Site Review: Stupid traffic trick? No, not really

I'm a sucker for banner exchanges and other "traffic enhancement tools," but they're almost uniformly disappointing. I expected to think the same of BlogExplosion, but it actually seems to be working out pretty well.

Here's how it works: You sign up, register your blog, and then you "surf for points." In other words, you visit blogs served up by BlogExplosion (yes, I'm flogging a referral link -- more on that in a minute) in a frameset. Spend a minimum of 30 seconds on each blog, and for every two blogs you visit, they send one surfer your way.

You can also rack up referrals by rating blogs (it's like a random drawing scenario -- rate blogs in a frameset, and every so often, "you've won n points" comes up), or use some of your credits to display banner ads for your blog on their site. And you grab a share of the credits those whom you refer accrue as well (hence the referral link).

The usual rule of thumb here is, if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. So far, though, I'm having fun with BlogExplosion. I just open up the "surfing" and "rating" pages in a couple of extra tabs while I'm doing other things. When I have a free moment, I look at or rate the blogs in the tabs and set it to loading new ones.

I've found a few blogs that I've bookmarked and/or blogrolled this way, so it's not a total waste of time. Offhand, I'd say 1 in 5 of the blogs are interesting enough to spend more than the required 30 seconds on. And the way I see it, at least some small percentage of those visiting my site via BlogExplosion will like it enough to bookmark or blogroll it themselves.

For once, everybody really does win.

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