Technology, business and change
Sponsoring a category in BlogCatalog
I’m a big fan of BlogCatalog and I actually much prefer it to MyBlogLog but I won’t go into details as to why I prefer it as it’s not the purpose of this post. I actually want to talk about sponsoring a category into BlogCatalog to get more exposure. I was interested in sponsoring a category to increase my visibility but I’m not sure it’s really worth it.
The price
The rates to sponsor a category are actually pretty good for a website like BlogCatalog which is receiving thousands of visitors everyday: it goes from 8$ to 25$. Prices depend on the category you want to sponsor. For example, a scrapbooking category will cost you 8$ while a Finance category will be 25$. It just goes with popularity.
What do you get?
Here’s what BlogCatalog gives you for sponsoring a category:
BlogCatalog’s Sponsored Category program is a way for you to get more visitors to your blog by taking advantage of BlogCatalog’s traffic of over 45 million annual visitors.
- A premium position in BlogCatalog’s Category specific directory
- Your blog will show up in one of the top 5 positions in the category you select
- Your sponsorship links to your BlogCatalog description page which links to your blog.
Worth it?
Well, with BlogCatalog, you can actually see the number of recent visitors on the website’s BlogCatalog profile and from what I’ve seen from other sponsors, I’m not convinced. The amount of recent visitors was similar to my profile’s recent visitors count and I wasn’t sponsoring any category which makes me think it’s not a big traffic source. These are only assumptions as I’m not sure how reliable the stats ar.
These are only assumptions, let’s try it!
Anyway, I don’t like to assume things so I decided to sponsor the SEO category on BlogCatalog for the next 30 days. So, if you search into the SEO category, you’ll see me appear in the first five listings:
So I say, if you were thinking about sponsoring a category to increase your exposure, just wait a week or two. I will provide some feedback in the next weeks as to wether it’s giving good traffic or not so this way you will be able to make a good decision and won’t throw away 10-25$. Let me do the dirty work!
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Hi Ben,
Can you tell me more about Blog Catalog, I haven’t really connected the dots there, MyBlogLog I understand the ins and outs but with BC what are the tips to get more traffic and exposure for blogs? Is it joining groups for instance? Or some other tricks?
Also, why do your prefer BC over MyBlogLog?
Thanks,
JR
BC is really similar to MyBlogLog, but there are a couple of key features I like. In BC, you can create and join groups and the concept is a little like Facebook’s groups. You can have discussions in a group and it looks like a forum. Then, there’s a concept of “broadcast” in BC (Maybe it exist in MBL, not sure.) which means you can actually send a message to all of your friends and they’ll receive a notification in they email box. So you can use it as some sort of “news letter” whenever you write a new article. People can rate your blog and post reviews also. There’s also a central forum, where you can join discussions and this can give you some exposure. The key concept is really to make friends and I love the concept of broadcasting.
Thanks Ben, I will try out all the tips you mention, I joined some groups all ready but I did not know about the broadcast.
Thanks,
JR
No problems mate!
I just want to mention that I use the broadcast carefully: I make sure it’s a valuable post before broadcasting it. I don’t want to spam people with crap as they’ll only block my future broadcasts if it’s not worth it for them. I hate spam so I try not to spam
Very interesting. I am going to sign up and see how well this one does. This is the first I have heard of it so thanks for sharing.
No problems, good luck with the sponsoring!
I never really looked into this, but I guess it’s just another form of advertising. I’d be interested to see what you find out by doing this…it may end up being worth the small investment to get a few more hits
JK, so far it’s not bringing a whole lot of traffic but it’s giving some extra exposure. I think it might be worth for a month or two but definitely not as long term advertising.
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anybody else tried this?
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