Written on September 16th, 2007 at 08:09 am by Darren Rowse

Find New Readers for Your Blog - BlogRush First Impression Review

Blog Promotion 65 comments

Logo-2Every time I survey bloggers to find out what they’d like help with most the answer always comes back as ‘finding traffic’.

Bloggers like to know that people are reading their blog and so any method that they can find to promote their blog is worth exploring.

In the last 12 hours a new service has been launched to help bloggers find readers. It’s called Blog Rush. If you read many blogs about blogging you’ve probably seen it talked about (they’ve done well at launching with a real buzz). I’ve held off on writing about it because I wanted to check it out for myself before writing).

My initial impressions of the system is that it’s worth exploring.

While I’m not a fan of traffic exchange programs - this one is a little different because it attempts to promote your blog on relevant blogs.

What is BlogRush

There’s a great little video on the front page of Blog Rush that explains the system better than I could on a post - however in short this is a little widget that you put on your sidebar which displays posts that others have written on their blogs (related to your blog’s content).

Here’s how the widget looks (RSS readers might need to click through to see it):


Each time the widget displays you earn a ‘credit’ which means that a recent headline from your own blog will be displayed on someone else’s blog. If your blog gets 100 page views a day your headline will be displayed 100 times on other people’s blogs.

Not only that - they have a referral system so that if another blogger signs up to Blog Rush after clicking through to it from your widget you’ll get credits each time that the referral blog shows the widget. The referral system goes 10 tiers deep - so you can potentially get ALOT of credits.

OK - so this sounds like a bit of a pyramid scheme in some ways and I guess it has elements of that in it - however there’s no money changing hands (it’s free to participate in and you can opt out at any point) and there are a few features in the system that I quite like the look of including:

  • Attempt at Relevancy - they show headlines on your blog that are relevant to your content (I suspect this will get better as more join up - but at present I’ve seen some somewhat irrelevant links showing up)
  • Filters - you can filter out any keyword that you want and any URL that you don’t want to display on your blog
  • Multiple Blogs - you can split the spread of your credits among multiple blogs (ie if you have two blogs you can enroll with both)

Will it bring a lot of traffic to your blog?

The jury is still out on this (despite the hype that many bloggers are using to promote it). The theory is good - although it will depend a lot on where people place the widget on their blog (and there’s not rules on this in BlogRush’s conditions as far as I can see).

I’ve not found that people click through on widgets like this in great numbers in my own previous testing of other things - however even at a small click through rate you could see some nice traffic if you refer a lot of people (and they refer a lot etc).

One key to how well this will work will be how relevant they can make links to content. In a similar way to AdSense increasing CTR when the ads relate strongly to the content - we’ll see the same thing come into play here.

I’m going to give it a go and see what the results are. I’m not sure I’ll put the widget on this actual blog simply because I have space issues in my sidebar - however I’ll be adding it to a few of my others to see how it converts for them.

Sign up for Blog Rush.

PS: one thing I’d like to see added is the ability to customize the design of the widget. While it isn’t ugly - it won’t ‘fit’ with the color scheme of every blog.

Another problem for many ProBlogger readers is that it’s available only to blogs written in English.

Note: links in this post are referral links

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65 Responses to “Find New Readers for Your Blog - BlogRush First Impression Review”

  • John Cow

    September 16th, 2007 8:59 am

    Your ref link isn’t working.

  • Darren Rowse

    September 16th, 2007 9:12 am

    fixed :-)

  • Warren

    September 16th, 2007 9:16 am

    This sounds like a great new system. I will have to check it out.

  • Maki

    September 16th, 2007 9:18 am

    I’m not a fan of blog widgets but John Reese and his team has certainly build up a great deal of hype for BlogRush.

    An good example of how internet marketers launch free products, compared to the traditional tech startups. :)

    I reckon BlogRush is a worth a try for a week or two just to see the results. The good thing about free widgets is that you can always dump it if it under performs.

  • Darren Rowse

    September 16th, 2007 9:28 am

    Agreed Maki - I think the first few weeks will tell a lot about a system like this.

  • Sly from Slyvisions.com

    September 16th, 2007 9:30 am

    I just wrote a review about this too on my blog, Slyvisions.com. It’s really cool how something like this can spread in minutes.

  • Andrew Ferguson

    September 16th, 2007 9:43 am

    I’m not a big fan of blog widgets and I hold a special chamber of hate in my heart for MyBlogLog, but this isn’t too tacky.

