Archive for August, 2010

SeededBuzz Blog Contest

By Melissa on August 31st, 2010 7 Comments

Would you like a way to bring extra exposure to your blog?  How about a chance to win more Seeds to plant? You have the opportunity to receive all of that and help SeededBuzz at the same time.

During the month of September, SeededBuzz will be sponsoring a contest for all of its members.  The only thing you have to do to participate in this contest is create a post on your blog about SeededBuzz.  After you have created and published this post, come back here and place the perma link to what you wrote  in the comment section below.

Some ideas for what to write about: How SeededBuzz has helped your blog grow, how SeededBuzz has helped your blog community grow, or what you hope being a member of SeededBuzz can do for you and your blog.

The top three best entries will receive extra Seeds to plant (use) on SeededBuzz.

Prizes will be awarded as follows

First Prize – 10 Seeds
Second Prize – 5 Seeds
Third Prize – 2 Seeds

Entry deadline is September 30, 2010.  We will begin reviewing all entries starting October 1st, 2010.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Please note that you must provide the permalink to the post you are entering into the contest. Links to your blog in general will cause you to be disqualified. If you are unsure as to what a perma link is or how to find it, please let us know.

We are very excited to see what all of you come up with!

How to increase your audience – BlogBurst

By Greg on August 26th, 2010 No Comments

One of the goals of SeededBuzz is to help you make your articles work for you.  SeededBuzz is a fantastic way to increase the web traffic to your site by allowing you to promote your own articles. The more articles you Seed and Buzz, the more likely the community will discover your site and Buzz your work. Another way that SeededBuzz helps is by providing you tools for you to use to increase your exposure (and revenue).  So I want to introduce you to  a service called BlogBurst.

As stated on their website, “BlogBurst [is] a syndication service that places blogs on top-tier online destinations.” What BlogBurst does is it uses your RSS feed to pool your articles with articles written by other users for professional media organizations to reference. If the media likes the article written, they can take the article and run it on their website, giving you greater exposure. But exposure isn’t the only benefit.

BlogBurst keeps track of how many times your article headlines are displayed on the media outlets websites, which they use to rank your activity against others. At the end of each quarter, those authors who rank in the top 100 of headlines displayed will earn a cash award. The minimum payout is $50.00 USD, and the maximum is $1,200.00 USD.

In 2009, I was fortunate to be in the top 100 with my website U.S. Common Sense. During the Second Quarter (April 1st through June 30th), my articles received over 800,000 headline impressions through the BlogBurst service, with my articles being read over 870 times during that period. During that period, my work was picked up by many media outlets including:

  • Chicago Sun-Times (Chicago Sun-Times, Post-Tribune, Lake County News-Sun, SouthTown Star)
  • Cox Ohio (Dayton Daily News)
  • FoxNews (Fox Business)
  • Houston Chronicle
  • Palm Beach Post
  • Reuters
  • Time Warner (Road Runner)
  • USA Today
  • Wall Street Journal
  • Ziff Davis Enterprise (eWeek Microsoft Watch)

I finished in 93rd place (I peaked at 80th) at the end of the quarter, earning me $50.00. Not a bad result for simply writing articles that were an interest to me. The following is a chart of the activity of the site during that period:

As you work on the articles you plan to Seed, or on Seeds that you are Buzzing for fellow community members, why not let those articles go to work for you behind the scenes?  Quality work will always draw attention and lead to increases in audience.  Put SeededBuzz and BlogBurst work together for you.

NOTE:  BlogBurst is a free service, though there are certain requirements that your site must meet before being approved (much like with SeededBuzz).

Joining the team

By Greg on August 21st, 2010 No Comments

As Matt and Martin noted in their last post, the SeededBuzz team has expanded by three. Melissa, Ian, and myself are proud to be picked to help expand the services on SeededBuzz and will do all we can to achieve that goal. So you have an idea of what to expect, let me introduce myself and what role I will play in the group.

Tutorials/FAQ’s: As with any user-based service, there will be times when the user has questions. My job is to answer the frequently asked questions (FAQ’s) as well as develop tutorials for reference. This will be important when new features are added to the website. If you ever have a question that isn’t already addressed in the FAQ’s, please do not hesitate to drop us a message.

Facebook: If you are not aware, SeededBuzz does have a presence on Facebook. It has been underutilized since its inception, and I think it will be a useful tool to not only increase the community involvement of our existing users, but also reach out to new members.

Site development: This is a role that the three of us will be tackling in our own different ways. Bringing a bit of my real life experience into this project, I will be analyzing various aspects of the site against other popular services to see where we are stronger and where improvements need to be made.

Our goal is to improve the functions of this site to make it even more beneficial to the users. As the next weeks and months pass by, I hope that the changes we implement will become visible on your end with increased traffic to your site and buzzing of the seeds you plant. If you have any recommendations for or questions about SeededBuzz, please do not hesitate to share them with us.

Member since January 2010.

Additions to the SeededBuzz team

By martin on August 13th, 2010 1 Comment

We recently asked our members if anyone had some time to help out with running SeededBuzz, and we were amazed at the number of responses we received – thank you to all of you who responded. From those applications, we are delighted to welcome Melissa, Greg and Ian to the SeededBuzz team and over the coming weeks and months you will see more of them around the site and promoting SeededBuzz to the wider community. We are going to let them introduce themselves in detail in their first SeededBuzz blog posts.

Matt & Martin