The FeedShot Blog

FeedShot has been sold. Thanks to everyone for your interest!

Recent changes in my life (my first child) have left me with less time than I would like to develop and promote FeedShot, so I am offering it for sale.

As you already know, FeedShot is the blog directory submission service that charges $1.99 to for its Premium Submission package, which submits to around 15 blog directories and search engines.

I launched FeedShot about 11 months ago, and promoted it heavily to the blogging community. FeedShot was the first well-known online RSS submission service. www.feedshot.com is a Google PR6, has 1131 backlinks in MSN, 1365 in Yahoo, and 84 in Google. FeedShot has processed over 100,000 outgoing submissions.

FeedShot was recently mentioned in the book Secrets of RSS by PeachPit press. Even at the old pricing that’s listed ($3), FeedShot is still much cheaper than the other options presented in the book.

Over the 11 months I’ve averaged just over $65 per month via 3 revenue streams: submissions (I currently charge $1.99 per), text link ads ($16 per month since late May), and Google adsense (run from November through April 1st, when I removed them for aesthetic reasons). The breakdown is $651 (from submissions) + $52 (text link ads) + $19 (AdSense).

I did some advertising via Google Adwords from December through March, but have spent no other money promoting the site. Due to the quantity of backlinks, FeedShot averages around 1100 unique visitors per month.

I have screen shots to prove all of the revenue and traffic. If you’re a serious buyer please email support@feedshot.com and I will forward links.

I currently spend less than 1 hour per month maintaining the site.

The sale includes the domain name (feedshot.com), all site content, the ASP.NET code that drives the site, the blog and its content (www.feedshot.com/blog), and the current database of submissions (with around 4300 submitter email addresses). Search engines can be activated/deactived and new ones added solely through the SQL Server database (as long as they only need the 4 data fields collected). FeedShot is not very resource-intensive, as I host it on a shared server plan with 3 other sites.

The purchase price is $2,500 or best offer.

Please contact me at support@feedshot.com for more information.

FeedShot has been sold. Thanks to everyone for your interest!

Imagine my surprise when I saw a screenshot of FeedShot’s home page while flipping through the book Secrets of RSS by PeachPit press. Sure, it was the old home page, but FeedShot is in print!

The author mentions FeedShot as one of a few RSS submission services. Even at the old pricing that’s listed ($3 for premium submission), FeedShot is still much cheaper than it’s downloadable software competitors.

Hooray for print media!

As tends to happen with this type of public service, spammers have ruined it for the people who want to submit their blog to a few engines for free. I had to de-activate free submissions due to the building number of spam submissions. I tried blocking IPs for a while, but it became too much of a headache to manage. I am sad to see free submissions go, and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

On the flip side, the Premium Submission is as solid as ever, and I lowered the price from $2.99 to $1.99 to take away the sting of losing the free service. I’ve also added a few more search engines in the past few weeks. Enjoy!

Thanks to the awesome team over at PixelTorch, FeedShot has received a long overdue makeover. The new look is leaps and bounds above the old one, and the entire process was virtually pain-free due to the design skills of PixelTorch. If you’re in need of some web design, definitely drop them a line.

And if you haven’t visited FeedShot in a while be sure to stop by and check out our new look.

After months of being down with absolutely no help from Blogger (since they’re owned by Google I have to admit that I’m very disappointed), I finally put in the time to install WordPress. I have to admit, I was completely hopeless when Blogger stopped working for me. I figured I would either leave my archives behind at some point, or Blogger would get its FTP functionality working again.

But I was playing around with WordPress a few weeks ago while working on another project and stumbled upon its import feature. And, much to my surprise, it was able to retrieve all of the posts and comments from Blogger with hardly any effort on my part. That is truly Amazing.

Bravo to the folks at WordPress.

Blogger is having issues publishing blogs via FTP (meaning blogs that are edited through their interface, but not hosted on their servers.).

It’s not affecting everyone who’s publishing via FTP, but it is affecting enough people to have a wave of posts to discussion forums. My web host says others are experiencing the same issues. I’ve emailed Blogger 4 times, and my ISP emailed them 3 times.

I’m actually editing the HTML by hand right now which is absolutely painful. I’ve been down almost 60 days. I don’t know when I’ll post again.

FeedShot is in dire need of a re-design.

The designer I was working with picked up a big project and won’t be able to help us out. If there are any web designers who’d like to improve the look of FeedShot in return for a mention on this blog as well as a link from the footer (FeedShot has a Google Page Rank of 7), please send mock-ups to support@feedshot.com.

I’m not looking for anything fancy - something simple, along the lines of www.pingoat.com or www.pingomatic.com.

I emailed PayPal approximately two weeks ago, and then again 5 days ago to request my account be switched to the new micropayment format, which will allow me to lower the price of the premium submission service. I’m going to email them again tonight.

This is frustrating!

I’ve made some changes to the home page based on Scott Berkun’s comments. The look is basically the same, but I changed the verbiage at the top of the page, modified the link text, and moved form elements around to give it a more cohesive feel.

Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts. I’m going to be watching the numbers over the next week to see if we receive more submissions than normal.

I’m also working with a designer to add some color and give a more polished edge to the site.

Scott Berkun, one of the original designers/developers of Internet Explorer from version 1.0-5.0, reviewed the User Interface of FeedShot based on an invitation he made on his blog that I responded to.

Based on his comments I’m going to be making some modifications over the next few weeks.