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Tuesday December 21

Making the most of Blogexplosion credits

What you really want is for people to come to your blog and repeat their visits on their own. But a lot of the traffic that Blogexplosion delivers is casual traffic and you don't know whether they are really interested in what you write. The only people who would stay are people who, obviously, want to be there. Those are valuable visitors. And here's how to make the most of your Blogexplosion credits in getting them.

1. You need to save up your credits. Go to your Assign Traffic page and place 25% in savings. This is the most that Blog Explosions will let you save.
2. Surf and build up your credits. Wait for that 25 or 50 credit mystery prize. 25% of that will go to your savings. The rest will go to credits for random hits to your blog.
3. At this point, I must say that random hitters to your blog are PASSIVE visitors and less likely to re-visit than people who know that they want to go to your blog and ACTIVEly click on a link to get there. Therefore your directory listing is extremely valuable. Make sure that the text is optimized with all the relevant keywords, accurately describes your blog and ensure that it is clear to the directory browser who should visit it.
4. There are two other ways to target active clickers. One is through bidding for directory listing. This will place the description of your blog on the front page of the directory listing in a prominent position. This is indeed very very valuable. Apparently how it works right now is the higher you bid, the more often and the more prominent your description will be in the text-ad column. However, the cost of credits is only deducted when someone clicks on the link. So don't bid too high.
5. The final way of targeting active clickers is through a banner. For each credit you spend, you get 20 random impressions. The bad news is that they are random. The other bad news is that people tend to ignore banner ads. The good news is that this behaviour is less likely on Blogexplosions because they really do want to find new blogs to read. The other good news is that you can tailor a message in graphic form to target your key audience with a relevantly-likeable message.

I've manged to get a few hundred credits total on Blogexplosions in the last week. Of all the ones that were spent on random hits through the surfing panel, not a single one stayed more than the mandatory 30 seconds. But when I started my banners, those that clicked on them stayed between 3-12 minutes to read. Now that's valuable use of credits!

If you need more credits quickly, I recommend buying them. USD$5 is a small price to pay for 500 easy credits. You'd otherwise have to spend about 3 whole uninterrupted hours to gain the same amount by surfing. I don't know about you, but the opportunity cost is too high for me.

For the reasons stated above, I wouldn't buy "Guaranteed Visitors" credits. Those go directly toward random visitors and would be nearly a complete waste of money. Rather, buy the banner credits. That's as long as you have good banner ads.

There are a few websites that deal with designing banner ads but they're more targetted toward business banners. So, one crucial point they don't touch is that banner ads for blog surfers MUST BE HUMOUROUS. Blog surfing is generally an activity for leisure so surfers would be more attracted to banners that tweak their funny bone.

Comments

I made myself a banner ad for BlogExplosion, for exactly the reason you mention. I figure people who click it will really want to read my blog!

What do you use for tracking visit lengths? I use Sitemeter, but it’s very limited: it can’t tell how long a visit is unless the visitor clicks more than one page in my blog. If they just read the main page and then leave, even if they were there for 20 minutes, it registers as 0 seconds. D’oh.

I use Sitemeber but it sucks. I know that Blogexplosions delivers viewers, but half of them don’t get logged by Sitemeter.

And when I had banners Sitemeter logs only half of the hits that Blogexplosion delivers.

No I don’t know what else to use except for Webanalyzer which comes with my hosting account.

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