DealDotFree

We took the weekend of to think things through some more. After a trial run with a few product comparisons, we realised that there is a much better way of bringing people free alternatives to commercial products (whether they are shown off at DDC or not). Instead of us doing all the research and writing from scratch ourselves, we are going to let others submit content, containing their free alternatives.

This will not be a free for all; it will be setup to help us gather content, which we will then edit to put together quality articles for publication. Let me explain how it will work:

1.) A list of DDC products will be displayed on our submit page, so people know what we have yet to write about. Users who have developed / offer free alternatives can then login and write a small excerpt about it. It should contain a description of the free product, a link to it, and a short explanation of why it is a good alternative to the commercial product.

2.) We will then cross-reference the post against the list of outstanding DDC products. If a match is found, the post will be saved, so that we can later review it, and edit it into a finished article. If a match is not found, the user will be told the post cannot be saved because a relevant match has not been found.

3.) We will then review all posts relating to a particular product, and use any content we feel is relevant and worthwhile in a published article. Users will be notified as to whether their content made it into the article or not.

Once we have built up some momentum, this should become an efficient way of building comparison articles between free and commercial products. We will retain all editing rights, so there is no danger of the site just becoming an article directory. Only 1 article will be published per product looked at, and no submitted articles will be used “as is”.

I came home today, and went to see what the folks over at DDC were promoting today. To my surprise, the whole site is returning a 403 (forbidden access) error. For a minute, I started to wonder if I’d been bloacked (yeh, crazy huh), but after checking with a couple of other people, it appears that the error is universal.

What’s going on - I don’t know. Most likely just a temporary glitch or coding error, but it did also cross my mind as to whether the site could have been hacked, or even whether the server load got too much for them to handle?

If you know the answer, do let us know!

UPDATE: site seems to be back up now, so I guess it was a temporary maintenance / server load blip 

DDF stands for DealDotFree, and if you have been around blogging or internet marketing circles lately, you probably know where the name came from. DealDotCom (DDC) was launched a couple of weeks ago, with a lot of hype surrounding it.

To be honest, we weren’t that impressed with what they had to offer. Why spend your money on digital products, when with a bit of research you could get something similar (and in some cases even superior) to these deals?

Whilst we don’t want to exclusively focus on DDC and its offerings, that will be our initial focal point, as we look to suggest and compare some free alternatives. We may also branch out to talk about some other great free deals we’ve found, or have been suggested to us.

Oh yeh, that’s right, we’d also love for our readers to help out with the research, by submitting any quality free products they find to us, so that we can write about them. If you’re really interested, you could also join our writing and research team!

It’s quite a simple idea as you can see, and our motto is simple too:

Who says good things can’t be free!