Their site is now live - Best of luck guys. A quick search of links shows none incoming, even the one from this blog, so it must not be an accurate count. No meta data on the incoming page… they could at least throw a description and some keywords in there.

You know what… I’m going to turn these Blastspot updates into an ongoing thing. It will be interesting watching a very Web 2.0 site try and make it. From birth to success? Or from birth to death? They have a great looking site… its time to market it heavily.

Current searches per day according to Wordtracker:
Myspace 207,003
Facebook 20,167
Blackboard 359
Blastspot 0

If I was promoting Blastspot, I would first start a flyer campaign around college campuses that would have a contest involved. I used flyers to find content writers and it worked really well. They should create a flyer with their orange logo with tabs along the sides or bottoms. Yes, sides. I had to go to campus today and was seeing how some flyers I put up a week ago were doing and saw the side tab design that was very eye-catching and unique. Okay, so why should people sign up for Blastspot? Is it because because they have a cool logo - nope, its not that easy. There needs to be an incentive for people to take action (in this case become a member), there is no compelling content that is being offered or an awesome deal. In this case a contest is needed, and what for the prize (lets say a $1000 budget)?

1.
Cash
$500 - 1st Prize
$300 - 2nd Prize
$100 - 3rd Prize
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I never know what I will run into when I go out on the weekends, but this past weekend I ran into a real life example of some good offline marketing for an online enterprise. I walked into a bar and there were about 8 guys wearing matching orange T-shirts with black text. I struck up a conversation with them they were out promoting a social networking site called Blastspot. The guy I talked at first was an investor. He had a card with the sites name on it that he handed me, and we talked for a while about the business. Its going to be a social networking site that is a combination of Blackboard and Facebook… which actually sounds like a pretty cool idea. It’s premiering here in Chapel Hill and in San Diego on Tuesday (I think that’s what he said). I missed blackboard by a year or so when I was in college, but from the limited experience I have with it seemed like it could use a lot of improvement. The idea of combining that with a social networking site is an innovative idea that if it catches on could be big business. I talked to the owner for a second and he was a fellow UNC grad.. by the name of Travis I think…. Pretty cool guy, and it looked like he had a lot of friends helping him spread the word.
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