Link Bait Me

I must be doing something right. A little over a week ago, John Chow stopped by, and now ShoeMoney has dropped in, too.

Now I just need to get in gear and write some good, linkable, content.

Oh… And I’ve reached 2 of my September goals. I think I’ll fail the Adsense one, and I’m working on the last one. More on that on Oct 01.

Popularity: 9% [?]

(This is also posted on my other blog, JoeTech.com, but I thought it would be important to share here, too.)

What’s Bla.st? I’ll get to that, but first, let’s talk about why BlogRush has failed.

1. BlogRush has a horrible CTR.
BlogRush has a horrible click through ratio. It may come up with tweaking or it may not, but it certainly doesn’t help that they’ve made a few other mistakes below. Look at my stats above. I might not win the Blogger of the Year award, but it’s not just me, either. Everyone has been complaining about the low click through ratio. Even though John Chow has 400+ people sign up under him (at a couple levels), earning more credits in the system, his own stats indicated a very low return on the investment made with that amount of screen real estate. This was problem enough for John that he wrote an article about how to control the headlines BlogRush displays for your site.

2. Too easy to game
These days, any new start-up or unique site needs to plan for explosive growth from the beginning. BlogRush seems to have missed a couple steps here. First, their site did not launch with safe guards against people trying to game the system. This was seen pretty early on, when a blog called A Blackhat’s Diary posted an article detailing how to exploit BlogRush, and soon enough, a lot of people were gaining credits they never earned. BlogRush found themselves scrambling to block cheaters, ultimately deciding to move to manual account approval, which is a nice bandaid, but it won’t stop the bleeding.

3. Where’s the revenue stream? Sustainability?
It seems the business model here might simply be to get lots of users and be Internet Famous. That’s all well and good, but nobody can expect to last without some means of paying the bills. I don’t know if they’re planning a “pro” upgrade model like Flickr or if they plan on selling the excess credits in the system, but I can’t see either making them rich. Maybe Yahoo will buy them and it won’t be their problem anymore.

4. It looks like an ad.
OK… I know they’ve now got their new “flavors“, but it may just be too little, too late. The original design was OK and all, but why not throw a javascript color picker in the “Get Your Code” page and let us pick out the colors that work for our sites? Even the resulting new color choices could have been available at launch with a couple extra hours of work.

5. Loss of loyalty and faith.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. BlogRush got a lot of great buzz and sucked us in. Whether they orchestrated the initial push or just got lucky, it worked brilliantly. The loss of faith came with the problems mentioned above happening so quickly. The fixes have been rushed and I, personally, worry about how well stuff is tested and over all stability of the system. The more you rush code, not to mention changing the was it is intended to work after launch, the more room there is for mistakes.

For me, it’s just not worth it to roll the dice and see what happens. I have removed the widget from my blogs, but you’ll notice that I’ve added something new. I’m talking about Bla.st, the free advertising directory. Just look to the right (under the Alexa ranking box) to see Bla.st in action. Below is an example of previewing a card on the site.

Bla.st is a system of “cards” displayed in a grid and categorized. A card is simply an image that should give a visitor a good idea of what to expect from your site or otherwise entice them to visit. Cards are free to add, but if you want to get noticed, you can bid to be the highest placed card. A single bid (per day amount) will position your card above all free cards and cards with lower bids in not only the main page, but up to 10 allowed categories to which you’ve added your card.

I set up 2 cards the other day as a test. It’s too early to make a good guess at how well it’ll do, but already, they’re performing better than expected. Here’s the free one, which I have pointing to my Win My Motorola Q Smartphone contest on JoeTech.com (my other blog):

Only one click, but it’s still free traffic, right, and it’s only been a day. The second card is one linking directly to JoeTech.com. It’s a paid link, so ovbiously, the higher rank (and more categories) has produced better results so far:

The important thing to note is that you don’t have to have the highest placement bid to be on top (and I’m on top of the main page for $1.37 a day). The key is to create an enticing image that draws the visitor to your card on the page. I spent about 12 seconds creating mine, but you should spend a few minutes if you want the ideal results.

The site, itself is still growing, but the bulk of the traffic, as seen in my stats above, comes from the widgets. They’ve done a nice job of making it easy for a website owner to create a widget that fits nicely into nearly any layout. You can choose how many cards to display, a number of columns, card size (small or big), a category and sub-category, and colors. I went pretty simple with mine.

You may wonder, as I did at first, why people would put a widget on their site if there’s no “view credits” to earn. It’s quite simply a referral program, but it’s one of the best I’ve come across. You get 50% of any sale made within 30 days of a click on your referral link. While you’re removing BlogRush from your site, you might as well replace it with the Bla.st widget and make a few bucks.

Bla.st has some pretty impressive numbers for a site that I think is lacking the buzz it deserves. At the time of this writing, they have 1,507 cards in 7,283 categories, which have been viewed over 27 million times.

I really encourage everyone to check it out, even if just for a free card. It’s definitely worth a look.

Popularity: 11% [?]

