slickhog.com

Over a month ago, I signed up one of my sites to BlogBurst. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it’s a free service that makes your blog posts available to a number of organizations, including FoxNews, Reuters, IBS, Chicago Sun Times, Wall Street Journal and more. You simply provide BlogBurst with your RSS feed URL and people from websites affiliated with them pick their favorite posts and place them on their sites.

The sign-up process is quick and painless, but you have to have feed with full content, not excerpts limited by the “more” line. Once I signed up, I was approved in a day or two and my posts started to appear on other sites within 3 or 4 days.

Like I said earlier, not all of your posts will be picked up, it seems to me that they sift through the RSS feeds and pick what they like.

In a period of 30 days, the site which I’m analyzing, produced exactly 100 posts, of these, only 10 were picked up by one or more of BlogBurst’s affiliates.

Here are the results for the 30 days, beginning March 1, 2008:

1. Titles of my posts appeared on various pages 3,214,775 times, of which 2,726,452 were in FoxNews
2. My posts featured on outside web sites were read 6,379 times, that’s a CTR of only 0.19%
3. Of those who read my posts on outside websites, 31 clicked through to my site, a CTR of 0.48%

Here’s my opinion, join BlogBurst if you can. It’s completely free, it requires no maintenance once you set it up. Your blog will get free exposure, but don’t expect any noticeable increase in traffic.