cliq

CLIQ To Be Taken Down

Cliqin Logo

Well, if you haven’t taken down the CliqIN widget by now, you’ll be forced to. I received word today that on January 31st, Cliq will be taken down indefinitely. All members that have registered with the Cliq website will be notified this week. Personally, I thought CliqIN was a good idea. However, it never seemed to garner a lot of press and it never took off like BlogRush did. As for the reason why Cliq is shutting down?

As it turns out, CLIQ was a client of Offermatica, INC and was built as a way to extend their story into the social media space. Well, Offermatica has since been acquired by Omniture. Omniture already has a number of projects within the social media space and therefor, it makes no sense for them to continue development and funding for Cliq.

It was a decent ride I suppose. I’ll never understand why the bloggers who fell for BlogRush didn’t get smarter and move to something like CliqIN which gave the user full control over their blogging network. If you still have their widget published on your site, now would be a good time to remove it.

CliqIn Adds Features To Widget

CliqinLogo

As you may have noticed the other day, I temporarily disabled the CliqIn widget. This was in response to the widget misbehaving. For whatever reason, it was stretching out the entire page and doing all sorts of goofy things. Now that the widget is back to normal, not only is it behaving but I’ve noticed a new feature was added. The reason why I’m happy to post about this is because this is the feature I requested.

Join This Cliq Baby

If you look at the bottom of the widget, you should now see a button that says JOIN THIS CLIQ. Now you no longer need to navigate to a specific Cliq on their website in order to join. Of course, you still need to have an account on the CliqIn website in order to actually join the Cliq. Also, because I’ve elected to make mine private, you will need to request an invitation to join.

Other than that, I have no idea what has changed since they never sent out an email detailing the changes that occurred. I do know one thing though, I now have an annoying title within the widget that says POSTS YOU MIGHT LIKE. I figured out how to get rid of that before, but now I have no idea. It looks annoying and messes up the widget. I’ve already looked within the embed code for the widget and the title attribute is not there. Anyone else have any ideas?

CLIQ Updates Reporting Features

I received an email today letting me know that CLIQ has completed the overhaul on their reporting system. The new reporting system focuses on the flow of visitors between blogs and CLIQs. You’ll be able to find the new report page by clicking on the “Who’s CLIQin?” link on the dashboard page.

New Report CLIQin

As you can see, since I’ve installed the widget on this blog, I have had 2,521 views. I’ve sent Brad 2 clicks, he has sent me 1. I have sent Mike 1 click and he has sent me none.

Let’s take a look at who is leading my CLIQ.

who is leading the cliq

Mike is leading the CLIQ with 80 views. Must be those videos he’s been posting. I’m in second place while Brad is currently in third place with 48 views. The views are the number of times that particular headline has been displayed on the widget.

If you are currently managing your CLIQ, be sure to read the mini guide for the reports area. The mini guide gives a good explanation as to what is being reported and what everything means.

As it stands, I currently have my own CLIQ. If your blog covers the topics of SEO, Web 2.0, Blogging or WordPress related material, and your a registered user of CLIQin.com, you’re welcome to request an invite to join the group.

BlogRush Upsets 10,000 Bloggers

BlogRush.com Logo

I received an email this morning from BlogRush letting me know that my blog had passed their strict guidelines. However, 10,000 blogs apparently didn’t get approved and among those that weren’t approved were valid blogs that were following the guidelines without any problems. Some of those blog authors that owned a valid blog that was removed from the BlogRush service have published rants against the service and John Reese himself.

After reading quite a few of these rants on various blogs and reading the responses of John Reese, it would appear as though that most of what was complained about is not true. First of all, if your blog fails to pass the strict guidelines by BlogRush, your account is moved into an InActive state which is considerably different than being banned.

Secondly, it has to said that the blogs were reviewed by humans. There are going to be mistakes made and each human being may interpret something differently than the next. This is apparent because John Reese himself has commented on various blogs that were deemed InActive when in reality, that particular blog was following the guidelines.

It is really easy to jump on a THIS COMPANY SUCKS bandwagon but come on, put a little sense into your post and stop jumping to conclusions before the real story unveils itself. I believe the best example of how this situation was handled correctly was by LocalSEOGuide. Although the post content is questionable, the way Andrew handled it in his comments section with John Reese is a good example of how to solve the situation. Believe it or not, Andrew mistyped his BlogURL which came up as “locaseoguide.com” which when reviewed, the site wouldn’t load causing the reviewer to mark his site as inactive.

