• Home
• Tools
• Blog
• Contact

Online Marketing Reviews

Me: Search Warp’s Largest Traffic Source

By traffic, this author is the #1 author on SearchWarp.Com.

Written on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 by lorien1973 :: 1 Comment so far

Not sure why it matters, but I think its interesting.

According to Search Warp, I’m the #1 author on their site. I know some of my articles have gotten positive and negative comments, there, as well - based upon the email notices from Search Warp. I’d bet the most negative is the self serving “dent removal” one I did a few years ago. Basically a commercial for a product I sell. I’ve recently added ones that are more neutral and offer alternatives besides actually buying stuff from me. One of the people at Search Warp suggested I do so, and I finally got around to it and did it.

I was bored this evening - actually writing a bunch of content and needed a break - so I broke down the above page a little bit. Of the top 100 authors, I account for about 14% of that traffic. I almost bring as much traffic as the 2-4th authors combined and I more than double the 2nd place author as well. A few months back, I noted that I was the #2 author on Search Warp. Something drastic happened though, as I believe I had about 31,000 referrals at point and the #1 author had about 33,000. So it must be framed over a given time frame.

If anyone feels to congratulate me on my minor acheivement, please feel free!

Pay Per Post Review

This is a review of a new service called Pay Per Post

Written on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 by lorien1973 :: 5 Comments so far

For this review, we’ll have to step away from a haiku format. This review will take on http://www.payperpost.com/, a service that lets you pay for a friend - essentially - and pay bloggers to blog about your site, a product offering a new movie or whatever you wanted to have them blog about.

Intrigued. We signed up and did a little experiment.

We set a budget of $1000 for the posts. We offered bloggers $10 for a post about a given product. We don’t feel the product is important. Due to fees, this equates to about 75 blog entries. Pay Per Post takes a little bit for their fees, which is totally understandale. As of this writing, there are 65 active blog entries. Pay per post says there are 74 (of the 75), but some were rejected (rightfully..more on this below) and some are pending. We will assume the pending blogs will be accepted.

First off, Pay Per Post did a nice job in detecting splogs and rejected those entries and did not pay. Whether or not the post remains is doubtful and irrelevant. The service also has a click tracking option on a post, which we did not use. We forced bloggers to include an image, which probably makes the impression tracking far more accurate.

For category, we chose “blatant advertising” - because we got a kick out of the name. We started on July 3rd and, as we said, as of now there are 65 blog entries. A decent per day average. The devil is in the details, though. As you will see:

The average home page PR of the blog entries was 1.95, with roughly 45% of them being PR 0, one had a PR of 6, and 1 had a PR of 7. The median page views of the blog entries was 38, while the average was 238 views per blog entry. Of the 65 blog entries, 30 of them accounted for 83% of the page views. The PR 6 and 7 blogs, alone, accounted for 65% of the page views. Surprisingly, the PR 0 blog entries accounted for FAR more page views than the ones that had PR 1 through 5.

The PR 7 blog entry - as well at least 3 others - noted that the entry was paid for (buying a friend), but even at that, there was a definite surge in traffic from that blog entry. Conversions were not high for that day as they were probably curiosity clicks more than anything else.

Some tips for getting your blog post on the higher PR (and thus higher traffic) blogs - pay at least $10/entry. While you will get a lot of low traffic blogs (as noted above), the higher traffic ones do delivery traffic and may make up for this in the long run.

We do have long term concerns about this idea. Some of which follow below:

• Same blog doing lots of entries may be considered a link farm eventually and while they are being paid for entries they’ll never deliver traffic.
• Buying a friend? We bring this up a few times. Will visitors to these sites think (especially if the entry is marked as paid) that this is spam?
• How long do the blog entries stay on the blogs? Will they be removed?

For now, more tests are needed to see if the service is worthwhile. At this point, we’ll give the service a mild thumbs up. More purchases will be made to see if the results are consistent and how well the service peforms over a period of time.