The folks over at BlogRush have been working hard to improve the service. They’ve heard the many complaints and are acting on them.

One of the changes I noticed earlier today. You can now change the color of your BlogRush widget. It doesn’t have to be that dark grey that not everyone loved. And they did it smart. You change it on the BlogRush site. You don’t change the code on your site. Makes it very easy to test colors.

They’re also getting very strict about quality control. They’re booting the cheaters after giving them notice today that their behavior will not be tolerated. They’re talking legal action when necessary. They’re also manually reviewing all new submissions and checking current blogs for quality. They don’t want junk in the network.

All of this will hopefully greatly increase the clickthrough rates on users’ posts. After all, it’s kind of a drag to be taking up valuable blog space advertising other blogs if you aren’t getting something in return.

They’re also spreading out their excess syndication credits, favoring the little guys. Since I’m in that number, I certainly appreciate it.

They will soon be adding a lot more categories as well, so that you can really narrow down where your blog belongs.

Another great change is that they allow you to filter out posts of your own that you don’t want to appear in the network. Just go to BlogRush and filter them out. You can add and delete at any time, so no worries that a particular filter will block a later post that you want shown. So if you’re going off topic and don’t want that going across the network, no problem.

I am starting to see BlogRush appear in my stats as a referrer. That’s pretty encouraging to me. I’m having a lot of fun just being in on the beginning of this and seeing how it goes.

Technorati Tags: blogrush, blog rush, blog traffic

I read on the pepperjam blog that Google now has a Bid Management Technology available in beta for selected publishers. I have an AdWords account which I use rather lightly, so of course I went to take a look, just on the off chance I, a very minor advertiser, would be included.

I do see Campaign Optimization, listed under Tools. No sign of the Conversion Optimizer so far. I go to the New Features section. I can see it there, and the Help explains that in order to be eligible for Conversion Optimizer, you need to have AdWords conversion tracking enabled and have at least 300 conversions in the past 30 days. This is by campaign, not by account.

And of course, that explains it. I’ve never used their conversion tracking.

This is a pretty interesting feature, however, for those who want to use it. You do have to be aware that Google says it is incompatible with the following:

• Position preference
• Budget Optimizer
• Site targeting
• Advanced ad scheduling
• Preferred cost bidding

Which of course you may or may not already be using. But it seems to me that if you wanted to do some of these things it wouldn’t be too hard to create separate campaigns for those ads which must have those features, while you test out the conversion optimizer.

There are of course very interesting forum discussions on this already.

Technorati Tags: bid management, google, conversion optimizer, conversion optimization

One of the keys to success in running a home business is connecting with others. Good relationships with other people in business can help you to build your own. It’s also just a lot of fun.

DirectMatches.com is for people who are running a home-based business. You get to network with other people as well as have the chance to win prizes.

In the setup, it’s rather like a lot of social networking websites. You have your profile in which you can tell other people about yourself and your business. There are networks to join, a blog to post in, contacts to be made. But the focus here is on business, not on the personal side of your life. Members can also post videos and classified ads.

One of the good parts is that it is free to join. There are paid memberships as well, but you can start out free before deciding if paid is for you.

DirectMatches.com claims 65,000 members, which is a good base of people for you to start meeting and help you build up your home business. The ads along the sides are member sponsored, which gives you an idea as to what you can be paying for on this site.

I love the sound of this upgrade, although I haven’t used it yet. I always wait a few days for the bugs to fall out. Then I do just one blog first, to see what problems are likely to occur.

But this upgrade, “Dexter” has a lot of great features added to it.

1. Native tagging support. You don’t need to rely on a plugin written by someone else. WordPress 2.3 can handle it, and can import tags from popular tagging plugins.
2. Update notification of WordPress and plugins.
3. Cleaned up how URLs are handled. It even helps with forwarding posts if you change the post slug, so you don’t get dead links from it. They call this canonical URLs, and they’re hoping it will help with search engine optimization.
4. Pending review section for multi-author blogs to make it easier for editors and administrators to notice when an author needs a post reviewed for publication. This sounds really great for handling guest posts too.
5. More advanced WYSIWYG. You can access more of the Tiny MCE features if you like.

There are also a lot of features that will matter most to developers.

We’ll just have to see how well an update of this size does over the next few days. I’m always cautious about upgrading right away, especially when major changes have been made. Some bugs hide until regular people are actually using the software.

