Blogging, traffic and reasons
One of the writing forums I frequent also has a forum on blogging. Somebody mentioned BlogExplosion and BlogMad there recently as a means of increasing your blog traffic. Now I don’t particularly care about traffic to my blogs but I do like technology and so I decided to sign up for both and see how they work 🙂
They both work pretty much about the same. You sign up for free, create a profile, add your blog(s) to your profile and then you start earning credits by browsing the blogs of other members of the service. For each credit you earn, you get a visit sent your way by BlogMad or BlogExplosion. The differences between the two services are minimal. In fact, the only real difference that I see is that BlogExplosion gives you half a credit for visiting a member site but takes away a credit when a member visits your site. BlogMad on the other hand keeps it at a 1:1 ratio.
So how do they ensure that a member actually visits your site and stays long enough to read anything? :p That’s the tricky part. What both services do is to have little navigation bar at the bottom or top of the browser window while you visit member sites. Each time you go to a new member site, the navigation bar starts a little counter. You have to wait till the counter goes down to zero and then select a displayed number from a list of numbers to signify that you are actually doing the browsing instead of having a robot (or a macro) do it for you :p Of course, this still does not mean that the person actually reads the site.
And that’s the problem with both the services. I signed up yesterday and had 80 visitors from BlogMad (they give you some credits to start off with :p) and about 20 visitors from BlogExplosion but I’m not sure that any of them actually read my site. Or maybe I was just too boring for them to comment on :p Either way, I guess the issue is that there a lot of people out there who just want the traffic and aren’t interested in doing any real work to get it. So not sure that BlogMad or BlogExplosion works in the spirit they are intended to be used in …. Of course, that’s just my opinion 🙂