Blogging isn’t the easiest thing to do in the world – there are always comments to be moderated, templates to be tweaked and sponsors to be sought…and then you’ve got to write posts! The thought has often occurred to me that it’d be a lot easier to create a blog with another person or work on a group blog and it’s an avenue that I can definitely see myself exploring at some point in the future.

One site that has fully taken the “group blogging” concept on board is Blog About Your Blog which aims to bring together quality bloggers from quality blogs to collaborate on one big blogging project! It’s definitely an interesting concept and I was excited to see how well the site was performing and what lessons I could learn.
Can many bloggers create a super blog?

I’m sure it’s quite easy to sell the concept of the site to other blog authors – ‘write a post on the site and in return you’ll be promoting your own site’ is a pretty attractive concept that I’ve taken up myself on a number of occasions! With Blog About Your Blog, the result is an eclectic mix of posts that cover quite a large number of topics and reflect the different views of different authors from all over the globe!

With roughly 20 authors writing for the site, each blogger is able to bring their own expertise and knowledge to the blog. This means that rather than having a mass of posts devoted to one blogger’s area of expertise, the categories are quite varied and don’t just cover the standards of ‘more web site traffic’ and ‘money making’ but also ‘inspiration’, ‘photography’ and ‘sports’.

Some posts that I quite liked included:

• Why some people’s posts are always well written
• 5 ways to get more comments and make you smile
• 4 steps to becoming a bad web parent
• This is NOT a sponsored post

Blog About Your Blog also has quite a few unique concepts that I found quite interesting. For a start, every Friday they publish a ‘Comment Friday’ post that encourages readers to leave a comment in the post about anything they like. Readers can rant on any topic and what is judged to be the best comment receives a free linkback and the title of “Blog of the Week”. I think this concept is quite ingenious for getting a blog’s readers to comment and it appears to be quite successful as most ‘Comment Friday’ posts are receiving around 30-40 comments. I think it’s a fantastic way to encourage interaction with all your readers, regardless of what areas they are interested in.

I also found Blog About Your Blog’s promotional techniques quite intriguing as by having multiple authors, the site has a large base of other blogs to be promoted on. With 20+ bloggers working together, it would quite easy to generate a massive buzz around a particular post and with a bit of organization they could quite easily push some of their posts to the front page of Digg. In fact, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened quite a lot already!

Blog About Your Blog is also currently holding a competition where you can win a mini-fridge valued at $60 by subscribing to their feed. Sounds pretty “cool”! Haha!

Too many bloggers spoil the blog?

I love the concept of Blog About Your Blog and I think it’s being executed with a fair degree of success but I really feel the site needs to set some rules or guidelines regarding it’s direction in order to succeed further.

While there are some great “standalone” posts, many of the posts that I saw contained links back to author’s home blog or the author’s affiliate links. This is not surprising, as if I was asked to write a post I’d probably fill it with links to my site and various affiliate programs too. However, many of the posts are also quite short which gave me the impression that the authors were writing them merely to create a link to their site rather than to contribute their knowledge. Unfortunately when you’ve got around 20 bloggers doing this, it makes the site feel a little like one big link list and a little spammy.

I also felt the site fell into the “sponsored posts” trap of writing posts purely for the money. It’s hard to tell someone to turn down a quick buck, but having the sponsored staples of credit card sites and phone companies really does more damage than good. I wonder if the profits from the site are then split 20 ways?

There are a few bugs with the site’s design and layout. On pages with a short post, the sidebar extends below the central white area and runs off the site. Also, while the categories link area lists many posts, clicking on the category link only shows one page of posts with no obvious link to see the other posts in the category. This makes navigating the site quite difficult but I’m sure that these are minor template bugs that are easily fixed.

The site is monetized by AuctionAds which I feel isn’t appropriate given the site’s topic. Auctions related to blogging are usually $1 e-books or $2 ready-made sites. The sales vs clicks ratio is quite low with AuctionAds and if the site manages to get a sale through these ads, the commission would only be a couple of cents which probably isn’t worth it. I’d predict that contextual advertising such as Adsense or Bidvertiser would earn more in one day than a month of AuctionAds on this site.

The future of blogging?

I can see group blogs gaining in popularity as blogging becomes more business-like and professional. With the everyday maintenance chores and posting tasks being divided, there would be a lot more time for blog promotion and networking. Blog About Your Blog is an interesting experiment to see how this will succeed at the grassroots level and I’ll be watching the site’s progress closely.

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