Blog bling, blog community and blog traffic widgets are becoming quite a conjested marketplace, so what makes Blogrush, the newest contender something to take note of?

John Reese

I have a lot of respect for John Reese. People talk about The Digg effect, John Reese can send Digg like traffic to a site just by sending an email, and what is more important is that he sends qualified traffic, buying traffic.

Funding

I am fairly sure Blogrush won’t have any need for immediate funding. They have launched on a cluster of 8 servers for scalability, there is no intention of starting this off small.
John has a team of programmers working for him, and established support personnel. Blogrush is apparently just one small piece in the puzzle which is Income.com, which he has been building up to for over a year.

Viral Concept

Blogrush is designed to encourage people to promote it with a 10 tier referral program. It hasn’t been specified how the breakdown works on each tier, but the benefit of viral referrals will be substantial for early adopters.

That will be one of the keys as with any program of this type. To get maximum benefit from Blogrush, you are going to have to sign up early and promote it… hence why this is going to explode.

The Blogrush Widget

The Blogrush widget looks par for the course, as they have lots of competitors. It is lacking a lot of the technology of similar widgets. Many widgets for instance have built in browsers for RSS feeds or to stumble through content that is being displayed.

What John claims is that Blogrush has advanced technology to match what is displayed on the widget with your blog content… that it is in some way contextual rather than just category based.

This hopefully will make a significant difference with click-through rate, though as far as I know traffic ratios are based upon impressions rather than clicks.

Hopefully we will see improvements in the future.

Free Traffic Potential?

If you look on your screen real estate as a way to generate more traffic by various means, Blogrush is going to be of interest. I believe it has more potential than many similar widgets, simply because it will gain so much attention over this launch period.

Get people signed up early to benefit from the viral effect.

If you have a lot of traffic already, then that will be leveraged into more traffic on the network.

If your screen real-estate carries high value advertising, you might have to think differently, either about including the widget at all, or positioning both now, and when it is more mature (harder to get new users)

I wouldn’t expect to get a 1% CTR from other sites displaying your content, it is going to be far less based upon what I have seen from competing widgets of this type.

There isn’t a community feature which might encourage repeat visits when someone bookmarks your content, thus you have to value the widget based upon its one click traffic potential.

You are going to have to test and track to see if the amount of traffic you receive is enough to justify the space the widget takes up. Initially you will benefit from viral referrals, but long-term you might be better using the space to generate revenue, and then investing that revenue in other traffic.

Lets Get Viral

Despite my long-term reservations, as it has just launched just hours ago, now is the opportune moment to sign up and promote it. It will grow exponentially for a few weeks.

Test and track, if you are gaining possibly 10 new visitors for every 1000 times the widget is displayed, that might be looked on as a reasonable return on screen real estate unless you have very effective monetization, or cheap methods to generate traffic.

Think about traffic arbitrage – I believe there is going to be a way to specify which sites benefit from your traffic credits. Get cheap traffic on one site, use the traffic credits to promote a better monetized site. You might be able to turn Digg and Stumbleupon traffic into higher quality traffic from another site – well, unless it turns out traffic credits are based upon clicks, but even then some headlines are going to generate more clicks than others ;)

Bugs

There were a few problems in the first hour of launch, but they are working around them quickly. Email delivery for registration was the biggest problem.
I had a problem registering with a .eu TLD (top level domain) so I had to use another URL which redirects here with a 301 redirect. That resulted in me not winning a free copy of Traffic Secrets 2 on launch – I would have won it.. honest.

John is promising some more launch competitions over the next few days, and I am sure they will be well worth entering.

My suggestion is to sign up, add the widget to your blog, and give it a little promotion. test and track and see if it works for you. That is what I am going to be doing.

Update – Full List of Categories

To avoid confusion, this is not just a widget particular to one niche such as blogging or internet marketing, it is hopefully suitable for all niches giving relevant content, and delivering your content to relevant blogs – I suppose if you have the only blog in existence on a particular subject, it is only going to be traffic based upon the categories.

Anyway, here are the available catagories

• Automotive
• Business Career & Jobs
• Celebrity
• Computers & Internet
• Education
• Entertainment
• Environment
• Finance & Investing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Medicine
• History
• Hobbies
• Home & Garden
• Humor
• Law & Legal
• Lifestyle
• Marketing
• Music
• News & Media
• Parenting & Family
• Personal
• Diary
• Pets
• Philosophy
• Photography
• Politics
• Real
• Estate
• Religion & Spirituality
• Sports
• Technology
• Travel
• Writing & Literature
• Video Games

Update 2 – Power Tip – Filtering

If people are reading a review you have just written about a product, you might not want them to click through to read someone else’s review, no matter which niche you are in.

