People who write public blogs often want to promote them. I’m not 100% certain but I am guessing that often times one of the things these people do (ok it’s me!) is search for promote blog in Google. There are a number of interesting results in the free section but one real eye-catcher in the paid advertising section:
Distribute my blog posts for free AND it’s free as well?! Holy shiznit I wonder if it’s free?
The idea behind their site is that you can sign up your blogs and then your posts are sucked up and placed on otherwise empty domain names owned by clients of whypark.com along with links (even better ONE WAY links) back to your actual blog. The people who provide whypark with all these websiteless domains get money somehow, presumably from advertising that is placed along with all those blog posts. Content on the sites gets indexed by search engines and your empty domain name is suddenly an actual domain with actual content getting actual hits from search engines.
Sounds like a win-win scenario so far. The total suckage part is that whypark has almost no support for their content promotion site. That means, for example, that there is no help on the website and if your feeds are turned down (as this blog was) they simply mark your submission “declined, must revise” which might leave some people wondering what exactly they should revise and how exactly they should resubmit after they make such a revision.
The general contact email for the site is [email protected] so I emailed them and asked them what I should actually revise on the blogs I submitted to them. A person named Kelly Urquhart responded that “Most declines are because the posts are commonly too short or provide very little text content. We like syndicate (sic) text with over 250 words per posting on average”. Well Ok I said, this blog and others should generally fall within the 250 word rule and asked her if there was something else going on?
Kelly Replied:
I am not a part of the approval department for Content Promote, but I know the common reasons for a feed being declined include:
– You are not offering a full-text RSS or XML feed. Summaries are not accepted as we can only syndicate full text content through our network.
– Posts are commonly too short or provide little text content. We like to syndicate text with over 250 words per posting on average.
– The content is inappropriate for syndication
First I have to wonder why if she’s not part of the approval department she replied to my question about approval. Notice that there is no reference to who (if anyone) actually IS in the approval department. The RSS feed is fine for this blog and the post length should be about right so we’re left with content that is inappropriate for syndication without any known rules for what is appropriate and what isn’t.
Because whypark.com is a company that depends on blogger’s posts to exist I would think they would have a more blogger-friendly system in place. Since they don’t I am personally done with them. If you have a blog I’d consider avoiding them as well.
Once place that does seem to work as advertised is Zimbio which adds your blog posts to its own wikizines and provides the same one way linkbacks to your actual blog. For the most part they have a very decent interface and picking and choosing blog posts to publish is simple. And no, I’m not being paid to say that.
