Step 16 to getting to 100,000 visitors and beyond: Experiment with blog traffic exchanges.
In the early days of this blog, I experimented with three blog traffic exchange sites: Blog Explosion, Blog Advance and Blog Clicker. They each have their positives and negatives and to be honest, I haven't visited them for awhile, so they may have totally changed in the last several months, but they all work on the same principle: you review other blogs and for every two you view, they send one person to look at your blog. It's an easy way to get traffic if you have some time to kill and want to see what other blogs are out there (in a random sort of way).
If you decide to use/experiment with these sites, there are a few things you should know:
- Don't expect high quality traffic. Most of the sites that sign up for these are of low to mid level quality (yeah, I know, I was one of them), hence the people coming to your blog (the owners of the other blogs in the group) probably aren't that great either. That said, if you're good and on the ball, your blog will stand out as a star.
- Don't expect a wide number of blogs. When I used these sites, I could view them for 15 minutes or so and then started seeing the same blogs over and over again. This may have changed as more people have joined these sites since I last visited.
- There's a large percentage of "this is my life blogs" in these groups. Lots of people talking about their lives. Their boring lives. Be sure to have a can of Diet Coke handy.
- Be ready to be surprised. You'll just be sitting there, almost asleep, reading another worthless blog and BAM -- a great blog will pop out at you. Don't be surprised if you find a handful of good blogs that you add to your blogroll. In a way, finding these makes all the time spent viewing the other sites worth it.
Plan to use these sites for a time and then split. Sign up, get the traffic bonuses, view some blogs over a few days (or weeks), send all the traffic to your sites, then never go back again. By then, you'll be up and running on your own and won't have time for such a labor intensive activity.
Click here to read part 17 of this post.
Free Money Finance recommends: Emigrant Direct and You Need A Budget.
Don't you think this type of traffic generation might hurt you in the future with SERPs?
Posted by: John Koontz | January 28, 2006 at 05:21 PM
It didn't seem to. However, I only did it for a short period of time and haven't used these sites in quite a while.
Posted by: FMF | January 28, 2006 at 07:07 PM
I used to surf these quite a bit and the effort is much better placed in adding content to the blog. The real trick to getting these to work for you is to get referrals -- then you get page views without doing anything if your referrals surf. Are those links in the post your referral links? If not, I can give you mine to put there :) Just kidding.
Blog Explosion is probably the best of the three -- it offers more varied ways to look at the blogs, and some of them encourage you to read them more than the others do.
What you say about the quality of the traffic is very true. It is possible to get a decent traffic base from these (I haven't), but you're surfing hours a day for months to get the 10-20k visitors a month, and only a very small fraction of them will stop to look at your site.
Posted by: mbhunter | January 29, 2006 at 10:56 PM
No, they are not affiliate links. And thanks for the "offer". ;-)
Posted by: FMF | January 30, 2006 at 07:16 AM
Hello I am in investigative reporter and I wish to have your views on the possibility or probability of earning while blogging.
My email is bugsey1@gmail.com and my blogsite is http://www.blogsite.com/bugsey. I wish that you can give your comments to the questions there?
Thanks and be blessed. You have such a great blog!
Posted by: bugsey | March 20, 2006 at 09:08 AM
I've noticed on my stats that most of the readers that stay for more than a couple of minutes are from technorati, yahoo, or other blogs linked to me. Yes I get tons of hits from different traffic exchange programs, but the best quality traffic is from those 3 things above.
Posted by: John | July 15, 2006 at 04:51 AM
Great Blog.. I am trying your suggestion... hope to get some traffic
Posted by: trixstr | August 30, 2006 at 02:37 AM
I have two blogs, one that I stared a few years ago and one that I just started last week. Last year I was using traffic exchanges a lot and I did get some readers out of it, but I was surprised from time to time when I would post something controversial or a general question, people from blogs that I had seen while surfing that I wouldn't have expected to be reading my blog (mommy blogs, right wing political blogs, food blogs) would comment.
That said, I just launched my new blog and I have to say that the traffic exchanges haven't really been delivering much traffic to my site at all. Take that and do with it as you will.
Posted by: RockStar Machine | July 19, 2007 at 06:15 AM
My site had been waiting for "admin approval" with Blog Explosion for over 3 months. They never responded to my "ticket" I created. There is no way to get a hold of them for real apparently. Well, they're down now anyway. Good riddance.
Posted by: rjjrdq | February 01, 2009 at 05:09 AM
Blog Explosion is back up and it didn't take more then a day to have both of my blogs reviewed and approved. I don't think I'm getting the traffic I'd prefer, however I have noticed I'm the only one in my niche on the exchanges so Hopefully that helps.
Posted by: g1eagle | May 14, 2009 at 12:31 PM
oh dear! makes me nervous... what to do, my blog is only 6 days old, and I joined blog clicker yesterday, I guess could try a few exchanges for a few days, then leave them alone and concentrate more on getting more content onto my blog instead - have only 10 posts so far for people to comment on, but at least quite a wide variety of subjects - hope that helps!
Posted by: Terry | July 07, 2009 at 05:23 PM