rssHugger Wants to Share a Little Love
written by John Chow
Your RSS Needs a Hug
rssHugger is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that the readers are interested in. Through the power of the internet, viral marketing and this ReviewMe review, rssHugger looks to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together. If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for only $20. If you make a blog post about rssHugger, you can get the page for $10. The website is been dubbed “the Technorati without the spam.” rssHugger says the $10-20 allows manually reviewing to ensure that all blogs are quality listings.
The Main Hugger of the RSS
The site is the brainchild of Collin LaHay, an experienced entrepreneur, search engine optimizer, and internet marketer looking to expand his portfolio. Collin hopes to get 50,000 blogs signed up to rssHugger. If he reaches that goal, he will have all of college paid for, be able to invest in new business ventures, sponsor other like-minded people and continue his support of Kiva, a non profit that support entrepreneurs in developing countries.
Inspired by John Chow and Shoemoney
rssHugger was inspired by my RSS competition with Shoemoney.
I came up with this unique idea while reading about Shoemoney.com’s $13,000 RSS contest for October, in which he was competing with JohnChow.com on who of the two had more new rss subscribers for their blog in a month.
The competition between myself and shoe did a great job increasing our RSS counts. rssHugger hopes to increase the count of every hugger members.
How Does This Really Work?
From what I can tell, rssHugger is nothing more than a web directory of RSS feeds. For your $20 ($10 if you blog about it) you get to have your blog RSS feed show up on its own rssHugger page. This is my rssHugger page.
The most viewed feeds show up in the Top 100 RSS Feed. There are only 16 feeds at the time of this review and my feed is in last place. However, I expect that to change real soon. Another way for rssHugger to give your feed more exposure is the Random Blog tab. Clicking on it brings up a random feed. New feeds are featured on the home page and a New RSS Feeds page.
Is This The Right Business Model?
The question many would have at this point is why would you pay to list your RSS feed on rssHugger when you can get listed it for free at a site like Technorati or Facebook and get a ton more exposure? The Facebook Blogfriends app is one of the best RSS promotion tools around. Competitors offering free listing may explain why Collin priced rssHugger as low as he did. The price spread over 10 years works out to only $1 to $2 per year. Chances are most of the users will opt for the $10 option. However, I can’t help but feel that rssHugger is using the wrong business model.
Instead of charging $10 plus a blog post, rssHugger should consider giving the listing for a blog post only. The site would get a ton more sign ups and become viral very quickly because of all the bloggers blogging about it. The site can then be monetized with advertising. Charging any amount of money for a listing creates a huge barrier of resistance that will make it very hard for the site to get viral.
$10 was low enough for me to pay for the listing but the main reason I bought it was research for this review. Were it not for that, I doubt I would have paid for it. The site doesn’t have enough members or traffic to justify the price no matter how low it is. If the site gets very big, then I can see people paying for it. However, when you’re new and you have to compete against much bigger players that will list your RSS for free, you’re fighting an uphill battle.
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(11 votes, average: 3.09 out of 5)
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(I just replied to this so it is near the top):
Due to the overwhelming comments and contributions, I am going to be revamping the business model (much like john recommended), as well as adding a few things I had planned so that everyone with a quality blog has a shot and listing their blog.
*IF YOU WANT TO BE LISTED IN RSSHUGGER, PLEASE REGISTER ON THE SITE AND MAKE A BLOG POST* - After that, email me [See the mixedmarketarts.com contact page for my email], and I will add your blog for free manually. Otherwise, you can wait a few days until I have the website reprogrammed to support the new business model and changes*
For those who have already purchased the $10 package, email me your blog post review about rssHugger, and your paypal payment ID, and I will refund you right away.
Thanks everyone for your opinions, and I hope with the new changes we can make a quality central server for promoting and finding quality blogs. If you have any more recommendations, I would love to hear them.
yay.. lol. I’m glad you changed your mind and decided to make changes john + others had suggested. It was a good move.
It’s great that you’re not thick headed.
You took good advice and are using it to your full advantage.
Keep it up!
IN RESPONSE TO THE COMMENT ABOVE, IT WAS OLD.
The site is now 100% automated. Please sign up to add your blog!
Thanks
Thanks for the review John! To debate a few questions/arguments asked, I just want to followup saying that if it were free, less benefit would be shared with those that visit it, as all of the spam/trackback plogs would sign up. rssHugger aims to be a quality resource for bloggers who write and care about their blog, while leaving the spam/free/ugly ones out. I know I am leaving out a portion of the bloggers out there by charging $1-2 per year, but I feel that this will ensure the site is of the highest quality.
Also, the “top 100″ page resets on the 1st of every month giving everyone an equal opportunity to gain additional promotion.
But it seems to be old wine in new bottle…the same concept…nothing innovative…
@John, Probably the 10 dollars wouldn’t matter to you, as it is a small amout to adjust against this review, isn’t it?
it should be free. you dont make a good argument for it not being free. in johns review he says that the fee helps with filtering out the bad blog feeds. why dont you just make it a manual review process, therefore keeping out all the crappy feeds.
then once you get huge, with more traffic you can charge for “special” listings. this wont get too popular, the only chance for that is if you make it free.
or do something like the first or next X amount of feeds are free.
Yeah! It is a good service for new blogger like me! I am searching way to increase the traffic to my site. Hopi it can help me.
dunno, gonna check it out.
