A couple of days ago Darren over at Problogger highlighted why he didn’t feel good about a specific type of Make Money Blogging training product.

Even though it wasn’t mentioned in Darren’s post, it was quite clear from various references in the post that he was referring to Jack’s latest offering Blog Success.

I am going to turn this on its head a little as I spent a few hours browsing around various B5Media blogs. B5Media is being highlighted as Darren was a founder, and his primary role was training the bloggers, though I am not sure about his current involvement or influence on content strategy.

I understand that they have been going through a lot of mass consolidation of their blogs, and there are tons of redirects from one domain to another, and my taste in content may be different to the general public.

Thus I thought the best way to judge overall content quality would be to use retweets, as recorded by Topsy.com

I am using Topsy as from what I have seen they at least handle internal 301 redirects fairly well, although they don’t seem to do the same for when content gets moved between domains – Tweetmeme doesn’t even handle small changes in permalinks.

Everyjoe.com on Topsy
Blisstree.com on Topsy
Splendidcity.com on Topsy
Bizzia seems to have been recently consolidated into Everyjoe

I also went through a number of their celebrity blogs which haven’t been consolidated, but didn’t see anything that suggested a different emphasis, level of quality or audience engagement.

Only BlissTree seems to have really knocked anything “out of the park” since B5 Media had their site consolidation – wait a moment, that was a post from 2006 on the effect of Coke on the body, and there is another great post on what happens to your body after giving up smoking with 3000+ comments which is also old content.

Even with an army of authors, plus the occasional mention in Darren’s twitter stream the overall public reception of the content is a little bit… muffled.

I am not knocking the strategy or the authors. The authors get paid to write content to specific requirements but ultimately the aim of the current content isn’t to get book deals or speaking engagements, though I do realise some of the B5Media writers are already published authors.

There was no attempt to sell an ebook of “Halloween appetizers” despite Alexa showing it was a recent top search term.

Here is a link to the blog Jack created about Environmental News and dog treats

I have nofollowed the links as I don’t want to have too much of a positive effect on their rankings. To be honest I would have done a bit more work in making things unique, adding a point of view and personality.
I am 50/50 as to whether I would allow the links from my comments though that could be easily fixed by making the sites more personal. When Jack comments with links to the sites, he does do so as himself.

The sites are nothing special, mainly built around niched 3rd party articles, press releases etc sourced through Jack’s custom tools, and using Zemanta in some cases to provide links to 3rd party resources including sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

I personally don’t think it is a worse user experience for a search visitor landing on one of Jack’s niche sites compared to landing on a B5 Media blog, though there would probably be less inclination to subscribe.

Can the content Jack uses rank? Probably depending on search queries, linking etc.

With some long tail queries for snippets appearing on his home page he already outranks the original article author, though that isn’t necessarily the goal.

It is too early days to see the full effects of Jack’s linkbuilding efforts, but both sites have 5-10% of content in primary index.

An alternative goal might be to use lots of this kind of site to help rank other higher quality money sites. To be honest when B5Media had 300+ blogs I always assumed they would eventually move to a more solid revenue model such as eCommerce.

B5Media blogs seem to have 5-10% of their indexed content within Google’s primary index, which can easily be achieved with 100% duplicate content.

Blog Success (on the surface) certainly isn’t the authority blogging model Darren is advocating for Problogger readers, but Jack has taught that model in the past with a fair number of his students achieving success, and also teaches that model as a consultant. I would think some of that also carries across into Blog Success.

(highly targetted display advertising)

Update 14/12/2009

Techcrunch had an interesting piece about quality content on Sunday highlighting a post on Wired that descibes the content creation process on sites run by Demand Media.

I am not suggesting filling up the web with junk content – I have always maintained there are ways to aggregate niched content in ways that add value and create a useful end user experience, even if it might not retain long-term subscribers.

Original Title: Speed Linking Slow Linking

First posted Jan 17, 2007 @ 6:55

I don’t like the term speed linking. I like it even less on some blogs that use the “more” tag on a speed linking post, so you don’t even get to click straight through from your feed reader.

I know it helps with traffic numbers, especially if you have a large subscription, but I find it just annoying. Higher traffic that isn’t going to click an advert lowers your CTR.

Another factor to think about is how long people are on your pages. There has been lots of speculation about how long a visitor stays on your site affecting search results. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, maybe it just doesn’t… yet.

Linking

I write a fair amount about linking… hmm so does Jack Humphreys. Actually Jack writes a lot more than me about linking, and has done for years. In fact, come to mention it, if someone was to ask me to name one person as an expert on linking, Jack would be a good choice.

Jack has just written a great article “Give Links to Gain Authority Status

Jack might even agree with this next part.

Speed Linking = Bad Blogging?

