Miracle of miracles I noticed in my referral logs that I had a visit through a BlogRush widget yesterday. I had forgotten all about them, since I don’t run the widget and the last time I logged in they said that my Video Rambler blog was not approved for their network. That made me laugh because as far as I am concerned their network is not approved for my video blog, since it is aimed at families and the types of posts they were displaying would make a marine blush. Anyways, I had forgotten that BlogRush existed until that referral.

I thought I would go and log in and see if anything has improved over at BlogRush. I log into my account and I am greeted with this lovely notice:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Your account is now temporarily inactive because our system indicated that the BlogRush widget is no longer being served on your blog. All BlogRush members must be actively displaying the widget in order to participate in the network.

While your account is inactive you will no longer earn credits or have your blog posts syndicated. However, your referral network activity, and any credit balance, will be fully tracked for your account during this time.

Not that I really care. I don’t want to have another widget on my blog that just slows things down. So to close this off here is a notice for BlogRush.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Until your service actually provides some value to my readers and not just spam, crap and adult content, I will not further pollute the web with your widget. Your widget is hereby banned from this blog and any further attempt to convince me to display your widget will be meet with distrust and scepticism. Any and all future email from you will be marked as spam and treated as such.
Thanks,
The Management

I have been holding off posting this until I was sure the domain transfer went through, but the lucky winner of the Domain Name Giveaway was Rasha who runs RoseateMarketingTips.com. Congratulations to Rasha who is now the proud owner of thewebhostingforum.com. Hope you can give it a good home and make a great site out of it.

You might want to take a few minutes to browse through RoseateMarketingTips.com. There are some gems on the blog. I think the one that caught my eye was Tips for Choosing Your Domain Name, since I have a post sitting in my drafts folder that is on the same topic. Now I will have to go back and look at it again.

I have been mulling this post over for a considerable amount of time. If you have not read Seth Godin’s post “How to create a great website” you really should take a look. He outlines 10 points to creating a great website. I agree with the points, but ever since I read the post there has been something in the back of my mind that just did not sit right with it. Let me try to explain.

Many of the businesses I create websites for are small businesses. Not large corporations, but businesses with usually less than 10 employees. They want a website because they know that in order to help with their marketing they need to be found on the Internet. They don’t have someone in their organization and they are not about to hire someone full time, to sit and blog, update and do all of the day to day tasks that would be needed to create the next killer website. These people are busy running and doing business not making websites.

Seth Godin’s list is great, but is it practical for small businesses that are busy doing business? Is the alternative that they should just not be on the web? I think I will have to let this percolate some more.

I have been seeing lots of advertising for the Best of the Web directory lately and I started to wonder if anyone actually uses web directories anymore. Personally, I don’t think I have used a directory for surfing for years. The only reason I ever use a directory is mainly to find the proper category to submit a website too.

I also took a look through the referral logs for several websites that I work on for clients that I know are in the DMOZ directory and the grand total of referrals from DMOZ is less than 25 for the year! Considering the controversy that DMOZ has had, the fact that Yahoo has removed the directory from the home page and not even placed a prominent link to it on the home page, and since Google recently penalized a number of general topic web directories can we safely say that directories are dead?

When was the last time you used a directory to find a website?

There is only one week left before I draw the lucky winner in the Domain Name Giveaway! If you have not entered go and leave a comment or trackback on the post and you could be the lucky one to walk away with a free domain name to do with as you please.

According to NameBoy the domain name is worth:

Appraisal Value of thewebhostingforum.com
- Dollar Value is $6745

To be honest I don’t think I would value it that high, but it if it is you are getting a real bargain!

I was looking through my list of domain names and have come to the conclusion that I will never develop thewebhostingforum.com into a website. I currently have the domain parked over at NameDrive, and while it has brought in the odd click I think I would rather give it to a new owner, someone that can take good care of it and hopefully make a website with it. The domain is at GoDaddy so it is a free push to your GoDaddy account. The domain does not expire until March 2008, so you get some time with it before it is due.

How to enter

To enter all you have to do is a leave a comment or trackback and your name will be entered into the draw. Only one comment or trackback per person, so you only need to comment or trackback on this post once. (If your comment looks/smells like spam it will still be deleted and not entered)

When Will the Draw Happen

I will draw a random name on October 31 and contact the winner by email. If you trackback make sure you have a way for me to contact you on your website.

If you have any questions or if I forgot anything important let me know in the comments. I am not done my coffee yet this morning so I could very well have missed something.

Let the commenting/trackbacks begin and good luck.

There was a post over on Pronet Advertising earlier in September that has stuck in my head for a little while now. The post was titled Social Media is the New Word-of-Mouth. Perhaps what caught my attention about the post was how narrow minded the post was about word of mouth advertising.

Fact of the matter is that social media is the new word-of-mouth and it’s about time we stepped out of the last century way of thinking about wom.

There is no doubt that social media is becoming an important part of word of mouth marketing, but it is not the only part. The fact is people are social, they like to stand around the staff lounge, talk over coffee and get together. As much as we like to think that chatting over the Internet is social or participating in social media is sharing, it is not the same a talking with a friend or coworker face to face. Social media is another way to help people get together to talk about you, your website or product.

A recent example from my business. When I get a new client I often ask how they heard about me. 90 to 95% of the time the person heard about me and my work from another client that has been happy with my work and passed my name on. That is word of mouth marketing, a trusted reference from a happy client. Thanks to all of my clients out there that have let others know about me.

