Note from Khalid: The following post was written by Matthew who was instrumental in helping us promote the invesp blog contest. I asked him to give us some ideas about ways to promote a blog contest. Make sure to chat with him if you need help in something similar. My review of the results of the contest will be published next week.

Some bloggers think that they can just post a cool prize for their contest and traffic will flow. That is along the same lines as the myth “create good content and they will come”. Many bloggers and website developers overlook the fact of how important marketing is.

Tools at your Disposal

When marketing you want to think of many different possibly ways to promote your contest. There are many websites out there to use, it’s become a lot easier to do promotion.

Forums are your Friends: Don’t overlook forums! By making a short, simple, and sweet post describing your contest you can gain lots of exposure. Would you pass up the thread stating “Subscribe to INVESP and win $400″, I wouldn’t. There are many forums that you can promote your contests on, such as PayPerpost, Digital Point, Bloggerforum, and more

Use Your Network: Websites like MyBlogLog have become perfect for promotion. If you have spent time building up your network, like I have, MyBlogLog is perfect. They have a great new tool where you can send a message to everyone in your community. By doing so, I can alert nearly 600 people of a new contest in 1 minute.

Ask Your Blogging Friends: It’s important to branch out and communicate with other bloggers. If you plug their promotions, they will do the same for you. ‘Scratch my back I’ll scratch your back’ type of thing. If you are having trouble with that, offer them incentive. “Hey promote my contest and I will give you a linkback”. It helps both parties involved.

It’s Not as Easy as it Sounds

Okay, It’s not that easy, it does take work. I have the advantage over some bloggers because I have been blogging for almost a year now. I have had time to build relationships with other bloggers and extend my network. When the guys here at INVESP left a comment on my blog about promoting their contest I jumped at the chance. Soon after accepting the “job” I got 17 links to their contest as well as several forum posts. The results have been great and they are very pleased with my service (which is why I am writing this post!).

Posted in Blogging

As you may have already noticed Chris Garrett joined our blogging team and will be sharing his expertise with us on a regular basis. Chris does not need an introduction. He is a well known blogger and posts regularly on sites such as ASPToday, ASPAlliance, Performancing, ProBlogger, and CopyBlogger. He is also started one of most favorite blogging forums: Authority Blogger Forum. Chris is the founder of Online Media called OMIQ a company that helps businesses achieve more with Online Media. We’re excited to have Chris join us!

Posted in Blogging

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs lately; replacing some with others I was completely committed in the past. It struck me that sometimes when a blog is too popular, the blogger is no longer in tuned with his/her readers. For example, one of the biggest pet peeves of mine is when I respond to a blog with a comment or question, and there is complete silence on the other end. There is an etiquette to blogging, and responding to those who comment (especially frequent commentators) is one of them. I have to give it to the Top Rank bloggers, Danielle, and Jason from Elastic Path they always seem to respond how ever many comments they get.

But is it reasonable to expect bloggers to respond to 50 comments? There is a point when it becomes okay to ignore your commentators I guess. For example, sometimes the commentators begin striking a discussion amongst themselves through the comment section on the blog. Well in that case, they’re getting the responses they need from others and don’t really need the blogger. My beef is when a blogger gets 1 or 2 comments, and they’re too snobby and busy to give a hoot. So should I drop the blog?

But wait…what if the content is useful and worth while? Should I still drop “that” blog? There are only a few posts that are truly profound. Other posts may have points that are interesting, but nothing that I would particularly miss if I dropped it; unless I had a relationship with the blogger.

The other day though, we received an inquiry from an interested prospect because of a comment we left on a blog!

That brings me back to my initial question, should I drop the blog? I think the positives of continuing to read and comment outweigh my dissatisfaction with the blogger who ignores me. What do you think?

Posted in Blogging

Well, Digg just released its new Digg profiles. I spent the last hour or so playing around with the site and checking out the new features. Here are few things that jumped at me right away:

Updated terms and conditions

One of the very first things that notice when you visit the site is the updated terms of use. I guess someone felt that the community needs to be aware of some new rules.

Obviously the language in the document is drafted by attorneys who are first and foremost concerned about Digg, Inc. (“Digg”), the Delaware corporation. My guess is that these attorneys never used the site. Hmmm, Yes, you are a Delaware corporation but aren’t you a social site as well? I do not know why this bothered me. The document was filled with legal jargon that you expect to find on the back of a credit card application. One part that caught my attention under User conduct was item number 6 which stated that users agree not to:

violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws);

hold on, I thought that Kevin said:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.

The other interesting part in the terms of use was under the trademarks section. The section clearly spells out that “Digg” is a registered trademark for the company. It goes further to state that:

Digg’s trademarks and trade dress may not be used, including as part of trademarks and/or as part of domain names, in connection with any product or service in any manner that is likely to cause confusion.

I guess Digg does not want to see any domains with the name “digg” in them. I wonder if they are indicating that they might actually sue someone who has the word digg in their domain name. Who knows!

The other section that I jumped right to was the new profile section.

In order to view my friends, the old design required me to click on my profile and then click on the friends tab. The new design is definitely an improvement. The right side of the profile page lists 5 of my friends who are currently active on the site. That is a cool feature.

