Blogging Zoom Review
I stumbled across a huge launch that is happening right now over at Courtney Tuttle’s Blog. He and his friend Vic Franqui have joined forces to launch the social networking site Blogging Zoom. Right now the site is in Beta and is attracting already thousands of hits within just the one day.
Since Court (as he is affectionately called by many regular readers) is a blogger that carries some weight in the blogging world, I have no doubt, that his new baby Blogging Zoom will create quite a bit of a stir in the blogosphere.
I couldn’t resist to check out what’s on offer since I have nothing to loose but a lot of traffic to gain. I realize that some bloggers will bash this one the on the point that is has been done before. In some regards, it has. Just look at Digg, Plugin, Sphinn and more.
But nowhere in the world of blogging have the investors of these social submission sites promised us to SEO each individual entry for better SE rankings before! This can be potentially the biggest thing for bloggers if it really will work. For some reason I do believe that it will, given that we follow some of the guidelines within Blogging Zoom.
- We need to submit each post with a minimum 350
wordscharacters description. This will help Vic who is the SEO specialist to place the post for better search engine rankings. It also helps to use paragraphs and using your primary keyword a couple of times within the first paragraph. - Another great thing about Blogging Zoom is the fact that bloggers can now guilt free submit their own posts. At present there are no guidelines on how many posts can be submitted per day, but I can see this might be a potential problem in the future as bloggers might just keep self promoting themselves all day. Court and Vic might put some restrictions onto this.
- The trick to submitting your post in order NOT to be penalized from the SE for double content, is to write your own description about your post and not just copy the first 350 words!
- Once a post submission is live, much like in Digg and other similar services we can Zoom (vote) for the posts we like best. There is a handy Zoom(marklet) for WP that is available from the back office. It is a Plugin and will allow you to place it onto your posts so others can vote.
- The service of Blogging Zoom is only available to blogs and not websites. This will cut out all the big contenders like news sites straight away which I personally see as a bonus.
- Another neat point is the fact that we are encouraged to point out spam submissions! These guys won’t last long if we all work together on this. However, this could potentially become a problem for Court and Vic as it would be sheer impossible to control all the complaints between just the two of them. But then spammers might be deterred by the fact that they will have to write up a 350 word overview to start with.
- The site also acts as a social hub for making new friends. We can add friends, comment on other entries and search for other users too.
- The profile section allows us to put a link to our home page (remember, blogs only) and upload an image. (Currently this isn’t possible yet it seems)
- There is also a section that tells you how many stories you have submitted, which ones of the went hot and not and Karma points. Karma points is an interesting one as I have absolutely no idea what they serve as yet, but I can imagine that these points are giving us some sort of rating to whether we are perceived as honest by other members or not. Just a guess by the way for now.
As time will pass, I’m sure that there will be a lot more benefits with Blogging Zoom. I am 100% certain, that this site will benefit us thousands of times more than John Reese’s widget. Admittedly there are still many things that need to be finalized, since Blogging Zoom only launched on the 1st November 2007.
I am keen to give this a fair go and am confident that Courtney and Vic will do their very best to help each blogger who uses their service to get more targeted traffic.
I wish them all the best from a fellow blogger
Monika Mundell
Technorati Tags: blogging zoom , blogging , courtney tuttle , vic , social submission site , social networks , SEO , search engine traffic , traffic
About the Author: I'm a passionate freelance writer and problogger. To further build my business I'm also in the process of building my own niche empire which pays me residual income.
Court | Nov 2, 2007 | Reply
Hi Monica! Thanks so much for the review! One quick note, we’re only requiring 350 characters instead of 350 words. It’s roughly two paragraphs and that should give us enough unique content to get it ranked for you.
The search traffic today for a one day old site was unheard of and higher than we anticipated, never a bad sign.
Monika | Nov 2, 2007 | Reply
Court: thanks for pointing this out. I have rectified the issue as you can see. I am confident that this service will be well received.
Monika
Terry Didcott | Nov 3, 2007 | Reply
Very interesting!
Thats a pretty strong recommendation, Monika. I think I’ll have to make time for this one! I looked at sphinn yesterday and signed up, but not sure about it yet.
Stumbled, (where’d plugim go?) and sphinned!
Terry
Terry Didcott | Nov 3, 2007 | Reply
Hehe, just zoomed you too!
Terry
Monika | Nov 4, 2007 | Reply
Terry: thanks, yes I know. I really see the potential in this service and since it has already brought up quite a bit of heat it grows nicely already. It seems to me that bloggers are adapting to Blogging Zoom.
