Review: Fire Board Plugin (not public yet)

After reading One Year Goal - Fire Board Plugin for WordPress, I was going to leave a comment but decided to make a post instead. You should first read it because Spud made a good review and raised a few things.

Ah yes! the One Man. I have seen it often but not on my blog.

What is the Fire Board Plugin?

In short, if you did not read Spud review, it's a way to contribute to a blog by buying a link. The link can be there for a long time until someone bid more than you. He has many spots available.

It's still in beta and not available to the public yet(more later).

My recommendations

-The ideal is good and is similar for one thing to bla.st(see my lower sidebar). The earlier your are in, the better for the advertiser. Here, it's a contributor to the blog(see TOS) and not an advertiser so that you can run Text Link Ads. He should change Featured Sites to Latest contributors to better reflect that fact.

-If One Man his wise, he won't charge for he's Fire Board plugin because a free plugin will bring in more traffic. He could ask for a contribution so that people that do make money could thank him that way.

-He could charge a small fee for sites to be listed in a "marketplace" depending on the amount of information the publisher leave and can control. It could go from just the Title to PageRank, industry, current price....That may require more work than just a simple listing.

-He should change is TOS:

"5. No profanity, no linking to adult sites. Keep it clean."

I do agree with No profanity, Keep it clean but I would allow adult sites. I have started an experiment last month and I now have 1 naughty blog of funny adult toons (Hey! I got a sense of humor :p ). I would add a checkbox so that people could allow it or not(default). I would not allow adult sites on Steve's Tech blog but I would on my experimental blog.

-Make it multilingual or allow user to change the default text. This could help with the TOS part mentioned above.

- A special page like My Stats of the last 25, 50 or 100 contributors could be made. They won't be seen in the main page but their contributions will live longer.

- Link should open a new window(optional). I may want to read more later on that contributor.

Using it for real

I decided to try it by contributing $5. It was 9h37AM but it was not showing after 25 minutes. I emailed him. A few minutes later, he confirmed that it was a bug. Soon after, it was fixed. It was the apostrophe in my blog name that caused it. It's a beta after all but with one less bug now.

Fire Board default display. Here, I'm at the top.

Click on Your Site here - $1 . You will see the submit part of Fire Board and how much each donated

Conclusion

Those are my recommendations and it's up to One Man to decide. He was quick to fixed it and I understood the delay. Just don't let this scare you. Spud did not encounter any troubles.

This a good way to earn a few more dollars while giving credit to contributors. Also, if a blog do get a very, very good day, someone else could use that time to promote a blog/site by contributing. It could stay for a few minutes or a few days. It may even start a bidding war thus making more money for the blog.

I which him good luck on his latest project.