• Unique Relevant Content – Quite frequently, a speed link post doesn’t have much unique content on the page, other than a few links. If you want a page to be unique, and have some value, it needs to have content. One piece of content linking through to another adds value and relevance to both.
• The Fire Exit – Linking through to others is great, but a speed link page is like a Fire Exit. I could understand it if it was an affiliate link… call it a minimalist approach, you don’t write anything to persuade the reader to click through, you just present them with a link and a choice, which pill? We are in a world of tabbed browsers now, but do some justice to the links, even if it is only including a few excerpts and links to related posts.
• Create a reference – If you present a document with lots of useful tips that can’t be totally digested in 30 seconds, there is a higher chance for the post to be bookmarked and saved for reference. That isn’t an excuse for not breaking up your writing with paragraphs, bullets etc.
• Add value – if you write something useful related to someone else’s work, there is a high chance they will link back to you either now or in the future. Are you just a fanboy or do you have a brain and a real opinion?
• Advertising – I mentioned near the start of this article about CTR

  Jack wrote:-

  My advertising rates continue to go up because advertising today is based almost completely on page views. I get new visitor page views, but remember the 37% return visitors? My advertising is affected by that greatly.

  Maybe he needed to make this a little clearer. Repeat traffic and repeat views for the same advertising message is more valuable, because consumers need to see an advert multiple times before it even registers as something interesting, or something they might be looking to buy.

Here is an example of a speed linking type post on Jacks site.

Now first off, Jack publishes full feeds – I am not forced to visit his site to use the links. Thus the links are there to be useful, and not to create supplemental traffic that won’t help CTR.
He does include some comments about why they might be useful to me. I would actually prefer him to write a little more, or to interweave the speed links with references to his own writing on similar subjects.

Back Scratching

Speed Linking can be good for back scratching – links are better if they are surrounded with lots of related keywords, not just for the person you link to, but quite possibly also for yourself.

(highly targetted display advertising)

• does suck
• is amazing
• can bring you masses of targeted traffic
• can be used for market research
• can help you optimize your titles
• can be used for discovery
• is overrated
• is underrated
• is useful
• is a waste of screen pixels

Get the idea? It all depends on perspective and objectives.

Even if you have absolutely no interest in TrafficJam or Blogrush, I strongly suggest you read this post, especially if you are interested in viral marketing techniques that are guaranteed to build you an email list.

John Reese launched TrafficJam just a few days ago with the slogan – “Speed Read Thousands Of Blogs!”

TrafficJam vs Techmeme & Megite vs Activity Streams vs Feed Readers

Meme trackers are great ways to discover what people are blogging about. I stop by Techmeme on a daily basis and it brings me a great overview of what is happening in technology. It is a little elitist, the blogs and other news sources that get picked up are carefully selected, though the algorithms will also pick up other news sources if the central seed blogs link to them, or if other blogs link through to the lead stories or Techmeme, effectively saying “Hey, I have something to say as well”.

Megite allows you to create personal meme tracks, so I might also stop by the Search Engine marketing meme tracker based upon the Online Marketing Blog Biglist.
Some time ago I also created a meme tracker based upon my Technorati favorites, but because technorati Favorites is still broken and not showing all my favorites, this is proving next to useless and it can’t pick up the “undercurrent” of the z-list

Obviously I have my feed reader, but whilst I have subscribed to 300 or so blogs, I rarely have time to read them – using Google Reader with my current connection is cumbersome and the same would be true of other online readers such as Netvibes and Bloglines – I am currently also experimenting with FeedDemon which was made free not too long ago. It is a good option for those feeds which are “must reads”.

Blogcatalog’s Dashboard – the new activity stream is great, I have actually set it as my home page – my friends need to update their profiles so I can see what they are up to, but it gives me a good overview without getting bogged down. In some ways this is similar to what you can achieve with Netvibes or Pageflakes, but without the need to add all the feeds yourself.

TrafficJam highlights the undercurrent

TrafficJam highlights what is currently hot, without requiring high traffic numbers, a “trained audience” encouraged to click things to bring you more traffic, or anything else.

Clicks are based purely on headlines – if you have a headline that visitors to other blogs find interesting, you are going to gain a few clicks, even if you have a very low traffic blog – Blogrush already favours low traffic blogs in this regard because they gain lots of free credits.
How many free credits? Well I have had my WPPlugins site listed on Blogrush since it launched, and it is a very low traffic site, that hasn’t been updated in a long time, and the headline of the last post is hardly captivating.
The site certainly hasn’t earned many credits on its own – it has however been allocated almost 400,000 credits.

If you imagine the potential for a niche website, with a carefully optimized title being the one appearing within Blogrush, leading to a well optimized page which has been designed with a suitable traffic funnel, a CTR of 1% would give you 4000 visitors.

4000 visitors might not seem very much, but that is probably the equivalent to being linked to from 10 A-list bloggers in the blogging, seo and internet marketing niches with what I would call a “good” link, intended to send readers to look at something.

