What is Deal Dot Com?

If you haven’t heard, it is essentially a clone of Woot.com for Internet marketing products.

What is Woot.com? Well, essentially Woot.com is a social shopping site where they sell one product a day at a deep discount and people discuss the product and share their thoughts. Not only is this invaluable way for businesses to move mass quantities of a product, it serves as a sort of impromptu focus group for that product as well. But I digress…

So, DealDotCom is essentially the same thing for Internet marketing products. These products are typically digital downloads such as e-books and software making this a perfect fit. The deals so far have been great.

As an added perk, they have an extremely good affiliate program – I haven’t really explored the full details about it but you can find more about it here. My understanding is that you get some kind of commissions for the life of the customer which is really rare in affiliate programs. Oh, but I digress again…

They’ve only launched a few days ago and have had some pretty interesting things on sale so far. If you want to aggressively market your website, I don’t think you can find an easier way to be exposed to such a wide variety of products at such low deals. I’ve been wanting to put it on my iGoogle home page.

If you haven’t signed up, checking it out it is completely free to signup. Is you do so via this link, I’ll get rewarded a bit if you ever end up buying something. If you want to check them out but don’t want to give me any credit — you can do that too with this link.

Doesn’t DealDotCom have an RSS feed?

Actually, they do — but it uses really cryptic titles and includes a bunch of other stuff as it is sourced from their blog. I’ve got no idea what they are selling and for what price from the headline itself. That doesn’t work for me as I kept having to click through to see what the deal is. This feed I’ve set up has the daily deal and the price — much better for my busy lifestyle. If you are interested in subscribing to it to see the daily deals, you can do so here or with this address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DealDotComToday

Please note, this feed uses my affiliate link in it. This won’t affect anything in the least, other than if you haven’t already signed up, I’ll get some rewards as I mentioned above. I’m working on a version of it where you can use your own affiliate ID once you have signed up to generate the link for use on your own blogs. If you are interested in beta testing this for me, please drop me a note on my contact form and give me your referral code and I’ll try to get a beta version for you to work with.

UPDATE 10/12: DealDotCom has published an official RSS feed for their daily deal here.

I’m with Google on this one. They made the better search engine. They made the yardstick for sites to measure themselves with. They have an interest in serps and pagerank meaning something, and paid links undermine that.

That is awfully hard to disagree with. I think that Google has made such incredible strides at making the Internet more useful, more enjoyable and more profitable for so many.

However, there is a natural byproduct to all of these wonderful things. Google has progressively gained leverage over website owners and we’ve reached the point where they are able to influence our behavior with implicit threats.

I guess we can always rank in Windows Live..

It is of course, their game and they can set the rules.

When one player in a common marketplace becomes so powerful that they leave people with few practical options but to play the game their way it might not always be bad, but I think it is always something we should watch closely.

Of course, I’m still willing to play Google’s game myself as so many website owners are — but the fact that they can exert so much pressure on the marketplace at large to help maintain their supremacy in search and prevent dilution of their aging algorithms is a little scary. I’ve been developing for the Internet since the early 90’s and remember a time when links were just links.

In some aspects, I think by turning links into a commodity, Google has destroyed the Internet in order to save it.

Comfortably Numbed by Google AdSense

But would I trade all the great benefits of life with the big G to go back to the Internet of the pre-Google days?

Not now. Not yet…

Why syndicate what you had for breakfast across the network?

Your blog may be an intimate place where you share many things with your readers that may not be appropriate for the network-at-large. Unfortunately, BlogRush offers no way to declare which posts you want to share across the network and which you don’t.

I’ve worked up a better way of doing this for SMO Blog and I think other bloggers that use Wordpress might be interested in doing the same. It’s in everybody’s interest to keep posts to BlogRush at a high level of quality so that people don’t begin to tune it out.

Add a Custom RSS Feed for BlogRush

The solution I’ve found is to add a Custom Field like this to each blog post that I want to promote.

Add the key “BlogRushTitle” and then in the value area put whatever you would like to title the post in BlogRush. The reason why I’ve defined the key that way is that BlogRush can only show about 40 characters or so in the widget. After that it gets truncated. Since I don’t really want to constrain my post titles just for BlogRush this provides a great method of providing a shorter title for BlogRush.

When you are done it should look like this:

The next time you write a post, “BlogRushTitle” will be on the dropdown of keys in the custom field area – you will only need to select it and type the title you want to use for a given blog post.

Create a custom RSS feed in Wordpress.

Wordpress provides a number of RSS templates in the root directory of the install to handle various feed types. I’ve created a new RSS template that uses the RSS 2.0 standard to tailor a feed specifically for BlogRush. I’ve got it set so that it only includes posts that have the custom field for “BlogRushTitle” associated with it and have a title filled in.

