Rand() Blog

So I figured I would follow up with my experience with Blog Exchanges and how they don’t work and why I probably will never use them again.

A little introduction, I found out about a few blog exchanges through a friend who has their own blog, I decided hey that’s a good idea, and signed up for a couple of them, blogmad and blogexplosion.  Now blogmad verified my blog first, and so I started surfing the other blogs in there to earn credits, however I soon discovered the other blogs were not what I wanted to read, mostly about politics or topics I had no interest in.  I’m tech head, a geek, so politics and fluffy cutesy stuff is not my thing, I want geek, gadgets, cool toys etc.  So of course I just waited out my 30 seconds and clicked on.  I did this a lot, I think my last stats on blogmad was I viewed over 450 blogs.  Now I earnt my credits and watch the traffic come in, and go out just as quick, I was getting traffic that well honestly wasn’t worth the effort.

If you think about the 450 blogs I surfed and I had to wait 30 seconds for each one, that’s 225 minutes or just under 4 hours.  Now that’s just 4 hours spent surfing through blogs I didn’t want to read, that’s a lot of time, especially when you’re a busy individual as it is.  The thing was what did I gain from those 4 hours of surfing, very little.   Out of the few hundred visitors I had during the period I probably kept a maximum of 5.  Yup, you all know who you are and I thank you for reading my blog.

Now I did the same with blogexplosion and came to the same conclusion with exactly the same results, spent hours surfing other people’s blogs to earn credits to end up with people surfing my blog and not staying longer than their mandatory 30 seconds.  So I decided to quit with the blog exchanges and I’m glad I did.  Not only was it a huge waste of time, but for the time spent I got very little to nothing back, now I thought I could do my own blog exchange much better, but also realized it would be the same, generally people want a quick solution to bring traffic to their blog, and blog exchanges use that to their advantage, however in the small print it should say, the traffic you receive will not be desirable traffic.

Now fast forward to this week and I’ve noticed a very interesting trend.  I posted a list on problogger.net last week that helped generate some traffic as well as some linkage, so I’ve noticed a few hits from that, not a lot mind, which is fine.  My biggest source of traffic right now is Google, that’s right, it seems my articles get picked up on Google and some folks honestly visit through Google, for example yesterday over 50% of my traffic was from Google, now that’s not bad in my opinion, my next goal is to figure out why Technocrati thinks my blog hasn’t been updated in 7 days, even though I update it daily, its really annoying and I’ve submitted 2 support tickets already about it.

So the moral of this story, don’t waste your time with blog exchanges unless you have hours of spare time where you can just sit in front of a computer.  The better thing is to comment, post good content and hopefully over time the search engines will find you, Technocrati will find you, and if you’re really really lucky, you’ll right something that will show up on Fark or boingboing.

Technorati Tags: blog exchanges, google, traffic

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Observations, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.