Just a couple of days ago I decided to join Blog Engage. Basically, Blog Engage is a paid social network where bloggers can connect, share content, build backlinks, vote for other bloggers’ posts, and much more. It’s a great way to not only increase your blog traffic, but enhance your SEO, make connections, and potentially make more money. I have been reluctant to try Blog Engage because it’s a paid community, but that’s actually one of the reasons I like it. I’m so happy I decided to take the plunge and I’m here to let you know that you should as well.
It’s a Paid Community
Perhaps the only drawback of Blog Engage is the fact that it costs money. The cheapest membership is a $19.99 one-time fee that you have to manually submit your content with. This is a great starter plan, but I opted to get the $9.99 per month plan that has so many more features that will ensure your blog success. Although I’m paying money for this service, that’s actually one of the good things about it. Unlike Facebook or Twitter where anybody can sign up, Blog Engage is full of serious members who are there for the same reason as everyone else – to make connections, share content, and make more money blogging. Being full of serious members is nice because you know that everyone who sees your updates is not only within your target audience, but they will care enough to click on the link and subscribe to your blog. Besides, $9.99 a month is not that much money.
Content Syndication Over Many Feeds
One spot I fall weak in with blog promotion is my social media presence. For one, it’s really hard to build up a following. Before I joined Blog Engage, the only reason I was getting Facebook fans and Twitter followers was from my giveaways. The problem with these followers is that they are only clicking the “Follow” button because they want whatever you’re giving away. Nothing is stopping them from unfollowing if they don’t win and chances are, they will never click one of your posts anyway. After I joined Blog Engage, I had 7 people like my Omega Web Facebook page within the first few hours. This is significant because I knew that each person that liked my page would click and read at least one of my articles, thus increasing my viewers, building stronger relationships, and potentially making more profit.
Although it’s nice that Blog Engage increased my Facebook following, that’s not really what I’m paying for. The meat of the $9.99 service is what they call “Content Syndication”. Basically, this is a service that reads your blog’s RSS feed and automatically shares your post to their thousands of Twitter followers as well as posting the article on their website for other members of Blog Engage to see. This is where the majority of your traffic will come from. In addition to bringing traffic, the Content Syndication is specially built to bring you PR3+ backlinks to every one of your posts in your RSS feed. This will help the SEO and PageRank of your blog tremendously.
Meeting New People
Looking back, I’ve met so many people in so little time because of my blog. One of the first bloggers that I started talking to was Ehsan Ullah of Guide and News. Ehsan has been good to me over the months and I have learned a lot from his posts. The next blogger I met was Enstine Muki, the developer of Cash Donator and EasyRetweet.com. I met Enstine by buying his Cash Donator plugin that I saw advertised on another website. After I met Enstine, I joined his Facebook blogging group and met up with one of my closest blogging friends – Wade of Bloggers Make Money… The list goes on and on. Each connection led to another and each friendship with these unique bloggers is one more person I have commenting on my posts, recommending plugins to me, and purchasing products from my affiliate links. In fact, the main reason I started thinking about joining Blog Engage was because Wade recommended it to me.
Although I have made some good friends via Facebook and linked blogs, it would be great if there was a service that made it easier – and that’s exactly what Blog Engage does. Basically, all you have to do is select your niche and a whole list of similar bloggers will appear before your eyes. Not only can you easily connect with other people this way, but you can find posts written by those authors to see who’s really worth connecting with. Once you find someone, it works very similar to Facebook – click “Add as Friend” and they will appear in your friend list.
The Community Blog
One of the features that they market with a Blog Engage membership is their community blog. Not only do Blog Engage members have full access to reading it, but we have full privileges to guest post there as well. As of November 5, 2012, Blog Engage is a PR4 website which means you will be getting quality PR4 backlinks for every guest post you write.
In addition to simply guest posting on Blog Engage, they run a contest every year and give bloggers an opportunity to win $500 or more for writing a single post. This is something that I am definitely interested in doing at some point as $500 is more money than I can make from any one post here on this blog.
Rocking Affiliate Program (I Call This Affiliate 2.0)
I really like the fact that Blog Engage has a tiered affiliate program. I normally refer to these as “Affiliate 2.0” programs because they offer more opportunities to make money. Basically, the program is broken down like this: you get 25% of all direct referrals you make and a smaller portion of sales your referred customers make. So if you email your buddy your affiliate link (or he clicks it on your blog), then you will make 25% of what he pays per month. So if he signs up for the $9.99 per month plan, $2.50 will be deposited into your account monthly… Now your buddy sees how much money you are making from this program and places the banner on his own blog. If he makes two sales for the $9.99 plan as well, you will make $0.62 per person per month. All in all, you will be making $3.74 per month for just referring one person. If you could rack up 10 or 15 people, you could be making as much as $56.10 per month just from the Blog Engage affiliate program.