    A customizable design would make it better, but it’s vaguely acceptable as-is.

    I’m thinking of trying this out as well, see how it performs. Are you going to be doing a follow-up in a few weeks to let us know how it’s been performing for you?

  • Darren Rowse

    September 16th, 2007 9:54 am

    Andrew - yes I’ll do a followup in a couple of weeks.

  • Laura

    September 16th, 2007 9:59 am

    What about compatibility with Adsense terms? Some traffic exchanges violate Google Adsense terms. Is this one of those?

  • Thomas Flight

    September 16th, 2007 9:59 am

    Sounds alot like The Good Blogs Network, only better. BlogRush seems to strive more for relevancy. I will probably switch from The Good Blogs to BlogRush.

    Thomas Flight
    Anything Computers at GeekMore

  • Travis Vocino

    September 16th, 2007 10:05 am

    I wasn’t happy with the widget system at all when I first saw BlogRush. My review was similar.

  • Lindsay (the sailboat guy)

    September 16th, 2007 10:10 am

    Question: In your opinion is this a DO NOW or WATCH and WAIT?

  • Mr. Grown Up Geek

    September 16th, 2007 10:26 am

    I just added BlogRush to my blog to see how it works out.. Sorry though, Shoemoney had it up first so he got my referral :)

  • Hannibal_Ryan

    September 16th, 2007 10:29 am

    Hey Problogger guy, your RSS feed link is broken:

    XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
    Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney
    Line Number 2, Column 1:

  • Brian Purkiss

    September 16th, 2007 10:55 am

    Wow!
    I shall have to look into that.

    It looks like it has a lot of potential, but needs a little refinement.

    Thanks Darren!

  • pelf

    September 16th, 2007 11:17 am

    Apart from the sorry-looking widget, perhaps what we “small bloggers” need to know is that it might bring us traffic but if our content doesn’t appeal to our new visitors, they aren’t going to come back for more.

    While I do agree that blog directories or what-nots (such as BlogRush) are able to generate tonnes of traffic to one’s site, I still believe that content is king :) Old-fashioned, I know..

  • Darin Carter

    September 16th, 2007 11:21 am

    wow … this is everywhere!
    Darin

  • Darren Rowse

    September 16th, 2007 11:28 am

    Laura - I don’t know for sure but I don’t think this would be incompatible with AdSense as it’s not actually a traffic exchange and there’s no incentive for people to click the links etc.

    Lindsay - I’d say it is a Do Now simply because if you can refer some people with the widget yourself it’ll pay off quite well - however there will quickly be a saturation point on it.

    Hannibal - yep, we’re in touch with Feedburner on this - not sure why it’s broken

    pelf - I think another key to making this work for you is to come up with great titles for your blog posts as apart from the position of the widget on people’s blogs the title itself will be the main thing that makes people click through.

  • Starfeeder

    September 16th, 2007 11:44 am

    trying this out myself, first heard about it on johnchow, then yaro’s blog.. .then more and more…

    Hey Darren your RSS feed is broken for me

  • John Reese

    September 16th, 2007 11:44 am

    Hi Everyone, John Reese here the creator of BlogRush.

    What everyone is seeing is only the very beginning. We have A LOT planned with the sole focus to bring our users more targeted traffic. Period. So this is only just the beginning.

    Laura - it shouldn’t violate the AdSense TOS because as Darren pointed out, it’s not a traffic exchange as in loading windows, etc. which inflates (i.e. makes inaccurate) the AdSense analytics. And we aren’t click-based so there’s no incentive to click.

    We’re hard at work already improving this initial release. Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

    ~John

  • WarriorBlog

    September 16th, 2007 11:45 am

    Wait wait…There is something I don’t understand…Why are there links in the widget to sites that doesn’t even have the widget on their site?

    So if someone display this widget on their site, does that mean anybody links relevant to that site niche can appear on there? even if that other person didn’t signed up to BlogRUSH and used the widget them self?

    I hope you understand what I mean =)

    How would you get your link to appear more on many of these widget? By getting lot of traffic (you said every 100 visitors, you get one credit).

    I already signed up to them, but I’ am just a little confused how the system work.

  • Coding Pad

    September 16th, 2007 11:50 am

    Looks interesting. I don’t like widgets too much though, so I’ll wait and see.

    BTW Darren, your feed doesn’t seem to be working.

  • Abhishek

    September 16th, 2007 12:55 pm

    This seems a like a great service. I sure hope they can add methods to add multiple categories and keywords.

