I Review, Do You?

Every blogger wants traffic. I spend tons of time doing things to try to generate visits to this site and you probably do the same for your blog. We can do all of this stuff untill the cows come home, but if those of us willing to put some effort into developing traffic flow were to form a loose cooperative, we could all benefit from the experience.

The Idea

The concept is that each blogger set aside one or two posts a week for a serious, honest, well thought out review of another blog, that blogger in return would write a review of the reviewing blog. The reviews would be arranged in advance between bloggers.

You would write a blog post about the idea (linking to this post please ;-) and install an "I Review" button on your sidebar that links to your post. Someone interested in exchanging reviews would contact you through comments or email and request a review. You would evaluate the other site and decide to accept the invitation or not. If so, you return contact and make an agreement to write reciprocal reviews. We could call this the "I Review Movement".

The Reviewer

As the writer of a review you should remember that what goes around has a habit of coming back around. If you can't write a nice review of the requesting blog, do not accept the invitation. All reviews should be honest and constructive, not rude, nitpicky or slashing. This is someone's project we're talking about here.

The Reviewee

If you agree to have another blogger write a review of your blog, you must be prepared for an honest assessment of your work. We're all adults here. (We are aren't we?) If you can't take it don't ask for it.

The Purpose For The Project

The primary reason for "I Review" is not to sit around in an echo chamber telling each other how pretty we are. It is to bring traffic to our blogs through a cooperative community effort. Think of not only the great contacts you would make and the aditional visitors you would get but also all of those wonderful backlinks.

I made up a few buttons for anyone that would like one. Feel free to change them to match your site.

        

    

Day Two

Here we are on day two. No hits yet, but that is to be expected. I see that the Google AdSense ads are already content appropriate. I expected that to take a couple of days. I expect to have to make at least three or four posts before I start to see any traffic. I've started the site with a banner across the top and a wide skyscraper on the right side. I think it looks attractive to match the ad units to the site. I know the site looks kind of girly but I like it. I may play with that part as well later on to see if it make a difference in how many clicks the site receives.