What makes you guys different from other blog directories?
Well, another big blog directory would be Technorati. What they do is go out and crawl sites, and then people come back and claim them — so they have a lot of different content — way more blogs than we could ever have.
We’re probably the largest user-submitted blog directory, meaning that users come to us, and we manually approve data applications and make sure they’re not spam. We get about 900 submissions a day, and approve less than half of those. So instead of having this large database of every blog, the blogs listed on our site are higher quality.
Do you have any features that are different?
We started as a straight blog directory. Then two years ago we purchased it, cleaned up the spam, and created a new approval process.
Now, you can add other bloggers as friends, create discussions in groups, set up lifestreaming, and so on.
We also added to tools section, where users can submit any tool: whether it’s a blogging platform or a widget or a moneymaking opportunity. It’s only three days old, but the idea is that users can not only submit, but they can also rate and review other people’s submissions.
So when your new blogger, and you want to know what is the best platform, you can compare options and read reviews by bloggers that are actually using them. We hope that will become useful.
It sounds like you’ve built a layer of community and social networking above a traditional directory listing. Am I right?
Yes, it’s a hybrid. A lot of our visitors are not part of the community. They come from search engines looking for blogs, or enter through our homepage and locate blogs by looking in each category.
The other big half are people coming from search. For example, they’re searching for Las Vegas hotels. One post from a small blogger may not yield really high results from the search engines — it may be page 20 — for “Las Vegas hotels”. But when I can put it on a page full of Las Vegas hotel search results – that includes 50 high-quality articles on Las Vegas hotels that super-targeted. Then when search engines crawl that page, they’re going to put it much higher in the results and then it would that single post on its own.
So being included gives the individual blogger a higher level of search visibility?
Right, exactly.
What type of traffic do you get?
We get about 20 million monthly visitors. They come from all of the world, and it may be about 60% are from the US.
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