Clunky set-up, unknown outcomes, and confusing verification process lead to some question marks.

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photo credit: Brett L.

I am a big fan of both blogging and reading blogs.  My RSS reader is full of unread posts I did not manage to get to over the holiday break!  While writing and reading blog posts of others is fun and interesting, it is the marketing part that is a consistent pain.  How do you get more readers?  How do you keep them engaged?  How do you get them to become a “fan” of your blog?  Well, one service is out to try and make that an easier process by putting your blog in front of individuals who are hanging out in the largest virtual community in the world… Facebook.  Enter NetworkedBlogs.com.

NetworkedBlogs is a service that resides inside of Facebook as an application (they also have a Fan Page you can follow, but the main service is run through their application page).  The service also appears to be branching out to a normal website presence as well, but that is not fully-functional as of yet.  Any action taken on their website just leads you back to their Facebook application.  Following blogs using NetworkedBlogs is simple and easy – all you have to do is install the Facebook application and then it prompts you to select blogs you wish to follow.  You can pick by category, geographical location, etc.  Then the application feeds you the top stories from those blogs to your Facebook application.  Quick and easy!

Registering a blog is another story.  It appears through testing that you have to sign-up to follow other blogs before you can submit your own.  The process would seem simple, but it appears to make you do it twice.  Then you finally make it to a screen that allows you to enter your blog’s information.  Then something weird happens… you need to verify that you are the owner of the blog in one of two ways.  You can either do some widget coding inside your blog to get the verification code to work (something that I am sure the non-technical blogger will not understand) or have some of your friends verify you are the owner of the blog!  This option blew my mind!  What is odd is that now I have to impose on my Facebook friends to verify that I own my own blog!  I examined the coding verification process and that seemed straight forward, but I actually wanted to see how the friend verification process worked.  I am a little concerned about how confusing the process is going to be for my friends to do the verification, but I guess we will see!

Looking at the application itself still leaves me with some questions.  How is this going to promote my blog?  Do I have any control on what content can show up on the feed?  Will I be able to see any analytics or view who is following my blog.  I hope to get some of these questions answered through the next couple of weeks.  After I see any results, I will post them on my blog, so you can check there for updates.  Just go to http://robertstanke.com/search and search for “NetworkedBlogs.com” to see what answers I come up with.  If anyone has any suggestions on other great ways to market a blog, I would love to hear about them.  Please visit my community discussion boards and share your methods/tools!

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By Robert Stanke of RobertStanke.com