Just remember something people, nothing is usually as it seems.

As for myself, my blog passed the guidelines but I have since removed the widget from this site. I am now a fond supporter of CLIQ which I reviewed here ( Share Blog Traffic Via CLIQ ) and I go into detail as to why it may one day kill BlogRush here ( Why CLIQ May Kill BlogRush ) Calm down bloggers, being InActive on BlogRush is not the end of the world.

Why CLIQ May Kill BlogRush

When BlogRush was released to the masses, it became the next best thing for bloggers since Akismet. BlogRush claimed it would provide it’s users with a RUSH of traffic from relevant blogs through the use of a widget. This widget would display your blog posts via credits earned by displaying posts from other blogs through the widget on your own site. The truth is, neither I or many others witnessed the RUSH in traffic that was almost guaranteed to those who used the service. If you’d like to see my results that came along with BlogRush, please read an earlier post I made called Is The BlogRush Over With?

After reviewing CLIQ and what that service had to offer, it dawned on me that this service could potentially wipe BlogRush off the map. Here are the reasons why.

Full Control:

With BlogRush, you have no control over which posts are displayed on the widget. You can only control what DOESN’T show up. You also have no control over who displays your blog posts.

With CLIQ, you have full control over what will be displayed in the widget. You also have the ability to make your group private so that members can only join if you accept their request, or if you manually invite them.

Relevancy:

BlogRush does provide a FILTER list that allows you to create WORD or PHRASE based filters so that you can sort of control which posts are displayed or not but when you think of all the posts your going up against within a widget that only has 5 spaces, the filters become less of a factor. BlogRush maintains a category based organizational system. Without knowing how many blogs are actually within this category, it’s hard to judge how much competition you’re actually up against. BlogRush also uses an algorithm to detect relevancy between the blog, category and blog post title.

Because CLIQ provides you with an option to make your CLIQ invite only, you can essentially control how relevant the content will be within the widget. That is, if you only invite members that post similar or close to similar content, your going to have a relevant widget that contains blog postings that your visitors and the visitors of your member blogs will have a higher probability of clicking.

Creating Your Own Niche Network:

Users have no way of creating networks within BlogRush. Your essentially at the mercy of the BlogRush algorithm to determine when your blog post fits the right criteria to be displayed next to 4 other entries.

By creating your own CLIQ, you have the ability to invite high traffic blogs into your group. Each blog that joins your CLIQ is a referral. CLIQ administrators can set unofficial TRAFFIC requirements for CLIQ memberships meaning, you can determine what amount of traffic a blog has to gain and refer in order to maintain membership. This produces competition amongst the members to drive up their own traffic which in turn, benefits the group as a whole.

Conclusion:

If you haven’t picked up on the theme yet, as a user of BlogRush, your essentially at their mercy versus CLIQ which gives you total control. Why rely on BlogRush to provide you with a lackluster rush of relevant traffic based on algorithms when you can do it yourself and reap the benefits? Sure, the CLIQ method revolves a little more in the way of work, but hey, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Bloggers won’t be benefiting from BlogRush anytime soon unless your JohnChow. So do yourself a favor, ditch it and go for something you can control and manage yourself.

CLIQ is what BlogRush should of been and I’ll leave it at that.

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know by leaving a comment and contribute to this conversation.

Share Blog Traffic Via CLIQ

CLIQin.com Logo

Background Info:

Just the other day, I noticed this service come across my FeedReader. It’s called CLIQ but the domain is actually CLIQin.com CLIQ is a service that allows bloggers to work together in order to share their collective readership as well as audience engagement. Members who are part of the same CLIQ share links to featured, popular and related posts on their own site through the CLIQ Widget. Users can manage which posts are featured on the widget as well as see reports about which blogs and posts are getting the most views and driving the most referrals around the CLIQ. By the end of this review, your going to be sick and tired of seeing the word CLIQ.

