Today Im doing a review of a new Word Press plugin called WP Blog Rocket

Blog Rocket is a plugin that comes with a lot of hype and a lot of promises. The vendors claim that its going to do some really incredible stuff. In fact here are a couple of the things they claim:

Now I will tell you from the door that the claim of “only ever available to the biggest sites” is total nonsense. What Blog Rocket does is nothing really new. When doing research for this article I have found plugins (both free and paid) from as far back as 6 years ago that do, at its core, just what Blog Rocket does. As for the other claims I’ll talk about them in a bit, first I want to explain exactly what it is that Blog Rocket does.

Ok so at its core, in it’s simplest terms Blog Rocket is a tool that allows you to split test your post titles. After installing the plugin it adds some additional buttons to your post / page editor in your WordPress site. Then instead of entering a post title that you write, you simply enter the subject of your post, press a button and Blog Rocket will generate a title for you at random, or you can select one from a drop down menu.

The titles that you get from this software ar pre-written fill in the blanks. Sometimes the title you get will match the content of your article well, however most of the time you will have to edit it at least a little bit.

Now just suggesting titles is not all this does. The main functionality is the split testing. After you enter a few titles Blog Rocket will then rotate through the titles to see which one gets the most engagement. It will track the stats of each title, seeing which one people are viewing and clicking on most often and then after a preset amount of time it will ‘lock in’ the title that gets the best engagement.

Sounds great right? Will when you think about it, not really. let me explain.

The first thing I want to point out is that Google does not crawl your site every day. For a very popular site it might crawl it once a day or once every two days. For a less popular site it might crawl it every couple of days. Also when Google crawls your site it caches what it sees for its results page. The same thing goes for the major social networks. When someone shares your site the sites info (including the title) is cached.

What this means is that your title is not going to rotate on Google, or on the search engines. Well to be fair it might on Google, though very slowly (changing once every few days). But it wont on for social shares. In essence, from a functional standpoint its really only going to change for your site visitors.  On most blogs, when people come to your site, they see a summery of your posts, or if they are reading a post they see some links to your other posts. This is where the majority of the title rotation and split testing is going to happen.

Now on a very popular blog, which already gets a lot of traffic and which already ranks high in the search engine results split testing a title might make sense. It will help webmasters see if the title is engaging people and getting them to click on their other posts and stay on their site. However for a totally new blog, or one that does not get much traffic already, its going to be much less valuable.  Think about it. What good is an engaging title if you cant rank your posts on Google? What good is rotating your title, if no one is coming to your site and seeing the title anyway?

The sales page for this product has some great income ‘proof’ showing how Sean’s coaching students have been using this plugin with great results.

Now honestly, things like this never really impress me to much. Anyone can make a screenshot graphic, so I asked Sean on Facebook if he would link me to one of his students sites that are using this.

Sean declined saying that he has a NDA (non disclosure agreement) with his students that prevents him from speaking in public about any aspect of their business.

Now I thought it was very strange that he could put his students web stats on his sales page (which is a private thing) but cant give me a link to his students website which is not a secret. I mean websites are not private or secret business info. They are public things and obviously his students want people to their site. So why is giving out a URL against the NDA but showing web stats is not? But I don’t know Seans agreement or his relationship with his students so I can, grudgingly, accept that he is just unable to give me the link. So instead I asked him to send me a link to some of his own blogs where he uses this plugin.

I asked him for links to one of his own blogs that uses this because I have seen interviews that he did with other marketers where he says he originally created Blog Rocket for his own team and for his own sites. I actually asked him twice, and while I know he has seen this message on the Facebook chat, at the time of this writing he has not answered the request for a link to one of his own blogs that uses this plugin.

When you first install and activate your Blog Rocket plugin you are shown a settings page.

The first thing I noticed about this plugin is that the is no help or tutorials built into the plugin. Now there is a members area where you can download the plugin and this members area has very well made tutorials as well as a support link but there is nothing built into the plugin itself. I could never understand why vendors of IM WordPress plugins refuse to put assistance in the plugin and instead insist on hiding it behind a members area. Its not like tutorial videos are some secret that need to be hidden. Really doing it this way is just a inconvenience for the end user in my opinion.

I also noticed that the plugin does not seem to be coded very well. I found a couple of issues that are likely the result of the plugin developers taking short cuts in the coding and not following standard accepted practices.

The first example of this can be seen in the screenshot above. Notice that there is a slider and an input field to enter the number of days for the campaign. The slider works well however the input field lacks basic sanitization.  This is a standard coding practice that insures that only the correct type of input is entered or accepted. For example you can enter letters in the input field that is expecting numbers, and you can save the settings with letters entered. Now this might seem like a petty thing, you might say, well just don’t enter letters, and while that would work, to me as a developer the lack of sanitization, which is a standard thing, shows me that the developers took shortcuts in the coding.

Another example of this is in the post titles themselves:

Notice how there are backslashes before any single quotes in the post titles. As a developer I know what is happening here. Its standard practice to ‘escape’ single quotes in any text that is saved to a MYSQL database. This is because single quotes have special meaning in both PHP and MYSQL. WordPress does this automatically for a lot of the text in your sites database, ‘escaping’ the quotes by adding a backslash right before them. Now normally you don’t want these backslashes, so what you do as a developer is use the built in PHP stripslashes() function to remove the single quotes after reading the text from the database and before displaying it. However the developers of this plugin seem to have failed to do this. Again a very basic mistake caused by poor coding.

I thought that perhaps this might have been happening because of an error with my theme so I did a lot of testing and each time the single quotes only fail to escape when the plugin is activated. Also looking at the plugins reporting I can actually see this same issue inside of there as well.

On the subject of reporting I also noticed that this seems to be a bit inaccurate. For example one of the reporting pages shows that one of the blog titles has never had a view even though I know for sure that it has, and even though the other reporting pages indicate that it has.

Ok so what do I think of WP Blog Rocket over all?

Well first off I want to say that I do think having a engaging title can be a good thing. However I don’t for one moment think that anyone is going to use this plugin and that magically get thousands of new site visitors. As I said Google and the social networks tend to cache your posts information, so its not like its going to rotate in Google or in Facebook. In reality this is just split testing and by definition split testing requires traffic in the first place (or else there is no one to test with).

If you have a lot of traffic already or if you can already rank in the search engines you might consider testing different titles. It cant hurt after all. However I don’t accept the implication that people are going to get this plugin, put it on a new, or low raking website, and suddenly get a ton of traffic. I don’t believe that for one second.

While there may be some value in the prewritten titles that are included with this plugin. Really they are just fill in the blank text that will likely often not match what your posting about and require editing to make sense anyway.

This plugin seems to be poorly written and full of a lot of hype intended to make you think that its going to magically solve all of your traffic problems. While I don’t hate it, and I think it might be ok for people who have traffic already and want to test different titles, this really is nothing new and there are other (free) solutions that basically do the same thing as this does. After giving it some thought I just don’t feel comfortable recommending people invest in this. I honestly believe that people are going to find its big on promises and low on delivery.

Want to see how I rate products I review? Click the link below for a detailed description:

http://brettrutecky.com/how-i-rate-products-i-review/

 A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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