I know how much traffic I get from such links, and whilst they are not always sculpted to send maximum traffic, and there is an audience cross-over, there are very few sites that have sent me over 500 visitors from a single link in a short space of time.
If I delve into Google analytics and filter based on referrer, there are a few links that over a long period of time bring me more traffic, but those are invariably a well highlighted link in corner-stone content that attracts lots of links in itself.

Blogrush – Poor Click Through Rate

Despite improvements in targeting and improved quality filtering, the CTR from the Blogrush widgets has drastically reduced.

I think this is down to a number of problems

• Public quality perception – if you have moaned about or subjected Blogrush to public ridicule (some Internet marketing sites are very much like Ripoff Report in that respect) then you are unlikely to click.
• Different focus of attention – manual comment spammers are going to be focused on visiting the next blog on their list, entrycard droppers on their next drop zone, Stumblers are just as likely to hit the stumble button.
• Ugly widget – some people still don’t like it
• Poor positioning of widgets – it is an exit point, and people don’t really want to encourage others to leave their website, though to be frank in most cases other than sales pages, they are likely to do that anyway. Obviously many people are also looking for maximum monetization

My hope is that over time these things will be improved, but ultimately Coke tastes better than Pepsi.. right?

TrafficJam Is For The All List

A list like that makes me excited, because half the blogs I had never heard of or visited, and there was some great content to be found. Not all of it, titles alone can be a little misleading, and I am sure could be gamed, but often someone who can write a good title can also write good articles.

Well not quite everyone is an unknown, there is a post from the Income.com blog on the list, as well as from Alice Seba, and one from Lynn Terry @ Clicknewz – they probably have more paying customers than many A-list bloggers have subscribers

Then I noticed Kieron has had some problems with people gaining a front page Digg… with content they ripped off from him – whilst Kieron is in my feed reader, I missed this post because I haven’t been using it as much due to connection difficulties.

I also noticed a couple of posts from Linda celebrating 5 years in the affiliate management industry and an analysis of salaries for affiliate managers.

I am not going to pretend that one link from me is worth the advertising space that Blogrush takes up, but bloggers clicking through on specific content written by other people in their niche has the ability to magnify the traffic.
It doesn’t take many links and new visitors to enhance the effect of social media, and add subscribers.

Before you moan about Blogrush not bringing any traffic make sure you have carried out the following:-

• Read my previous articles on Blogrush
• Installed a plugin to create a custom RSS feed which you can use for testing

Mark was one of the first to offer a decent solution that doesn’t involve manual editing of an RSS feed, and since then a good solution was created by Pawan Agrawal of Max WordPress with his Blogrush Click Maximizer.

Pawan actually released a new version yesterday (22 feb), and even if you have no interest at all in Blogrush, you have to download this new version hosted in the WordPress plugin repository, and go through the activation process – it is a brilliant piece of coding by someone who really understands list building.
If you are doing anything to do with WordPress, whether it is plugins or themes, you have to see how he is doing this. Even better, the plugin is released under GPL, so you could easily reuse his code.

I think Pawan has a snse of humor as well. He said in the update notes that there were small changes made… that trebled the code size. Seriously this is list building artwork.

• Created a custom langing page or optimized your site to maximize conversions
• Actually clicked a few Blogrush links every day since launch – if you don’t use it, how can you expect any traffic from it
• If it turns out to be a good post, Stumble it, bookmark it – I have enhanced friendships and loyal readership by doing exactly that

TrafficJam Teething Problems?

Whilst I am overly positive that this is going to be a very useful service (if people give John and his team a little slack), there are things that should be cleaned up a little.

• Session IDs – for some reason clicking links from TrafficJam leaves ?PHPSESSID=llrg8vvclv49dko9ekp38uf2v7 or similar on the end of the links, and WordPress doesn’t clean that up automatically (and I hope they never do, unless used for other purposes) – this is something that needs fixing as it can mess up some things with social media, and looks ugly.
• Not displaying Blogrush – there are sites still listed that are not displaying Blogrush – I am sure this is because whilst they are no longer displaying Blogrush, they referred a lot of people – I am not sure how to handle this – as an example Linda isn’t displaying Blogrush on her blog, but from memory she was mainly displaying it on her forum previously. I am sure she referred tons of people, and will always have credits from referrals.
• Stats – make all traffic and credit stats crystal clear, and exactly how they came about
• Positioning – TrafficJam could be used as an incentive for good positioning of the widget. If blogs send more traffic due to good positioning, they should in some way have their feeds highlighted. Alternatively or in addition you could just have recent clicks highlighted.
• Design – I would like to see the category choices at the top or bottom, with the right side of the page reserved to highlight more content such as positioning benefits.
• Blogrush Widget – it really needs excerpts and maybe some kind of additional ratings for a post just read. A blog is gaining a benefit from a click based upon a title, but a title has to deliver on the promise +1/-1
• For Blogrush – I want to be able to promote my downline, I don’t really need more referrals, but my readers do

Unlike many, I am willing to give John a chance to make this a success – there is a need, and someone needs to fill it. This is only the second part of Income.com, I am looking forward to the third, and probably largest piece of the puzzle that John started launching over 1 year ago with a small green blob.