Thanks for the Zoom too, I had to switch off the plugim one as it interfered with my single posts display. They wouldn’t show anymore.
Monika
Karen Zara | Nov 5, 2007 | Reply
While I do see lots of potential in this project, it must be noted that a blogger’s posts won’t really get any SEO benefits. Those will go entirely to BloggingZoom. What the search engines will display is a BZ page that contains a link to your article.
A person looking for the kind of content your blog offers would have to: 1) type the desired seach term; 2) find the BZ page that links to your article among the results (hopefully it’ll be among the top spots); 3) visit said page; 4) click on its link and finally 5) arrive to your blog.
I know, bloggers benefit from BZ’s powerful SEO tactics because BZ’s pages are being indexed very quickly and they link back to your posts. But I’d like to know exactly what they are doing in order to achieve such results. Of course they’ll never tell us, but the fact that Court emphasised on his blog that Vic is a programmer made me a bit uneasy. I’m afraid that the SE party may not last forever and that someone will be penalised someday.
I have yet another concern, but that’s the sort of thing I’d better keep to myself, for I don’t want to risk being unfair (nor do I want to risk getting into trouble with individuals who are much more famous and important than me).
Despite the rants above, I’m willing to join BZ and give it a try. After all, who doesn’t want some free traffic?
Maybe I’m just too cautious (and skeptical) and time will show me that I had no real reasons to be worried.
Karthik | Nov 5, 2007 | Reply
Exactly the same things I were wondering Karen, I’d addressed the same things that you mention at Cash Quests (That’s where I’d read about it first)
Vic was nice enough to answer my queries and I’ll have to say he makes some valid points, I just don’t like the fact that we don’t even get a follow link in the whole process – one on the individual entry page would make up for it in the least IMO. That said, I’m still going to give it a try, but exactly the way you put it – we’ll eventually end up fighting for SERPs spot with BZ. I could only imagine lesser traffic following the multiple links and ultimately reaching the blog rather than the direct link from our blog if it were ranked higher.
For all the SEO benefits that they claim, I don’t see them ranked for “Blogging Zoom” at google.com, nor does the BZ entry of this review. This page itself seems to rank top for “Blogging Zoom”. [And Google is supposed to place new sites higher up for about 2 weeks, so the new site phenomenon should actually be helping them]
All said and done, like I mentioned at CQ, I will get around to signing up and giving it a try – maybe like Vic suggests, for keywords that are hotly contested.
They’re still very young and I’m sure they will go a long way.
Monika | Nov 6, 2007 | Reply
Karen: these are interesting concerns and you are certainly entitled to raise them. Don’t ever think you are worth less than somebody famous!
If blogger get you in trouble, then it only shows they are childish enough to engage into a battle that is unnecessary since we are all entitled to individual opinions on any subject. Regardless of your “status” always stand up for yourself. Sometimes a bit of controversy goes a long way to get you a lot of traffic too. It’s called link baiting. Just look at John Cow.
Karthik: thanks for pointing this out. Currently I rank second behind CQ for the search term. I certainly will be interested to see whether the long term rank will be done by BZ myself. I suppose we can see this in two weeks time or so.
Your arguments do make sense and like you said I cannot see the review in BZ ranking higher than this one. But then they might not use Google either but Yahoo or MSN?
Monika
Vic | Nov 21, 2007 | Reply
Hi Monica,
Let me just start by saying I am so sorry I missed this review do not ask me how this happen but let me just say that 20 hour days tend to drive people nuts.
Karen:
Consider BZ as a bridge between Google and you. So even though your specific post will not get any SEO you will benefit from BZ’s SEO. At the end of the day what matters is traffic right?
“I’m afraid that the SE party may not last forever and that someone will be penalised someday.”
NO! This will never happen if you follow my history when you see people complaining and bitching about the Google slap I am one of few that defends Google. We neither now or ever infringe in Google’s TOS. We are real Google believers and as so act accordingly.
What makes so good at what we do is exactly that. We have a complete grasp of what Google needs and we provide them exactly that.
Also Karen what ever question or doubt you have please you can always PM me or Court at BZ we answer every PM.
Monika thank you for your review it was refreshing to read it.
As a small update: If you look at our Alexa and compare to Digg.com you will notice that we are about 9 months ahead of Digg.com in timeline with traffic so we expect great things for BZ and the blogging community.
To your success.
Vic
Monika | Nov 21, 2007 | Reply
Vic: that is great news for you guys. You have put a lot of work into this as one can see pretty easy. Don’t worry, I think Curt put it on his first post with some others and then missed out on the recent update where all the reviews are featured.
Oh well, never mind