FJ's Fitness Posts

There is no questioning the popularity and usefulness of social bookmarking sites - they provide users with quality content since top stories have to be voted while delivering hours of entertainment. Then there is the fact that you can interact and express your thoughts via comments; a feature that RSS readers lack. The ability to feel like you’re part of a community is monumental to the success of any social media site. Period.

Overall, it is a sweet combination of democratic voting mixed in with the social vibe of being in college. Everyone gets a voice, but the best will rise to the top. So technically, Healthranker should have been a huge hit… I mean on paper everything looked great. It had all the ingredients needed to be a success recipe online. But alas, it failed miserably. How come? Well there are a few reasons… and some reasons contributed to it’s failure more than others. Let’s take a look:

• It launched “quietly”. It doesn’t matter what the heck you’re planning on launching… a product, website or service. There should be no such thing as a “quiet” launch. You need to get as many partners on board as possible and then launch that shit with a big bang. The result should send shockwaves throughout your niche… enough to get people talking.
• Lacking features. If you see their current version of the site (HealthBubble), then you’ll see that it’s very basic. Not only is there a lack of user interaction, but you can’t even down vote articles that you think are useless.
• It got owned by spam. While the site started off doing things right, everything quickly turned into a mess as spammers took over. Not only did this drive away any potential visitors as all they could see is useless content but when Google got a wiff of this, they flexed their muscle and slapped them into oblivion… which brings us to the next point.
• It was left un-attended. Getting hit by spam is nothing new, millions of Wordpress blogs suffer from it, but active and persistent site owners are quick to rid their sites of such evil. Not Healthranker. The spam got overwhelming and from what is known, the site was sold off to new owners. Then Google came back and this time gave it a straight up BAN. It also doesn’t help knowing that if you need help with the site, there will be no one present to answer your questions.

All these reasons and more resulted in its demise. A shame. But where there is a failure, there is an opportunity… and because a social networking and bookmarking site in the fitness niche is needed, Fitmarker was created. With a focus on an active community, it gives every user a TRUE voice, regardless of whether or not they submitted the content or not. A few of the features you can find on Fitmarker:

• Ability to “Bump” or “Dump” articles semi-anonymously. This means that on the submitted page, no one will be able to tell who was in favor of the article and who wasn’t. Too many people refrain from down-voting articles in the fear of being called out. This won’t be a problem at Fitmarker.
• Threaded commenting with thumb-voting. Not only can you comment and reply to other comments, you can also up vote and down vote comments. Democratic voting extends to the deepest core of Fitmarker, giving every user a truly loud voice that they can express.
• Ability to submit anything related to fitness. The content delivery vehicle doesn’t matter. Blog posts, articles, pod casts, forum posts, video logs are all fair game as long as the content is relevant to the topics that are represented by the site.
• Serious spam protection. reCAPCHA, active spam black lists and highly active admis are always on hand to send spam back to the evil caves where it came from. Fitmarker also has a very nifty “killspam” feature. Come across a user that submitted 200 spam articles? No problem, with the click of a button the admin can: delete their account, all their submissions, perma-ban them and add them to an ever-growing black list.
• And many, many more! To find out the other nifty features, you need to visit Fitmarker for yourself and try it out. Here’s a small sneak peak: Users who are active will be… “rewarded”.

So not only does Fitmarker aim to provide the absolute best fitness content on the web, its a place to meet some driven individuals, discuss awesome training topics and submit content that you create for thousands to check out. It also helps that Fitmarker is backed by some solid partners and industry trail blazers. The site launches on August 1st 2010.

Come check it out, get involved and get in the best shape of your life!