Riding the Rocket!

A couple of days ago BlogExplosion introduced a new idea called the Blog Rocket. I stumbled upon it purely by accident very early on, even before the mailshot went out to BE customers. And I have to admit that it's addictive and fun, as well as increasing traffic to your blog.

It consists of a list of 25 slots for blogs. Register for the game and your blog is inserted in the bottom slot. As more bloggers join, you move up the list, eventually arriving at the top spot. Of course, the first blogger to join after that knocks you off the top and you can then re-register to appear at the bottom again.

The benefits come in that you can win credits by having a look at the blogs riding the rocket with you. You have a chance of winning the big prize, 1,000 credits, as well. But the real benefit is that it increases traffic to your blog. I rode the rocket a few times yesterday (Saturday) and, at the end of the day, the stats showed twice as much traffic from BE as usual. That's pretty impressive, I think.

But I'm a bit cynical about these things and so my first thought was that yes, it increases traffic, but it has to be poor quality traffic in that no-one will stop to read. It seemed to me that everyone would just click through the available blogs, hoping to win a few credits. There was no obligation to stay the regulation 30 seconds, after all.

A few things happened that made me change my view on this. To begin with, I noticed that I was seeing a lot of blogs that I'd never seen on the usual blog exchange. And I stopped to read them. Incredibly, I began to find a few that interested me and (horror of horrors!) I started blogmarking some. As I settled in to the speed of the rocket, I realized that there was no hurry; the thing progresses slowly enough for you to stop and read if you find an interesting blog.

That's just me, I thought. Nobody else is going to bother with actually reading anything. Yet I was proved wrong in that too. Quite soon I began to get comments from bloggers that had never visited before (I even had a sarcastic one - yes, thank you, that man!). So it seemed that I wasn't the only one finding it easier to investigate blogs properly at the pace of the rocket. Another point in its favor.

Don't get me wrong; the speed of the rocket is variable, dependent very much on how many bloggers are clambering on. There were times on Saturday when it really was a rocket and there was hardly time to glance at a few blogs before your own shot out of the top of the list. But late at night it gets really slow and can take an hour from start to finish.

Perhaps the greatest thing about the Rocket is that it's fun in a way that blogclicking isn't. After a few rounds of clicking on the blog exchange, the same old blogs begin to come up and it becomes an exercise merely to build credits. On the Rocket, however, there seems to be a much higher proportion of blogs not seen before. Perhaps they are the blogs of those who have become disillusioned with the usual exchange.

The tendency on the Rocket is to run round to the bottom as soon as one pops out of the top. But I have found a principle of diminishing returns in this. Most bloggers repeat the process as soon as they have completed a journey and this means that you can find yourself riding the Rocket with pretty much the same people as before. And then you find that you're not allowed to look at a blog again if you've looked at it in the last 24 hours. Ride the Rocket three or four times in succession and you can be in for a boring time with nothing to read until you reach the end of the journey.

And, of course, most have looked at your blog by that time, so the number of hits it receives declines with each succeeding trip. Probably the best way to ride the Rocket is to take it a couple of times and then go off and do something else for a while. Return later and you'll find a new set of bloggers to ride with.

Number of hits varies between about 6 to 20 per journey. As I've said, no matter how well you do on your first ride, the hit rate will decline as you take successive trips.

Overall, I have to say that the Blog Rocket is a brilliant idea and a great way to increase hits to your blog. It's early days yet but it does seem that it will continue to deliver on its promise of traffic. But perhaps the best thing about it is the fun it provides.

Go ride the Rocket!