BloggingZoom – November Stats and Review

With the Thanksgiving Holiday and everything I purposely decided not to do any kind of BloggingZoom update after my two week review until after a full month had passed. Since November 1 was the launch date and the day I got involved (at least I believe it was the official launch date) I figured it would be good to take another look at everything at the end of November.

If you haven’t read them already you might be interested in checking out my previous articles on BloggingZoom for the simple reason that much of what I write in this article will be a continuation or update of what I’ve already said in those articles.

• BloggingZoom – A Better “Diggâ€Â? For Bloggers
• BloggingZoom – First Week Review
• BloggingZoom – Week 2 Review: Traffic Surpasses Google

You might also be interested in reading my monthly site stats article, Inner88 Stats Update for November 2007, in which I give detailed traffic analysis that includes BloggingZoom info.

By this point you all know that I’m sold on the concept of BloggingZoom. I’ve been an active participant in the site as well as a vocal proponent of it out in the blogosphere. I won’t waste time a lot of time saying what I like or don’t like about BZ because Court and Vic are hard at work on some major upgrades so we may as well wait and see what they have for us (besides, I’ve pretty much already stated my suggestions).

What I will discuss is what BloggingZoom has done for me so far and how I think all of us can make the most out of BZ to build traffic to our sites.

Let’s Talk About Articles

I have been an article submitting fool. By the end of November I had submitted a grand total of 94 articles to BZ. Of those articles, 85 had gone “Hot” (90%). These 85 articles were all over the board as far as the type of articles they were. I had articles about movies, photos, sports, videos, blogging, link building, health, the writer’s strike, Google, and even Indian condom commercials.

The 9 articles that did not go hot seemed to follow some trends. As you can see from looking at the list, 3 of the posts were videos and 4 were movie related (part of my regular poster and trailer articles). I’m genuinely surprised that some of the articles didn’t get very many Zooms as I thought they were topical and were interesting or cool or just funny. But then, I’m the one that posted them all so it’s no wonder I felt that way.

• Ultimate “Hitmanâ€Â? Trailer and Poster
• New “Cloverfieldâ€Â? Trailer – People Are Going To Want To Know How It All Went Down
• What Happens When Hollywood Stars Try To Tutor Kids In LA School (Funny)
• What The Customer Actually Wanted – Best Marketing Cartoon Ever
• Obi-Wan Kenobi Buys A Used Car (Funny Video)
• The Coen Brothers’ “No Country For Old Menâ€Â? Poster and Trailer
• Video Of New Frontier Hotel Imploding In Las Vegas
• One And Done – Ricky Williams Concludes Shortest NFL Comback Ever
• Woody Allen’s “Cassandra’s Dreamâ€Â? Poster and Trailer

A couple of the articles have gone hot since the first of December but the rest of them are still lingering with only two or three Zooms. I cannot say whether no one found them worthy or they just got lost among all the other articles being submitted. I have discovered that it really only takes 5 or 6 Zooms to get your Post to go “hot” and if you wait long enough you can sometimes get a post to go hot even after you’ve forgotten all about it. I’m not sure if that will change as more people begin using BZ. I actually think it should since 6 Zooms aren’t very many.

Out of all the articles I’ve submitted I have a total of 42 that have double digit Zooms. That breaks down to 36 articles that have 10 to 19 Zooms, 5 articles that have 20 to 29 Zooms, and 1 article that has more than 30 Zooms (Easiest Way Ever To Get A Backlink From A PR4 Website! – 35 Zooms).

It seems like the more people are getting involved in BZ the less people are actually Zooming. My articles from the first couple of weeks got a lot more Zooms than my articles from the last couple of weeks. I think that is mostly due to the volume of articles that is now available for people to read through.

If you view the Published Posts with the most number of Zooms (for the year so far) you’ll find that there are 35 articles listed on the first page and that it takes a minimum of 19 Zooms to get your post listed on that page. I have six posts that I submitted listed on that page.

1. Easiest Way Ever To Get A Backlink From A PR4 Website! (35)
2. The BloggingZoom Backlink Participants 1-10 (28)
3. How to Transform Readers Into Raving Fans (25)
4. How I Increased My Alexa Ranking By Nearly 2.5 Million in 7 Days (24)
5. BloggingZoom – First Week Review (22)
6. Getting Out Of Google Trash (the Supplemental Index) (22)

The Top Ten Zoomed Articles

These are the articles that have received the largest number of Zooms so far (along with the BZ user who submitted it and the number of Zooms it has received):

