide links to your site, thus giving your content and overall site lots of Google Juice, to help you rise in the search engines, and also give you some traffic to maybe increase your audience.
Note:I am linking to Rand/SEOmoz simply because he coined the phrase, not because I ever expect Rand to link to me

As a blogger, I am going to suggest that you forget about A-list linkerati, and concentrate as much attention as you can on B-list linkerati and your own readers.

Target your content to your readers or the ones you potentially want to gain, because they are the ones who need to benefit from your content. Don’t alienate your core readership by watering down your content to please the A-list.

Over time, as your core readership expands, you can become noticed by the A-list linkerati in your own niche, but that connection is more likely to come via a 3rd party blogger or through a social media site.

Addressing The Needs of Your Audience

I have had a few people leave comments in the past that a lot of what I write is a little over their head currently, or that a particular post might be too long.

I made a concious decision 6 months ago not to write many “Top 10 tips” type articles on this blog. The core content isn’t intended to be a beginners guide or introduction to any particular topic, though I am always willing to answer questions in the comments, and lots of people take advantage of my contact form.

One of the things I have learned is that even your most fervent readers will miss posts, or skip them. They will also skip related posts links and avoid taking a look in categories or going tag browsing.

They will quite often suffer in silence.

One of the things I try hard to do is read or visit reader’s blogs. Sometimes it is hard to get too involved with the commenting, so it might end up being a drive by answer, but you can always follow up with further questions by email (and many do). I did however note in my post on blogging productivity that commenting on other people’s blogs is not productive, at least in many ways.
There comes a point where you can spread yourself too thin, and you would be better off answering questions on your own blog and possibly linking through.

But to answer those questions being raised you have to know about the discussions in the first place, and that requires at least trying to read as much as you can in the time allocated.

I recently went into quite some detail about all the methods I am looking at to help me read more of the blogs my readers write – as my subscriber base increases, it is becoming more and more of a problem, I have significantly slowed down my blog posts over the last 2 months due to the time it takes responding to comment threads on other blogs.

Some of that experimentation is coming under fire from many notable bloggers.

A few bloggers have already had a chance to respond to the criticism so I am going to link to them here.

On DoshDosh there is a very in depth post about the motivation in exchanging Technorati Favorites. and covering the potential effect. Maki doesn’t fully agree with the OPML import method I introduced because it isn’t as personal. If you have 1000 blogs being rotated through your Technorati for the next year, there is a good chance you are going to see something of interest on all of them… well maybe, but there are some bugs.

Kevin suggests some A-Listers might have had their feathers ruffled. I need to check out Favorite.me

Elaine goes back to her prom days, and also likes pushing the boundaries a bit. Suddenly a collection of 2000 bloggers can be used for other things.

You could probably pick up links to certain memes and find some really high quality blogs, and then convert the list into a high quality OPML file of blogs on a particular theme.

Gary Lee also related about his own experience in running the Technorati Train. Not quite so in-depth, but for me the most significant part was the conclusion:-

I will continue to use this feature on Technorati and believe that it will continue to give me access and exposure to some sites that I probably will never have found for myself. For those who question the intergrity of this practice, I would just suggest that you first closely take a look at what you have been doing before overly criticizing the marketing practices of your peers.

I also respect the decision of Kieron to only selectively reciprocate.

Technorati Gains From People (ab)Using The Favorite Feature

Engtech has saved me a lot of time, because one of the things I was going to write was desciption of all the geeky things you can do with Technorati Favorites. He has also written about a number of bugs or things that need fixing and I am going to add to that list.

• How hard it is to clean your favorites list – lots and lots of page reloading if you want to delete comments feeds, twitter, search results etc.
• My Favorites should have equal authority – this might seem obvious, but if you have selcted certain blogs as your favorites, you would expect them all to show up someime or other on your front page. This doesn’t happen. The blogs with the least authority are skipped, and you can end up with 4 copies of the same blog post plus comments on your front page, and all the content from other blogs never appearing.
  The same happens in the RSS feeds, and my sidebar syndication unfairly doesn’t include as many blogs as it should.
• Importing OPML – I want to pre-assign tags when I import, thus I could for instance grab a list of 400+ SEO blogs, and import it under an SEO tag immediately. Duplicate entries would just get a new tag
• The Searching of Favorites isn’t giving me any results

Based upon the bugs Engtech has found, and my own experience, it seems to me these features were never really put through their paces before, and certainly not by the people criticising the favorite exchanges (who still ask their readers to favorite without giving a benefit for doing it)

As far as I have seen, no mainstream tech blog has ever actually done an extensive review including the various ways Technorati Favorites can be used.

If They Saw a Value In Reciprocation
Or Using Technorati Favorites
The Detractors Would Be Reciprocating Like Mad

Lets take Twitter as an example:-

This is a screenshot from Twitterholic, where I have highlighted all those accounts that are practicing reciprocation to a large extent, or have invited a massive amount of people as friends in the hope of them being reciprocated.

I grabbed the top 21, just so I could mention Stephen Colbert, not that he is actually doing any reciprocation.

Among the reciprocators are Robert Scoble, John Edwards, Jason Calacanis (though not 100%), Chris Pirillo, and the extremely smart social networking specialist Webtickle added maybe 5000 friends the day he setup a Twitter account.

