New way to drive the traffic to your site – Celebrity Blogging. Does it work?

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[Post submitted by Mallik, a pluggd.in reader.]

Once you create a website/content portal, you need to figure out different ways to drive traffic to your site.

So what is new way to drive traffic? Catch hold of any Indian popular figure and ask him to start blogging using your platform. BigAdda did that with Amitabh Bachchan and recently mypopkorn got Lalu to blog on their site.

This strategy helps the website in multiple ways:

• Free publicity on all the popular news channels. Though it may talk more about Lalu’s blog than mypopkorn but in a way the site gets the publicity.
• Lots of fans visiting the sites and posting the comments. Each article on BigB’s blog gets hundreds of comments.
• Makes fans stick to the site.
• Fans of popular figures visiting the blog may be interested in other parts of website and in process explore the site.

Soon Hrithik Roshan, Sharukh Khan, Sonia Gandhi, Rajnikanth, Chiranjeevi etc may start blogging. Lets see who will be able to catch hold of them.

Does celebrity endorsed blogging works?

Comscore tells a different story (I know comscore’s data needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, since they don’t measure traffic from cyber cafes and moreover, the may 2008 data is not yet available).

Both ibibo and Bigadda have used celebrity blogs (ibibo: ravi shastry, bigadda: Big B), but the traffic doesn’t seem to reflect the celebrity impact.

Goes back to the basic question – web users aren’t consuming the ‘extras’ and content portals need more coherent strategy than the amount of money wasted in bringing celebrities.

What’s your take?

Are web users ruthless?

[Few parts of the post edited by Ashish]