For a full rundown of the possible commissions, see this post on Blog Engage.
In Conclusion
All in all, I’m glad I decided to join Blog Engage. I currently have two blogs set up with their RSS Content Syndication service and I’m hoping that each one will benefit immensely from the platform. I’ve heard nothing bad about Blog Engage and I believe that it will pay for itself very quickly.
Sign Up Now!
If you’re interested in signing up for Blog Engage (remember, it’s only $9.99 – you can’t go wrong), you can do so here.
Hi Ian. I joined Blog Engage just over a month ago and I am very glad I did. The traffic on my website is getting better, and so are the comments on my blog posts, You are right about the members being serious about promoting their blogs. I think Blog Engage is the best community of bloggers on the web.
It really makes a difference! I have two different blogs in completely different niches so I hope Blog Engage helps them both and not just this one…
I have considering it myself with the recent deals on membership but really want to syndicate a non-Wordpress site and not sure it’s as useful for those.
Blog Engage has nothing to do with WordPress actually. It’s powered by RSS feeds so it doesn’t matter if you use Blogger, Drupal, or a custom coded site, as long as it has an RSS feed it’ll work with Blog Engage.
And if you’re interested in signing up for their special November deal, let me know so I can send you my affiliate link!
This deal is a great deal. Every new blogger should be in on this. This is not a lot of money, and the traffic and SEO is great off of it!
I’m actually writing about the special November deal right now.
BlogEngage is great for bloggers, i remember when Brian very fist started the website.
Do you get any benefits for being an early adopter?
I am starting up a blog soon probably and therefor will definitely start using Blog Engage. It helped others, I only read positive reviews and it is worth a shot.
There hasn’t been a better time than now! Check out this post for a coupon link –
https://www.omegaweb.com/2012/11/november-sale-join-blog-engage-for-66-off-total-savings-40/
I actually joined BlogEnage when it first got started, and I never expected it to grow as much as it did. I’m glad I joined early and got grandfathered in! I submitted just one article and got a spike in traffic, so I definitely agree that it’s a great place to be.
That’s very cool that you had the opportunity to join early. I didn’t know about Blog Engage at all until a few months ago, so it was definitely all new for me at first.
By the way, I really like your blog. I discovered it via Blog Engage in fact! I’ll be returning often… You have amazing English skills which is hard to find these days with it being so easy to publish your writing online. People get lazy, ignorant, or they may never have learned proper English, but it’s nice to visit a site that looks clean, elegant, and is written correctly.
By the way, you should consider installing CommentLuv on your site. It’ll help with all the articles that have 0 comments. After I installed it, I was getting 1-2 comments a day when I used to be getting that many a week. Now I get 5-6 comments a day from different people. They have a free version that’s pretty good, but if you want the paid version, you can use my affiliate link that I have in this post:
https://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/why-i-finally-upgraded-to-commentluv-premium/
It’s great to know about Blog Engage! Thank you so much for sharing this. It’s a paid site but I think it will be worth a try
People should stop worrying about paying for things. If it’ll help your blog, then it’s worth paying for.
Congratulations on making this big leap, I frequently visit Blog Engage and I know that this move would be most beneficial for your blog. Thanks for sharing!
Blog Engage is beneficial to any blog in almost every niche!
With the price of 9.99USD, you’ll surely never go wrong with it. Best buy!
That’s right! $9.99 is nothing compared to the benefits you will reap from Blog Engage.
Sounds great, I especially like the sound of the affiliate program. Have you seen much traffic coming from Blog Engage?
Yeah, I actually have. I’m getting about 45 visits per month from Blog Engage right now.
Thanks for this post! I’ve been thinking about blog engage – going back and forth on whether to sign up. I’m doing my best to not buy memberships and products that I’m not going to use right away, and while Blog Engage seemed cool, my head was reeling with all the information and I kept finding myself going “Wait . . . so what EXACTLY does this do for me?”
😀
Your post really helped break it down for me and give me a better idea of why I should give this a honest try.
I still think I’ll wait a little while to sign up thanks to other things I have going, but now Blog Engage will be high on my list of sites to join. 🙂
I was thinking the SAME thing when I was deciding whether or not to sign up. I hate paying for products, especially if they aren’t NEEDED or provide me with a 100% guarantee that I’ll make money. If nothing else, Blog Engage just acts as a cool social network to discover new people on.
I also to thinking to join Blog Engage..