Cash is Good!

I have taken a part-time job, and it's definitely affecting my blogging time. I'll continue to post here as I am able.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Link Referral Basic - Is it Worth The Time?


LinkReferral is a networking site that is designed to send more traffic to your blog. One of my other blogs, My Quality Day, has been listed on it for quite some time, with the Basic (free) package.

When you sign up, you put your blog in a category, chosen from these major groups
  • Computing/Technology
  • Life/Home
  • Education/Career
  • Reference
  • Entertainment
  • Shopping
  • Finance Travel
  • Health
  • Adult
  • Money Making Opps.
  • Top1000
  • Miscellaneous
  • Social/Personal Pages
This blog wouldn't be a bad fit, but my other blogs, on nature-related topics, fit poorly.

Has it generated more traffic for My Quality Day? Only on the days when I was willing to spend about an hour working on it. The secret to getting lots of hits is to get your blog into the top 10, or at least the top 30. You do this by meeting requirements in four categories of action. To make the top 10 for the day, you must meet all four requirements

1. You have to visit 30 of the sites in their blog members list. The theory is that people will choose to visit the top sites, which is why you want to spend the time to get there. Of course, just to be contrary, I liked to scroll down and visit sites that were lower in the list. You can't do this quickly, because if you click too quickly it won't register all your visits. This doesn't make much sense to me. I can understand why you want a site to load fully, but you should be able to click several links and then let them load.

2. You have to review 5 sites. Reviews are supposed to be meaningful with at least two sentences. They give good guidelines for writing reviews. However, it's just not worth the time this takes. If you offer constructive criticism (there are a lot of crappy blogs around), the owner of that blog will come back the next day and give you a poor review. These reviews are manually checked and graded by LinkReferral! With all my efforts to write meaningful reviews without spending all day, I've not gotten better than a B. Phooey!

3. You have to select one blog to mark as a favorite. I often had a hard time finding one that I was interested in. I know, I should have just picked one... who cares if I really like it, right?

4. You have to make a post in the forums. Well, you know what kind of forums requirements like this create. This is also manually moderated and useless comments don't count, so people tread a thin line between making it sound like they have something to say and not really caring. There are several topics where your comments don't count toward the requirement.

To be fair, on the days when I spent the time to do all of these things, my blog did end up in the top 10, and I did see some traffic from LinkReferral, but not nearly as much as through some other social networking sites.

Bottom line... I'm still listed there. My current rank for My Quality Day is 81 of 17413, and that is without doing anything there for weeks. My account stats says that I've gotten 5 visits this month through them. I'm content to just let it be out there as a possible source of visitors and a link, but the frustration factor was high, and I can't spend the time to guarantee a top spot every day.

Multiple blogs must be entered under separate accounts. You can upgrade to a premium package for $49.99. This gives you opportunities to make money. I haven't signed up for this so don't know how well it works.

LinkReferral

web ad income today (4 blogs, 2 web sites):
Adsense $.10
Adgitize $.19
Project Wonderful $.05
______________________
Total: $.34
Total to date in March $17.35

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