1. Blogging Zoom Bringing The Man Down (Vic – 45)
2. StumbleUpon – The “Super Stumble” Traffic Tip (Tyco – 42)
3. 3 reasons why Blogging Zoom SUCKS! (bsd13 – 36)
4. This Worst Post In The Universe (Dax – 36)
5. Easiest Way Ever To Get A Backlink From A PR4 Website! (jclark88 – 35)
6. The 100 Zoom Bloggingzoom Reward (Blendworx – 35)
7. BlogRush Yet To Deliver on Hype | Blog Traffic (Desty – 34)
8. 35 Guaranteed Ways to Increase Your RSS Subscribers (fredpeters – 30)
9. 5 Reasons I Used To Suck At Social Media (fredpeters – 29)
10. Killing It On The BZ | Official Blogging Zoom Blog (Court – 28)

Let’s Talk About Traffic

So it’s all well and good that I, and others like me, are submitting articles to BZ and people are Zooming them, but what does that mean for traffic to my site? How is BZ actually helping? Is it actually helping? Is it worth the time it takes to submit the articles and get involved in the BZ community?

Yes. And I’ll tell you why.

BloggingZoom brings in traffic. That is, being involved in BZ helps bring in traffic both directly and indirectly.

In the six months prior to getting involved with BZ (May through October) I only had 6,846 total hits for an average of 1,141 unique visitors per month (don’t laugh). My numbers looked like this:

1. Google (organic) – 2,520/420 avg
2. Direct – 995/165 avg
3. Technorati (referral) – 584/97 avg
4. Stumbleupon (referral) – 572/95 avg
5. MSN (organic) – 505/84 avg
6. Other Sources – 1670/278 avg

Since I got involved with BZ on literally the first day of November it’s very easy to compare the differences between the previous months and my first month being involved with BZ. I had a total of 4,398 unique hits in November (a 385% increase over my average!). This is what my numbers looked like for November:

1. Stumbleupon (referral) – 2375
2. Technorati (referral) – 591
3. Google (organic) – 463
4. BloggingZoom (referral) – 413
5. Direct – 284
6. Other Sources – 272

As you can see, the visitors from BloggingZoom alone are as much as my monthly Google average. Keep in mind that these are mostly other bloggers as well. I tend to view them as higher quality traffic because they tend to read more articles, spend more time on the site, comment on more posts, and be more likely to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Another thing I’ve learned is that BZ users tend to be Stumbleupon users as well. I had several articles stumbled which led to my getting almost as much traffic from SU in this one month as I’ve gotten from Google in the previous six months. SU traffic seems to continue to deliver for quite some time as well. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether or not you think SU traffic is valuable, but I for one am happy to get it wherever I can.

I’m not sure how or why the Technorati traffic went up so much. It’s too much of a coincidence to not think it has something to do with BZ. Perhaps it has something to do with getting DoFollow links from leaving comments on other sites or something…? I really don’t know. I’ll keep my eye on this and see if it continues to show numbers that are comparable to BZ.

Even if I do a conservative estimate I would have to say that BZ is directly or indirectly responsible for sending 2,693 unique visitors to my site (maybe more) in November. That’s a 236% increase over my average just from BZ! And that’s not counting direct visits or visits from comments that I left because I found an article on BZ or anything like that.

Conclussion

There is simply no denying that BZ can help you build traffic to your site. You can clearly see what it’s done for me and this site after only one month (one!) of active participation. Just imagine the possibilities of BZ once Google begins indexing all of the pages and once thousands of bloggers are submitting and visiting and zooming instead of just hundreds.

Right now it can be difficult to get articles in certain niches noticed because the bloggers who are frequenting the site are more interesting in other subjects. But that won’t always be the case. As more and more people become a part of BZ we’ll start to see a lot more activity in the narrower niches and a lot more traffic to those types of blogs. It’s like how you can put the most unusual, random item on eBay and there will be hundreds of people who know what it is and desperately want it… Once a certain number of users are a part of BZ none of us will have a problem getting traffic.

If you are a blogger who is reading this and you have not tried BZ I suggest you give it a shot. It can never hurt to get your stuff out among a new audience. And I think I’ve already proven that it can be very beneficial.

If you are a reader I would ask that you consider signing up on BloggingZoom and Zooming my articles if you like what you read. The higher my Zooms are the more exposure I get in the blogging world. It only takes a moment to sign up and once you do that it takes merely a nanosecond to click on the Zoom button to Zoom my article. I would be forever grateful.

Click here to REGISTER

If you are a blogger who has been involved with BZ I’m very interested in hearing more about what experiences you might have had over the past month. Has your traffic been increased as a result of your involvement in BZ? Do you think it’s worth the time and effort? What do you think about the BZ community?

I’d love to hear what you have to say.