As a follow-up to my previous “Blogging: what kind of visitors are best” article, here are a few more thoughts about the subject.
First, I had no idea of how hard the Google Sandbox can hit a site. The fact is that 90% or more of Internet users use Google exclusively for searching for things - if Google never includes your blog in the first page, even though your blog has one or more articles with exactly the user is searching for, then you almost never get new visitors, except when a regular reader links to a post of yours in his/her own blog.
And it’s the new visitors who click on ads. Regular readers almost never do (you can influence that a little by varying your ads - I’ve already mentioned it in passing, there).
What about blog exchangers? As I’ve said before, they can get you a lot of traffic, but most of it is not “good” traffic. In other words, most people there are simply surfing for credits, they don’t even look at the content of the blogs they “visit”. (and yet they feel those credits are useful because other people won’t do what they’re doing… weird people :)).
I’m not against blog exchangers, don’t get me wrong. I’ve had some real visitors, and gained several regular readers, from them - not to mention blogs I, myself, discovered by using the exchangers, such as The Martian Anthropologist. But you have to see them as they are - they get you a lot of visits, but only relatively few visitors.
Now, think about it. If you get a lot of extra visits per day, but most of them don’t even look at your blog, what effects does that have?
Well, firstly, a very low Click-Through Rate (CTR) on any ads on your site. That’s not good. Then, skewered stats - a lot of people accessing your front page, and only that - many more than there would normally be. And your top referrers are blogexplosion.com, blogclicker.com, blogazoo.com and so on.
On the other hand, those visits improve your ranking in lists like BlogTopSites, which is good - but, again, it’s artificial, in a way.
That’s why I’m performing a little experiment now, which is to temporarily stop all traffic from blog exchangers. I’ll have much fewer hits, but hopefully the ads’ CTR will improve. And I want to see if that makes any difference in earnings - not to mention statistics.
Again, blog exchangers aren’t a bad idea - you get some real visitors, and find some interesting blogs for yourself. But I want to “turn them off” and see the difference, for a while.
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That’s why I just don’t use blog exchange sites. I focus my energy on writing more decent content and getting to know other blogers in my niche.
regards,
Leo
Well, it’s possible to do both. I don’t intend to stop using exchangers for good - just for a while, to see the difference it makes.
I still believe exchangers have their uses.