Or perhaps that should be Fechr-ed? Fechr (pronounced ‘feature’ not ‘fetcher’, and definitely not ‘felcher’ which is something altogether different) is a very new site aimed at promoting your blog.

How does it work? Very simply, you write a short review about Fechr on your blog, then submit your blog to the site, and if chosen at random, your blog is featured on the Fechr homepage for a full 24 hours. As you can see, the blog of the day is simply framed by the Fechr navigation, and can be interacted with, within the navigation, despite you remaining on Fechr.com.

Fechr

What would be the point of featuring here, as well as on your own URL? Well obviously the aim of the site owner is to build a community around this site, of people who will check out the URL every day, in order to find new blogs to read. Once large enough, appearing on Fechr could be putting your blog in the ‘shop window’ for many thousands of potential readers. For now of course it’s not that large, but already several bloggers I know have been featured, and received over 100 hits from Fechr in the course of their 24 hours. As the users of Fechr will not be earning’ points or the like, just looking for new blogs, there is more chance they will actually read your content.

Furthermore, this site is the work of one Bobby Griffin (click for his latest blog), who was responsible in the past for the very successful Bestest Blog, which was a mix of blog directory/hit exchange/StumbleUpon. Although you had to pay for inclusion, the hits received from Bestest were of good quality, as the people hitting the random button were again, not earning points etc. for their own blogs, but were looking for something to read. By being included in the directory, you gave yourself a chance of appearing under the random rotation, and the more you paid, the better were your chances. I did have my Thermal blog included, for $55, and regularly received 150 hits a day just from BB. Unfortunately BB was shut down by Blogger for a while, for reasons never fully explained, which rather killed it off.

But apart from being a salutary lesson to not use a free blog host if you want to keep full control over your website, it was proof that the concept worked, and I don’t regret spending the money, although I wish it had lasted longer.

So will it work? Who knows, but I can say that it is already showing results, and Bobby has been successful before. The big question is can it hurt to try? I don’t think so, which is why I’ll be submitting this post as entry to Fechr, and if I get featured I’ll pass on the results.

For now submission to Fechr is free, subject to what is effectively a link exchange, but in the future Bobby will be looking to charge for submissions as his traffic (and therefore your potential traffic) grows. He has suggested a flat $5 fee, although there will also be a ‘Free Fechr Friday’ where a free slot will be up for grabs.

I would be interested to know what other monetization plans there are for Fechr: At $5 a submission in future, for a 24 hour rotation, it doesn’t appear to be able to make much more than $1500 a year. I don’t think it would be unfair to say that the level of paid posts to Bestest Blog was a contributory factor in it’s downfall, as they eroded a lot of the community feel around the site, so there is a danger that inappropriate monetizing could happen here – I wouldn’t want other people’s ads being associated with my blog for example.

For now though, it’s free and ad-free, so it’s worth a try, and keeping an eye on for the future.

Pros:

  • Simple submission requirements.
  • Potential for a large amount of reasonable quality traffic.
  • Excellent promotional site for new/low traffic blogs.

Cons:

  • Higher ranking/trafficked sites may be giving more than they receive.
  • Readers are not actually ‘on’ your site – although you can leave comments, I couldn’t pick up the RSS feed. There is a link to the featured blog’s URL at the top left, but I think this needs a little more prominence.
  • Whilst the name is very ‘Web 2.0′, the presentation is more like Web V1. Will the lack of polish hinder it’s potential?