Now in the case of this review, I want people to click through to read the site and sign up, not click to someone else’s site writing about Blogrush.

Blogrush provides a useful filtering mechanism based on either keywords or URLs, or both if you are that way inclined.

Yes, I am blocking the keyword Blogrush at least for now – it seem to be case insensitive.

This might seem a litle mean, but if you are writing good content, and then someone clicks away to a very poor review, but then buys a product using their affiliate link, that isn’t rewarding you for creating good content.

I would advise blocking keywords if they present a leak, though if you are running a golf blog, you might not want to block a keyword as broad as “golf” as then the widget wouldn’t offer any useful content for your readers.

Disclosure: I do some minor consulting with one of the blog community widget sites, Blogcatalog, for which I might receive some monetary compensation if they ever manage to flip the site. I try hard not to let that involvement affect my judgement of other similar sites

Dan from the Venture Capital Florida Blog, who is a managing partner of Inflexion Partners hinted to me in a quick email exchange that Pay Per Post had some very significant changes coming in the very near future, and he was certainly right.

Halfway through writing this review of PayPerPost Direct I hit a problem, and I really needed to check my facts straight from the horse’s mouth. After being passed from the PayPerPost PR agency to the PayPerPost switchboard, I discovered that Ted Murphy is truly protected by a wall of iron, and direct contact at short notice might be difficult.

I opted for plan B, went searching into the depths of my Gmail account, and I was fortunate enough to find a direct phone number to Ted in some old email correspondence.

Thus part of this review is direct from the PayPerPost Hotline

PayPerPost Announce Pay Per Post Direct

With Pay Per Post Direct you can reach out to advertisers, even those not currently in the PPP network, and advertise your own blogs and content. We’ve found in the past that advertisers often want to directly hire good bloggers to write about their products or services and with PayPerPost Direct that’s now possible.

Whilst I have written reviews with both ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews in the past, and I have supported Pay Per Post because I appreciate their business model, I have never written a review for their service.
I wasn’t interested in many of their opportunities for a number of reasons.

1. Many of the topics were not suitable – my blog is a business blog, and many of the opportunities were more “niche” or suitable for a blog about “stuff”
2. I didn’t qualify for the higher paying opportunities that might have been suitable content for my audience, and the lower paid opportunities for the same subjects were often snapped up by active Pay Per Post users extremely fast
3. The time allowed to post a paid review with PayPerPost before it is no longer reserved limits the amount you can really write about each service.
4. I wasn’t prepared to log into the service multiple times per day trying to find something to write about to make money

Up until now, ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews provided the best marketplace for what I would look on as being “professional reviews”, and I mean no disrespect with that term.
If you want to be able to spend 10 hours writing a review for a service over a couple of days, it was previous impossible with PayPerPost, and the higher priced reviews were more about the huge traffic potential from a popular blog than the possible benefits of a review as a consultant.

How To Qualify For Pay Per Post Direct

First of all you have to sign up for Pay Per Post as a “postie” – it sometimes can take a couple of days to be accepted depending on demand, and I am sure with this new service there will be a huge amount of new demand, so be patient.

Whilst you are waiting for acceptance, you can install the code, and make sure your blog has very clear disclosure – clear disclosure is a requirement with Pay Per Post.

Update: I have been notified that there is no waiting time or qualifications for Pay Per Post Direct, you can sign up and display the badges the same day.
There is still a waiting time for acceptance into the marketplace

Once you are fully qualified, your interface within the PayPerPost system should look a bit like this under “My Blogs”

Buy Cheaper Reviews With PayPerPost

One of the things made clear by Dan Rua in the comments of my review of Sponsored Reviews, is that Pay Per Post actually have the lowest markup of the big 3 paid reviews services.

At RM, that $150 delivers $75 to the blogger and $75 to RM as a 50% “cut” (75/150) or a 100% “markup” (75/75).
At SR, that $150 delivers $98 to the blogger and $52 to SR as a 35% “cut” (52/150) or a 53% “markup” (52/98). (see “You Get” in first screenshot)
At PPP, that $150 delivers $111 to the blogger and $39 to PPP as a 26% “cut” (39/150) or a 35% “markup” (39/111). Assuming a sponsor wanted 50 such posts, you should also include PPP’s $5 opp fee which would equate to $.10/post across those 50 posts — a rounding error in these calcs.

