10/09: AdGridwork & Review Back For Bloggers

A few days ago I received a message from a fellow Bumpzee member promoting a couple of services that may be of interest to some readers. The first of these is an ad-swap effort called AdGridwork. The concept is your basic ad exchange where in return for showing third party ads on your blog or website, yours is shown on other sites on the network.

I haven't signed up for the service myself for the simple reason that I don't have a suitable space to display the ads. However, having had a quick look around the site, it looks OK and for anyone looking to participate in some kind of free ad exchange program it could be of interest and you might want to add it to your shortlist. I think the biggest objection that some have to this kind of system is the worry about the kinds of ads that will end up displayed on your site and in the past, many have become a hotbed for less than attractive get rich quick and similar programs. Below is a sample of how ads are displayed on your site.

If you have no advertising budget to speak of, the big advantage is that programs like this are free and can help you to get your ads out onto a high number of sites. Once again though, you don't really know the type/quality of the places your ads will appear. The only way to see how effective the program might be for you is to give it a try and, ultimately, you don't really have anything to lose. If you haven't yet had much success in selling space on your blog and have some real estate doing nothing you may already used  or considered using an ad swap program.

There are plenty of other programs offering a similar service and whether this one will prove to have any particular advantages over their competition is impossible to say.

What may be of more interest to some bloggers is their other service which is called Review Back. As the name suggests this is a service that allows bloggers to exhange reviews of each others sites and for bloggers looking to generate a little buzz as well as some link love from other blogs, it could be attractive. It's really reciprocal linking taken a step further, and, let's face it, blogrolls have become less and less useful in this respect. A review of your blog is probably far more likely to persuade readers to click through than a link in someone else's blogroll.

Whilst I can see the potential of this idea, it has its pitfalls too. At the moment the site has just under 1000 blogs listed in their membership and you can easily browse these from their main page. What I noticed when doing so was that a lot of the blogs were not particularly high quality and rank. Maybe that's to be expected as the site is still in its infancy. However, the potential for well established quality blogs is probably questionable because of it. I can't see there would be much incentive for someone who has already established their presence and a good audience, to review much lesser known bloggers. Those less well known blogs however are likely to be very keen on getting a review on the higher ranked sites and this inequality is always going to be difficult to manage.

I haven't tried the program, and I'm not sure how you would ensure the quality of writing that might be employed to review your blog. My guess is though that it would be a simple case of visiting the potential reviewer's site and making a judgement basedon what you see. To be fair, the program provides a decent amount of statistical information too, such as alexa and Google Rank for the member blogs, so in conjunction with your own judgement it shouldn't be too difficult to find potential Review Back partnerships.

Despite these minor criticisms though, all due credit to the owners for coming up with the service. I'm sure that the membership will continue to grow and that it will benefit a lot of bloggers who want to take part in cross promotion of this nature, and for bringing another free promotion idea to fruition, Review Back and its owners should be applauded.

TCH

tags: Review Back, Adgridwork, Blog Advertising, Blog Reviews, Promote Your Blog