Do also make sure you check out Pawan’s plugin – there are actually a few flaws in the process which I am going to suggest need fixing for his next upgrade – it doesn’t seem to work with multiple lists, so I ended signing up to 2 lists of his this evening, when I have been on some for the last 2 years or more, and as it is on WordPress plugins, you don’t know who the referrer was – it would be good if there was a “where did you hear about this plugin” field.

In direct referral stats it didn’t cause a shockwave until I looked at the specific pageviews of the page he chose to link to, my WordPress category.

My category pages rarely figure highly in the most viewed, so I could actually attribute the majority of the traffic to that specific landing page, even if the traffic originated from an email or RSS subscriber.

This takes me back to one of the discussions I had with Joost regarding his Google Analytics tracking from RSS Plugin – I am sure there must be some way to modify it so that when you link to someone, they can actually see the traffic you sent them, not just click-throughs from a blog page, but from subscribers.

This actually relates to link and traffic reciprocation, quite an important blogging concept.

People Need To See The Traffic

With an affiliate program it is easy for the affiliate program owner to see the traffic you send them. Everything is tracked. With blogging in general it isn’t so easy.

Search Engine Land for instance frequently link to me in their Search Cap which goes out to email subscribers.

From the posts that appear on the Search Engine Land blog, I rarely see more than 10 visitors – but that doesn’t account for the traffic sent from the email newsletter which is totally invisible.

Frequently I see posts receive a flood of traffic where I don’t have a referrer, because it is coming from various email clients.

Danny actually faces a similar problem, as he has raised the question of cross promotion of conferences in a discussion on Sphinn.

The big problem? The email edition of Search Cap is invisible traffic.

If people see that a link made a significant difference to traffic and conversions of whatever kind, they are much more likely to reciprocate.

In many ways, measurable traffic is the only traffic that counts and where you are promoting someone else, they have to see it too.

But whilst we await an advertising metric which can’t be gamed, there is certainly one measurable benefit of having a good Alexa score, or more importantly a significant gain in Alexa rating.

Alexa Can Drive Real Qualified Traffic

But where from? The Top 10 Movers and Shakers page.

Due to the sudden influx in traffic over the last week due to the Google PageRank updates, I was shocked to see some referral traffic coming from Alexa.

Here is a screenshot for some future bragroll or for use as “social proof”.

Here is my traffic spike that demonstrates that 390% increase in traffic as measured by Alexa.

Alexa Accuracy

Here is the amazing part of all this, though obviously the traffic interested in my PageRank articles is probably similar in nature to my normal traffic (using the Search Status plugin for Firefox)

390% Increase Is Fairly Accurate

The peak traffic on 24th October represented 4,093 unique visitors (24hr tracked by MBL) and 6,901 page views. Awstats shows 7674 visits and 66630 page views – the first figure is a lot more accurate.

Traffic actually has grown fairly slowly since February or March whichever metric I use, other than the one that probably counts the most, subscribers.

You will notice that that subscriber growth doesn’t contain any significant spikes. The growth isn’t based upon massive social media traffic such as a front page Digg as this blog has never appeared there, and probably never will.

I will have some more stats about the “PageRank Blogstorm” in due course.

So How Much Traffic Can You Gain From Alexa?

Note I am at the bottom of the list, so the traffic I will receive is much lower than those further up.

So far since I appeared on the list yesterday I have received 110 visitors, and those visitors know what the site is about which they are clicking on. Targeted Visitors

If that listing remains for a week (I don’t know how long they normally last), then I might gain 300+ visitors.

300 visitors might not seem like a lot, in the past I have managed to send 400 to someone’s blog, but in the general scale of things in this niche it isn’t bad for a single source of targeted traffic (discounting social sites), though temporary.

I am writing this article because I keep on being asked the same questions, not with the intention of beating the drum about Blogrush, or to promote my referral link. In fact you won’t even find my referral link in this article. Go and use someone else’s, or look at one of my previous articles.

I thought about adding some “notice me” links in this post (that was more just to say thanks), but that isn’t my style.

Lots of the people who have been making mistakes in their professional analysis in theory subscribe to my blog, thus I am not going to single them out.
There have been a lot of anti-hype articles, and I also still have some reservations, but that doesn’t justify articles full of criticism that don’t contain facts, or contain interpretation of facts that are so obviously full of mistakes, I am amazed they were written by the person credited.