Lets put that into perspective on what I am currently charging

I currently aim to earn around $130 for each review I write, but also remember I donate 50% of those earnings to the Best WordPress Plugins Developers, voted for by my readers which gives lots of longevity to the reviews I write.

Bloggers can set their review prices cheaper and earn the same amount of money, or set their review prices slightly higher and earn more, and still offer competitive pricing.

The amount possible with the normal PayPerPost marketplace is effectively hypothetical because so far I haven’t managed to reach the higher ranking necessary for their “big green” reviews, typically PR6 or PR7 with an Alexa rating below 10,000.

I try to aim for a quality influential readership, thus my traffic does grow a little slower than many blogs, and I do tend to take a fairly controversial stance on some issues, so I might not get as many links as “populist” bloggers.

PayPerPost Direct Only Charge 10%

I have set the price I want to be paid at $130 as listed above, and advertisers will pay $143. PayPerPost get $13, and from that they have to cover the cost of credit card and Paypal processing fees.

In addition they are holding the money as a form of Escrow service, and paying me immediately upon completion. There are also some advantages when it comes to tax time for those in the US.

You will see in this screenshot below that you can set your own price. I was going to base my pricing upon the 35% markup PayPerPost normally charge (which is still cheap)

Ted set me straight on that. 10% is 10%, and anyone who wants a review will only be paying $143 of which I receive $130 (and give half of it away)

This Isn’t A Market Place For Paid Reviews

I questioned Ted quite extensively about this.

As far as Pay Per Post are concerned, if the advertiser is coming from our blog to purchase a review, they have no right to be charging a 50% or more service fee. (some competitors have a 100% markup as you can see above)

Once Pay Per Post have a few thousand of their 15000+ 25000+ bloggers setup for Pay Per Post Direct, they will also be providing a marketplace on the PayPerPost site, where Advertisers will be able to search for bloggers to write reviews and approach specific bloggers.

In that situation, because PayPerPost would be enabling the transaction, there would be a higher service fee. I would expect it would be the familiar 35% though I couldn’t pin Ted down to an exact figure – understandable, because this is a new service.

This is different to their current marketplace, which is based upon fairly broad category and traffic details.

Negotiation Interface

This just keeps on getting better. If you click on the button on my sidebar, a popup will appear to order a review. You are not taken away to a marketplace to explore other blogs who might offer on the face of it better value, but in my own mind would give an advertiser less value.

Within the main Pay Per Post interface, it is possible for the blogger and advertiser to send messages backwards and forwards and actually “haggle” over the review price.

As I mentioned in my review of Sponsored Reviews, this is something I wanted included in their service. Currently they offer a method of negotiating prices that doesn’t have a message interface. They don’t object to emailing an advertiser directly, but it is slightly inconvenient.

Giving Away Your Customers?

With that popup window, the transaction starts whilst someone is on my website. They are my customer and it is me selling them the opportunity for a review or consultation, which is how I look on many of my reviews – they are not for search engine links (I give those editorially, they are partially for buzz and qualified customers from my audience, and above all they are looking for expert feedback.

You might think that review marketplaces are really bringing me lots of review customers and I would miss their traffic.

My last review with ReviewMe was at the beginning of March. Take a look at these referral stats.

I have sent ReviewMe 400 potential customers since the beginning of March, and none of those potential customers have converted.

They may have converted into ReviewMe bloggers, but I don’t earn anything for that. They didn’t convert into advertisers, I would have been paid $25 for those.

That conversion rate is affected by 2 major factors

• I set a premium rate for my reviews so that I receive $130, but advertisers see a $260 charge
• Other blogs look more competitive because of a bug in the ReviewMe rating system in how they count Bloglines subscribers.

Sponsored Reviews aren’t without their problems either. They don’t seem to use Bloglines as a criteria, but they do use link popularity, which these days usually means Yahoo.
Yahoo currently reports more than 27,000 links to my blog. During the last month they have reported as high as 40,000, and as low as 9,000.
Not long ago on Sponsored Reviews my blog was rated a 4 and now the average is a 3. I know a lot of blogs with lower pagerank, worse Alexa and Technorati stats, and a lot less links that currently rate a 4 overall.

Sending traffic to a site which isn’t rating your site as highly as it should isn’t good business.

Thus it is hard to judge how much money I have lost but let us suppose of those 400 who clicked through to ReviewMe, a percentage were genuinely interested in buying a review from me. If I converted just 4% of those enquiries into some form of paid content, I could well have earned an additional $2000 in paid reviews over the last 3 months.