I have been doing a lot of reading about Alexa rank lately, and I was curious how I might be able to lower my Alexa ranking. While most webmasters would probably agree that the Alexa ranking is not very accurate, it does play a role in how some websites are valued. A good example is Text Link Ads, where Alexa rank helps to determine the price for selling links from your site.

As an experiment to see if I could lower the Alexa rank of three separate websites I added an Alexa widget to each site and recorded the Alexa rank from August 8, 2007 for one site and from August 23, 2007 for two other sites. Below is the data for the three sites.

Date	Website 1	Website 2	Website 3
8/8/2007	556,017
8/15/2007	473,705
8/20/2007	445,224
8/23/2007	423,651	643,353	1,733,470
8/28/2007	401,288	670,621	1,736,471
8/29/2007	392,310	650,306	1,647,715
9/2/2007	392,128	644,207	1,646,994
9/7/2007	378,928	612,253	1,519,212
9/10/2007	378,928	608,857	1,442,110
9/12/2007	354,528	566,842	1,441,124
9/22/2007	344,909	566,842	1,441,124
9/24/2007	342,354	554,282	1,351,596
9/27/2007	343,567	529,555	1,281,987
10/2/2007	349,609	519,612	1,152,594
Drop in Alexa Rank	-206,408	-123,741	-580,876

Overall there was a decrease in the Alexa ranking by adding the Alexa widget to the sites. While I dislike adding additional items to websites that will slow down a page load, placing an Alexa widget on your site might be worth considering if you are thinking of selling direct advertising or other text link sales. With a little clever CSS and HTML the visitor does not even need to know the Alexa widget is there, yet the visit will be counted by Alexa.

I am going to keep the Alexa widget on the three sites until Christmas and see if the sites Alexa ranking continues to slowly drop. One of the sites is fairly new, launching only in June 2007, so it might gain more traffic by December and drop more significantly.

I, like most people, love contests for free stuff. They sucker draw me in every time. If you are running a tech website or blog it can be very easy to come up with ideas for prizes to give away, simply look for the latest computer gadget or addon that grabs your attention. If you like it you can bet that others would love to win one as well. John over at SiteFever did just that. He is offering up one Western Digital 1 terabyte external hard drive as a prize and the rules are simple. Write a post with a link back to the contest saying what you would do with a 1 terabyte external hard drive.

Of course you don’t always have to spend money to offer prizes. Smashing Magazine recently ran an Anniversary contest where the prizes were donated by many different organizations and businesses. That post alone had over 1800 comments!

Problogger is also getting ready to celebrate the birthday of Problogger and had a call for donations of prizes. A quick add up of the prizes was over $35,000 USD.

Of course if you are just starting out you will probably have to find the money yourself to fund the prize, but if you can get the word out, holding a contest will help you gain more links back to your website or blog. It might be some of the cheapest advertising you can get with better returns than most pay per click campaigns.

Oh and to answer the question of what I would do with a 1 terabyte external hard drive? Whatever the hell I want!

Every blog I visited last night and today, including Shoemoney, Dosh Dosh, Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim and John Chow, had something written about Blog Rush.

What is it? Blog Rush is a new javascript widget that you can place on your blog to display the latest headlines from other blogs that are in the same category as your blog. You get to display your latest post on other blogs for every page view of the widget on your blog. Of course that is not all Blog Rush is, it also has an affiliate program built in so for every person that signs up under your referral you will also get more displays from your referral page views.

It sounds great doesn’t it? A great way of getting the word out there about your blog and displaying your latest headline. Since everyone was talking about it I had to check this out for myself. I signed up using my Video Rambler blog. I tried several categories and placed the widget in the template and republished. I then went to check to see what kinds of headlines I was getting. I was not impressed. Check out the headline of the second story? I clicked through to see the content of that story. Not the kind of site I want to be linking too. Perhaps I have to high of standards, but I don’t need to advertise that on a site that I know I have kids visiting. The widgets I have seen on blogs similar in content to the LGR Webmaster Blog has been not bad. I suppose it might just be the categories I choose for Video Rambler. Needless to say the widget was off of Video Rambler as fast as it went on.

Giving it some thought since I tried the Blog Rush widget I have a few things for people to consider before trying it out.

• Currently they only have one layout for the widget. Hopefully they will come out with more options for the widget so people can make it blend in with their blogs more.
• How are they going to keep the spam blogs out? There seems to be no check at all when I signed up. You could end up linking to blogs that you really don’t want to promote.
• Do you really want/need another widget on your blog?
• There is no guarantee of the amount of traffic you are going to get, if any.
• There needs to be a better way to filter out blogs and posts from appearing in your widget. There is a filter that you can use to block certain keywords and url keywords from appearing, but I could not get it to work when I tried to block certain keywords.
• If your blog receives little traffic your headlines will not be shown very often. You might be better off building links and taking part in others blogs to help build traffic before placing the widget. If you already have a high traffic blog, do you need this widget?

Given some of these current issues with the widget if you feel it is right for your blog you can sign up at Blog Rush. I will be interested to hear other people experiences with it, but I think I will leave it off of my blogs until the filtering is better. It might be worth joining to be a part of the affiliate program, just to gain some referrals and some page views through your referrals to judge if it is worth placing on your blog.