I thought I would show you a little bit of proof that Blogrush sends traffic to small blogs.

First of all here is the traffic to my WordPress Plugins site which hasn’t really been touched for 12 months.

So that is 60 readers, and 131 page views since Blogrush launched – the site is 2 years old, PR5, so it does get a little seasonal search traffic, which is picking up this time of year.

Here are the stats from Blogrush

So when I took that screenshot earlier yesterday to show to someone, I had had 5 referrers. I should have possibly waited with my screenshot, it is actually 75 readers, 179 views and 10 clicks through from Blogrush.

That Doesn’t Mean I Had A Great CTR

That blog hasn’t only received 149 credits, it has gained lots of bonus credits, though it is impossible to tell how many.

Many people really didn’t understand this message on the stats page.

Special Note: All Members are currently receiving BONUS CREDITS that are not yet reflected in these statistics.

Your referral credits are not being used currently… there is no way to allocate them if you have multiple blogs.

Some blogs are in categories where they can’t use all the credits they have been generating.

John Reese said in an email to members yesterday (summarized) CTR problems can be solved with:-

1. Better titles, and gave some great examples
2. More categories are needed for better targeting – also of note in that point is that if you have people averaging 0.5% CTR, the widget itself is averaging 2.5% CTR – that is a conceptual difference people might not realise.
3. Fraud – expect a big clamp down and permanent bans – I hope people weren’t being evil and expecting to get away with it.

I am not going to show off a load of referrals, though I have got quite a few. I am also even more happy that my downline have got referrals and are benefiting from the free credits in the system. Not everyone has had great success, there are some inherent problems, but these things will be ironed out.

Here is an easy way to understand this.

A few people are referring to Blogrush as a pyramid scheme

However there isn’t any money changing hands, and there is another problem with their theory. What happens with all the excess inventory that isn’t spoken for by referral credits?

Until the referral matrix gets deeper than 10 levels, and referral credits are actually used, there are a lot of spare credits that need to be assigned to something, and those are the credits that created additional visitors to my plugins site.

Lots of the high traffic blogs are in the top level of the referral structure, so there will always be a large amount of these free credits. Blogrush had a very explosive start, and there are 100s if not 1000s of blogs in the top level.

A blog with 30,000 pageviews per day in the top level is generating 150,000 RSS impressions, but only gaining 30,000 for itself. Blogrush use 10% to cover their costs.

That leaves 105,000 credits per day for Blogrush to hand out for free. They are not being handed out to an upline that doesn’t exist.

I have no specific details of how the credits are being shared out, but it seems smaller blogs are receiving windfalls (in my estimate) of 1000 credits or more per day.

The Blackhat Threat

Alex Goad pinged me about some of the blackhat games that Blogrush faces. It is true, but I wouldn’t class any venture by John Reese as low hanging fruit.

Over on Problogger John Reese has stated:-

That’s for all the great feedback. We’re working really hard to make some “must needed” improvements due to some unforseen issues we’ve encountered. Fraud has really hurt us in the early going and is dilluting the CTRs across the entire network. We’re moving to a 100% Manual Review Process and this will not only eliminate most of the cheaters but will also eliminate all the low-quality blogs in the network.

Don’t doubt for a minute whether John has the resources to hire 10 or 20 people to manually review every single site if that becomes necessary, but lots of tools are fairly easy to create to make the process much more efficient.

Lots of people have asked me about what traffic I have received. It has possibly decreased over the last couple of days due to the spamming, but here is a screenshot I took yesterday.

So we don’t just trust MyBlogLog tracking, we also should compare it to another source. Google Analytics will do for this purpose.

I actually waited for a day so that the Google Analytics data could be compared.

How to see this in Google Analytics?

1. Go to Traffic Sources >> All Traffic Sources
2. Find source medium [containing] widget.blogrush.com
3. Click on what is probably just a single result listing containing the combined referrals

Now whilst there is an obvious decline, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is all caused by spammers. It might also mean that the free credits in the system are being applied differently, or that they are being spread thinner.
If they are being spread thinner, that actually makes me happy, because that means more of my referrals are gaining a little free traffic. Maybe it is just an extra 10 visitors per day, but when you have less than 100 visitors per day, that is significant if it is targeted.

The decline can also be caused by articles that are just not compelling enough for people to click on them. I am sure this article will not receive a lot of traffic, and will probably only be read by my regular readers.

I don’t write articles specifically to get high traffic from every single one. I just try to provide useful information and title it appropriately.

I have lots of referrals, and so do many of my downline, but those credits are not being used currently, because there is no interface to allocate them.

My guesstimate is that I have probably had 15,000 to 20,000 impressions so far.

