Blogging Zoom has definitely evolved into it’s own mini social media site. Many bloggers I know use it or have in the past. Getting to the front page is easy, everyone can always use a few extra visitors per day. However, has that gone to their heads?

Blogging Zoom Copy and Paste

Blogging Zooms submission process for new articles has always been a bit annoying. To submit every post you must write 350 characters of text. To get an idea how much that is, it would be almost two times bigger than the first paragraph of this article.

When I submit to social media websites I usually do so 2-5 at a time. That would be stumbleupon, sphinn, mixx, (sometimes digg), and blogging zoom. With submissions and writing my next article, I don’t have time to write 350 characters uniquely for blogging zoom.

The result, Blog about your Blog has been officially been banned by Dictator Vic. I’ve taken a lot of crap just for my submissions at Blogging Zoom. Our latest submission received two comments from Vic scolding me for “copy and pasting”. I noticed my article was the only one receiving attention for “violating the rules”. Then I was told to quite whining by a very nice user. After I told them to stfu, BAYB was banned.

Ooopps…

Double Content and Banning

I only have to assume that Blogging Zoom wasn’t ranking as well for terms or being penalized. Not only is their search system terrible, but they don’t show often in google either. I find it hard to believe it’s “for the blogger”. If it is for the blogger, how would you be helping them by banning them from Blogging Zoom. Sounds like someone is on a power trip.

By duplicating a few sentences of a post, I have never felt any penalties. By making it 350 characters long I suppose it could be a penalty due to it being so long. Blogging Zoom isn’t looking out for their bloggers, it sounds like they are looking out more so for themselves. It’s funny how this rule isn’t in place for any other social media site…

“Two main reasons why we do not allow copy paste. First reason is for the benefit of both Blogging Zoom and you as the blogger. Every time you copy and paste your content in a submission let it be here at Blogging Zoom or any other social voting site you are giving yourself and Blogging Zoom a duplicate content filter penalty with Google.

We ask you to please follow this rules. Not only are you hurting yourself with the copy paste but also fellow bloggers that do follow the rules but are also penalized with a site wide duplicate content penalty.”

After issuing the “no copy and paste” policy I know several of my own contacts have stopped using the service. Honestly for me I have a lot less of a desire to publish articles. Either the comments are rude and nasty, or I’m not writing my description long enough…

Comparison to Digg

I love that Blogging Zoom has compared themselves to digg.

“Blogging Zoom is heading toward one day being a much stronger site then Digg and any other social site. If you need proof of this look at our Alexa vs Digg we are month ahead in traffic for the same time of Digg. If you want to be a Power Zoomer and grow with Blogging Zoom please help the community.”

It’s nice to have a nice high goal set, but being bigger than digg? Get real. First off as a blogger, Vic you know Alexa is worthless. Secondly you guys are no where near digg. Possibly in volume of rude users. How are you helping the community by banning members who aren’t commenting on every post being an idiot?

I’m not one to be negative towards anyone, but like he’s done to many others, Vic (and Blogging Zoom), has just rubbed me the wrong way.

Can Blogging Zoom ever be the next Digg?

Promotion and discussion on forums can definitely help your traffic as well as web presence. I’ve even tried to run my own forum however it proved to be too time consuming and difficult to fight the spam bots. The benefits of forums are great and I really wanted to tap into that area.

Instead I’ve tried to be active on several forums (as well as social media) because it’s important to branch out. Talking to other bloggers and conversing can really only help you expand.

Out with the Old

BloggerForum once was a great place for link exchanges, posts about new money making opportunities and a place to share your blog. They took some downtime figuring out a new way to fight the spammers. As they have re-emerged (I had no idea they were back until today) they are missing several key categories, as well as no easy way to search new posts. I was there several minutes without success.

PayPerPost Forum was a great place for me for a while. Lately their forum hasn’t become as blogger friendly, just postie friendly. My blog promotion and social media promotion wasn’t very well received the last few times. Stumble and digg requests go unanswered and blogging news needs constant bumping to keep it alive.

In with the New

Bloggeries forum has been very impressive so far. It’s one of the few “new” forums I’ve joined. Several seemed to pop up all at once. I’ve given Bloggeries forum a shot and it’s been pretty good. I’ve gotten to know the owner pretty well as well as converse with several members. The posts have already proved to be worth it, sending about 20+ unique visitors in just two or three days.

9Mb is a webmaster forum that is owned and run by Nomar. He is previously from KingNomar.com but that has been sold. The forum is a mini-digital point. They have a tight community of users who are frequent and active. It’s good for link sales, exchanges as well as blogging questions among other things.

Have you moved on to any of the new forums yet?

Lately I have been trying to break into affiliate marketing. I’ve written about Pepperjam and Promoting and Earning Money with Affiliate Programs. In that article I mention referring yourself to affiliate offers to earn money. However, I didn’t mention incentivizable campaigns.

Incentivizable Campaigns

Basically what incentivizable campaigns are, are campaigns where you can reward people for completing your affiliate offer. These offers usually are free trial offers or a sign-up. By giving incentive for these offers, you could reward them however you want to.

How can incentivizable campaigns earn me money?

Recently I got a friend of mine (and co-author as BAYB) to join NeverblueAds. Some of you may know him as Ryan of Blogging4everyone. We talk on IM nearly every day. In about a week of being a NeverblueAds Affiliate, he’s been able to earn about 450$. I asked him a few questions about his recent success.

Ryan said that several ebooks and other internet marketers like Zac Johnson have inspired him to start affiliate marketing. Since they are making thousands of dollars on it, why not give it a shot as well.

