Category Archives: Reviews

BlogRush: a new tool to get more traffic to your blog

Posted on by
5

I just heard about BlogRush via Yaro Starak and after watching their intro video, I signed up.

What is BlogRush? Well, if you’ve been on the Internet for a long time, you might remember banner exchanges… they were very popular a few years back, and the concept is pretty much the same: you advertise other sites, in exchange for your site being advertised.

BlogRush takes the traditional model and applies it to blogs. Now the sites you advertise are blogs, and your blog is advertised. Big deal, right? After all, you could always have put your blog in a traditional exchange.

Well, that’s where the beauty of the blog-specific model begins to show itself. Because pretty much all blogs use RSS feed technology behind the scenes (whether you know it or not :) ), BlogRush uses your blog’s feed to advertise specific posts. They also use a combination of broad categories (you pick which one your blog fits in when you add a blog) and some proprietary methods for displaying the posts that are most relevant to your readers.

To me, that’s a big benefit. I’m not interested in showing generic ads for everything under the sun–that’s just not a benefit to my readers. But if I give them a tool to find more interesting posts on topics they care about, that’s a win-win.

One of the other ways BlogRush is shaking up the old model a bit is by using a more generous “ratio.” You see, many traditional exchanges set it up so that your ad is shown every time you show two ads on your site; this is a 1:2 ratio. They do this because it leaves the exchange service with extra slots, which they can use to advertise the network or sell to other advertisers.

If BlogRush didn’t do something along those lines, I’d be nervous; I don’t like it when there’s no discernable business model for making money. They do follow the ratio system, but they do it a little differently: they structure it based on referrals and tiers.

I’ll get back to that in a second, but it brings up another interesting point about the BlogRush service: your blog is advertised when it shows advertisements, but also when someone else you refer to the service shows ads. For example, I signed up using Yaro Starak’s special link, so I’m counted as his referral. When I use the service on one of my blogs to show ads, not only will my ad be shown somewhere else, but Yaro will also get an ad displayed. And if you sign up with my link, when you use the tool to display ads on your blog, you’ll get an ad displayed, I’ll get an ad displayed, and Yaro will get an ad displayed.


They can do this because each BlogRush box shows five blog posts (see example to the left). They’ve set up their system so that there’s a 1:1 ratio for your own blog, your referrals’ blogs, and their referral’s blogs. That means every time an ad is displayed on your blog, your referrals’ blogs, or their referrals’ blogs, your post is displayed somewhere else. That could really add up!

Beyond the first two levels of referrals, there’s also a 1:4 ratio for levels 3-6 and a 1:8 ratio for levels 7-10. That may not sound like much, but if you get an active user as one of your referrals who ends up getting a lot of people to sign up, you could end up with thousands of people in your 10 levels. And because the ratio isn’t always 1:1, that means that BlogRush is effectively keeping 10% of the ad spaces, which they can sell or use themselves–enough that they should grow to be a successful, reliable business, which is what I like to see.

Aside from the interesting business model, there is the question of effectiveness. Is this thing actually worth putting on your blog? Time will tell (I’ve put it on a couple of my blogs), but I think that it has real potential. It seems like it could be a very organic, beneficial way of getting traffic while providing good information to your readers.

One of the variables is where bloggers put it on their blogs. I personally think the best place for a tool like this is right at the end of a post, when the reader is prepared to move to something else; by putting it there, you’re offering a doorway right where they want one. So far, though, I’ve seen several blogs putting it in their sidebars or near the top of their posts. The sidebar is an okay place to put it (I’ve done that on the front page of one blog where it really doesn’t fit well in the posts themselves), but I don’t want to encourage my readers to leave before even reading my post by putting it near the top.

Because BlogRush is still in the launching process, and I think a little overwhelmed by the response, they’re still working on a few things. The most important of these things are the stats. I believe that when the stats are ready, they’ll show how many times your ad has been shown, how many ads you and your referrals have shown, etc. I also hope they’ll show clicks, because that would make it easier to determine whether you’re getting real traffic out of it (and that’s the whole point!).

If this sounds useful to you, I’d encourage you to sign up and play with it. Because it’s free, you don’t have much to lose (even time, because it’s pretty quick to sign up), and it could be a good source of traffic as it grows.

