I wrote a few months ago introducing Tag A Cloud as a possible method for generating free traffic to a site. At this point, I think the results are mixed.

Starting Off

I signed up with Tag A Cloud back in January. I put a link on my site in a blog post I wrote about Tag A Cloud, and then I simply clicked on my own link each time I visited my site. I usually browsed a few of the other links that were there, too, doing my part to help drive a little traffic. The day I put the link up, my site visitors started to click through as well.

At that time, there weren’t nearly as many links, and many of them weren’t upgraded, so if you could make your link on the Tag A Cloud pages larger, you stood to gain a decent amount of traffic. I know I clicked on the larger links, especially to see why they were larger—was there something about the site that was driving clicks or traffic?

Leveling

Like role playing games, leveling up is addicting. My visitors and I drove about 190 clicks to Tag A Cloud, and my tag is now level 9, which means it’s now a larger version of the standard black text. No bolding, underlining, or colors yet. I wonder how far you have to go to get more than font-size upgrades.

Google Juice

In my last post about Tag A Cloud, I wondered what Tag A Cloud would do with the Google page rank it would surely get. Their rank is up to a 6. That question is still to be answered. They may not need to think about it, though, if enough people keep paying to have their tags upgraded.

Noise. Lots of Noise.

Tag A Cloud recently introduced their “Point Shop” which allows tag owners to pay to upgrade their tags in an effort to make their tag more visible and drive more traffic. Most of the sites that joined early on have had their tags upgraded through natural clicks to and from Tag A Cloud, too. Between all the upgraded tags and the paid highlighting that many have been doing, Tag A Cloud is starting to look rather noisy. It’s harder to make sense of the big pile of tags. Since they’re displayed randomly, it’s a little tricky to find a tag you know was there before from earlier. They need a save-a-tag feature that lets you save tags to your own personal tag page.

Free Traffic

Despite the noise, Tag A Cloud has delivered 27 clicks to my site. This may not seem like many, but it’s nearly as many as I have ever received from any other directory-type listing, and certainly in a shorter period of time. If you don’t need to pay attention to it, then your interested visitors will do the work of clicking through to Tag A Cloud and increasing the prominence of your tag. If you have to babysit your tag, however, the invested effort compared to the traffic you will get is an ROI that doesn’t make much sense. I think I may make one last push to get my tag to be more visible and drive traffic, and then I am probably going to let it go dormant and let the link on my site and the tag on Tag A Cloud do all the work.