    Check out my post on the subject.

    http://abhishek.tiwari.com/2007/09/15/blogrush-a-pyramid-traffic-scheme-for-bloggers/

  • Iantrepreneur

    September 16th, 2007 1:55 pm

    I am too not fan of a widget - I had the mybloglog on then took it off - I just added this blogrush - and luckily it matched my site pretty well - I am still Neh for widgets - but lets see where this goes - good job to mr reese

  • Dave

    September 16th, 2007 2:02 pm

    Neat idea. I’m setting it up right now on http://www.findingroy.com. We’ll see how it does. I’ve got a new blog and I’m trying to build traffic for it, so this could be an interesting test.

  • Rose DesRochers

    September 16th, 2007 2:31 pm

    Thanks Darren. You answered my question. My biggest concern was if you could block out Url.

  • Avinash

    September 16th, 2007 3:14 pm

    @Maki. I think it is too early to call this a hype. We can come to any conclusion only after trying it out for a week or two. I would wait for Darren’s follow up post to find this out.

  • Sly from Slyvisions.com

    September 16th, 2007 3:19 pm

    Darren, I’m just wondering, what category is the current widget on?

  • Chad

    September 16th, 2007 3:35 pm

    I suppose I will give it a try to see how it pans out.

    Thanks for the tip Darren.

  • Graham Jones - Internet Psychologist

    September 16th, 2007 3:43 pm

    I’ve tried several of these different kinds of services. None of them bring me as much traffic as promoting the blog directly myself.

    Also, just as is the case for Blogrush, you can’t style the panel enough. The colours are dreadful and don’t match my design. Plus it is too wide for the column I want to place it in.

    So even if Blogrush is better than all the rest, I can’t use it.

    Furthermore, I can’t even ask for the changes I want as there are no contact details or support system for the service.

  • Joseph Kelly

    September 16th, 2007 3:53 pm

    A lot of bloggers publishing articles about BlogRush today, saying they aren’t sure it will work, but using their referral links anyway. That’s the brilliance of referral programs: people will be inclined to write encouraging articles so that others will sign up using their referral links. You won’t find any strong criticisms today. I’m no A-list blogger, so I won’t bother expressing my skepticism. But my eyes are rolling at the blogosphere today.

  • A Dawn

    September 16th, 2007 3:57 pm

    So far I have found 3 super bloggers commenting on BlogRush. I have planted this on my site(http://adawn.squarespace.com) today. Hopefully it will bring some traffic. Thanks.

  • rxbbx

    September 16th, 2007 6:40 pm

    Indeed great idea.. they only should get some more widget styles. This one is BIG..

  • A Blog about Nothing

    September 16th, 2007 6:48 pm

    First impressions being the mother of all evil I’m not impressed, yet. I just got finished writing a blog post about how unimpressed I am with this thing.

  • rxbbx

    September 16th, 2007 6:57 pm

    You re right.. but i like the referral structure.. as long other people like it..

  • Joseph Cizek

    September 16th, 2007 7:04 pm

    I found there is enough potential to try the widget out on my home page. As others commented before, the site is lacking in support or documentation - it seems very ‘alpha.’

    A problem I encountered: during the setup, it gives you the widget code, then prompts you to alert their service once the code is live on your site. It never gave me confirmation, it just kept going back to that same page. Did anybody else have this challenge?

  • Blogging The Movie

    September 16th, 2007 9:14 pm

    yeah I was interested in this widget. I actually installed it to try it out… by the way just to clarify darren.. you are interested to be filmed if you do win?? You live in Australia, right? haha. Sounds like a good place to visit.. haha..

  • Mark Evans

    September 16th, 2007 9:21 pm

    Blogrush looks extremely similar in look, feel and function to TheGoodBlogs (thegoodblogs.com) - a service that has been around for a couple of years.

  • Rog

    September 16th, 2007 10:26 pm

    So, I have to ask… is this going to tick off Google’s Adsense team?

    There’s a post here:

    http://www.45n5.com/permalink/warning-blogrush-may-violate-the-adsense-terms-of-.html

    where the author seem to think so. The commenters on that blog post don’t think Google will be upset by this, but I have to say I’m wary of trying anything that’s going to cut my Google revenue off at the knees, never to return.

  • Yong Hwee

    September 16th, 2007 11:08 pm

    Wow, it sounds too good to be true. I’ll have to try it out for myself I guess.