I assure you that is a lot more traffic that I have sent ReviewMe than ReviewMe has sent to me.

Buttons

PayPerPost have made a lot of buttons available, which you can customise, and you are even able to use a text link, or create your own buttons.

Couldn’t You Do This With A WordPress Plugin

Yes you could. I actually own a copy of the WordPress Bankroll Plugin, which cost me $100 when first released for an unlimited use license. I gave them a lot of feedback, and many of the features in version 2 were based upon my suggestions.

I would still use PayPerPost Direct

• They have a brand – it may be a little tarnished (wrongly), but at the end of the day someone would trust them to hold their money until I had a review written meeting the agreed upon requirements. That is an escrow type service, and is highly worthwhile.
• PayPerPost promote their bloggers extensively – I have even appeared on their blog in the past even though I haven’t written any reviews for them in the past.
• Their future marketplace I predict is going to be much larger than the other services. They have had major brands such as Hewlett Packard using their services in the past.
• I have a feeling many of the “big green” promotions, many of which were for writing about PayPerPost services will in some way also be channelled through the PayPerPost Direct service
• This is a service that I think will be highly acceptable for mainstream bloggers, and as more come onboard, more opportunities for reviews will become available. Advertisers rarely just buy one review with a service if they are looking for buzz or even for quality feedback.

That doesn’t mean I won’t use the WordPress Bankroll, it just means I will use the WordPress Bankroll plugin creatively for a purpose it is ideally suited for, but for which it was not intended.

PayPerPost – Other New Announcements

• Rating system changed – they no longer use Technorati because it isn’t very relevant (and I suppose is easily gamed)
• Time for Reviews Increased – for conventional market place reviews, there is now 6 hours to complete an accepted opportunity
• Rating System – the internal ratings system for posties has “benches” added in addition to “tack” – I don’t know too much about this but hopefully it will lead to more reliable reporting of good or bad reviewers.

How Much Did I Get Paid To Write This Glowing Review?

Not one cent!

In fact this is the kind of service I would actually be willing to Pay PayPerPost $100 for, because I know it is going to make me a lot more money.

This review contains no affiliate links, but you can find those now on the sidebar of my blog if you wish to sign up.

I have spent quite a long time writing this review, and there is now a lot more information available on the Pay Per Post blog including a cool video explaining the whole Pay Per Post Direct system, and an overview of the benefits.

The funny thing is, I doubt this new service will get a lot of coverage, because it is so good, even Michael Arrington at Techcrunch. or Jason Calacanis won’t be able to find much wrong with it.

Update:
It seems lots of people enjoyed this post, why not share it with others by
giving it a Digg

Update 2:

• I have adjusted the number of bloggers signed up with Pay Per Post, which is currently over 25000, a lot more than the 15000 I was previously aware of.
• I have added a clarification regarding the approval process. There is no waiting time or approval required for Pay Per Post Direct, you can sign up and use it the same day.
• Yesterday I modified the time required for a marketplace post to be completed from 4 hours to the as published 6 hours, which is even enough time for me to write most reviews.
• I have been reading a fair amount of questions and answers on the Pay Per Post forums (they are very active and full of help for Bloggers) – with Pay Per Post Direct there is no official time set for writing a review, but apparently an advertiser can cancel if you are taking too long to complete. I suggest you give yourself a nice large window and spend some time to write really high quality reviews that you can be proud of, and show to other advertisers.

Despite the fact that Andy Beal thought it was a pain to sign up for the new Jubii service (it seriously is), I thought I would give it a try and give some feedback – 10GB of free storage could be useful, depending on usage restrictions.
The NY Times piece didn’t really give me any indication as to whether this service was just intended to be some kind of integrated Myspace, or dare I say it, something useful…

Initial observations

US Only? – Before I had got to the terms and conditions, I discovered a drop down box allowing me to select my country – the only option was US. I also had to enter my area code – 99999 seemed very suitable.

Terms of Service – Insanely difficult to read – the javascript popup box doesn’t respond to keyboard or mouse-wheel input, so I had to resort to dragging the scrollbar. The window size for reading a legal document was just not suitable. Fortunately they offer a downloadable PDF.

Terms Of Service Are Important

I have a pro account on Flickr, but their terms of service prevent use for commercial purpose, and especially use for hosting web graphics. I know lots of people break this rule, but that doesn’t mean it is a good thing to base your business around.

You could just pay for hosting images and other multimedia on Amazon S3, but that isn’t always suitable and it can be slow. The charges however are a lot lower than from most hosting companies.