These are people who want to communicate with others in the blogosphere or Twittersphere and Twitter encourage reciprocation because every time someone adds you as a friend you get an email.

Both Bumpzee and Blogcatalog also send emails notifying about new friends, and I expect both services will add lots of features to take advantage of this

Hang on a minute… MyBlogLog used to also send emails for everyone that friended you automatically, and people complained about that being abused, and I was among them.

What is the difference?

With Twitter it is like an invitation to enter 2 way communication

With Technorati, no emails are sent, and if you friend lots of people maybe using the OPML import you can use that to make your searching more relevant, and for creating useful shared feeds.

With Bumpzee and Blogcatalog I have generally reciprocated a fair amount, because everyone using the service so far has been quality with no spam – both services have blogs being vetted for inclusion, I am not sure how members are vetted these days. Most of the people I recognise as my readers, so of course I am going to reciprocate.

With MyBlogLog, currently there still is little use for having friends other than if you want to allow only certain people access to your contact information on various networks, and to segregate messages between friends and strangers. Hopefully they will start accelerating their development as I saw they are hiring 2 new developers.

Technorati Reciprocal Favoriting

I have always offered benefits for people to add me to their favorites. I reciprocate, because I truely want to read what my readers are writing, and whilst I started off just using the Technorati supplied widgets, I now have a Technorati Favorites RSS feed in my sidebar.

Unlike MyBlogLog Communities, I get to read my Technorati Favorites in a single stream of RSS or on the Technorati site using pagination and I have always had my Technorati Favorites in my Google Reader Account as well.
I can’t guarantee to read every post, but I definately skim them when I have time.

The other thing it guarantees is when I am researching new posts, I get to read what my readers have said about a particular subject, and respond to them, and not the A-Listers.

I do however reject the notion that services that provide an OPML import feature don’t want people to actually use it to import feeds.

Other Ways to Add Incentives

Andy Beal is offering a Wii for favorites, similar to his earlier MyBlogLog efforts.

Jordan seems to have the hots for data, so I am also going to offer some.

During the last month I have had 562 visitors from Technorati

80 of those visits came from the Technorati home page (as in from people who had favorited me)
26 visitors from the Technorati Top100 Favorites Page
51 Visitors for my andybeard.eu page on Technorati

In addition I show my favorites in my sidebar, which shows up as links in Technorati, just link blogroll links – so my favorites all get a nice link from me without losing too much Google Juice to a huge long blogroll.
That link however also gets seen in the WordPress console, so brings in a few visitors. I would attribute at least 50 uniques for that.

Also important, I have probably gained at least 50 subscribers to my RSS or email syndication that I can attribute and quite a few links, though I am also giving out a lot of links.

For an established blog, these numbers would not be looked on as significant.

I have also spent much more time writing about Technorati Favorites than taking part in the exchanges, but as one of my core topics for this blog is blog optimization and blog search, plus various blog social networks, that time invested was worthwhile.

Some Ideas for Technorati, and My Readers

If Technorati provide a way to tag OPML when you import, then users of the service could create packages of their favorite blogs around a certain subject. Other feed reader services have default subscription packages, why not allow Technorati users to create their own with the ability to import them under their own designated tag.

Web Designers
SEO
SEM
Knitting

Proactive Technorati users could then share these OPML distributions

Feed Link Chain?

Yep, another chain starting up, this time with RSS Feeds – seems to be a long list and I couldn’t find any mention on Google Blog Search, so maybe he is starting it.

The problem is with full feeds in your feed reader, there are only a certain number you can read. Sure again it is interesting OPML but there is no way to gauge reciprocation, and the list I have seen gives absolutely no details about the blogs to give an incentive to subscribe to a particular one.
Also why all the manual clicking to add people to a feed reader. Why not just distribute an OPML file if you really want to do it.

It has been mentioned that this will help boost monetization potential, but advertisers aren’t stupid, and nor are TLA / ReviewMe / Sponsored Reviews / TLB / PPP etc

Here are the questions:-

Andy, congratulations on starting “No nollow, I follow, Dofollow BumpZee! Community”. To start off I would like to ask you what are the requirements/limitations for a blogger/blog to be accepted or rejected?

I have read in one of your posts that you call your dad a “computer evangelist”. If I may, I will call you “nonofollow evangelist”. As such do you wish that every single blogger out there would take down “nofollow” from the links in comments ad trackbacks?

Let say my blog ranks on Google at PR 8 but I like your idea to get rid of “nofollow”. Should I exercise caution doing that? I am sure the good folks at Google may see it strange that my site all of a sudden begins to give credit to so many links. What would you recommend to some one like that?

I guarantee there is no way you can guess the answers I gave, and it is also unique content I will not be publishing on this blog, so if you want to know the answers to any of these questions, you will have to read it there.

Vlads Affiliate Interviews

Gothwalk just pinged me to say that he has now written a guide on how to remove Nofollow on Moveable Type.

Gothwalk had been scratching his head all weekend, because he wanted his blogs to be included in the new DoFollow community on Bumpzee, but everytime he thought he had it cracked, I would spot that something wasn’t quite right.

I will be adding his post to the list on my Ultimate List of DoFollow Plugins where I would like to have a comprehensive list for every blogging platform.