One of the nice features in the old design was a small widget that allowed you to see who from the community befriended you. The new design however lists all my friends in a single page. If that person befriended me back, his listing will include the tag “Mutual Friend”. That is a nice improvement.

The old design gave me an option to view all stories submitted, dugg or commented on by my friends. The new design offers the same feature. However, in the old design, I had the ability to digg the stories from the listing page.

The new design, displays the total number of diggs next to each story. I was not able to digg any of the stories directly from the listing page.

I have to click on the story and then digg it from the story’s own page. I am not sure if this is an issue that will be corrected or if this is the way it is going to be from now on.

The new design features a full list of settings that allows digg users to fully control who can view what on their profile. This is a nice new addition. It is one that I am going to use once and pay very little attention to it later on!

Socialize on Digg

I had to save the best for last. This is probably one of the best features and one most Digg needed the most. In the past, I had to use other social media sites to socialize with my friends. There was no way to communicate  with other Digg users on Digg itself. The new addition to Digg is the “shout” feature which allows users to communicate with one another. It is simply great!

So, there you have it. These are my first impression of the new profile features of Digg. I think overall there are some great improvements although I must admit that I was turned off with the legal disclaimer on the first page!

Tell me, how do you like the new features?

Update #1: I am getting way too many errors as I try to digg or comment on stories. I wonder if the servers are getting hit harder than expected or if there are still some bugs that need to be fixed.

Posted in Blogging

If you have been anywhere in the blogsophere in the few days, you must have noticed that there is a lot of talk around blogrush, the new service that promises bloggers to drive a flood of targeted traffic to your site. The first email I got about this service was Friday night. Since then, I must have received close to 10 emails from friends who were asking about it. On a hunch, I checked out the number of links the site had Friday night. Yahoo told me that there were 340 links to it mentions of it. When I checked the number of links mentions on Monday afternoon, the count had gone up to 2,400 links mentions:

On Tuesday they reached a whopping 44,000 links mentions! As of writing this post, Yahoo is reporting 62,300 links mentions.

62,300 links in three days is amazing. As a metter of fact, the huge demand for the services caused some technical difficulties.

I expect we will hear a lot more about the service before things calm down. John Reese the founder of blogrush successfully designed his marketing campaign to spread virally. I compared some of the elements I outlined to creating a viral campaign to what John did.

Do you have something worth talking about?

Obviously John had something that created a lot of discussion and excitement amongst bloggers. Getting more traffic to a new blog is one of the main problems bloggers struggle with when they start a new blog. Provide a good solution or at least claim to provide one and bloggers will talk. The speed the campaign picked in the first two days is also a good indicator on how big the problem is for bloggers. When creating a viral campaign, most of the time is invested in coming up with the initial idea.

Simple Idea

You have to agree with me that the idea of blogrush is fairly simple. There is nothing creative about it. It is easy to explain. We do not necessarily have to come up with something too creative for a viral campaign. We need to find a problem or a need that people face every day and provide a solution to it.

Find the talkers

This step was probably one of the easiest steps in the blogrush campaign. The product is designed for talkers. From what I gathered based on the emails I received, John emailed few of the big name bloggers about the product. These authority bloggers did the initial talking, and their readers did the rest of the job. When you sign up for the blogrush services the first time, it asks you to input the names and email addresses of your friends who might be interested in the service.

I hesitated in the past in emailing other bloggers about new materials we publish or blogs that might be interesting to their readership. To be honest, I did not want anyone to think I am spamming them. I have learned since that if you have something relevant and of value, bloggers do not mind hearing about it.

Is blogrush really that good?

Good product or good services are essential elements for the success of a viral campaign. You can succeed in all of the above elements but your product must carry you the rest of the way. Creating a viral campaign for a poor product most likely will backfire. That is the main area where blogrush will fall short. In order for blogrush to be successful, the service has to be automated. You subscribe to it, you get some javascript code to place in your blog and that is it. From blogrush perspective, this is a model that can easily scale up. However, this model does not provide real way to review the blogs subscribed to the service. Subscribers to blogrush have no way to ensure that blogs appearing on the rush widget are good quality blogs. Here is a good example:
Nusuni is a blog about seo and blogging news. Links on the blogrush widget included on it are to

• Create I-phone ring tones for free
• Inside of windows vista
• The smallest 50 inch TV screen
• get coupon codes to amazon, ebay and many
• New firefox

None of these really relates to the topics discussed on nusuni. I clicked on one them just to see the quality of the blogs linked via blogrush. Not too impressive.

We spend a lot of time choosing the blogs we link to. As a matter of fact, I can spend close to an hour looking for good blogs to link for each of my posts. Quality of the links matter a lot. This is where blogrush falls short.

All good things come to an end or get copied

Blogrush obviously provided a solution many bloggers need. Others will copy it. Since the service is not at the level where many bloggers will accept it, I think this even provides a greater chance for other services that provide something very similar but with more quality control mechanisms.

So, at the end I give the viral campaign ran by blogrush two thumbs up but the service itself gets a thumbs down!

