“Want an explosion on blog traffic?”

Wanting more traffic to your blog, or simply want an easy way to get in touch with new blogs? The blog rotation networks out there might just be your thing! But what exactly are these services, what kind of explosion will they generate in stats? I know of three major of these networks, namely Blog [...]

Wanting more traffic to your blog, or simply want an easy way to get in touch with new blogs? The blog rotation networks out there might just be your thing! But what exactly are these services, what kind of explosion will they generate in stats? I know of three major of these networks, namely Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and BlogMad and decided to put them to the test.
Blog Explosion is one of the three I’d like to mention first since I have been using it in the past, it was quite a nice idea so I decided to join up. At first I got like 35 hits a day thanks to Blog Explosion, no comments from people coming through Blog Explosion though and browsing around other member sites quickly became boring because the network is either pretty small, or hogged up by a selection of blogs. For each 100 blog views you do, there are about 10 blogs which you will see passing by 5 times each, covering about half of all your views.

As time passed by the amount of visitors decreased, but the team kept active on forums and site. They included a nifty feature named rent my blog, unfortunately this was extremely slow and a lot of people took it off their blogs since loading times on it wasn’t a matter of seconds, but more like minutes.

That all was a long time ago, so I decided to give Blog Explosion another chance. Recently I submitted Slevi to it for approval and just now I got a reply on that, I wasn’t even expecting anything anymore since as they say it takes 72 hours up till most for it to take. Well, it must have been really busy or something since it took more like 5 days. To make it even worse, just to hear Slevi to be denied for the following reason:

Due to some problems with IE and CSS inside frames your blog was not readable. It looks scrambled.

Your content drops to bottom of page in some versions of IE please correct, if you need assistance please visit our forums as members are aware of the error and have posted fixes.

Frames? I do not use frames, they are called layers. Their technical knowledge apparently is at a level of 0 and they can’t read XHTML or they are simply making assumptions. Or are they perhaps meaning their frames? Do they scramble it up? That would be more like an issue on their side then.

The second comment, I can just confirm. Do I need assistance on fixing that? No, I am not interested in using CSS hacks just to fix that for a browser which is outdated and should be abandoned. If they want to deny sites which actually want to put the rubbish behind, fine with me then.

In the first days of waiting though I did browse around some on the forums and found that people reported of getting just about 15 hits on a weekly basis, even though they had a couple hundred of credits left. And the forums were pretty much dying out in activity as well. I guess all the transfers in administration simply have killed Blog Explosion off, they are clinging on to the past too much whilst people want to move forward.

• Blog approval time: 5 days - 0 points, unacceptably long.
• Ratio: 2 : 1 (visit 2 sites for 1 credit) - 0 points, nice way to get people to buy credits, but not what I’m interested in.
• Blog traffic gained: about 15 hits/week - 1 point, 15 hits a week reportedly? Well, some traffic there, but an explosion? Hell no!
• Features: Weak - 1 point, they do have some features, but not much changed since over a year ago and reportedly still slow, so definitely not a win there.
• Blog viewing time: 30 seconds - 0.5 point, not too bad but when you get to see the same blogs over and over I just want to click NEXT!

Overall rating Blog Explosion: 2.5 / 10

On to the next! Let’s forget about Blog Explosion and have a look at Blog Soldiers. Kudos to the administration team first of all, it took just 3 hours before my blog got approved there! Absolutely awesome, something Blog Explosion could learn from. Definitely a +1 on that, people don’t want to be waiting 5 days before they get approved, they’ll simply forget about the page and leave it. Asides from that, the admin which approved my site was using IE7, outdated technology is not being used with this one, that gives me confidence.

The amount of blogs in rotation is bigger than with Blog Explosion, much bigger. So if you’re not wanting to see the same thing over and over that much? This is a nice deal. But there is a downside though, as you visit a lot of pages, I must say the traffic driven to your site is low, about 25 on a weekly basis.

One thing I don’t really like about Blog Soldiers is their site, it looks a bit too plain. Just some random template by the looks of it which you’d expect with some cheap hosting company, not something in the blogosphere.

• Blog approval time: ~3 hours - 1.5 point, really fast, nice job on that!
• Ratio: 4 : 3 - 1 point, I can live with this, especially because the random bonuses come by frequently it still feels like 1 : 1 anyways, and 1 : 1 is what we like to see!
• Blog traffic gained: ~25 hits / week - 0.5 point, come on, we want to see more! But at least they don’t advertise with exploding your number of traffic and just say they drive traffic to your blog.
• Features: Weak - 0.5 point, it is really focussed on a business view here, you can do banners and text links, but no games or so to bring in some fun.
• Blog viewing time: 20 seconds - 1 point, not bad, but on blogs which really don’t interest you 20 seconds can still seem like a lifetime.

Overall rating Blog Soldiers: 4.5 / 10

If those weird looking eyes don’t bring you in I won’t know what does. BlogMad is the next on the list and as weird as the name sounds, this one might definitely be worth a check. The site looks a bit messed up at first with a lot of features, but after a second look it is all quite logical. From what I can see it is also quite frequently updated and pretty new. Unlike the others this one also gives the feeling of actually being set up by bloggers themselves or something close to it, rather than being part of a company out for money.

When it comes to technical knowledge, this site is great. On signing up you instantly get your account activated simply by logging in to your blog through CRP, making use of an activation code to implant, etc. And only if you cannot do any of these the aid of administration is required. Instant activation simply is super, definitely a great feature.

With about 150 visitors a week driven to your site through them they definitely are the only one which actually bring you some traffic, although it could still be more, it definitely surpasses the other 2 by far. They have quite an active userbase so visitors in numbers definitely are gained here. If it actually comes to people sticking to your blog and returning outside of BlogMad, I cannot say.

They are also the only ones giving a 1:1 credit ratio, I must say that this definitely is how it should be. You come there for traffic partially or mainly to begin with, so you expect an equal return, it’s only fair.

• Blog approval time: Instant! - 2 points, not much more to say about this.
• Ratio: 1:1 - 2 points, the ideal ratio and on top of that high bonus turnouts you can easily stuff credits into additional features like text links which are for a extremely low pricing!
• Blog traffic gained: ~150 hits / week - 1 point, best of 3, but 150 still isn’t too much, nice for starters though.
• Features: Medium - 1 point, text links and banner ads for really great pricing, fun games to play but nothing too fancy. They are setting up a second project exlinks though which does sound quite interesting.
• Blog viewing time: 25 seconds - 1 point, can be a bit better, but overall can live with that.

Overall rating BlogMad: 7 / 10

So if you want to gather some traffic to your site and/or have a nice time browsing other blogs, I can definitely recommend BlogMad. Out of all 3 it by far is the best and most professional. If you have any experience with one or more of these 3, or even better yet are using it right now feel free to leave your view on them as well!