Posted 6/11/08 - Kellex
The first thing I'd like to do is acknowledge Dannie from Sports Blog Earnings and his positive look at BlogBurst while I was hating the hell out of it. BlogBurst ran an initial push back in April by recruiting any basketball blogs they could find that would be willing to join their network.
I jumped on the idea but after seeing nothing early on from it and the fact that they denied the Sports Dollar from it had me quickly forgetting about the service and moving on to other ideas.
So what happened?
Well sure enough, Dannie was right about its potential to put your blog posts on major sites and deliver some nice traffic. During these NBA Finals, I've been linked up to NBA.com on 2 of the 3 games and man, did Le Basketbawl feel the love! Not only was it linked up, but it was one of the top posts linked during the entire running/streaming game which obviously had thousands of visitors simultaneously checking the score for updates.
The first line in this image is the traffic that the BlogBurst post to NBA.com has delivered to me so far tonight for game 3 and the second line is from game 1 on 6/5. (I grabbed that 408 visitors number at 11PM PST and the traffic is still flowing in, so that number will look drastically different by now.)
Those may not seem like Deadspin or Big Lead numbers but they are the exact readers I am looking for to come to my NBA blog. These are die hard NBA fans that are following the game play-by-play online and also browsing around to the top blogs at the same time. Can you get any better than that? My Google Adsense sure loves BlogBurst! These numbers are also pulled from my Google Analytics which for whatever reason always recognizes far less visitors than my other stat trackers. (Anyone else notice that?)
How can you utilize BlogBurst?
Write a game preview! Write something buzzworthy! Don't swear (too much)! Here is the bullet list pulled from the BlogBurst site on how to get the "in's":
- The more frequently you post, the more likely a publisher will be to find you. Minimum of one top-notch post a week.
- Our publishers tell us that they are most interested in unique perspectives, make sure your blog offers a distinct voice. We don’t want novels, but we do want full-length essay-style posts with unique content.
- Stay away from posts that just link and summarize content from other sites.
- Spell-check, grammar-check, polish it up.
Tell us Dannie!
I'll leave this post open for Dannie to possibly write about on his blog or respond via comment as to how he got linked up to the Chicago Sun Times. Was it a game preview of a Sixers-Bulls game or just an interesting piece on them?
For the rest of you, if you haven't already, you will want to sign up for BlogBurst and try to break their code to get some play on a major site; the results speak for themselves.
Time to join ClickBooth to help monetize your site, don't you think?
10 comments:
BlogBurst seems pretty bad, they don't link to the blog posts directly. Instead they show the reader the entire post and make clicking unnecessary. And you don't get paid for that.
I'm only going to disagree because NBA.com sent me 640 targeted visitors last night. Plus I use one big Adsense unit and it blew up because of it.
I didn't actually click on the link from NBA.com to my site but it obviously took the readers straight to me in drones.
Have you seen it not link directly back to the original blog?
I also am on the Blogburst wagon, I was listed on NBA.com and while I didn't get as many views as Kellex, I had a nice increase in traffic.
wow that is great to hear, I signed up way back when and never saw any signs of life since. After reading this I may have to revisit it.
It's worth targeted a couple of articles toward. The numbers were still flowing in this morning even so it could be even larger than 640 visitors by now.
Plus my Deng vs. Beckham article had a nice Stumble Upon run as well. Go Le Basketbawl!
Way to go Kellex. Like I mentioned in my earlier post they were looking to ramp up any and all NBA coverage for the playoffs and especially the Finals. Typically, though I think original works are published most often. Game recaps probably won't cut it when the interest in the game isn't this high a peak.
Tim - They do link directly to post in two locations with the article. 1. At the top where you give a blurb about your blog and 2. at the bottom with a line "read more from this blogger.
Of course they post the full article they are syndicating your content and would be no benefit for them if they didn't.
The benefit for us the bloggers comes in exposure to audiences we wouldn't otherwise have access to (Rueters, Chi Sun times etc). With anything you write if the content is strong people will click through to find more. If the content sucks of course they won't click through let alone read the full article that is there. If you write well and have interesting ideas traffic will come. And guess what, even if it doesn't what have you lost? Nothing. We are going to keep posting regardless of whether we get picked up or get traffic from Blogburst anyway, why not leave the possibility for something good to happen by getting an account.
The only thing I wish was different was making this syndication SEO friendly. I think they run some sort of api or widget that pulls your content into the site and doesn't give you backlinks. I noticed this looking at the page source. My view is, publishers choose what content they want on their site, if they feel your post is worthy that is enough justification for SEO link love as well.
Dannie-you are right, they do not give backlinks and you are also right by saying they should.
I think you lose when you syndicate your content for free.
This is an example:
http://www.suntimes.com/sports/blogentries/index.html?bbPostId=B6SsPFTYUvkHBCKMk2hkHabWA94ARasNGlAA5QcvpCocMC&bbParentWidgetId=B7hKffsuorcGDKIZK9SoYtK
Pretty good deal for the Sun-Times - free content they monetize with ads. I don't like it.
I was initially denied by BlogBurst a few months ago, but after reading this I gave it a second chance and was accepted this time. Hopefully soon I'll be able to add some input to this discussion.
Tim - I think for a young growing blog, Blog Burst could be a great tool. Even if your stuff is syndicated for free, and posted it in its entirety, the new blog still wins. Like Dannie said, if the person likes your writing they will visit. So then you'd get one more viewer there, that you didn't have before.
Blogburst has definitely got me wanting to write more frequently...they picked up another article today of mine and delivered another 700+ visitors and added an extra 20 clicks on my adsense unit.
The best thing is that of those 700+ visitors, they are targeted exactly to my topic, which is the NBA. Can't ask for anything more can ya?
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