Converting the PDF

Whilst the PDF was a useful way to read the terms of service, it was proving difficult to copy and paste text for this overview. There is an easy way around that, just send the PDF to myself as an attachment in GMAIL, to get a “view as HTML” option.

Jubii Terms of Service

4. Purpose.
The purpose of our Website is to offer users a variety of possibilities for publishing (e.g.
private homepages, weblogs, linklists, dating services, discussion forums, upload services) and
exchanging (e.g. via email, chat file sharing) information, data, data banks, texts, links,
software, music, sounds, photos, graphics, videos, news or other material (“Content”).
Content on the Website is offered for your personal (noncommercial) use and may not be used,
copied, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed or otherwise
exploited except with the prior written consent of Jubii.

Based on this clause, Jubii is next to useless for anyone who has any kind of monetization on their blog. Are they just after the MySpace crowd?

5. Publication of Content/Grant of Rights.

By submitting and contributing Content for publication within the Jubii Service, you
grant Jubii an unlimited, world-wide, non-exclusive license free of charge, including the right
to grant sublicenses, to use, reproduce, publish, display, copy, transmit, store, disseminate,
translate, reformat and make publicly available such Content or prepare derivative works or
integrate the Content into compilations or to distribute the Content and extracts of the
Content and to perform and display the foregoing in connection with the business of Jubii
including with or within advertising as determined by Jubii. This license includes without
limitation the right to make the Content and extracts of the Content accessible as stated in the
preceding sentence via mobile devices, whether now known or hereafter devised, and the right
to adapt the Content to any data format. You authorize the use of the Content which you
place on the Website for the purpose of publishing, displaying and advertising of the Content
with or within Jubii Service, any link to the Website or search function associated with the
Jubii Service or the Website. You agree that Jubii does not guarantee any confidentiality with
respect to Content that is submitted and contributed to the Website.

This is actually fairly standard cover-your-ass stuff, but it effectively allows them to make derivative works and sub license them to others anyway they choose.

6. Copyrights/Privacy/Intellectual Property Rights.

You represent and warrant to us that you have not, and will not (nor authorize any
person using your password), publish any Content that infringes the copyrights,
patents, trademarks, trade secrets or other intellectual property rights (the
“Intellectual Property Rights”) of any person. You further represent and warrant
to us that the addition of advertising to any of your Content (or to Content added
under your password) will not violate the Intellectual Property Rights of any
person.

They are basically ruling out any material published under a Creative Commons License.

7. Rules.
You agree to the following:
(a)
The information which you have submitted is accurate, correct and complete. You
will not provide to us or post on our Website any information that is not correct,
such as an incorrect name, address, email address or any other incorrect
information whether with respect to you or any other person.

Oops I have given fake address details, so I can’t exactly test their service any further – the fact that I couldn’t give real details wouldn’t help me.

(b)
You will not use our Website, or any of the Content on the Website, for any
commercial or professional purposes, or for any other purpose involving solicitation
in any way to sell merchandise, goods, services, real estate or any product. You
may not post any links or telephone numbers for commercial or professional
services.

Even more hyper-restrictive – whatever you do, don’t go posting your favorite recipes, as that might be a precursor to a thriving online business.

You agree not to remove or block any copyright notices, ads or references or links
to the Jubii Service or elsewhere that we place on or near your Content.

So you are not allowed any privacy whatsoever when using the service, and have to turn off all your anti-spyware tools and services so Jubii can serve their adverts.

Limitations on Users.
(a) Users of the Jubii Service will be subject to reasonable limitations on the amount
of storage capacity which we offer and we reserve the right to change or reduce
the amount of storage capacity in our sole discretion from time to time without
advance notice.

So the 10GB storage is just a promotional gimmick, and they can reduce it without notice at some time in the future.

The Missing Security Code

Take a look:-

I am assuming this is a new security method, the “Invisible Captcha”

It is difficult for blind people to fill in a captcha, and use of a captcha that causes people with disabilities problems is certainly frowned upon, and possibly illegal in some countries (IANAL).
Obviously the best way to handle such an issue is to level the playing field, and make the captcha invisible for everyone.

Conclusion

I am prevented seeing anything inside the service, maybe it is not really live yet? I will write a review sometime in the future, assuming they modify the terms of service to allow a little more freedom.

Jubii doesn’t have a front page that makes it attractive to young users, and I believe it is almost impossible to use it for anything else that is useful, at least for my audience.

With all the features I have read about, they could make it extremely useful, we will see what happens.