• Do your own testing and tracking
• Compare it to the value of screen real estate
• Decide whether it works for you
• Give it some time, and think of your readers (sharing traffic is good for you)

Update

John Reese responded to the discussion on Alex’s Blogrush post with a couple of comments, one explaining the algorithm a little explaining why Blogrush shouldn’t be looked on as a Pyramid or Ponzi scheme (all credits in the system are earned, nothing is projected forward, upwards allocation of credit), but also made the following statement which I feel is very significant.

The only reason some impressions are “held back” and not immediately delivered are because the system continues to ‘adjust’ based on the network size itself, as well as how many members in each category — because we serve each members’ credits in the category they choose. There ‘can’ be an imbalance of inventory in certain categories, but we’re able to make up that adjustment based on the “breakage” of math that occurs because all the accounts that immediately signed up essentially joined ‘under’ BlogRush — and so the network has a large percentage of surplus; which we are currently auto-distributing to all the members equally to help them get more traffic. We have plans to eventually give most of the bonus credits to our SMALL USERS since they need the traffic the most.

Whilst many people are looking on Blogrush as being a pyramid scam and the rich are feeding off the poor, I am increasing feeling that in many ways this will become more of a Robin Hood scenario.

Whilst the big blogs will generate more credits themselves, and lots of referrals, they will not gain the same CTR as smaller unknown blogs, because people are using Blogrush for discovery.
With John highlighting that the surplus inventory is mainly going to go to smaller blogs in the future, this really is going to be robbing the rich to feed the poor, and a blog like Shoemoney or Problogger probably signed up directly.

Andy Beal being such a smart marketer probably signed Marketing Pilgrim up under his wife’s Hawaii Vacation Blog. Despite the drama, if he removes the widget, his wife’s blog will receive less credits to allocate – what a dilemma to be in ;) – note those credits can’t be allocated currently.
Andy hasn’t yet published any real stats (from 3rd party tracking), but I would love to see what traffic his wife’s blog has received in Google Analytics, and whether that traffic was more worthwhile than the traffic Marketing Pilgrim receives.
I honestly wouldn’t click on one of Andy’s ads, because I am already a subscriber, but I did just see my WordPress Plugins site advertised on his site, and that doesn’t have a compelling title.

However so many people are making critical mistakes with Blogrush, I thought it would be a good time to give them a few tips and clear up some misconceptions.

1. Don’t Scare Your Readers

   I have seen a number of negative reviews of Blogrush by people worrying about privacy, data collection, what happens to data collected etc.
   Let’s face it, your ISP sells your user data
   Advertising companies are collecting data all the time
   Whatever widget or image you place on your website, quite often some smart person is collecting data

   It is worth evaluating the ownership of a widget, for instance if they are a direct competitor, possibly they are a blog network, but as far as I know, John Reese is moving away from the massive number of niche sites model and has been for the last year.

   My evaluation of the Blogrush privacy policy? I am not a lawyer, but it seems the intent of the data collection is for internal use, plus they may issue reports or use the data to highlight hot stories currently in the network.
   Lots of widgets and social network sites for bloggers collect the same data, and use it in the same way, where is the problem?

2. Blogrush Won’t Bring Much Traffic

   How useless is social media traffic? You get 10,000 to 100,000 visitors to your site, and very few leave interesting comments or subscribe to your blog.

   Blogrush promises targeted traffic – not just category based – how good the contextual algorithms work is yet to be proven, but the hope is that the traffic will be more focused.

   If you can convert 100,000 untargeted visitors into 1000 targeted, that is actually quite valuable and worthy of consideration.
   If you gain a few referrals, things get really interesting – I now have an incentive to Stumble and Digg the people who signed up under me, because that will give me traffic even if they didn’t link to me directly.
   This introduces a totally new level of cooperative traffic arbitrage.

3. Not Including Blogrush On Every Page

   Are you scared of leaking readers? Maybe your blog isn’t set up to retain interest and encourage people to read more content.
   Blogrush gives you circulation credits for each time the widget is displayed.

4. Prominent Positioning

   There are huge long-term benefits in referring people to Blogrush and having the widget prominently displayed on your blog will help referrals.
   If you don’t use it yourself, how can you recommend it?

   Don’t be worried about sharing a little traffic

5. Ultimate Incentive

   John Reese is counting on these widgets to remain on blogs, so he is going to do everything he can to ensure that the smaller bloggers get some traffic from it.
   There is a whole load of excess inventory “above the pyramid/matrix” that needs to be disposed of – 10% is sectioned off for Blogrush to sell. It is my hope that this inventory is distrubuted “flat rate” or at least “flatter rate” to all publishers, not pro rata their existing credits in the system. This could prove to be the great leveller.
   Based upon 1% CTR on Blogrush currently (it is really hard to pin down), $1 CPM for the advertising adds up to an awful lot of money, though I would hope it will be as low as $0.20 because CTR will drop.

