Blogging Zoom is a new free service made by bloggers for bloggers. With it, you can submit your own posts that will "zoomed" or voted to the top by the other bloggers. I decided to wait and see some results before posting.
Is it another Digg, Technorati type service?
Yes and No. The basic ideal is the same but the main difference is that it's only for
quality bloggers. So, you won't see any non-blog posts or spam blogs in it. Plus, you can submit you own post unlike Digg.
The SEO angle
When you submit a post, you will have to write a small teaser first and a second longer one. It's here that they come in. They will make modifications to both descriptions so that it can be index by Google faster.
One of my post descriptions was improved by them. In time, bloggers will be better at it and they won't need them as much. But you need to use more than one sentence to make it easy to be index by Google.
Show me some numbers
Yesterday, I
submitted 3 posts and thus I had to wait for Google Analytics to finish the first 12 hours. I was surprise a bit of the results this morning.
A Real Review of Income 4 Beginners 4 Zoom by 3 members, sent 5 visitors
Avoid Being A “Dead Blog” 3 Zoom by 2 members, sent 1 visitor
Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player: A $200 Doorstop? 3 Zoom by 3 members, sent 0 visitor
You always start with 1 Zoom, meaning your own.
What I find funny was that the most to be zoomed and read was the one that I taught would be the least popular considering bloggers are the first wave to use it. I did made my own description to better teased people. I guest, I'm learning more than I taught. ;)
I also got 1 referrer from the
Upcoming page thus I don't know what was read. That person read 3 pages/visit versus 1 for the others.
The Categories
The number of
main categories is small but you can add some tags to compensate. For example, I wanted an Electronics section for the
Toshiba post but had to put it in the Technology and Science.
The Interface
I did find that it's overall easy to navigate and use. The small thing I would fix is that you could click on the
Posted by nickname to see the profile. This way, I could see the other posts by that person. Sometimes, I can see the
View profile and sometime not.
The Widget
The widget was available only late last night. It's very easy to install but you have to add the calling code manually for each of your post. You can choose where to place it. They are just starting so I'm sure they can improve it so it's always available in every post or disable on some post. A small readme.txt for the calling code could be useful later on. I download it last night but installed only this morning. So, I had to go back to the blog paste the code in my text file where I keep my AdSense deluxe code. ;)
So who are those bloggers?
The 2 bloggers are:
Courtney that I already knew and
Vic that I did not know before.
Money
The first thing you will notice is the lack of ads. Yes, I wrote
lack. I expect the cost to skyrocket once it's better known and I don't want them to go broke. Court answered me back that they are planning to do something about it. If they slapped some Adsense don't be surprise.
Conclusion
My recommendations are mostly for when they ever have a few minutes again ;). For now, their main goal is to make it work correctly. I did not get a deluge of traffic(only 7 visitors) on my first day but every visitor counts and that's the primary focus of Blogging Zoom.
I wish them a great success on this new endeavor.
Thanks guys!
P.S. It's the same
quality bloggers I need for my
paid blog directory/direct paid review service.
Edit 1: It took some time before being able to submit this post on Blogging Zoom. The new 350 characters description was harder to fill. I would like some character counter like the summary. It would had make my
job much easier ;)
Keywords: Blogging, Review, Traffic