What you should know about SoloSEO, a new search engine optimization tool

Posted on by
3

I recently read a post about tracking the factors that contribute to good search engine rankings. There are lots of factors to keep track of, but if you do a good job, your blog will get tons of new visitors from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.

The post was specifically about the tool WebCEO, but at the end, Guillaume opened up the discussion with this question:

Anyone have a better/faster system to accomplish most of those tasks / tedious reports?

Even though the post itself didn’t deeply interest me (I’ve played with WebCEO before and already have an opinion), that question did and I clicked through to see the comments. Sure enough, people were weighing in on a wide variety of products and services. One that caught my eye particularly was about a new site called SoloSEO. I’m a big fan of web-based software, so I signed up for their mailing list, and yesterday I received an email saying the system is up and running.

I promptly signed up for a free trial account, and they gave me extra incentive to try it out by bribing me to write a review about it. :) I’ve tinkered around a bit and generally like what I’m seeing. Here are some observations, both positive and negative.

What can it do for you?

Like all search engine optimization (SEO) tools, the idea here is to get more visitors to your blog by creating a blog that the search engines want to send people to. A good chunk of the strategy here is in choosing keywords that accurately describe your content and using them judiciously (like in your post titles).

To do a good job, it’s important to pick good keywords (ones people are actually looking for!) and then also track how well you’re doing with them—both how often you’re using them and whether you’re part of the results the search engines display for those words. SoloSEO offers a range of tools designed to help you pick good keywords and then track them.

How well does it work?

My impression at this point is that there are a few kinks to work out, but the tool generally works well.

One of the strongest parts of SoloSEO seems to be the tools to help you pick good keywords. They’ve taken some of the best-known tools in the SEO industry and put them together in an easy-to-use page. You can have their tool scan different pages of your site and recommend keywords based on what you’ve already written about (this is great for a blogger who’s written at least a few posts but is just learning about SEO).

All of these tools don’t work together quite as well as I was hoping, though. I decided to run a report to see where this site ranked for the various keywords SoloSEO recommended. However, the report tool asked me to type in a list of up to ten keywords I wanted to check on. I found that pretty odd, considering I’d saved a list of its recommendations; I expected to be able to choose from them rather than type things in.

Interestingly, a lot of the tools are built to use your site’s “Sitemap XML” feature. Most bloggers aren’t taking advantage of this feature yet, but this requirement is good motivation to do something that you should already be doing (if you have a sitemap set up, you’ll show up better in Google and other search engines). The upshot is that, just by getting your blog ready for the SoloSEO tools, you’re actually likely to have better results.

The tool seems to be targeted at people who have a rudimentary understanding of search engine optimization, but are not experts. They have provided some explanatory text, but mostly it seems like the site is designed for exploration—click here, click there, “I wonder what this does?”.

There is a “Learn” button, and I kind of expected that to take me to detailed information and instructions about the page I was viewing, but it actually leads to a list of good resources to learn more about SEO. Helpful, but perhaps a little unintuitive because of its location.

Overall, I think SoloSEO is a good tool for bloggers getting started with search engine optimization, but they have some things to work on. However, they’ve shown (by the fact that they have a blog, and also because they’re looking for honest reviews) that they’re interested in feedback, so I’m very hopeful that they will take advice and suggestions seriously. If they do, they could have a truly fantastic product.

Is it a good value?

Like most of the time that question is brought up, the answer is “it depends.” The introductory cost is currently $29/month. If you’re strictly a hobbyist, or are using a free Blogger or WordPress blog, this is probably not the tool for you (I’d recommend the excellent and free Sitening tools instead). If you’re a hardcore SEO user, you’ll probably find the tool a little too lightweight for your needs.

However, if you’re in SoloSEO’s target market—starting to be interested in search engine optimization, willing to invest a little money into your site/blog because you expect to make money from it—I’d absolutely recommend signing up for the free trial and taking it for a spin. Plan to spend a few hours just testing it out; if you haven’t looked seriously at this kind of thing before, just the trial will definitely be worth your time.

I’m interested to hear from those of you who do try it; what do you think?