Okay I know it was posted here that you should consider adding BlogRush on to your blog to get more traffic. I agree that right now it is probably a good idea as it is still in the new smell stage. Like anything though I am predicting it here and now BlogRush will be over run with spammers.

Yesterday John Chow used our RSS tutorial to show how to bring your top post to your BlogRush instead of whatever you are blogging about right now. What John did not say is that you don’t have to direct your link to your blog you could link it to anything.

Spammers will eventually figure this out and you will start to see ads on BlogRush instead of blog posts.

If you have installed BlogRush keep a close eye on the links your suggesting to your visitors. If you have not installed then I would suggest you don’t bother.

Yesterday, I talked a bit about BlogRush and how it is supposed to generate “free” traffic for your blog. The other major service that was released around the same time, as I’m sure you’re well aware, was DealDotCom, a Woot! style website with Internet marketing products for sale on a daily basis.

Both of these services gathered quite a bit of steam before their official launch dates and some may attribute that to the exposure they received through John Chow dot Com. John wrote about DealDotCom three days before it launched, getting people to sign up for something basically sight unseen. No one had any real idea what the final website would look like or how successful it could be. They couldn’t even confirm its legitimacy, but the affiliate program sounded so lucrative that people just couldn’t pass it up.

John then wrote on power of hype and sure enough, both BlogRush and DealDotCom received massive spikes in traffic even before they even had a product or service to sell. That’s the power of hype and that’s the power of building some viral buzz. In this way, you can see that it’s very important to start marketing your product even before it becomes available; this way, you start with a huge client base instead of having to try and slowly grow it bit by bit.

There are growing pains, of course. Both BlogRush and DealDotCom have had their share of problems this past week and it is thanks largely to the overwhelming interest in their respective services. I think you’d agree, though, that this is a much better issue to address than the issue of trying to find users/customers/clients.

On a side note, be sure to check out the DealDotCom plug-in coded by our very own Gary Jones.

So we receive a lot of feedback and found a few glitches that have been fixed today. We have pushed out a version 0.3 which has both a graphical (made by Rainer) and a text version for you to choose from (see pictures below).

This version also includes a width feature you can edit on the text version.

This script is still in Beta so use at your own risk. We will wait a few more days to see if any other bugs crop up. If you find anything wrong or any suggestion feel free to post them.

UPDATE - Okay I found a few other issues and they have been cleaned up. Version 0.4 is now up and ready for testing.

UPDATE – I pushed out a small update on Version 0.5. We have caching and a vertical display in version 0.6 coming soon.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past week, you’ve surely heard of BlogRush by now. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a service that is set up to share traffic in the blogosphere and it works very much on a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” system. You can see the widget in action over at Beyond the Rhetoric near the end of the sidebar.

For every impression that the widget gets on your site, you earn a credit which will then be “spent” on an impression over at someone else’s blog. You get a temporary linkback and hopefully a visitor to that other site will hop on over and visit your blog based on the catchy title that you’ve given your latest blog post. It also helps that the referral program goes ten generations deep.

This concept will work great for big blogs like John Chow dot Com, because he already has referrals down to the 10th generation. In this way, his account gets credited with a whole whack of hits, resulting in even more publicity and exposure for the supposed panda killer. But what about smaller blogs?

Even though I’ve only been running BlogRush on my blog for a few days, I was curious to see how it was performing and, well, things aren’t as bright as one would hope. The traffic I have received is minimal at best, but I am not alone. Even the almighty John Chow is only getting a 0.33% CTR (click through rate). That’s one-third of a percent! He hopes to increase this figure by controlling the headlines displayed.

With that, I open it back up to you, my fellow BlueFur enthusiast. Have you joined BlogRush yet and what has your experience been thus far?

After reading what seemed like 100′s of blog posts on the launch of DealDotCom I decided today to write a quick and dirty plugin. They currently do not have one available for WordPress and I thought it would be interesting to build my first WordPress plugin while helping fellow bloggers monetize their sites.

So the plugin looks like this after installed…

 

The install is very easy…

1. Download the DealDotCom Plugin.
2. Unzip the file in your wp-content/plugins folder.
3. Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin.
4. Customize the Plugin on the Options page.
5. Add a bit of code to your sidebar.php file.

This script is still in Beta so use at your own risk. If you find anything wrong or any suggestion feel free to post them.

I have also posted the full script here.

UPDATE – If you downloaded version 0.1 we just now uploaded version 0.2 (19/09/07). This will fix a lot of the issues.

I wrote about this same topic some time back on Beyond the Rhetoric, but I feel it is worth revisiting for several reasons. Many of us, whether we work for ourselves or for a company, spend a good deal of time in front of our computers. It could be graphic design, web design, freelance writing, financial management… the list goes on. The personal computer has very much become a part of just about every industry and with the proliferation of the Internet and instant communication, email has also become an integral part of doing business.

At first, people said that email would help increase productivity, because business partners from around the globe could communicate with one another instantly, sending updated files and all sorts of other goodies in a simple name@domain.com kind of way. It seemed great at the time and I can’t imagine having the Internet without having access to email.

In a recent survey, more than one third of workers said that they were “stressed out” by email, because they feel that they need to respond to all messages as promptly as humanly possible. People have come to expect that when they send out an email, they’ll get a response within the next couple of hours. Contrast this to when people still used snail mail. Or even when someone was to leave a voicemail, it was perfectly acceptable to not reply until the next morning. With the instant gratification of the Internet, there is more pressure to reply instantly.

Furthermore, this same study found that these “stressed out” individuals checked their inbox “as often as 40 times an hour.” That’s more often than once every two minutes. I know that speaking for myself, I leave my Gmail window open all day, so I know right away if a message has come down the chute. Most of these aren’t urgent, but I feel compelled to know. In this way, I’m spending time reading and replying to email, rather than doing work that I actually get paid for.

Do you suffer from the same conundrum? Do you feel like your BlackBerry is just a company leash?