Yeah you said it first, and Ill say it again…..it’s basically like a technorati page, but not free and not on an authority domain.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I know you are entitled to your opinion, which I will respect, but Technorati has over 110,000,000 blogs listed, and they certainly do not benefit the majority (~99.5% if not more) of the blogs. The top 5% receive 95% of the publicity. My ‘end game goal’ is entirely the opposite of Technorati, by allowing readers to find the quality blogs (in that other 99.5%).
Most bloggers who have quality sites can afford to spend $1 per year to help promote their brand… but I suppose only time will tell. I for one, am in no hurry.
Never heard of this, but his model is ok, he gets differentiation imo.
I dont know if I see the benefit of it. well not yet. I think if there were more blogs on their I would consider it.
If you join now, you will be surrounded by some great blogs but if you join when more blogs are already in it, you might not get that much traffic as now.
I guess John Chow’s review sent that much many traffic.
I think it takes time to grow, let me just wish you luck on this collin.
I think everything needs time to grow. =)
Thanks for the good luck.
Where’s the categories?
Similar to a site of mine I started and sold a while back http://www.rssmad.com
http://www.rsshugger.com/search
John I think your WPAffiliatePro has a few bugs to work out. It is overriding full words rather than just “RSS”. (see above post). Just a heads up.
Just signed up! Thanks for the tip!
Hmmm… so like a blogging yellow pages? Hmmmm….
I would just like to note that while I didn’t write this ReviewMe (gasp, John writing his own reviews!), I can take credit for the title because John asked me for one before this post went live.
Update!
I just made it into the final 8 this month competing for $10,000 for the best business idea of the month with IdeaBlob. I need the most votes to win. The $10k will go towards marketing, contests, and other promotion.
http://ideablob.com/
Sign up (If you haven’t before) and vote for my idea.
(Bottom right on homepage) - “Find and Promote Great Blogs.”
I like rssHugger. Colin’s projects are very good web applications. For example his wordhugger.com is 100 times better than installaing a mediawiki software and selling pages.
rssHugger should provide a tagging feature so that blogs can be tagged and searched.
I can see the site providing values to the site visitors (not advertisers) which the paid wikis never did.
I like the tag feature. Great idea.
Yeah, good luck Collin.
I first heard about you with Wordhugger but I’m kind of paid wiki’ed out.
I hope you get your college money as you’re really working hard for it.
I don’t really agree with you about his pricing for this service John. Just because your product is new doesn’t mean it isn’t worth something. Sure you want to get as many people as possible using it as fast as possible…but I think giving something away for free and then later charging for it is only going to piss off the people that get penalized for not being in it early enough. Can you imagine if Apple decided they would give away a few thousand iPods for free and then start charging more once they became popular? Customers would have revolted.
What will make this successful is the efforts in place for marketing and exposure. I’m sure the ReviewMe review is helping make some people aware and in time we will probably see rss hugger succeed through sheer tenacity in the market. but that’s just my .02
I quite agree with your views. For ten or twenty dollars, we get to see how this project develops and what tools he will use to sprint after start.
Nice way to make some quick cash. First it was milliondollarwiki, then millioneurowiki, onebuckwiki, now rsshugger. The domains just keep coming…nice idea though
This makes me guessing what will be next? RSS Feed has already been attacked. First, pay $ to increase the number of your subscribers and now this RSSHugger pops up.
What will be the next?
Too many of these sites popping up to make a quick buck, but it seems like rssHugger is something new. I would give it a try if it didn’t actually cost money.
-Mike
There are too many huggers on the planet of www
As hard as i try to register my feed i keep getting asked to create an account … although i have one.
i have read how to make money on line i have tried to subscribe to some leads and affiliates but i have not been able to succeed i am from nigeria i have develop my site since june 2007 but i have not been able to optimize fully all benefits as an internet publisher, any way john chow you are a mentor i appreciate and like to be like and even surpass in achievement.
Looks like the system is a bit ‘buggy’ at best. I’ll try again another time.
rssHugger looks pretty interesting… Not entirely sure if it’s for me. It might be worth keeping an eye on for the future, though.
Regards,
Steve
[...] is apparently the answer, according to guys like John Chow. We’ll get to why in a [...]
Another blog directory is one thing but charging $20 is a different story. The site is a carbon copy of his other site wordhugger and thats just a wiki type site where you pay for a page eg. one million wiki.
He claims he wants 50,000 listings
50,000 x $20 = $1,000,000
oh look, it is a one million wiki type site!
In all serious, i think the site has a nice design but I wouldnt recommend anyone to pay $20 for a listing as there are hundreds of other blog directories out there with more traffic and their listings are free
Another way of looking at it is why not? At $10, I have little to loose and a lot to gain. Particularly with all the background information that you have given, it is worth spending this small sum and I shall do so and see what happens.
It makes me think I should put up another site of this kind because some people will always pay even if my site have no traffic!!!
I agree with Kevin Muldoon I would pay $1 for this service. Anyway is a great design and promoted by big bloggers.
Interesting concept. The RSS business is in full flow. Nice Logo too. Very snazzy.
I’m not fond of the idea of paying a fee to list my RSS feed, when there are hundreds of sites that will do it for free.
agreed, has anyone told you that your avatar looks like the miller lite beer leagues commissioner? (the doc from scrubs)
Hmm, can’t quite put a picture to that name. Find one and show me. lol
Ha I’m sure enough people will pay eventually. It might not be huge but any income is good!
yh, but it’s a matter of a few hundred dollars or a few thousand. one simple change can do that.
I can understand why everyone makes these sites now since it’s almost easy money
Just a couple reviewme posts and some HTML programming, then it’s a $1 million potential website 
Isn’t what we’re all trying to do?