Shortly after I started blogging in 2006 a new company opened for business. This company’s name is Blogburst. It’s a syndication service that places your blog content on top-tier online destinations. Namely online news sites like Reuters, USA Today, Gannett, McGraw-Hill, Fox News and Internet Broadcasting.
What could I get out of listing my sites with Blogburst? Well increased visibility for one – especially if any of my sites or posts got picked up by online news services, plus a greater audience reach and increased traffic. Online publishers in turn would get more material to use on their sites in order to broaden their reach and increase their own page views.
So I signed up my sites and kept on blogging as usual. Nothing much happened for a long time. I’d go and check my account to see if any of the news services had picked up any of my posts every now and then and I was disappointed to find out that they had not.
I wasn’t ready to give up though and I kept my sites listed on Blogburst.
Late last year Blogburst started a service where they would provide quarterly revenue to their top one hundred bloggers who’s posts got picked up by online services consistently. Obviously I was not one of those bloggers. I believe that Blogburst has plans to expand compensation to bloggers as their reach grows and more online services start to use Blogburst’s bloggers for content.
Yesterday while I was checking site statistics for my blogs and my husbands two blogs I made a surprising discovery. One of the sites bringing new visitors to my husbands site was USA Today! It seems that they just started picking up his weird news posts from Odd Planet at the beginning of March. We hope that they continue to do so.
Now that I’ve actually seen how it works I can tell you that the online service- In this case USA Today, will pick up a post and place a short summary of the post on their site. Visitors to their site who want to read the whole post are brought directly to your site. This increases visitors and hopefully your sites popularity in the long run.
Naturally we were thrilled that Odd Planet was picked up by USA Today.
Pleased, I went on checking site stats for our other sites and made another amazing discovery. USA Today, and IBS (I believe this must be Internet Broadcasting) had been picking up some of my posts from As the Garden grows since early February. I think that over 33,000 post views have occurred since early February via those services. How had I not noticed this earlier?
I promptly got busy and placed a number of our other sites on Blogburst. I’m now keeping my fingers crossed that posts continue to get picked up from As the Garden Grows and Odd Planet and perhaps some of the other sites that we added to Blogburst.
Maybe we’ll end up on their top 100 list of bloggers and end up making some money through Blogburst. As of now I’m just happy that we should see an increase in visitors.
This certainly is incentive to create excellent content on all of our blogs.