owenkellett.info

This site being only about a month old, I’ve been recently trying to make it more visible in the “blogosphere” so to speak and attract more visitors. Yesterday I came across the concept of traffic exchange programs and thought I’d share my so far brief experience with them. For those who are unaware, traffic exchange programs are designed to do just what they describe: exchange traffic. Most of them, however, require that all member sites are blogs or something that closely resembles a blog. For example, one program that I have signed up for is called BlogExplosion. Members sign up and register their own blog sites so that they can start receiving traffic. However, in order to receive traffic, you must earn “credits” by visiting other members’ blog sites for a minimum amount of time (usually around 20 or 30 seconds). You can also earn additional credits by referring other people to join the program. Also, most of the exchange programs offer some type of credit earning games and lotteries where you can randomly win more credits while surfing people’s blogs (I have already won several bonus credits from BlogExplosion alone).

Now, at first glance, this appears to be nothing more than some twisted pyramid scheme. To be honest I was very skeptical at first and in some ways, perhaps, I still am. However, I figured it was worth a shot to sign up for a few of these programs, and here are a few things that I’ve noticed:

• First, all of the programs do actually work exactly as described. I spent quite some time surfing other people’s blogs through these exchange programs yesterday and I received over 100 unique visitors yesterday alone. That’s 10 times my normal daily traffic.
• Surfing other people’s blogs through these programs is actually interesting and addicting. While many of the blogs that you come across you end up clicking through after the 20 or 30 second limit, there are also many interesting blogs out there worth reading. You come across them often enough while browsing through these exchanges that you just tend to keep surfing. I’ve always been somewhat drawn to read other people’s blogs and personal sites because it brings a very broad and fresh perspective on many issues and news. Surfing through these programs is actually a great way to increase your exposure and sometimes you even come across real a gem of a blog that you’d like to add to your regular visits.
• The traffic that you generate from these programs is largely untargeted, and therefore most of the people end up just clicking through. However, some of the larger exchange programs are able to offer targeted blog surfing according to categories, and even with the untargeted population, you are bound to get some interested visitors here and there that you wouldn’t otherwise get. Just yesterday I started getting comments from random visitors which I think is great.

In an ironic twist of fate, I was watching the Daily Show last night and they had John Hockenberry as their guest. Hockenberry is a former Dateline NBC correspondent and he was talking about his experiences during the 2004 election when he had so many emails and so much interaction with military bloggers. I have always been aware of the blogging community but my surfing yesterday really opened my eyes to the pure expanse of real, quality blogs that exist out there. Hockenberry was talking about an even more remarkable phenomenon in the blogging community: military personnel are starting to blog from the front lines of battle and war. Thus they are becoming their own news outlet that delivers information even before mainstream media and they deliver it in its rawest and truest form.

In any case, that was somewhat of a diversion, but so far I have a positive reaction to the traffic exchange programs. Most likely, as my participation in surfing through the program dies down slightly, my traffic will go down with it. It is, however, a fantastic way to increase my exposure to other blogs, it is somewhat addictive and enjoyable to surf in this manner, and hopefully it will generate at least a handful of regular visitors that I wouldn’t normally get otherwise.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2005 at 10:59 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.