Do you think many bloggers will continue to use the widget? Did you install the widget on your site? What do you think of the service?

Update #1 : Ben from blogging experiment reported today on his statistics after using blogrush for three of days. His blog titles had a total of 595 impressions with 1 click to the blog.

Update #2: Problogger is reporting that his blogrush click through rate is around %1 0.05%. There also seems to be some problems with the way credits are calculated in the system

Update #3: well, it seems that i was using the wrong command to show the number of links. The command I was using shows the actual number of times the words “blogrush” was mentioned in text format with or without a link. Of course it is still impressive that blogrush was actually mentioned almost 63,000 thousand but these are not actual links.

Posted in Blogging, Business, Sales & Marketing

We are pleased to announce the winner of the “subscribe to the Invesp blog Rss” contest that we held last month: Congratulations JASON BILLINGSLEY of Elastic Path! Thank you everyone who participated and we wish you luck during future contests through INVESP.

Khalid will be sharing an analysis and the thoughts about this contest very soon. We will also be posting new contests so keep looking out for more.  Happy Friday.

Posted in Blogging

We all know charismatic people – the ones with that special je ne se quoi which makes them endearing – but are there websites (or blogs) that have charisma? This question hit me one evening during a discussion with a friend and I have been pondering the idea for a while now.

Charismatic people are known for being liked or respected immediately upon walking into a room. Their presence, confidence, and maybe even their abilities seem unfathomable and nearly incontestable. There are websites that are loved my most and respected by almost all and while they might have their own weaknesses they hold their positions high above their peers. But, do they have charisma? I don’t think so – inconclusively. Look at some of the greatest sites out there.

A handful of the most popular and most famous websites and blogs:

• Google.com (search and information dissemination)
• Amazon.com (online sales)
• MySpace.com (social networking)
• ProBlogger.net (blogging)
• Wikipedia.org (free content encyclopedia)
• YouTube.com (video sharing)
• Engadget.com (gadgets and consumer electronics)

All of these sites maintain enviable followings, prestige, and power but I don’t think the sites themselves have anything particularly charismatic about them. They are famous because they are backed by great ideas, companies, brands, or people (or usually all).

People are drawn to Google because they offer reliable and ultra fast searches as well as numerous other sources of information from maps to translators to business tools to stores. ProBlogger is one of the most popular blogs in the world because Darren Rowse has an excellent blogging voice and has built an excellent brand. YouTube became one of the most famous companies and brands in the world because they basically built the user-created video movement by making it exceptionally simple for Joe Anybody to upload and share videos with the world.

After all my searching I do NOT believe a website can actually possess what we call charisma but I DO think it can be designed to be as likeable as possible – even immediately likeable to most visitors.

There are people who believe charisma can be taught and I agree. Assuming that is true and I am right we should be able to loosely design certain charismatic traits into a website to make it more welcoming, interesting, and engaging. That is, we can make our websites more likeable.

But first, we should focus on building a great company with great people and a strong brand based on excellent ideas. By the way, the only common thread I could find in my comparisons of charismatic people and sites is that they all focus on the other person or user when interacting.

So, does your website have charisma?

Posted in Blogging

The winner for the comment give-away will win a free copy of ” The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” by Timothy Ferriss. The book is on Amazon 100 best selling books. Here are couple of reviews for the book:

Jack Canfield, Co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul:

It’s about time this book was written. It is a long-overdue manifesto for the mobile lifestyle, and Tim Ferriss is the ideal ambassador. This will be huge.

And

he author has convinced me to change my assumptions about worklife and personal goals. This is an easy read. Althought I am a slooooow and easily distracted reader, I finished the book from cover-to-cover in a few sittings.

Wish you all best of luck and keep these comments coming!

Posted in Blogging

The winner for our weekly comments contest is Bob from  Ahern & Brucker. Bob won a copy of ““The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly” ” by David Scott.. Congratulations Bob!

Posted in Blogging

Khalid is trying his best to encourage comments, but of course, we do need to lay down some ground rules for comments.  Yes, the INVESP Blog loves and encourages its readers to leave comments, and that’s why our rules are easy to follow and encourage great insight from our readers:

1. Relevant links: FOR SURE! If you’d like to leave relevant links within your comment, you’re more than welcome to. It’s actually very encouraged.  The keyword is “relevant” . 

2. Signatures:  Signatures are fine as long as the comment is relevant. So if you leave: Great Job! Or Great post! And a linkable signature, you’re comment will be most likely be deleted.  However, a meaningful comment and a signature afterwards is okay and encouraged! 

3. Irrelevant links gotta go:  Now on the other hand, if you leave links that have nothing to do with the content of the blog, than we will most likely be deleting that comment.

4. Spam Will Be Deleted:  Any comment that feels “spammy” and has no relevance to the post will be deleted.

5. Don’t be afraid:  Now, we aren’t establishing policies to make commenting a difficult process.  We are however confirming to everyone that some things are just not tolerated and we reserve the right to delete anything deemed inappropriate. 

Again, don’t hesitate to comment. Khalid has gone out of his way to show you that he is willing to reward comments and commentators every week!  What kind of comment policy to encourage on your blog?

Posted in Blogging