The FeedShot Blog

We passed 50,000 outgoing submissions last week, and we’re moving in on 55,000. That puts us at about 1,800 outgoing submissions per day since launch. Two days from now will be FeedShot’s one month anniversary.

Thanks to everyone who has emailed, commented and linked!

I’ve been monitoring FeedShot’s PageRank since launch, and it appears to have finally kicked-in, changing from (0/10) to (7/10) sometime in the past week. The interesting thing is FeedShot receives a lot of traffic from MSN, and barely any from Google. I can’t figure out what that means; can any SEOs out there lend an explanation?

In my previous post I solicited new ideas for expanding FeedShot and didn’t receive any replies. I’ve been running through several ideas of my own but each one falls short in some respect. I’m still waiting for something to “click” that sounds like a winner.

Also, I’m looking into PayPal’s new Micropayments service. It doesn’t appear to be public yet, but it would be nice if I could lower the submission price by avoiding the current 13% cut that PayPal takes from each paid submission. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks to everyone who emailed or commented on my last few posts. Only a handful of people think a pinging/monitoring service would be of any benefit to the community. So it’s back to the drawing board.

I’m soliciting suggestions for new blog-related services. If there’s an idea you’ve been thinking about but don’t have the time or skills to put together, post a comment or send an email to (support *at* feedshot dot com). If I move forward with your suggestion you’ll receive free use of the service and credit for the idea.

So send them in; no idea is too small.

I’ve spoken with quite a few bloggers over the past week or two, asking if they’d be interested in a pinging service that monitors their feed and pings a list of servers each time they post. The bigger question is: would they be willing to pay $2 a month for such a service (to cover bandwidth, monitoring and maintenance time).

I’ve received mixed opinions, but the first question is typically: “What’s the difference between your idea and Pingomatic/Pingoat?”

The basic difference is that the FeedShot version would monitor your feed; you wouldn’t have to come to the site each time you want to ping, like with Pingomatic and Pingoat. Not that this is very difficult, it’s just something I tend to forget to do.

After explaining this a few times, I realized that the learning curve of this concept, in addition to trying to enter the pinging field this late in the game, makes this a somewhat sketchy idea. Or maybe trying to charge for it just isn’t going to happen?

Any thoughts before I make a decision on whether or not to proceed?

I’ve received a few emails about a recent block I added to slow multiple submissions. The original intent of FeedShot was as a tool that handles your blog’s first submission to a group of search engines and aggregators. But it’s come to my attention through email and the logs that people are using it to ping servers, as well.

So today I’m announcing the development of a FeedShot service that will ping a collection of pinging servers, and keep the search engines happy by not re-submitting your feed every few days

Keep your eyes peeled for this upcoming change.

As we approach 40,000 outgoing submissions I’d like to clear a few things up some people have brought to my attention during the past week and a half:

1. Search Engines: Some of the places FeedShot submits to aren’t really search engines (NGoid is an open network of news submission services, NewsMob is a web based aggregator, etc…). The bottom line: it’s easier to tell people the FeedShot is a blog search engine submission tool, rather than a “tool that submits feeds to a bunch of places that accept them.” I may change this tagline in the future.
2. Specialty Sites: I don’t have plans to add specialty sites to the general submission list. Maybe down the line I’ll set up a specialty channel (web programming comes to mind as one with potential), but the last thing I want to do it spam specialty RSS sites with a slew of general feeds.
3. The Original: FeedShot is not, actually, the “original” blog search engine submission tool, as it says in the tag line. Before I launched FeedShot I searched far and wide for submission services but didn’t find any. Afterwards I found two, which both appear dormant. I’ll likely change the tagline in the next couple weeks.

Ultimately my hope is this tool saves the blog world a lot of time. Maybe we can take that extra time and make the world a better place

A few people have asked what motivated me to build FeedShot. The short answer is I’m a programmer, and after seeing a need for this kind of tool and knowing it’s not terribly complicated to build, decided to take a crack at it.

Of course, development took longer than expected because the original sketch of the site was totally stripped down…it didn’t even list the search engines it submits to. After going live I realized there should be a running tally of the number of outgoing submissions, and that I’d overlooked a few back-end issues such as tracking submissions, logging errors, and sending emails. Oops.

Once those were in place it was a no-brainer to contact a few of the bloggers that I frequent to let them know it was live. The plan was to start with a trickle of traffic, see how it went for a couple of weeks, and decide then if I would continue to support and improve the service. I think my exact words were: “If I have 100 submissions after two weeks that will suck. If I have 1,000 after two weeks that will not suck.”