However Ryan has taken a different approach as some of the affiliate marketers have. Over 75% of Ryan’s earnings have been through incentivizable campaigns. He has taken his offers to forums, myspace and other online contacts. In exchange for them completing his offers, he pays them a few $ for their troubles via paypal. Some of the offers can net him up to 30$! For just a couple of dollars as incentive, his profits are huge.

If he can keep up this insane rate of earning money, he could be looking at 1600$+ in earnings per month, with very little cost!

Search engines provide one of the biggest tools in the world right now. Information can be delivered to you in a matter of seconds. With so many people getting as much information as they want, the information then sometimes becomes popular. Such as internet videos. Some people have become internet celebrities due to their videos. Stars such as Will Ferrell have used videos to go viral and become even more popular.

Introducing Vid Search Live

Vidsearchlive is an internet Video Search Engine that gets videos from MySpace, MetaCafe, Veoh & Yahoo all from one location. This provides all the videos you want to get and search for all in the ease of one website. What I think will turn webmasters on to this is that you can then embed the videos onto your own website or blog.

This technique is used for other things such as searching for popular articles, pictures, etc all in one place. The is the first I’ve seen with videos.

Apparently YouTube didn’t appreciate their videos being displayed on  other sites, and have banned external script feeds. This means it will no longer work on VidSearch. I would recommend VidSearch remove them all together from their website. No reason to still have the ability to search them and get nothing.

On top of videos you can also search for music and listen to it on the website. It pulls from Esnips (which I’ve never heard of) the problem with it is it gives you the song several times. I found several titles that wouldn’t play when I searched for them.

With internet users looking to get even more information faster, I think we will see a lot of these type of sites emerge in all types of different categories.

The following article was written by Ryan from Blogging4Everyone dot Com.

Page Rank should be made a thing of the past. I am a blogger, who blogs for the pure fact that my blogs are fun for me to maintain. I NEVER feel obligated to blog on a day where I am sick, too busy, etc, as long as it doesn’t keep happening day after day.

I have had Page Rank on numerous blogs sucked away by Google. Sure, I deserved it. I admit I did PayPerPost on my blogs and I didn’t make it nofollow. However, PayPerPost slapped me back in the face with a wet noodle when they told me I had to have X page rank to take an opportunity.

Great news however from PayPerPost. Ted Murphy, IZEA’s president(PPP’s parent company) has announced that Page Rank has been eliminated from their new product, Social Spark. Blogs with bigger communities and more traffic will benefit under Social Spark, according to Murphy. Ted Murphy also disclosed that they are kicking Page Rank out of the current PayPerPost system after their new product, Social Spark is live.

Alright, so maybe that is just one reason to get rid of Page Rank. Here are some more;

• Bloggers shouldn’t feel tied to a mythical number
• Bloggers shouldn’t have to be pressured to conform
• Blogging should be your choices, and your choices alone.

The list goes on and on. However, the point remains, Google has the money. Will you let them continue to tie you down with Page Rank or will you base your blog on something better. Your community, traffic and I thank you!

Things have been pretty consistent here. Posts have been good as well as our rss count. Project Wonderful, is still working out for us (advertise for only .60 cents a day right now). I hope to have a review prepared next week. In the entrecard shop we have banner space back up for sale (500 credits for a week). Also, Brians post yesterday is featured on Search Engine Journal. We’ve been busy!

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 100 entrecard points.

Leave us a comment about anything you want. This week I’m particularly interested in interviews. Have you conducted interviews on your blog? Have you been interviewed? Do you enjoy reading them? Should we bring back interviews for Blog about your Blog?

As always tell us what articles you’d like to see here. Any questions are welcome!

Be next weeks Comment Friday sponsor for 3$! Contact us.

Traffic from search engines is the blogging gift that keeps on giving. You can find yourself receiving a steady flow of new visitors to your blog each day once you have a post ranking high in search engine results. Of course, it’s not easy to get on the first page of Google for a search term so you need to think creatively. I have an idea that can help.

Every day millions of people search for solutions to their tech support problems. This is a golden opportunity for you drive new visitors to your blog. Simply write a post detailing a computer problem you are familiar with and offer up the solution. Post it and forget about it while the Google crawler works its magic on your behalf.

Here’s a real world example from my own blog. Almost a year ago I ran into a problem with an Access database. I eventually realized the problem was with an Internet Explorer setting (of all things) so I wrote a short 100 word post about it called Access Files Located on an “Untrusted Site” and moved on with my life.

Lo and behold, over the course of a few weeks my post slowly rose in the ranks of Google searches. As of today, it’s on the first page of results for a variety of searches related to Access and “untrusted site” error messages. The post receives new and unique visitors each day from search engines. I’ve since gone on to write a number of posts containing tech support solutions that now account for about 40% of my incoming traffic.

This idea doesn’t require you to write long posts or have a lot of technical knowledge. A lot of these problems and their solutions can be found online already. Just keep these two things in mind when writing your post:

• Be smart about your post title. Use keywords you think people will use in their search results. It’s a good idea to use words or phrases from any error messages the problem contains if possible.
• Keep your description of the problem and its solution clear and concise. People want a fix for their problem and not more confusion and frustration.

Helping people solve their computer problems is a simple way to generate natural traffic to your blog. In fact, you could probably start a brand new blog offering nothing but fixes and solutions for any software package on the market today and have traffic rolling in. It just takes a little patience as the search engine spiders crawl and index your posts.