Usually I’m the last one to sign up for new services like MyBlogLog, Digg (okay—Digg’s not so new anymore), etc., so after hearing Shoemoney’s show last week where he and Kris Jones discuss BumpZee I figured I’d try to break my pattern by registering and giving it a whirl.  I just installed the BumpZee plug in for WordPress a few minutes ago so I’m still totally new to the product, but it seems pretty cool to me.

I really like the idea behind BumpZee (if I understand it correctly ;)) which seems to basically categorize blog posts based on ‘community’ (topic, in other words) and then rank them in a Digg-like fashion. 

This is convenient because unless you have an insane amount of time to spend you probably won’t subscribe to the Digg RSS even though it might have some great stuff.  I tried that subscription a while back and found myself wasting hours going through the interesting, but often unimportant posts there.  With BumpZee, however, the posts you ‘subscribe’ to are going to be much more relevant to your niche.  Furthermore, the social media ranking element helps make sure the posts you see are ones that other users, ideally interested in the same topics as you, thought were important. 

We’ll see how this develops and works out but I think it has a lot of potential.  Readers (like Google Reader of Blog Lines) are cool but the problem is bloggers, even the ones I really like, often blog about things I have no interest in or just don’t have time to go through.  Sadly, this has resulted in me unsubscribing from a lot of good blogs that post a high percentage of things I’m just not looking for.  Actually the concept is something I’d thought of doing myself with an old domain I never put into use—SEOforSEOs.com (the stuff on there is an old business idea I never followed through on)—so it’s cool to see someone else had the same idea and appears to have done a great job launching it.

  

Tags: bump, zee,, bumpzee,, scott, jangro,, jangro,, seo,, blogs

  

If I had to identify an area in the online-money-making-world that I believe is grossly neglected yet holds extensive long-term potential I would have to say “forums.”

Why?

First, because forums are so unfairly criticized (I have five and still consider this a big mistake on my part… that number should be far larger). For years I’ve been reading posts and discussions revolving around what type of site someone new (or even old) to the SEO/SEM world should create. About half the time, forums are mentioned as a possibility but are quickly dismissed as unprofitable. “Forums suck! My forum only gets an AdSense CTR of about 0.1%! Meanwhile, my niche, informational sites get a CTR of as high as 35%!” the argument usually goes.

If you’ve never run a forum, this might sound convincing. But it’s not.

Of course the CTR is miniscule. You have guys that spend their entire days on the same site, and they do develop ad blindness. Unlike many search visitors, these regulars are already at the site they want. They typed in the URL. These users load tons of pages and will rarely click any contextual advertisement. The unfortunate mistake, in my opinion, is to think that you should be earning contextual revenue from such users, because they’re already doing you a huge favor. Let’s think about what’s really going on in a forum where a user hangs out all day but never clicks an AdSense advertisement. This user, 99.9% of the time, is posting a lot! My metal forums, for example, have 120,000+ posts and I’ve barely promoted them - the users love to post and they do just that. And what is a forum post? A post, in a very simple sense, is a bunch of words. But, these words are often “expert” and cover a specific (niche) topic. These posts are discussing issues that are on people’s minds, and that they want to know more about. From this perspective, it’s fair to say that such users are creating content for you, for free. The content is often great for SEO (discusses things people search for) and it didn’t require you (the webmaster) to do any keyword research, writing, etc. “Good writing” is expensive. The lowest prices I’ve found for fluent English, and this is certainly dumbed-down borderline spammy English, is $.02 per word. This price, depending on where you look, can be as high as $.25 per word or even more (If you don’t believe me go check out some sites like elance.com). Connecting the dots here shows that although you aren’t assigning the writing to your forum users directly, or placing an order, you are still getting content of monetary value for free every time someone posts. The only costs I can think of at the moment are your bandwidth, the domain, and your time in setting up and/or moderating the forum (although this last ‘cost’ is almost always delegated to volunteers).

In addition to the free content, loyal users will often link to you from their signatures in other places: their blogs, homepages, other forums, whatever. Again, this is something that can easily be translated to monetary terms (e.g. text-link-ads.com).

Finally, creating a forum sits well with your conscience. You’re creating something “good”—not a questionable, perhaps low quality site about a topic you don’t really know a lot about. You’re creating a platform people can use and enjoy to discuss topics they’re interested in. In other words, you’re giving people exactly what they want and in many cases I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say you’re making their lives better.

To borrow a quote from Thank You for Smoking, “the job’s almost done for us!”

Building sites that are useful and that grow on their own—without your constant contribution and oversight—is a formula for success. Once you have the traffic there are lots of ways to monetize it (click here for a podcast where Shoemoney and Lee Dodd discuss the monetization of forums), so don’t let a poorly interpreted low CTR statistic impede your judgment. And it’s not too late, by any means—there’s still room for quite a few more forums :).

PS: Although I’m sure most of my readers are well aware, for completeness I have to strongly recommend vBulletin. You can be up and running in less than an hour, even with no prior experience.

  

Tags: forum,, forums,, seo,, sem,, forum, seo,, forums, seo,, vbulletin,, shoemoney,, lee, dodd,, webmaster, radio

  

After reading Kris Jones’ summary of Neil Patel’s presentation of Social Media sites like Stumble Upon and Digg at the Elite Retreat, I thought I’d share some data on my first experience with the Digg-esque Stumble Upon network that seems to be growing increasingly popular.

While I was at Affiliate Summit West (2007), I noticed one of my main sites got a burst of nearly 1,100 uniques more than usual (in one day). When I went into my analytics, I was surprised to find that this traffic was coming from Stumble Upon. I had never used Stumble Upon myself, but was vaguely acquainted with it because of some discussions on the Digital Point Forums.

Anyway, I have no ads on this site and don’t monetize it in any way at this point, so I can’t share any data on CTR or conversions, but what I have found interesting is the fact that I am still getting traffic from StumbleUpon today, two months after the big burst. It’s nothing major, but on some days it’s about 150 uniques which is pretty cool. Furthermore, I didn’t Stumble Upon my own site nor submit it in any way–it was all natural, which was also very cool (in fact I wasn’t even registered with Stumble Upon when the traffic first came).

In case anyone’s interested, here’s a graph showing my traffic from Stumble Upon alone over the last two months:

Just thought I’d share this experience so others know Stumble Upon might be worthwhile. Of course the cool part isn’t the traffic itself, but the links these visitors have added to their blogs, etc.

  

  

For the past several weeks I was out of the country visiting my father and we had very poor or no internet access most of the time (I can’t believe I survived).  I realize now that I probably should have made a blog post beforehand letting my readers know I’d be away for a bit, but as I mentioned in a comment, I was hesitant to make a post that didn’t really contain anything useful, humorous or informative–so I held off—and now I’m doing it late, as a loser would, just to let subscribers know I’m still around and will be posting at a normal speed again :).