Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

I run a number of blogs these days:

Jim Lynch (my writing clips repository)
Off the Top of My Head (this blog)
Free New Hampshire (life in the Live Free or Die state)
The iPhone 3G Free Software Reviews Blog (free software for the iPhone 3G)

My traffic is modest right now partly because two of my blogs were recently moved from blogger and because one of them (this blog) just got pulled out of mothballs (it was offline for about 3 years). So Google hasn’t quite caught up in terms of indexing my sites and routing the appropriate traffic to them.

So I’ve been looking for ways I can increase page views given the current traffic I’m getting. Well one day I was over at the Mac Daily News site and noticed they had some additional content at the bottom of their pages. I checked it out and noticed the little Pluck On Demand graphic at the bottom right. So I clicked it and found the Pluck On Demand site.

What the heck is Pluck On Demand? Here’s a blurb from their site:

Pluck On Demand uses simple widgets to present your visitors with related articles, videos, and blog posts from leading sources. When a user clicks on a related headline link, a new page is generated within your own site where the full article, post, or video can be viewed.

Pluck On Demand also activates a vibrant new community on your site, allowing user comments, recommendations, profiles and more.

Content and social media widgets are pre-packaged with display and video advertising, which earn you revenue.

After seeing the MDN site, I knew I had to put Pluck on my blogs. So I signed up. Initially I only had it on the iPhone 3G Free Software Reviews Blog. But with the assistance of one of the folks at Pluck, I was able to get it on all four of my blog sites.

So what do I like about Pluck? Quite a lot actually.

Please note before reading any further that I have not been paid or otherwise compensated to write this column by anybody at Pluck On Demand. These are my thoughts and I’m not getting anything financially from anybody to write them. Just wanted to state that before somebody accuses me of being a paid shill or something. For additional thoughts about Pluck On Demand, see this analysis in an article over at Plagiarism Today.

Here are the ten reasons why I love Pluck On Demand:

10. Easy To Install
Once you go through the steps on the Pluck On Demand site, it’s very easy to add Pluck to your site. First I created a blank page for the Pluck full page articles to appear on then I just pasted in the code into my blog’s theme and voila! Done. I had Pluck running on my blogs.

If you can copy and paste, you can easily add Pluck to your site.

9. Blends In With My Site’s Design
I’m no great site designer as you can tell if you visit my sites. I’m using free WordPress themes that are pretty much bare bones and very basic. They aren’t the prettiest things on the web but they get the job done.

And Pluck matches in very nicely with them. The Pluck content pretty much looks like it’s a part of my site not some kind of foreign element that doesn’t belong there. I was very surprised at how nicely it blended into my blogs.

8. Provides Additional Contextual Content
One of the challenges for small sites that are just starting out is to have enough content to give their readers. Writing content takes time and you can only do so much at a time. Gradually, over time, you can build a nice library of content but it doesn’t happen quickly.

Pluck solves this problem to a certain extent by essentially handing you a load of additional content without you having to write any of it. When a reader finishes reading an existing article at your site they will see a number of articles from the Pluck network. And since these articles are contextually related to your existing article, readers are getting extra value from visiting your site.

Now don’t get me wrong. Pluck isn’t perfect and sometimes the articles provides are only marginally related to the content in your article. But it’s close enough most of the time (and is actually quite good a lot of the time) that it adds extra value to your own content.

7. Pluck Ads Don’t Interfere With My Ads
One of the nice things about the content Pluck provides is that it comes with ads. When you sign up you can customize ad choices a bit. And what’s really nice about it is that the Pluck ads don’t interfere with your own ads.

If you look at a Pluck article on this site, you’ll see a 300 x 250 ad in it and some Google ads at the bottom of the page. But you’ll also see my banner ad at the top and also another of my ad’s in the sidebar.

So you don’t lose much in the way of ad space by using Pluck if you set up your ads right on your site.

6. A Wide Range of Content
Pluck seems to pull a pretty wide range of content from different sources. Here’s the blurb from their site about it:

Pluck On Demand displays articles, blogs, and videos from a selection of leading sources. As of now, these include eHow, Expert Village, Answerbag, Mania, and BlogBurst (which includes millions of posts from leading blogs). We expect to be adding many more high-quality content sources soon.

So far I’ve been mostly pleased with the content appearing on my site. I do think though that the Pluck On Demand folks need to rely less on Blogburst and start to view Pluck On Demand has more of a content sharing system.

For example, when a person signs up for Pluck they should be offered the opportunity to have their content appear on the Pluck network without having to sign up for Blogburst. I personally do not care to be part of Blogburst because I get no significant financial payback. Links on sites are not enough.

I would not mind some of my site’s content appearing elsewhere in the Pluck network though if there was a decent revenue sharing arrangement available. Pluck On Demand almost has it right but they could expand their content offerings significantly by having a content sharing option as part of the Pluck On Demand sign up.

Go to Page 2 of the Ten Reasons Why I Love Pluck On Demand

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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