An aside: Does Blog Soldiers work?
In short, I would have to say no. First of all, what is Blog Soldiers? Its a way of driving "readers" to your blog. From their homepage:
"You view other member's Blogs and in return other members view your Blog. Every 2 member Blogs you visit, 1 member will view your Blog, all Free."
Sounds good huh? Although I had reservations, I decided I should check it out. So what happens is you sign up for a free account, then start viewing other member's blogs. You have to stay on their blog for a minimum of 20s before an option to browse to another blog appears. In return, you are guaranteed that for every 2 blogs you view, someone else will view your blog. Easy traffic you might say? Yes, easy traffic. But low quality traffic. The problem of course is that the people who are viewing your blog are really just doing so in order to increase traffic to their own blog. I tried to surf with an open mind, with the intention that if I visited an interesting blog I would read it, leave a comment, or maybe even bookmark it. But I found very little that was of interest to me. That's not to say all the blogs were necessarily bad (some were), but that they weren't my cup of tea. But I suspect that most blog soldier surfers dont even do this - they simply sit there clicking on the 'next' button whenever the 20s timer runs down, without even reading the blogs. All the while increasing their own credits so that they can get a bunch of people not reading their blog!
Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic. But my own experience was that I did indeed generate hits to this very blog from Blog Soldiers, but that not a single soldier left a comment or browsed to squidsquid.com from here - indicating that the readers can't have been very engaged. Of course I might just have a genuinely uninteresting blog, but I hope instead that most of the soldiers weren't really interested from the outset.
If anyone else has had a different experience with Blog Soldiers, I'd be interested to know...
"You view other member's Blogs and in return other members view your Blog. Every 2 member Blogs you visit, 1 member will view your Blog, all Free."
Sounds good huh? Although I had reservations, I decided I should check it out. So what happens is you sign up for a free account, then start viewing other member's blogs. You have to stay on their blog for a minimum of 20s before an option to browse to another blog appears. In return, you are guaranteed that for every 2 blogs you view, someone else will view your blog. Easy traffic you might say? Yes, easy traffic. But low quality traffic. The problem of course is that the people who are viewing your blog are really just doing so in order to increase traffic to their own blog. I tried to surf with an open mind, with the intention that if I visited an interesting blog I would read it, leave a comment, or maybe even bookmark it. But I found very little that was of interest to me. That's not to say all the blogs were necessarily bad (some were), but that they weren't my cup of tea. But I suspect that most blog soldier surfers dont even do this - they simply sit there clicking on the 'next' button whenever the 20s timer runs down, without even reading the blogs. All the while increasing their own credits so that they can get a bunch of people not reading their blog!
Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic. But my own experience was that I did indeed generate hits to this very blog from Blog Soldiers, but that not a single soldier left a comment or browsed to squidsquid.com from here - indicating that the readers can't have been very engaged. Of course I might just have a genuinely uninteresting blog, but I hope instead that most of the soldiers weren't really interested from the outset.
If anyone else has had a different experience with Blog Soldiers, I'd be interested to know...
posted by Gordon Simpson at 11:23 AM
8 Comments:
Hello!
Well, you can say I'm one of those surfers with an open mind :-) Sure, the main idea of BlogSoldiers is to increase traffic on your blog, and that works for me, because I use AdSense and every visit to the site is welcome. However, my experience from visitors seems to be similar to yours - not a single comment to my "downright funny" articles. The only comment I've got (not counting comments from my friend and collaborator of the site) when I found an interesting blog about making money on the Internet and made a link to one of its posts. Your site looks interesting, so keep up the good work!
I thought I was the only one that bothered to read blogs. I like reading and don't give a whit really about how many people look at my blog. I leave comments on the ones that intrest me.
I have marked several blogs that I don't want to view again. After a few days I get them popping back up this annoys me. I also notice that banners often hide the blog mark line. That irritates me too.
I often read the comment section of new blogs and surf off to other blogs, from B.S.
However I will check my site meter and visit those that actually stopped by mine from their link.
Well, the fact that you two have commented has at least partially proved me wrong!
Aleksandar - its my understanding that adsense (for content) only pays out on page impressions if a particular advertiser chooses to advertise on your site. Otherwise the ads are cost-per-click based. Which means getting a lot of traffic, with no actual adsense clicks wont generate any income. Is this what you have found?
lilfeathers2000 - true that if you dont care about how many people visit your blog then you have nothing to lose by randomly browsing with blogsoldiers. But then you could also browse blogs any number of other ways - and wouldn't have to deal with the annoying interface issues you mention...
One other thing I didn't mention in the original post is that after surfing only 50-100 blogs using blogsoldiers I started seeing the same ones appear multiple times. I guess that these bloggers either buy credit or build up a huge number of credits by "browsing" blogsoldiers heavily. I have now started blocking these ones - even if they might be interesting I dont want to keep seeing the same blogs over and over when I am browsing.
Hmmmm, you may be right about that pay-per-impression thing. I wondered why I still had no money after reaching 500 impressions :-) Rats, it seems like I'm going to have to listen to my mother and find a decent paying job. It's kinda depressing.
Sorry to burst your bubble aleksandar!
Hi guy,
i just join blogsoldiers last week and is generate traffic for my blog once i use it to browse other users blog.
Once i stop browsing at blogsoldiers homepage, my blog traffic wills decrease. So, is there any idea for generate traffic?
Hi xfutureblog,
Blogsoldiers will certainly increase your traffic - although the question I was asking was what type of traffic is it?
I dont have too much other advice on increasing traffic in other ways right now - apart from registering with blog directories, feedburner etc. There is a pretty good post here you might want to read - its how I found out about blogsoldiers in the first place.
I definitely take a look at people's blogs when I'm "soldiering"...I think it's a great service. I was just worried it may violate the Adsense TOS
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