BloggersBase, Efforts to Building a Blogging Community
Believe it or not, there are over 100,000 new blogs created every day. With so many blogs already published and nearly 3 million new blogs every month, how it anyone supposed to make sense of it all, or at least weed out the good ones. BloggersBase is trying to do just that. While there may already be sites like Technorati to automatically rank blogs based on their popularity, and sites like Digg to have users vote on the best content… BloggersBase strives to bring you the best of both worlds. In short, “BloggersBase is a citizen journalism magazine powered by YOU!”
How BloggersBase Works
To participate in the BloggerBase voting system, you will need to signup for a free account at their site. They only as for your email, name and password… so it’s a quick easy setup.
As a blogger you can write your content directly to the BloggerBase web site, or you can add your original blog content to their database. Your original blog content can be added by using an RSS feed, or simply copy and pasting your original work. The pros to duplicating your content, is that you will get more people reading your content. The cons include the possibility of getting outranked in the search engines by BloggersBase in the search engines, or Google possibly seeing the post as duplicate content.
User Feedback and Voting System
Everyone loves to see that people are reading their content, and when feedback is left, it’s that much more important. I think the biggest potential for BloggersBase lies in the future of it’s community.
Right when you visit the BloggersBase site, you aren’t overwhelmed with options or a million different categories to separate blogs into. There are four main categories which are Entertainment, Lifestyle, Technology and World Affairs. Once you select your desired category, it will further group into small categories if you want tighter search results.
Below is a screenshot on how users can rate and comment on your blog postings. Much like regular blogging, the comments and user information are listed below the post, but users also have the ability to rate of agreement, presentation, professionalism and value of the posting. I can see this being very value and effective for anyone starting out in the blogoshere and doesn’t have any money to spend on user feedback and getting people to their own sites.
Prizes and Awards on BloggerBase
One of the big incentives that will drive a lot of people to BloggersBase, is their ability to offer cash prizes and an affiliate program. Each week BloggersBase awards $50 to their top bloggers and a rewards/cash system through their affiliate program. Based on ratings and feedback from the community, the top blogger of the week would receive $40, while the second place blogger receives $10.
The Future of BloggerBase
With so many directories and voting sites out there, it is hard for any new sites to compete. One of the hardest thing to build in any niche market, is a loyal user base. If BloggerBase continues to grow, and user participation stays up, they can be one of the big players in the blog tracking area. A few areas BloggerBase may need to work on, is creating better incentives for bloggers to write or add content to their site. The cash rewards and prizes are a good addition, butare most likely not large enough to bring over any decent sized bloggers. On the other hand, the system is perfect for anyone that doesn’t want to learn wordpress or setup their own blog.
What are your thoughts on BloggerBase and how they can improve their site?
Its a great idea and the design looks very nice, but like you said its very hard for a new site to compete in a for such a hard niche. But it has a nice design to it so Im sure if it continues growing it will do well
For non-blog owners not having to maintain a blog is certainly a selling point.
I suppose if it actually increases a new blog’s exposure it is beneficial; as I see that as the only reason an existing blog would participate.
I figure the best way to see if it works is to give it a test.
I started 5 blogs a couple weeks ago, and I will submit 1 of them to the bloggerbase and watch the analytics. Each of my blogs has about the same number of posts, frequency, readers, marketing plan, related topics, etc. so it should be a fairly good test.
Of course as Zac’s massive reader base would skew results I won’t say which will be added or when (ie not today). I will keep doing it for the month of Feb. (maybe longer if need be).
If you are interested Zac, I will send you the results.
Hmmm, lets see. I visited their site and basically they are new. Im not sure this site would succeed as many sites who are like this doomed to failure. But anyway, I think its worth a try
Zac,
My only issue would be the duplicate content. My blogs are all on Blogger.com excepting one on WordPress.com. While I would like to extend my reach, the point of my blogs is to drive traffic to determine the popularity in the marketplace.
I'm getting 100 or so visitors per week according to my Lijit.com and FeedJit.com widgets on my blogs.
I have hosting and plan on moving my blogs to WordPress-based there.
Also starting two 'split-testing' Yahoo campaigns this week, at a very conservative daily click budget.
Respectfully,
Nicholas Chase
http://www.twitter.com/nachase
Interesting site. It definately takes a different angle than Digg, Stumbled, or many of the other social networks that are coming out the last few months. Not sure I'd go in that direction though. Willing to watch and see where they go with it
The challenge with tools like this is that they are so dependent upon their community. If people buy into this, it will prove to be a success. From your descriptions, it sounds interesting and I'll be checking it out.
I have signed up for the service and I will try and post some of my blog articles. They don't allow for HTML formating, which made my first post look really bad. They also review your submitted posts.
I don't know about the duplicated content being bad, I heard Justin Broke say that google doesn't penalize against duplicate content much. But I'm still not sure about that.
It is an interesting social networking website none-the-less.
The whole concept for bloggers base is what blogging is about. coming together to share ideas and stories, of our knowledge and experience with one another.
But with new blogs or sites coming up, it's hard to compete with the big boys that already have a reputation and branded their name with what they do..so in a way it can either get you out there, or it can get you lost in that sea of bloggers. Either way its still a good concept to build a community.
Personally the site looks too busy. I would try and figure out a better way to display the content on the homepage. I think it's a decent idea and wish them the best of luck.
interesting site but I will rather keep my content on my site. How I could used BlogBase is to write a few post every now and then only for Blogbase.
I've heard about BloggersBase before. It does seem like a pretty good concept, and does hope it works out well. I think I might sign up for it.
exciting and communicative, but would make something more on this topic?
Thanks for letting us know about this site but i can assume that this site may works the same as ehow and bloggerparty which they will give you a reward for the best article submitted. I'm definitely will try this since i want my blog to get more exposure not only from the search engine
They are new, and although the concept is quite cool, are going to have to work hard in order to ensure success of their offering. The stats of 100,000 new blogs per day is quite unreal, but then, how many humans are on the face of this planet?
Everyone will sign up to see what it's about but probably won't stick around. You'd be better off with a more established one.
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Your are Great. And so is your site! Awesome content. Good job guys! Interesting article, adding it to my favourites!
I am concerned as to the % of legitimate vs false blogs (or flogs) that this daily 100,000 figure is made up out of. Something like this service can also serve to help weed out the spammers by identifying and flagging them.