It’s been fascinating to see how the Bumpzee affiliate marketing community is developing. As the “owner” of this community and developer of the platform, I wrestle with lots of decisions and policies.

Who Gets Included?

One area that has been on top of my mind from the start is how to decide which blogs get their RSS feeds included or not. Right now, htis is pretty much all on me. When someone submits a blog for inclusion, I take a look and make a judgement. I look at the posts and picture them showing up in the newest entries page. But what are the requirements?

1. The blog must be at least partly about affiliate marketing. Usually the blogs are a mixture of Affiliate Marketing, PPC, SEO, blogging, etc. That’s great, but if it’s missing the affiliate part as a significant percentage, I usually pass. Or, if the non-affiliate stuff is too far off topic, I’ll usally pass on that too, sometimes reluctantly. Many times it’s a difficult decision.

2. The content should be unique, interesting, mostly non-self-promitional or sales-y, and built for readers and not for search engines. I like to see more than just the same old stuff regurgitated. Affiliate marketing news is fairly hard to come by and many people do end up writing about the same stuff. But I like to see unique perspective added. Plus, if you do this, you’ll have a more interesting blog.

3. The more interesting and unique the content is (as long as it’s online marketing related), the more I’ll relax the affiliate-specific requirement, though never completely.

At the beginning, I wasn’t this choosy. Pretty much anyone who responded to my original blog post back in October got included. I just asked for affiliate marketing blogs.

I’m strongly considering stopping the RSS on a few blogs that contain only merchant offers. There’s nothing wrong with those blogs. It’s all interesting stuff, and serves a purpose, but is it of interest in this particular community? I’m not sure. (If you have feedback on this, please keep it general. I don’t want a witch hunt here.)

If you’re not included (or get removed), please don’t take it personally. We’ll hopefully have new communities soon where your blog will be a better fit. Or have ways to include or exclude certain types of posts. Read on…

Off-topic Posts

What bothers me the most, however, is that some people who ARE included feel pressure to write about certain stuff, or worse, not write about certain stuff because it may not be what “belongs” on BZ. We all write about non-affiliate marketing stuff and shouldn’t stop because of Bumpzee.

A small amount of off-topic stuff seems to flow through here just fine. It can even add some levity. If it’s a significant percentage, however, it starts to stick out.

Currently, as a blogger, you can prevent any single post from appearing here by putting a comment in the body:

<!–no_bumpzee–>

So write about getting your dog spayed or your vacation in the Seychelles without worrying about it getting dumped on bumpzee by putting that code in there.

Future Stuff

That no_bumpzee code still requires that the author has BZ in mind and take action before hitting that publish button. So it’s not ideal.

I’d like to develop a way to automatically pull in only stuff that the blogger wants pulled in. So for example, a blogger may specify one or more categories on their blog that get included. Or perhaps categories that do NOT get included. Like on my blog, I’d want to exclude the “samsung dlp” and the “electronics” categories. The blog owner could control this.

That would also allow me to include more blogs that are not 100% affiliate marketing without worrying about flooding the entries list with a bunch of off-topic stuff.

What do you think? Your feedback is welcome required.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under bumpzee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.