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Your 30 Seconds Are Up

I signed up for Blog Explosion today. BE, as it's called, is a way to bring extra traffic to your site. You earn credits toward visits from other bloggers by visiting their blogs. The more blogs you visit, the more visits you get. It's a bit more complicated than that, but since my mom complained that the average person would never understand my recent post about GMail I've decided to work on simplifying my explanations.

Anyway, I can tell right away that this isn't going to work. That's because there's no way to filter what kind of blogs you want to visit. Browsing through the other blogs in order to rack up your own credits is excruciatingly boring. You have to visit each blog for a minimum of 30 seconds. So what happens is that people who want to get credits so other people will visit their blogs sit and watch the counter, waiting for it to count down so they can escape from the current boring site and go on to the next boring site.

I'm not interested in business blogs or technology blogs or personal blogs by people who cannot string together a comprehensible sentence. And, I have to assume that most people who happen upon my blog are going to be bored with it, too. Because they are going to be business bloggers, technology bloggers, or people who cannot string together a comprehensible sentence.

It would be so much better if there was some way to get people who are interested in writing or photography to visit Gienna Writes. I don't care if one million people visit if they are all just waiting for their 30 seconds to be up. And I would rather find new blogs that match my interests than spend 30 seconds of my life staring at a picture of some stranger's baby.


7 comments:

Visual-Field said...

BE doesn't sound like very good idea, especially for someone whose blog is atypical.

To generate traffic from people interested in photography, I suggest listing your blog on photoblogs.org. This site will also help you find other photoblogs you might enjoy. If you post comments on blogs you like, the recipients will then often visit your blog in return.

I wonder if there's anything similar for writers' blogs. (I've passed along information about your site to a couple of aspiring writers, so there's also word-of-keyboard.)

Anonymous said...

You got my attention! Good job! Have fun! I agree about sitting on the boring ones, thanks for a good one.
-Ginny, http://www.ginnybonk.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Passing through from BlogExplosion (BE). There are a lot of places you can find what you are talking about. You can find a lot of interesting blogs, forums, communities etc. involved very strongly with writing. You may want to search them down through google or other venues and get involved in or join some of them. Just some ideas anyway. Most of these communities, forums and blogs are free to join. If you get active in one or two, you may learn some new things and others may from you.

Gienna said...

Hey VF,
Are you saying my blog is atypical? Because if you are that's the nicest thing anyone has said about it so far!

Also, the other comments made me realize--perhaps I should stop complaining and concentrate on A) making my blog better and B) seeking out other good blogs.

Thanks for the comments!

G

Photominer said...

Hi popped in also from BE, its just one of many tools out there to find new blogs. I empathize with the problem though. Luckily you really only have to find one or two, and then surf their links. Just a thought...

karenology said...

I definitely have to second the last comment...as soon as you find one or two good blogs, these people have usually done all the work of finding and posting other quality blogs. That and word of mouth (I'm one of VF's referrals, so it worked at least once!).

Anonymous said...

Hi Gienna...I blogmarked you to my favories. Former New Englander/now living in the south. Your photographs are wonderful and I've enjoyed your writing also. I'll look for you on the BE site. msdedi@sc.rr.com http://msdedi.typepad.com/reflex_photos