Apr 07 2007
Promoting Your Blog
A few days ago Andy Beard wrote a very in-depth post entitled Blogcatalog Slam Dunks MyBlogLog on his niche marketing blog.
I finally had a chance to have a look at Blogcatalog today. From Andy’s post I gather this site has been around for a while but has recently added a number of new features such as neighborhoods (aka communities), personal profiles and blog rating.
Good Points
One of the things I like about Blogcatalog is that the blogs are classified and tagged. I think this really helps when looking for blogs on a certain subject, and is one of the main advantages Blogcatalog has over MyBlogLog. But I’m a classification / keyword nut (which probably stems from the fact that I run a business directory).
Similarly, you can browse via country (which I love), language or user and search by tag and category which makes it much more functional than MyBlogLog in this respect. Incidentally there are 1,362 Australian blogs listed
The ability to vote for a blog, and leave a review also adds value over MyBlogLog (although MBL does have comments).
Each blog and update is manually reviewed (in my case it was done within an hour), so this should reduce the incidence of splogs.
Bad Points
I think they need to be a little more transparent about how blog rank is derived – I’m still trying to work out what’s better – a higher rank or a lower one (though I suspect if they are giving brownie points for adding widgets then higher is better).
On the subject of widgets, as Andy points out;
“A huge amount more needs to be done in promotion – viral marketing can fizzle if people don’t notice the benefit of including a widget.”
Having a free WordPress blog means that I can’t incorporate the “recent visitors” widget, and yet I can with MyBlogLog. That’s something they really should address, as there’s a big market there.
The following graph shows that Blogcatalog is picking up some traction (but still quite away behind MyBlogLog).
Anyway, that was my first impressions – head over to Andy’s post for a full rundown.
And if you are looking for some more ideas, check out Dan’s analysis – Six Alternatives to MyBlogLog. It’s a good read.
4 Responses to “Promoting Your Blog”
Thanks for the mention. I didn’t know you couldn’t use the Blog Catalog widget with free blogs. That’s quite a significant issue, considering one in every ten blogs I come across on MyBlogLog are using a free blog service.
To drift off-topic for a moment, I used to hear the radio ads for dlook all the time when I was driving around, and I would never have guessed I’d come into contact with one of the owners. Anyway I always love bumping into fellow Aussie bloggers. There seems to be more of us around than I first thought.
Cheers.
Dan.
Hi Dan
It wasn’t until you popped up on Twitter today that I made the connection between you, Sevn, your blog and an Aussie D’oh.
I really enjoyed catching up with your recent posts & have added you on the reader.
It’s a small world as they say – keep up the great posts – I’m sure I’ll be linking to more!
My blog rank seems to be going up
I am honestly not sure how it is derived – I do know that some of the most active members actually have quite a low rank, despite having lots of reviews, and traffic from being on the most popular list.
I have a feeling the ranking system will work wonders in preventing people spamming, because negative votes can affect your ranking.
Categorising in various ways is great – the amazing stat for me was that there was only 1 listing from Japan, which is a full 1/3 of the blogging market according to Technorati.
Hi Andy,
Mine’s gone up too
It was 34.1 when I started and now 45.7.
I suppose that in keeping the rank a secret it makes it harder to “game”. I can see the posts now “how I gamed blogcatalog” heheh.
Japan – only 1, that is interesting. I notice you have “moved” 😉 – all good!