God only knows, God makes his plan.
The information's unavailable to the mortal man.
…Slip Slidin' Away
About a year ago, I mentioned how I was giving until it hurts by supporting one brother-in-law and his family here in the Philippines. Soon after that, I started supporting ANOTHER brother-in-law and his family. Charity never ends.
Update 2008-01-26: I don't know when it came back up, but it's back up and better than ever.
I went to BloggingZoom to do my daily run through the posts and found… NOTHING.
Knowing that Courtney Tuttle of "Court's Internet Marketing School" is a cofounder, I checked his blog and found "BloggingZoom Hacked". I think Vic's "Blogger Unleashed" blog may be housed on the same server as BloggingZoom because his site won't come up either.
BloggingZoom is growing rapidly. It poses a threat to other social websites that rely on the traffic that's leaving them and heading over to BloggingZoom. It's obvious to me, and should be obvious to you, that this hack attack is an attempt to put it out of commission. Wrong answer. Both Vic and Court have the finances and the connections to make BZ bigger and better than the other, similar, social websites. In fact, a not-so-closely guarded secret is that they were preparing for a new design and interface launch on February 1st.
I think, and this is my thought only, that the competitors weren't worried about BloggingZoom as long as BZ continued to use the Pligg software (based on a very old copy of Digg). An improved design and interface changed all that.
Are you one of the many bloggers that never takes advantage of tools that are freely made available to you, in order to promote your blog articles? If you are, feel free to slap yourself around.
"BloggingZoom", which hasn't been around for very long, was designed with you in mind. Yes, you! While other social websites frown on self-submissions (and may even ban you), the founders of BloggingZoom encourage it. Who's the better judge of an article you wrote, you or someone else? Who makes the determination that your article is "zoom-worthy"?
Every time I go to BloggingZoom, I see pretty much the same bloggers submitting their articles (duh, including me). The amount of people using this free service is minuscule compared to the amount of bloggers there are out there. Why are you allowing us to hog all the glory?
By using BloggingZoom, you not only gain visitors (some will convert to regular visitors), but every single post submitted will appear on search engines and point back to the original post. That's a free backlink, baby! Anyone who doesn't want free backlinks, raise your hand. Ha! I thought so.
Do you want to make your blog more popular? Use this free service to your advantage. You know you want to, so just do it!
If there's one thing I've learned in more than a year and a half of blogging, it's that no one can write "diamond-quality" articles on a daily basis.
I've published my fair share of stones and then some. Sometimes it's intentional, believe it or not. If I write "diamond-quality" articles every time I write, then that becomes what's expected of me. I've noticed that I pick up a lot of repeat visitors when I write a series of good articles. The problem is that the same repeat visitors bail on me when I don't.
Back on November 4th, I told Google to kiss my ass. I admit it; I was angry, but not angry enough to go to some of the extremes that other people did. There were bloggers who abandoned anything Google and there were bloggers that put the "rel=nofollow" on all of their outbound links, not just the paid links.
It took me two days to go through my blog reading list, since I no longer use a feedreader. It wasn't just the number of blogs that took so long. My lousy DSL connection didn't help at all. I really hope to resolve that next month, if Globe broadband has their capacity problems fixed by then. Anyway, I told myself I wouldn't be posting anything new, on either of my blogs, until I got through that list.
At the end of my list is BloggingZoom. While it's not a blog, it's just as important. Blog articles are posted there for blogs that I've never heard of before. It was there that I found two interesting articles.
The first one, by Vic at Blogger Unleashed, tells us how a lot of bloggers are self-centered and started me thinking about how I've been doing things. I admit that I haven't played by all the rules, but to be honest, I didn't know what the rules were before I jumped in head first with some of my tactics.
Let's take the sponsored posts services, for example. I didn't know that the links in sponsored posts, without the nofollow attribute, were considered wrong in the eyes of Google. I had never read the Google terms of service, except for the terms that applied to Google AdSense. Unless someone was planning on gaming the system, why would they? It's just a search engine, right? I read everything thoroughly after getting my PageRank dropped from 4 to 3 and then to 0.
The second article, by Court at Court's Internet Marketing School, explains what links should have the nofollow attributes attached and which shouldn't. There were even more gems in the comments that followed. One thing Google doesn't do very well is to communicate to us at our level. I can only blame their public relations department for that.
I've made some changes recently and I'm going to make more. I put Google AdSense back up on this blog, but people who visit 2 times a week or more will never see them, nor will people who are registered and logged in. December 12th was the last sponsored post I wrote and I won't be doing any more until SocialSpark comes online. Why? SocialSpark is supposed to comply with Google's terms of service. On January 12th, I'll be putting the nofollow attributes on all the old sponsored posts and moving them out of the sponsored post category. Immediately after that, I'll be requesting reconsideration using the Google Webmaster tools.
The bottom line is that everything that happened to me is my fault and I really can't place the blame on anyone or anything else.
For bloggers, BloggingZoom is the new Digg and its popularity is increasing.
While blog articles can and do make it to the front page of Digg, it's a rare occasion. As bloggers craving traffic, we want to hit the front page even though it makes our blogs inaccessible for hours due to hundreds of connections that happen all at once.
BloggingZoom is all about the bloggers. As the blog author that knows what content you want submitted, it's no problem if you want to submit your own articles. They won't be marked as spam solely for that reason. Since bloggers have better things to do, unlike the 12-year olds that live at Digg, they won't be hitting our blogs all at the same time and driving our servers into submission.
Making Friends at BloggingZoom
If you wait for other people to befriend you, you may be waiting a long time. Go to your submitted posts, see who zoomed it and make them your friends. There's a very good chance they'll reciprocate. Just like it used to be on Digg, your chances of getting more zooms increases when you have a lot of friends.
Karma
I've always been a little confused by karma. I do know that when you have more of it, your zooms carry more weight. Making constructive comments on posts you zoom will encourage people to vote the comments up, raising your karma. Likewise, adversarial comments will cause your karma to go down. In my opinion, people with a karma of exactly 10 never comment (unless they're very new at BloggingZoom).
Submit and Run
Don't be guilty of submitting posts and never spending any time zooming and/or commenting on other posts. You submissions will start languishing at a grand total of 1 if you do it few times. I can't emphasize it any more that that.
The Front Page
Needless to say, not every post will make it to the front page. I have had 4 out of 7 make it there so far. Does it mean the other 3 aren't any good. No, but it does tell me that they're not interesting to the members. Rather than lament, I use it as a form of constructive criticism. You should too.
The BloggingZoom Bury Brigade
Digg has an option for burying posts. Posts for blogging articles frequently get buried for any number of reasons. At Digg, not only can you be undugg, you can be buried without being dugg. It's the double whammy of death for a post at Digg.
BloggingZoom doesn't have that option and I hope it never does. Remaining at a low "zoom" number is enough to prove your article isn't interesting.
Final Words
I haven't had the ability to practice what I preach very much at all due to circumstances beyond my control, but that should change in a week or so (when I change Internet connection providers).
Ranking factors and other metrics will come and go, but one thing remains a constant that we bloggers always need: Traffic. BloggingZoom can help to generate that traffic if you use it wisely. Remember that not every article you write is "zoom-worthy" and it can only help the ones that are.
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