Blogging Proposition Results

1. So, what’s your conclusion? Of the other 84%, do you think they’re just too lazy or apathetic to participate; or that they’re all traffic arbitrageurs.

2. I don’t know about arbitrage, but I think they’re just surfing to generate traffic for their site. Of course, you have to wonder if ~85% of the people are doing that, then is it’s really worth it.

   If we assume that for every four sites that you surf, you get three visitors (average between the traffic exchanges), and 85% are mostly ignoring you. That would mean you get about an 11% return on your time investment. Pretty bad in some ways (I’m sure that there are some people marketing using the traffic exchanges that would kill for those numbers).

   More importantly, it means that my traffic statistics are almost useless.

3. I would assume people who are abusing the system are using bots, so there’s no significant cost to them to acquire the traffic. (That’s why I would consider it arbitrage.)

4. The traffic exchanges all employ some for of anti-bot technology. Which isn’t to say that people aren’t using them, but it’s not trivial. I’d guess that most users are just manually surfing the exchanges, but ignoring the contents of the blogs.

   I mean it’s really easy to run a bunch of these at once and just click on the next button as the timer expires on each site (most mandate 15-30 seconds per visit).

5. Your blog is dull. It has no unique features. It looks like every other blog. It has no character like you! Your life experiences as listed here are 0. Are you a ghetto blogger?

6. Interesting results,but what i would rather say is that most of the ppl who came in thru blog sites don’t really glance through ur page… so i guess thats where the majority of the 85% ppl went off to

7. EuroYank, sorry you think so, but I’m glad to see that at least you didn’t leave the same comment you’ve left at other sites before. And what exactly is a ghetto blogger?

   Leon, I tend to agree with you, but is it a universal experience, or just an artifact of my blog?

   Since I left that particular post at the top for almost 24 hours, it was a brief post, and it offered a pretty reasonable exchange I feel it would have been impossible to get the attention of those who didn’t even bother to comment.

8. Oh My!! I’m….I’m a man???

   heee hee jus playing…

9. Just a test buddy to see if you were paying attention!

10. Hi again,

    Thanks for keeping your word and stopping by my blog the other day and commenting. Like I said before, I’ve only been doing this for a month, and I only use blogclicker. To tell the truth, I don’t actually have time to surf through it every day, so I’m not really sure how much traffic it’s been generating for me.

    Anyway, can I ask a stupid question about Firefox? It’s not related to blogging, but you seem to be rather savvy in the computer department, whereas I am NOT. If you don’t use Firefox, no problem, but if you do, can you tell me how I can change my language and location options? Because I live in Japan, everything’s in Japanese (not that convenient for me, as I’m still learning the language) and when I search Google it only sends me things that are pertinent to Japan, Japanese, etc.

    Thanks a lot.

11. Konbawa Melinda,

    you can set the language settings in google by going to:

    http://www.google.com/preferences

    just select “English” from the first drop down menu, then save the preferences.

    For Firefox:

    Change language on web pages

    Some web sites offer content in multiple languages. You can choose several languages in Firefox and they will be treated in order of priority. In order to change the priority, just go to Tools > Options..., select the General section and click the Languages button.

    Let me know if this works for you.

12. Arigatou gozaimashita! Okay, I am going to try this and see how it goes. Thanks.

13. (See, I’m returning) Interesting results. I surf Blog Explosion regularly and that is of course how I discovered your blog. For myself, I don’t exactly “ignore” the blogs that I see, but if there isn’t something fairly interesting and attention grabbing “above the fold”, I usually hit go without exploring much of anything else, and I suspect the same is true of many traffic exchange users. Still, for a small blogger without a lot of Google presence, the small amount of traffic generated by traffic exchanges is better than no traffic.

14. Kate,

    funny you should mention interesting content “above the fold”, because I mentioned the same concept in a post last year.

    But, in this case the proposition did appear above the fold. Which is not to say that it was interesting, but it was short and to the point, with a title that should have at least garnered some attention.

    I’d imagine that for content that’s not on the first screen (which for some blogs is all the content) the read-through rates are even lower.

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