We all want links to our blogs. Hell, that’s what this whole blog is about. So how do you get 4,000 links back to your blog post? It helps to have a popular blog to begin with, but you can still get a lot of link love to your content by posting good content. This is not only a lits of examples, but it IS an example. This list came from a smart blogger who found his way into my RSS feed reader. The original post is at here.

Check out the list and then subscribe to the author’s RSS feed. Subscribe to my RSS feed while you’re at it.

Problogger
The strongest post with 4130 backlinks is Blogging Tips for Beginners. This post is the second part in the series of blogging tips for beginners.

John Chow
The strongest post with 1180 backlinks is The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores. It is a list of websites which make more money from Adsense. People always love to link this type of lists.

Shoe Money
The strongest post with 1160 backlinks is Dmoz Extortion.

Doshdosh
The strongest post with 119 backlinks is 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank. This is a post about ways to increase Alexa ranking.

Daily Blog Tips
The strongest post with 1480 backlinks is Daily Blog Tips Theme Released

Entrepreneurs Journey
The strongest post with 161 backlinks is What is RSS and How Do I Use It? This is a post explaining about RSS.

Emoms At Home
The strongest post with 286 backlinks is The Biggest Blog Post of My Life.

Carl Ocab
The strongest post with 60 backlinks is 69 Ways to Boost your Web Exposure! Fast! This is a linkbait.

NetBusinessBlog
The strongest post with 322 backlinks is Building a Niche Minisite A post about how to create niche minisites.

Ades Blog
The strongest post with 71 backlinks is WordPress Plugins

45n5
The strongest post with 1340 backlinks is Instant Adsense Graphs With GraphSense

Tyler Cruz
The strongest post with 60 backlinks is Tyler Got Hacked!

Sabahan
The strongest post with 404 backlinks is Search Purple Web Directory Hacked!

Who Is Andrew Wee
The strongest post with 442 backlinks is Exclusive: $99 Internet Marketing giveaway including Robert Allen book

Blogtrepreneur
The strongest post with 1180 backlinks is 101 Essential Blogging Resources . This article is very informative and useful for every blogger.

Earners Blog
The strongest post with 123 backlinks is 15 Ways to become a Digg Power user in only 48 hours

5xmom
The strongest post with 348 backlinks is The Thinking Bloggers Award

Memwg
The strongest post with 152 backlinks is SEO Siloing WordPress Plugin

Popularity: 32% [?]

Was John Chow really the second MyBlogLog visitor ever to visit me?

Since I started really looking at how to blog like a pro, I found myself learning more and more about how to make my blog successful and still enjoy dong it.  In this process, I discovered John Chow’s blog, www.johnchow.com.  He has taken a personal blog and turned it into a daily must-read for thousands.  Read some of his posts and you’ll see why.  This is why I find myself quoting John to my wife once a week.

The other morning, I rolled out of bed and went straight to my laptop to see if I had any visitors to my new blog in the last 24 hours.  Of course, I had dropped some linkbait for John and others the previous night.  When I loaded up my blog, I found that my MyBlogLog widget showed two visitors and one of them was John Chow.  Make fun of me all you want, but I actually got excited and called my wife over to see.  Then I thought “Is it really THE John Chow”.  Looking at my referrer logs this morning, I noticed a visit from John Chow’s admin area of his blog and my excitement returned.

Thanks for the visit John, and expect more links from me in future posts.

Popularity: 12% [?]

If you got this far, you may be wondering the same thing a lot of bloggers want to know: What is linkbaiting and is it good or bad? While I am by no means an expert, hopefully I can clear this up a little while providing several examples.

According to Wikipedia, link bait as “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites.” Links back to your site or blog from reputable sources are like gold and can really boost your search engine rankings and, ultimately, incoming traffic. Search Engine Land wrote the 2007 Guide to Linkbaiting, which is a great read for anyone interested in turning this tactic to their favor, and even a better read for those interested in turning it into a freelancing gig. As you read, you learn a lot about the various aspects of linkbaiting, such as hooks, widgettailing, etc.  I’ll save more of those details for a later post.

Matt Cutts offers his thoughts on linkbaiting, too.  Anyone following any search engine news should know who Matt is.  When he posts, people read it and they pay attention.  If anyone’s an expert on optimizing for Google, it’s Matt Cutts.  But just because he’s a Google insider doesn’t mean his is the only blog to read.  Nick Wilson helps us out with The Art of Linkbaiting, and ProBlogger provides an introduction to linkbaiting.

So… Is it bad to linkbait?  Some people might say so.  As you may have guessed, I don’t think so.  I like to think of it as a flirty little game between bloggers.  You feed my ego and I’ll feed yours, but it’s often subtle.  I’ve placed my linkbait throughout this post in a useful way, providing links to content that you surely will want to read.  In doing so, I’ve (hopefully) provided a benefit to you, the reader, and also to the authors of the above links.  Perfecting some linkbaiting techniques may take a lot of work, but it’s worth a try for the potential reward.

Popularity: 14% [?]