   The critical mistake – people are thinking that for some reason only the big bloggers are going to benefit

6. Titles Maketh Traffic

   Short, possibly controversial titles are going to perform better than titles that aren’t topical within your niche but you certainly need to test and track

7. Traffic Analysis

   Use your normal tracking software and see where the traffic is coming from, and how it is interacting with your site.

   Blogrush is already referring more traffic to me than MyBlogLog, Bumpzee or Blogcatalog, and I have a fairly broad network in each of those communities.

   You might think that my best performing story on Blogrush was my slightly controversial story on John Chow Reviews, but my analytics prove otherwise, with more people landing on my Gmail story from Blogrush.

   Content is being very widely distributed on Blogrush already, in fact half of the sites that have sent me traffic I have never even heard of.

   Blogrush allows you to reach new sites you may never of heard of, and have never heard of you, that are highly relevant to your topics, it has nothing to do with who referred you

   Whilst you might think that the “blogging A list” are going to benefit the most, lets face it, a high percentage of people interested in content on Problogger within the blogging niche already read it. The big bloggers might get more credits, but they will likely have a much lower CTR.

   The biggest benefit for the more prominent bloggers will be if/when they will be able to use credits towards other sites they wish to promote, such as in Darren’s case using credits to promote his photography blog or other B5 properties.

Click On It

If you see something interesting from an unknown blog shown on your site, click on it. Not only might you find the story interesting, but if the blogger also uses some tracking, they will see where the click came from, and possibly come and pay you a visit.
Many widgets clicks don’t really mean very much, because they can’t be seen as coming from your related site. Hopefully the stats Blogrush create will also help to highlight this, as not every blogger uses tracking effectively.

Blogrush is not just an advertising tool, it is a discovery tool

Bonus Tip – don’t add Blogrush to a blog that doesn’t have any content – lots of people are adding it to new blogs that just have the first “Hello World” default post. They end up on my permanent block list.

p.s. I have been going around stumbling the people who wrote about Blogrush and who mentioned they signed up with me and linked through to my initial review. Even if you haven’t linked through (with a trackback/pingback), let me know – I will be setting up some ways to help promote your widgets and content in various ways in the future and I would like to help you gain more referrals.

Update

We are not quite sure where the problem is, and Tinu kindly offered for me to post her article her for you all to read.
But I am not going to do that…

Here is a link to her feed where you can read her article on free traffic and lots of other great content – don’t forget to subscribe

Its Not The Quality Of The Product

I have experienced some of Jacks training in the past, and it is always phenomenal, he gives so much valuable information and presents it in a way that is easy for anyone to understand.
I have absolutely no doubt that Social Power Linking will be no exception to the rule.

It Is Not Philosophical

Jack and myself currently have the same philosophical approach to building websites, and in fact I am fairly sure with his Authority Site Centre that he built and promotes with his partners he uses many of the same plugins as I do on a regular basis, only his team sets up the blogs for you on their own servers.

It Is Certainly Not Price

This is a physical product that will be shipped to your door

• 6 Hours of Video on 8 DVDs
• PDFs of the Slides
• PDF Fast Start Guide
• 3 CD of the same material to listen to in your car

Now most “online gurus”, most of which have half, or even less, of Jack’s 10 years of online experience (and often propose some shady tactics) would start off with a short term promotion of their product for $497 or more, and quickly raise the price to the best part of $1000

Now don’t get me wrong, some of those more expensive packages are worth their weight in gold, because they come from people with a similar level of experience to Jack, and honestly I am sure Jack’s latest offering is worth far more than the measly price he is charging.

Quite often these days you would be expecting to pay $67 for an ebook, with the price raising to $97 within a few days for something that might take you 1hr to read. Sometimes again that is worth it, if you already have a successful business, and one tip could make an existing traffic funnel profitable, or allow you to use a new one and make a profit.

This is a steal for only $149 plus $20 for shipping anywhere in the world… yes even to the Far east, Australia, or to me in Poland.

Take a look at Social Power Linking for yourself

I Don’t Know All Jack’s Strategies

Whilst Jack has a very similar philosophy for site building, I am sure I would pick up a few tricks that would make a total cost of $169 worthwhile.

It Not The Sales Letter

Jack has been known to have some pretty long sales letters in the past, but this one is only about 4 or 5 pages, tells you exactly what you get in Social Power Linking for such a small purchase price, and gives a quick overview of the contents of each CD.

There is not a testimonial in sight

Why? Jack honestly doesn’t need them, he has been in the business so long and is so highly respected. He is also quite sure that his offer is so compelling combined with the feedback his affiliates will give him in reviews such as this that any testimonials will just be unnecessary fluff that will scare away potential customers.

Jack knows full well that in some niches PPC is just not a viable consideration unless you have massive profit margins only suitable for those who have already learnt how to play Google’s Adword’s fiddle to perfection.
Fortunately there are ways to capture free traffic from search engines, and Jack is a master at not only gaining traffic, but teaching others how to do it in whatever niche they are in.