Technorati Tags: wordpress 2.3, dexter, blogging, blogs, blog

I’ve been trying Facebook out just a little. Not working it very hard; my account has a whole two friends, one being an acquaintance from high school who happened to be there too.

And then this morning I read over on Shoemoney’s blog about Facebook Flyers. I’d never noticed them before. But I immediately decided I needed to give it a try.

Facebook offers two choices. You can pay a flat rate for a number of exposures, or pay per click. I chose per click because the article on Shoemoney mentioned starting out with a really poor clickthrough rate. It’s a very minimal campaign for now, and aimed at getting subscribers to one of my newsletters.

Once I’m comfortable, I’ll start looking at how to earn through these links. Newsletter subscribers are very nice to have, but I’d love to see what can be done to earn some good old money too. But the plus is that I will know very quickly if I have new subscribers. As with many areas, no doubt things that are initially free will work pretty well, so pay per lead is probably a good idea.

Of course, I’ll have to be pretty creative since I’m sure the Shoemoney post will bring a lot more people to advertising on Facebook. But that’s all a part of the game.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook flyers, advertising on facebook

I was having a little fun Stumbling around when I came across a post called How I Made $100,000 by Spending 25 Minutes and $0 on Marketing on the Self Made Chick blog. It’s worth a read. She’s not joking, and it’s a great reminder that when you come up with an idea that should get you easy business, even if it’s not quite in your comfort zone, you should probably run with it.

If she keeps up posts like this, her blog is likely to be popular pretty quickly.

Getting out of your comfort zone is tough. I’ve made myself do that a few times, and it has always felt good, even if it hasn’t had quite the results Christine’s had. I even tried promoting myself as an expert for a local television show once, and I’m the girl who could barely talk in front of her class in high school. It didn’t work out, and a few months later the show was cancelled anyhow, but I tried.

Think about what you’ve been putting off. What should you be doing to grow your business that you haven’t yet?

Technorati Tags: procrastinate, procrastination, grow business, home business

Google’s Landing Page Quality Score has a huge impact on PPC costs. If you don’t have a good quality score, you pay more per click. It can be pretty painful.

But today the Google AdWords blog has a post on the topic. It goes into the types of landing pages that will tend to get low quality scores. They can even refuse to run ads for some sites. The pages that will generally get low scores include (from the blog):

• Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information
• Arbitrage sites that are designed for the sole purpose of showing ads
• Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor’s computer

Seems pretty reasonable to me. They also include”get rich quick” and similar sites. Seems to me I still see plenty.

I know a lot of people find Google’s standards pretty tough. It’s not always the easiest advertising to do, especially if Google declares that your page that was converting well for you “low quality”. But that’s all a part of the game.

Technorati Tags: adwords, ppc, quality score, landing page

This one is a real relief. BlogRush is coming up with flavors soon, so that you don’t just have to suffer through having the dark grey border now offered. You will be able to choose from a range of colors.

Of course, the real question is how well does it do in terms of building traffic? The answer so far is “Meh.” 1230 displays, and only 5 clicks for me. Considering that I know of a few visits from other BlogRush users clicking on their own widgets, that’s not terribly impressive.
But they are trying to improve it. They’ve started the manual reviews, and they’ll be removing blogs that are hiding the BlogRush widget or otherwise falsifying impressions. Combine that with getting rid of the low quality blogs, and this should pick up.

I’m getting more low quality comments right now too, but that doesn’t seem to be associated in my case. At the very least, one of the blogs that is getting the comments did not have the BlogRush widget at the time. They’re more or less the standard “good point” or “me,too” type comments, with a link to an article on that person’s site. I don’t care if you link to your site, provided it’s relevant, but make your point in your comment. Done right you can still draw people to your site, and they’ll be more impressed.

But back to BlogRush.

It really doesn’t surprise me that many people are trying to game the system already. They know all the hype/talk going on about BlogRush, so it’s the point at which they’ll get the most for their efforts. And so I appreciate that John Reese is already taking steps to get it under control. I expect that the system will soon enough be adequately improved in that area.

Once that happens, it will be time for bloggers to really asses its potential. Is this widget worth its weight in traffic? If people don’t see good enough results, they won’t keep using it, and this kind of a system relys on having a large number of users.

Technorati Tags: BlogRush, blog rush, blog traffic