Ed Stoffel

I couldn’t help noticing that so many blogs are displaying lots of 80 x 15 buttons for services that seem to send visitors. While some are essentially blog directories, a number of them are blog promotion tools where you can either visit blogs in exchange for receiving visits to yours, or pay for them to bring you visitors. So over the weekend, I signed up for four of these and tried them out… using the method of visiting other sites to earn credits which should result in having my blogs visited. During the sign up process, you list your own blog(s) address(es). Each of the services requires that you visit their site to begin your blog surfing, and do so inside of a timed frame, which requires that you stay on each visited site for a minimum time period, usually about 30 seconds.

Blog Explosion has the best interface, complete with the ability to bookmark favorite sites, voting sites good or bad, and reporting problem sites. I did quite a bit of blog surfing with their service, but when I checked my stats, I saw that they weren’t sending any traffic to my blogs, and my blog list said they were all ‘Waiting for Admin Approval’. With a little digging, I found news that Blog Explosion was sold, and that “site administration may be delayed.” Blog Clicker credits pile up fast, and their site indicates they’ve sent me a lot of traffic in return, confirmed by my own server’s traffic stats. Their interface has a way to ‘Report a Site’, but doesn’t allow you to indicate why you’re doing so. Blog Soldier seems to have a number of problems including lots of downed sites, junk financial sites and bugs on their own site. It doesn’t take long surfing before they’re feeding you their own blogs, too. When I clicked their ‘Support’ tab, I got “Error: Invalid License Key (Time Period Expired)” which I assume refers to some of the software they’re using to run the site. I couldn’t confirm any traffic sent specifically from them, though I have received mysterious traffic from “stumbleupon.com” which might be them. Blog Mad gave me the most surfing credits and quickly sent matching traffic to my blogs, according to their stats and confirmed by my own. I like that Blog Mad doesn’t block my browser’s task bar url display when I point to site links.

In the end, I spent hours surfing other blogs and received back very brief visits from other blog surfers, none of which stayed for over a minute. So besides driving up my webcounters, what good are they? As I reflect on the amount of time it took to setup and experiment with these four services, I believe there is a better way to create web traffic… a way I found to bring lasting visitors to all of my sites. By examining all of my blog traffic statistics, the visitors who come and stay are those who read the content. So it would be better for me to spend less time with these gimmicks that produce shallow results, and more time writing thoughtful content that visitors find of value.

If you use an image from someone else’s site, should you link directly to it (to give credit where it comes from), or copy and use it, so you aren’t using their bandwidth? I’d recommend putting the image on your server so that 1) you aren’t continuing to pull bandwidth from the source site, and 2) you will always know what’s being loaded on your site. Exceptions would be when you have an arrangement to load an image from somewhere else, and you trust the source.

In the very week when the Windows MetaFile crisis is here, you wouldn’t want to give someone else the ability of putting a malformed image onto your website. Malformed images can contain executable code, which runs when your browser (or shell) can’t display it normally, and that’s a backdoor to anything invading your machine, as well as anyone who visits your website - yikes!

For more on the WMF issue, see Steve Gibson’s Security Now, Episodes 20-21
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