You can download this file here: blogrush-rss-wp2.12.zip

Please note – this has been tested in WordPress 2.12. I think it will likely work in 2.20 but I won’t be testing it until later tonight. Also, if you are using .htaccess to perform URL rewriting, you may need to make some adjustments there as the file will be called directly.

To use it you’ll want to drop it into your Wordpress root directory. The path to your BlogRush specific RSS feed will then look like this:

http://www.smoblog.com/blogrush-rss.php

Validating the feed

I recommend that you validate the feed to make sure it is working correctly after you have everything setup but before you post it to BlogRush. Try using this RSS validator and make sure you scroll down to the bottom and review the source code of the feed to see that your posts are showing up, etc.

Telling BlogRush about your new feed

Unfortunately, BlogRush lets you edit everything about your blog except for the feed address. This is a little crazy as many blogs change their feeds over time (changing to Feedburner, etc). Hopefully they fix this. Until then, the best you can do is add a second blog and specify your new BlogRush feed as the feed to use. I believe that this will mean that at least one-half of your syndication credits are using your new, optimized feed.

Not a member of BlogRush yet?

If you haven’t signed up yet, you can put this in place first, sign up for BlogRush and then use your optimized feed right from the start.

Once you have everything in place and your feed is working properly, you can get started with the signup process.

Any problems with it?

Please let me know in the comments if you have any problems or suggestions on how it could be improved.

UPDATE: John Chow has a post up about how to add the ability to customize BlogRush headlines as well. His approach is to make a static file in RSS format that you update periodically. That will work too, but I think the approach I took is a little easier to maintain over time as everything is controlled from within Wordpress once you have it up and running

Also, Softsled makes a great observation in the comments. You can go back and add older posts to the feed as well. So, you could use it as a sort of “best of” and include things from well before BlogRush was even born.

BONUS TIP: Subscribe to your feed on whatever home page service you use (iGoogle, PageFlakes, etc) so that you can keep an eye on what you have cycling through BlogRush and not forget about it.

BlogRush is a “co-op” for bloggers. Here is how it works…

BlogRush is a crafty little widget. Essentially, it has two parts:

The headlines area displays 5 headlines from the RSS feeds of other bloggers that blog within your niche and are a part of BlogRush. Each hit to a page of your blog rolls the dice and shows another set of headlines.

The most interesting part of this is that instead of distributing a fully random mix from participating bloggers, the system keeps track of how many times the widget on a particular blog has been viewed and assigns the blog “syndication credits” that are used automatically to syndicate stories on other participating blogs. In a nutshell, the more your blog puts into the system the more benefit it gets out.

And here is the twist of lemon that is going to give BlogRush some real zing…

For anything to achieve rapid adoption on the Internet there needs to be some aspect that screams to be viral. For this, take a look at the second part of the widget.

Each time someone clicks the bottom of the widget to add BlogRush to their blog, your blog gets credit for it. Furthermore, you continue to get some credit for each of the bloggers that that blogger brings into the service, and those that are brought by those bloggers, and so on – all the way down to ten tiers and you have what would look like a giant family tree with you as the Blogfather. All of these credits translate into “syndication credits” that are used to gain exponentially wider distribution for your blog.

Why BlogRush is going to be a big hit

There are a few reasons:

First, it’s going to provide an excellent source of free traffic for bloggers.

Second, the traffic should be targeted as BlogRush claims to have content analysis in place to help match the posts that are displayed with the blog hosting the widget.

Third, there is a tangible benefit to a blog’s readers as it highlights other related blog posts that they are likely to be interested in but may not have seen yet.

Fourth, the potential for exponential traffic growth through the syndication network should lead to rapid adoption.

Still it could be better (or at least have a change of clothes)

One thing I was surprised to find was that it only has the skin that you see featured in my sidebar. This is a shame, as aesthetics will probably prevent some bloggers from including it. Ideally, they’ll provide a way to skin it with different colors and looks from a wizard in the control panel and provide advanced users with the ability to fine tune it with CSS.

Where did this crazy thing come from?

BlogRush is the first component of John Reese’s Income.com to launch. With Income.com, John Reese hopes to provide the “ultimate community for entrepreneurs” involved in online marketing. If all of his ideas are as well thought out as this one, it’s going to be great.

Big benefits to joining early

As with many things on the Internet, there is a lot of potential benefit to early adopters. With BlogRush, take that and cube it. I’ve little doubt that this widget is going to be a big hit with bloggers and will eventually be as much of a mainstay as MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog have become.

Given the viral nature of the way the referral system works, there is a substantial advantage to getting started early and adding it to your blogs before the blogsphere has become saturated with it.

I strongly recommend giving BlogRush a try.