Question from Sylvia M.: Rick, I have a womens’ book review blog that I’m trying to promote. I’ve been writing at least one post every day for 7 months, but my traffic is still just a trickle compared to where I would like it to be.
I was doing some research on the Internet about how to grow blog traffic and I discovered a service called BlogUpp. Since there’s no sign-up of any kind required and you don’t have to give them any personal information, I’m seriously considering adding their widget to my blog.
I have a couple of questions that I’d like to ask you before I start using the BlogUpp widget:
1) Is it really effective at driving traffic to a blog?
2) Will using BlogUpp cause me any problems with the search engines ranking my blog posts?
Thanks in advance for your help Rick!
Rick’s answer: Sylvia, what you’re experiencing right now is the same problem that most new and struggling bloggers experience, and that’s getting visitors to come to your blog. It makes no difference how insightful, useful and entertaining your posts are if no one stops by to read them!
There are about a million different ways to drive traffic to a blog. Some work well, others work somewhat, and many others don’t work at all. As far as BlogUpp is concerned, I can’t really speak to its effectiveness based on personal experience because I’ve never used it. I did perform a few common-sense checks however…
I visited the BlogUpp website and checked out a number of the blogs listed in their directory, and many of them have very high Alexa rankings which is an indicator of very low traffic levels (in general, the higher the Alexa number the lower the traffic). That isn’t a good sign since the purpose of the BlogUpp widget is to drive traffic to the blogs they are posted on.
To answer your second question, while I was on the BlogUpp site I took a look at the code they give you to place on your blog and I didn’t see anything that should raise a red flag with the search engines. You should be good to go there should you decide to give the widget a try.
As a last “check” I typed “BlogUpp Review” into Google and it returned a long list of pages where various blogs had reviewed the BlogUpp service. I checked at least 10 of the blogs that had posted BlogUpp reviews and not a one of them had the BlogUpp widget on the blog, regardless of how glowing the review itself was.
In my opinion, that’s a very bad sign. Why? Because why would the owners of those blogs remove the BlogUpp widget if they found that it worked for them?
Bottom line: Sylvia, my answers to your questions are based solely on the results of the checks I mentioned above, not on personal experience on my part as I mentioned earlier. Like I said, I have never used the BlogUpp widget on any of my blogs.
That being said, based upon the results of the checks I made it appears to me that using BlogUpp would likely be a waste of your valuable time – time that could probably be better used with other methods of promoting your blog.
Update from Sylvia: Thanks a bunch Rick. I suspected that your answers would be just as you gave them but I wanted to check with you before I made a decision. I’ve decided to skip BlogUpp and try other things. Thanks again.
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