First of all, I want to thank Blogcatalog for helping to build some serious traffic.

As of recently, I haven’t been able to login to my account at blogcatalog. I still get friend requests and blog reviews, but I can’t login. I’m even able to retrieve passwords for my user/pass. When I click the author link to OpenJason, it says ‘this user is pending approval.’ Not to worry though… I created another account for OpenJason, so I’m back in action.

How could this have happened? I don’t know the exact reason, but I can certainly speculate.

I’m guessing that Blogcatalog has around 11k - 12k users. All in which were my “friends.” If you belong to Blogcatalog, you’ve definitely received a friend request from me… and likely a request for a backlink. Yes, EVERY member. You’re probably thinking that I have no life and sat in front of the pc all day, everyday, for 4 straight weeks, right? Not exactly… it took approx 5 minutes. My presence on blogcatalog was nothing more than a traffic/rank building research project for OpenJason.com. My goals were simple:

1. Break into the top 100k technorati (current rank: 37k plus/minus)
2. Break into the top 100k compete  (current rank: 88k plus/minus)
3. Break into the top 100k Alexa  (current rank: 127 plus/minus)
4. Monetize.

Alexa is the only goal not yet accomplished, but I expect the objective to be met within a week or two.

On January 23rd, I wrote this discussion on Blogcatalog : Technorati Rank - How to quickly improve i t.
At the time, my Technorati rank was somewhere around 300k.

My thoughts on using blogcatalog to build traffic were actually rather simple. In the beginning, I’d log on to my account two or three times to check out who’s visited my blog, who’s befriended me, etc. I found myself visiting the pages/blogs of my “recent viewers.”  I figured that other users do the same thing, and visit the people who have been lookin’ at their profile. I figured that all I needed to do to build some good traffic to openjason was visit everyone’s profile. When doing so, my little avatar would appear on their ‘recent viewers’ page and they’d get curious and visit my profile and perhaps my blog, thus increasing/improving my blog’s traffic.

Sure enough, doing this sent thousands of visitors my way. All I did was visit everyone’s profile a few times a week… it was great. Nothing more… just visited their profile.

Hopefully you don’t think I personally went to blogcatalog and manually visited everyone’s site… ’cause I didn’t. It was actually rather easy.

1. I needed a way to find each and every member of blogcatalog - Several programs exist that will crawl a site and return any/all links available on that site. My program of choice is LinkSleuth, but there are several web-based crawlers too. Each user at BC gets a URL similar to this: http://www.blogcatalog.com/user/jdaynger. As you can see, the user name appears at the end of the URL, therefore grabbing all the links of the site will return all users.
2. I Needed to automatically visit each profile - iMacros. I just threw together a little script to visit all of these different URL - it looked like this:  

URL GOTO=http://www.blogcatalog.com/user/jdaynger
URL GOTO=http://www.blogcatalog.com/user/nextuser
URL GOTO=http://www.blogcatalog.com/user/someuser

Easy enough, right?  This actually built some great traffic. But I wasn’t finished. I then realized that adding new friends was just a link away. When somebody adds you as a friend, you receive an email that has a link like this:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/friend/add/jdaynger

Clicking the link added this person to your list of friends. So, using the same method described above, I was easily able to add everyone as a friend.  I didn’t add everyone at the same time, but rather broke up the process over a week or two.

Shortly after, I sent a private message to several users that requested a backlink to the openjason site… Sure enough, many of the friendly folks at BC added me to their blogroll (THANKS!), and my Technorati Rank improved - Drastically. 

My little research project yielded me some phenomenal traffic. I don’t have the same account at Blogcatalog anymore, but that really doesn’t matter…  I was just able to open a new account, which gives me the opportunity to do it all over again. No intentions for now, though.