RSSHugger goes viral

If you have not heard their is a new feed aggregator on the net. RSShugger is an application that allows bloggers to reach out to readers in a new way. The site allows bloggers to submit their RSS feed to the site and depending upon the traffic it receives is ranked accordingly.

Originally Collin LaHay created this site to earn enough money to pay off college bills and he charged $10 dollars per submission. While this is not much money, it may be out of the reach of some bloggers, especially the ones who really only blog for fun and not for profit.

At the request of various bloggers including John Chow, Collin has decided to remove the $10 barrier to entry. I personally think this is a good move for Collin. It’s really hard to convince someone of a specific directory site’s effectiveness anyway and one that is brand new such as RSSHugger is not yet proven. Collin now only requires a blog post review of the site to be included in the application. This action should help Collin grow the site a lot faster than he would have been able to do with the entry fee. I’m sure there will be a lot of blog posts around the web about this now and will create a viral effect for the site and there should be a lot of new blogs added to RSSHugger over the next few days and weeks. Hopefully it will take off for Collin.

I have not looked at the application much, but I do see some areas where it could probably be improved upon.

1. Currently when a blog is listed it only shows the titles of the latest blog posts and none of the summary. While this will force the visitor to visit the blog to read the story. It may be more effective for a lot of bloggers if there was a short summary. I know I would be more apt to click on a link and follow it if I had more information on the post other than the title.

2. There does not seem to be any method for various blog posts to be highlighted. There is a top blogs category and newest blogs category, but that it pretty much it. This is going to make it hard for people to get a lot of traffic. It would be better if there was some sort of social type interaction available where people could vote for their favorite blogs and have this information displayed to other readers.

3. There also does not seem to be any method for a reader to save their favorite blogs. Seems to me this is not going to be useful for the readers unless they can find the information they are looking for easily. Right now the site could be compared to a StumbleUpon for RSS feeds, where you are not sure what you may get with the Random Blog feature.

RSSHugger is an interesting idea and I want my feed to be listed, but I’m not sure its going to be successful long term. Of course this is still in beta and there may be other features planned that I’m not aware of.

No matter whether it really takes off or not, this shows the power of taking action. Collin saw a need for bloggers, listened to the feedback he was getting and created something that may fill a need. That is where a lot people fail on the Internet in trying to make money. You got to have an idea and actually do something about it if you are ever going to be successful at earning a living on the net.