Companies Needing Blogs and Bloggers
At One By One Media and Bloggers for Hire we’re constantly finding companies that would benefit from having a blog as a marketing, promotion, and communication tool. We believe business blogging builds and sustains relationships – with current and prospective customers, shareholders, mainstream media outlets, industry experts and more. And we use our blog to highlight examples and case studies where blogging aids businesses – or in some cases, could have made a positive contribution during a difficult time.
Our first example was the Kryptonite Lock Company. They could have used a blog as a tool to better communicate with customers during their recent product recall crisis. A look at Donna Tocci’s statement illustrates how a blog might have helped their public relations nightmare.
Our latest example is with the blog traffic company Blog Explosion.
I’ve been working with Blog Explosion for a number of months now. I pay them to send traffic to my personal site. Yet the recent changes they’ve implemented, coupled with the obvious confusion and concerns raised by clients, illustrates that BE needs to send traffic to its own blog. But what’s this? They don’t have one!
What is Blog Explosion anyway? Blog Explosion (BE) is a blog traffic generator that encourages members to surf their network of registered blogs to earn credits. These credits then translate into hits for your own blog – when you surf through two blogs, they in turn send one visitor to your site, using a 2:1 ratio. You can earn credits in other ways – signing up new members (who then earn credits for you following a traditional MLM structure) – or you can buy credits, in essence buying traffic through “advertising” your blog.
On July 29, BE implemented a new feature on their system that allows you to filter out blogs that you’d rather not view (usually by category, rather than individual blog.) As a result, they’re limiting potential traffic available to advertisers (who don’t have the opportunity to target their advertising in any way so far.) As BE sees it, however, they’re providing a better quality of readers – readers who want to see your site. The end result? Four days later, my inbound traffic has all but vanished for the blogs I buy advertising for.
To be fair, I contacted the people at BE to get clarification about “improvements” to the traffic generating system. I had to issue a support ticket and stand in line (tick tock, tick tock). The only information I was able to glean was from their static home page:
Members this afternoon we updated the traffic delivery (surf for traffic) scripts which will cause a slowdown in traffic distribution short-term until it works itself out.
This is the third part of our updated traffic project starting with the surf by description and reducing the minimum auto-assign levels.
The update of the surf script is designed to generate better overall rotation of all the blogs in the BlogExplosion system and will improve quality as a result.
On paper the math behind the script updates indicate rotation will normalize in the next couple of days and will continue to improve.
Thanks for your patience as we continue to improve BlogExplosion for all of our members.
Two days later, there’s still been no real communication about their changes. And when I inquired why I couldn’t access up to date information, and after asking why BE, a Blog traffic (now quality) generator, did not have its own blog to share information with members (yes, it was a great time for me to plug our services), they sent out a unilateral communication device, the dreaded newsletter, which stated:
Many people ask why BlogExplosion does not have a blog of their own? How can a site that offer blog services not even support a blog itself?
We have always wanted to have a blog for BlogExplosion but realized there was certain functionality we wanted to include beyond a basic blog offering and the secondly the features we needed to develop first on the site that complemented what we could offer for members as a great blog on the site. As a result we have tested most blog scripts out there over the last year trying to pick out the good and bad features each of these scripts have incorporated and what we ideally need. Patience has probably been a good thing now where we think we have the right script and we hope to have the BE blog ready for the new design and part of our new site moving forward. We will be potentially looking for moderators (where it makes sense) and will need general help getting the BlogExplosion blog off the ground.
Hopefully, the people at Blog Explosion will soon enter into the blogosphere with the rest of its customers. The people they are asking to purchase their service through both time and money, should be wondering or perhaps demanding an answer. To the Blog Explosion people I say this: “We are here, we are staffed, and each day you spend “getting the BlogExplosion blog off the ground” is a loss of revenue and potential customers.