No Problems With Payment

There was a time that many residents of far-flung countries didn’t have the possibility to pay for products using Paypal but times are changing. Paypal makes it easy and if you haven’t got an account then there is always a credit card.

(note: in the past Jack used 2checkout for one of his programs I was a member, and I had some problems – Paypal really does make a difference for me)

Guarantee – You Had Better Believe It!

Not only do you get your money back, they will also pay you a little on top, though actually this is a little confusing.

They don’t refund the $20 shipping charge, but they do pay you $22 on top of the purchase price of the goods. You would only actually gain $2.

On top of that you would also have to pay for the goods to be shipped back, so if you do feel compelled to ask for a refund, you might actually be a few dollars poorer, but that is the same with any product you purchase mail order or over the internet.

So Why Am I Not Buying?

No it is not what you are thinking, I am not looking to get a free copy, I really would part with my cash right now.

I am an unusual rare case, and even if Jack offered it to me for free, including free shipping I would refuse.

Part of my old job in the computer games and software industry here in Poland used to be import/export. I have been through living hell with Polish customs so many times the very thought of having to handle what is now minor import paperwork, and then only sometimes, just gives me the shivers.

When I started my online business, one of the primary reasons was to get away from some of the mundane and sometimes highly stressful aspects of international trade.
My wife working for her father’s apparel business still goes through this almost daily and although things have greatly improved since Poland joined the European Community, I still have what I can only look on as “import phobia”

Thus I am only interested in digital products

Don’t Let My Reservations Stop You

Honestly, my phobia is my problem, not yours.

Physical products are shipped around the world daily, and if they are for personal use they most often sail straight through without having any customs paperwork or charges even here in Poland, well unless you are buying an $80,000 car, a motor cruiser or $4000 hifi system (yeah I still get requests from family friends to help with such purchases, and more often than not I avoid it, even though it would pay well just to make a few phone calls)

$169 Flat Rate (including shipping) = no brainer?

For some people yes, for others who are not making any money online and things are a little tight financially back at home, Social Power Linking is not for you. I would in that case suggest you read Jack’s Authority Black book, and Michelle’s Web 2.0 Traffic guide that I mentioned just a few hours ago.

I actually deliberately wrote about the free alternatives first so that I could link through to them in this post.

I deliberately wrote this as a separate post because just like Jack, I know a little bit about traffic generation and how well I can rank for products that I discuss that I believe are of value to my readers.

Hopefully I can persuade Jack to make a digital version on Social Linking Power available for fellow “import phobia” sufferers as I am sure I will learn something new.

Yes, I did deliberately use “Social Linking Power” instead of Social Power Linking” and I suppose I should also mention Socialpowerlinking.com – there are currently around 2000 references to this product in Google, I wonder how I will rank in the SERPs for “Social Power Linking“

I got to skim through this a couple of days ago and need to read it again in more depth and do a lot of planning.

It is free, and well worth downloading.

It is totally different to Stampede Secrets which I reviewed a few months back, or the Authority Black Book which I haven’t reviewed, but I am sure many people have read anyway.

How can 3 ebooks from highly experienced internet marketers on Web 2.0 marketing and traffic generation be totally different, worthy of your time, and in the case of Stampede Traffic, worthy of some cash?

I would look on Authority Black book as a guide to building an authority site with wordpress and promoting it, which is effectively what Jack’s Authority Site Centre is all about, but they build the WordPress sites for you, and trick them out and host them.

Michelle’s Web2.0 Traffic Generation Blueprint is a step by step list of every way she promotes a website. It doesn’t get into possibly complicated decisions about deciding which site might be most appropriate, you end up generating traffic from so many different sources the odds are in your favour that you hit a good source. It should be noted that Michelle works a lot with out-sourcing, and this would be a perfect guide to give to a link builder and say “do this”, and also assign an outsourced writer to work with them.
I suppose rather than creating a mininet, it is more like a “social net” of 100s of interlinked pages on web 2.0 sites & profiles, social bookmarks and news items that eventually lead back to your money sites.

Stampede Traffic is a little more selective – you target the social networks you believe will give you the most traffic and best links, build up credible profiles, and develop “meaningful” communication with other social network users.
In some ways it is also more of an executive “Why are we doing this?” and “How are we doing this?” approach, and gives you some great basics. It is for niche marketers also looking to refine their approach.

All good reads, if you value your time I would read all of them, though I am not sure in which order, probably go for ABB, then Web 2.0 Blueprint, and if you find you need more of the executive overview, in a Marketing Sherpa style report, Stampede Traffic is ideal and extremely well researched.

Update:

Lots of well deserved positive feedback on Michelle’s Web2.0 traffic blog

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