First Things First:

When you register an account with CLIQ, you’ll be presented with two options. Starting your own CLIQ or joining a pre-existing CLIQ. For the purpose of this review, I have created my own called Jeffro2pt0 A CLIQ Covering SEO, Blogging and Web 2.0. When creating your own, you’ll be presented with a number of options. These include the name of your CLIQ, Description, username, email, password, BLOG URL, and CLIQ Enrollment where you can choose whether to make your CLIQ private (invite only) or public. I have chosen to make my CLIQ private because I want to have complete control over who joins my group. Since I’ll have complete control over who joins my CLIQ, I can ensure that only relevant blog postings and URLs are displayed within my widget.

Your CLIQ Widget:

After you register your CLIQ, your given the chance to invite others via email. Unlike Quechup, your friends won’t be bombarded with invite spam since this is a manual process. Once your done with the invites, you can then give your CLIQ a public avatar image. This image will represent your CLIQ and will be seen within the CLIQ directory.

ShinySilver Bold Black GoofyGreen

At the time of this writing, CLIQ only supports three different color schemes for their widget. Those are: Shiny Silver, Bold Black, and Goofy Green. I would imagine that there will be additional color schemes available sometime in the future but I wonder, why don’t services that offer a widget give users the chance to colorize the widget themselves via CSS or HEX codes? It can’t be that hard to implement. The minimum width of the widget is 160px but will scale to fit the width of your blogs sidebar.

Once you choose your theme and move on to the next step, CLIQin will automatically try to recognize the blogging software attached to your domain and provide you with the appropriate code to copy and paste into your blogs sidebar. Here is some detailed information from the CLIQ support forums in regards to which blogging platforms are currently supported.

In order to fully support a blog platform, two things have to “work” :

1. CLIQ has to be able to ‘read in’ information about the posts (Title, Tags, etc.)

2. The CLIQ widget (which is JavaScript) has to display on the page correctly.

Currently, we fully support blogs with standard templates on TypePad, WordPress and Blogger.

Blog templates with customized fields and names for data elements require some manual set-up from our team, which we can do on a case-by-case basis.

Due to their JavaScript limitations, the CLIQ Widget does not currently work on Hosted WordPress blogs. If you’d like to see JavaScript on Hosted WordPress, contact your Senator…

We are looking into ‘slimmed down’ versions of the CLIQ Widget that would offer (likely limited) functionality on the platforms we don’t yet support…so stayed tuned!

Configuring The Widget:

There are a few options in which you can use to configure what is displayed within the widget on other blogs. You can choose to feature your most RECENT post which is updated daily. You can choose to feature your LONG TAIL which shows one of the five posts with the least total views, this also rotates daily. Or you can choose the manual option and select an article from the list of articles that are presented to you. This is a good feature if you want to pump some Google Juice into a specific page.

Configure The Widget

There are a few things that I don’t like about this widget. The first is that, it doesn’t look good if you have a skinny sidebar for widgets. The text appears cramped and at times, the content within the widget looks like a mess. The second, there is no link displayed that allows visitors to JOIN the CLIQ or at least REQUEST TO JOIN if private.

CLIQ Reports:

Since I created an account yesterday, the reports section of CLIQ is pretty bare. The reports section displays a dynamically generated graph that highlights views that were contributed through CLIQ. You can choose to view stats from your own blog, member blogs or, all blogs. The stats timetable is broken up into three sections: The Last 1 Day, Last 7 Days and Last 30 Days. Alternatively, you can select ALL VIEWS or how many times your CLIQ Page was viewed within the CLIQ Directory.

One Of The CLIQ Report Views

Conclusion:

Overall, this service reminds me of old fashioned web rings from way back when. Web rings were essentially a group of websites that were all related towards a specific topic. Maybe I’ll coin a new term here and say that CLIQ is WebRings 2.0. Unlike MyBlogLog, BlogRush, or any other community based widget I have come across, this one gives site owners full control over who is part of the group which means, you can really create a targeted CLIQ and share each other’s traffic. Because most if not all of the posts within your CLIQ will be related, there is a higher probability of someone clicking on your blog post, thereby gaining you a new visitor.

I would compare this service to BlogRush but that is for another post. If your a blogger currently using BlogRush, I strongly advise you to check this service out and create your own CLIQ. Work on inviting high traffic blogs that are related to your content and build a small niche network where everyone within your CLIQ benefits. As it stands, I currently have my own CLIQ. If your blog covers the topics of SEO, Web 2.0, Blogging or WordPress related material, your welcome to request an invite to join the group.

As always, I look forward to hearing your feedback whether it be about this review, grammatical corrections or questions.