New Products and Where We're Heading

I am happy to announce that we now have two products - Zoundry Blog Writer and Blog Writer Lite. We are tying the regular Blog Writer closer to our service and have targeted it to people who want to share product recommendations in their weblog. The Lite version is a simple posting editor for our users who have only one weblog and are not interested in earning rewards from product recommendations.

Among the new features in our Blog Writer are:

• Template-based preview - a very cool feature. Now you can preview your post in your blog's template.
• Multiple image drag-and-drop
• HTML cleanup at posting

We have also expanded our Zoundry Service with initial support for new merchants including Buy.com, iTunes Music Store, and TigerDirect. Now you can convert product page URLs from these merchants into Zoundry product links. Simply copy and paste (or drag and drop) the product URL from the merchant's site into the Blog Writer, right click and select Convert (Merchant) Link into a Product Link. Now our users have a wider selection of products and songs to recommend to friends and family.

I also want to share a bit about where we are heading. Our near-term focus will be to expand our service by adding more merchants and integrating their product catalogs into our Zoundry Product Chooser search engine. Our goal is to offer a simple one-stop source for finding products and placing affiliate links in your weblog.

Another priority is to help drive more traffic to our users' blogs. As I wrote earlier, adding Technorati tags will help our users get in front of all the users who use Technorati for searching. In addition, we have just started a Zoundry Reviews portal where our users can submit their reviews. We see it growing into a destination site for people to research products, especially niche items out on the Long Tail. When users find an interesting product at our portal, they can click through to the originating blog and purchase to reward the writer.

I'll continue to write about our plans as we go forward. We have lots of great ideas, and we're getting excellent suggestions from our users. Stay tuned - you'll always get our latest news first here at the Zoundry Blog.