I was in the middle of writing a new post for Blogging For Novice, but I suddenly saved and hold that post as I think there’s a breaking news with higher priority. As the post title suggested, yes, BlogRush is shutting down. (Thanks Lax for the information)
I’m a BlogRush user. I joined BlogRush as early as November 2007 when it just started launching. Few months ago, I removed BlogRush widget in my personal blog, as I think it’s not performing well for a mixed content blog. I kept the BlogRush widget here in this blog as I thought it could attract readers with more similar topics or bloggers from similar niche.
Sad to see that BlogRush failed its objective. Here is a quote from BlogRush.
BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.
Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs. This was our primary focus. Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else. BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later. Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped. (It happens.)
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Tags: traffic
Earlier, we have discussed the use of microblogging like Twitter. I used to manually post a link to Twitter to promote some of my very own blog post. There’s some work need to be done like copy and paste the post URL, type in a short description or just the post title. My friend then introduced me to a very useful tool, so that all my blog posts will be automatically posted in Twitter. Isn’t this great?
Introducing TwitterFeed…
To make this work, you need the following:
- A Twitter account.
- An OpenID.
- Your blog RSS feed / feedburner URL.
[...more]
There are other similar services like FeedBurner, but I recommend FeedBurner as it’s the only feed customizing service I use. What is FeedBurner? In short, it’s a mean to publish your online (blog) contents, so that your readers can subscribe to your feed and read your site updates via the RSS / feed reader.
No doubt that a lot of blogging platform like Blogspot, WordPress, etc has its own built-in feed feature. But why should we even border to “burn” our feed? Because you can customize how your feed content be presented to your subscribers and you can get more benefits like getting your feed stats.
I hereby pinpoint some great features you can get once you add your feed to FeedBurner:
- Easy-to-remember feed URL
- Get number of subscribers
- Get live hits statistic (readers geographical location)
- Know your readers preference via popular item (blog post) listing
- Show feed count widget on blog
- Allow email subscription
- Customize how your feed content look like in feed reader
- Customize how your feed content look like (color, styling) in email
- Associate your Google Adsense account to monetize your feed
- Make it easier to promote your blog (will talk about this in the next upcoming post)
- and many more..
Ready to burn your feed? What are you waiting for? Get FeedBurner now, it’s FREE. Also check out the quickstart guides on how to setup your blog feed with FeedBurner.
Tags: feed
Are you familiar with the term “OpenID“? I strongly encourage every blogger and blog reader to sign up for a FREE OpenID. Once you have your own OpenID, it will become a digital identity of yours in hundreds and thousands of websites. (provided they support OpenID)
The most common place that you will see OpenID enabled is a blogspot.com blog. Just imagine if you have an OpenID account, you can just post comments with that single identity that represent you. Maybe you think this is not neccessary, but OpenID will come in handy when you want to sign up an account in a site that supports OpenID. [...more]
Tags: OpenID
Do you know Twitter can be a useful tool to help promote your blog (or online business / products)? Twitter is part of Micro-blogging. You can post updates of your blog via Twitter, and also include the Twitter widget to your blog to show your updates.
What is Micro-blogging?
Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web. [ Source ]
Other than Twitter, there are several similar services such as Pownce, Plurk, Jaiku, etc… [...more]
Tags: micro-blogging,
traffic