  • Andy Merrett

    September 16th, 2007 11:43 pm

    I’ve given it a go on one of my blogs, to see how it goes. The system fell over during sign-up, but fortunately a page refresh continued the process. Will be interesting to see what it does. For tracking, it’s going to be difficult to tell if people have visited via the widget, as presumably the referring site will be shown.

  • Andy Merrett

    September 17th, 2007 12:00 am

    Actually take that tracking comment back - it seems to go via the BlogRush web site.

  • Lisa

    September 17th, 2007 12:48 am

    Thanks for this. I just signed up. Here’s hoping it works! :)

  • LA

    September 17th, 2007 2:23 am

    should be interesting to see what type of response this gets in the coming weeks I am goign to keep an eye on it

  • Eric

    September 17th, 2007 8:45 am

    I am giving the widget a test run on a couple of website now; posted about it at EllipsisAeon.com despite not having the customization.
    I’m also keeping a very close eye on the change it makes in the load time. So far, it’s been minimal. Relevancy seems to be ok as well.
    Darren (anyone) have you noticed any issues with the load time and relevancy?

  • Ben Yoskovitz

    September 17th, 2007 11:43 am

    Seems like a copy of TheGoodBlogs — http://www.thegoodblogs.com — although TheGoodBlogs doesn’t have quite the same pyramid scheme structure.

    But the concept is the same. I’ve used it for awhile and generally don’t get a lot of traffic, although I find the links helpful for myself to discover new content.

  • Teejay

    September 17th, 2007 12:23 pm

    I hope this is just the beginning of the blogrush. If not It seems that it might be forgotten sooner than expected.

  • John Pozadzides

    September 17th, 2007 12:25 pm

    Ok. So it sounded good in theory… and I blogged about it on my site, but some of my readers later pointed out to me that none of the links were going to pages that actually contained the BlogRush widget.

    After this, I started checking the links and found that the quality was severly lacking. I ended up removing the widget because frankly it would have made my site look pretty low class.

    With regards to what could be causing the links to go to sites that don’t have the widget installed…

    If you refer someone to sign up, you get credit for all of the pageviews they generate on their site, and this goes 10 deep right? Ok. Let’s say that you referred me. Today I’ve had 23,286 page views so far. That means even if you don’t have the widget installed you are going to get 23,286 appearances!

    This means that like Darren here you could recommend that others install the widget, have them sign up and generate a ton of views for you, but never actually install the widget on your own site. To me this just doesn’t seem right. I believe in practing what you preach.

    By the way, I’m not insinuating that Darren did anything wrong by sharing the information. It did sound very good at first. But now that we’ve had a little experience with the service it would be another matter to continue to refer people without full disclosure.

    For this reason, I recommend that others pass on this “opportunity”.

    John P.

  • PlasticPilot

    September 17th, 2007 8:27 pm

    Hi Darren,

    I’m not a specialist in AdSense T&C, but knows enough to be careful. Can this widget be assimilated to a concurent advertisment program, and then breaking the T&C ?

    Thanks for your answer.

  • Dunia Fana

    September 18th, 2007 1:58 am

    My blog is bilingual ( most Indonesia, English). Can I sign up ?

  • Clement

    September 18th, 2007 2:06 am

    I like the blogrush idea.But I am of the view that it is the big guns that will stand to benefit from it. I mean guys with more referrals. People who already have lots of traffic will get more referrals and this lead to more exposure for their sites while on the other hand, small sites will have less exposure.Even the little traffic that they have received will be rerouted to the big boys. These are just my views.What do you think? I will follow this one closely.I have checked the “Notify me of future comments via e-mail”

  • Clement

    September 18th, 2007 2:08 am

    I like the blogrush idea.But I am of the view that it is the big guns like Daren Rowse that will stand to benefit from it. I mean guys with more referrals. People who already have lots of traffic will get more referrals and this will lead to more exposure for their sites while on the other hand, smaller sites will have less exposure.Even the little traffic that they will receive will be rerouted to the big boys. These are just my views.What do you think? I will follow this thread closely.I have checked the “Notify me of future comments via e-mail”

  • mark

    September 18th, 2007 3:26 am

    Dunia Fana: Only english blogs are allowed at the moment, according to the site. I suppose if it’s equally mixed, or mostly English it will be accepted. You can try though.

  • Sime

    September 18th, 2007 8:08 am

    Added, I guess time will tell!…

  • Hans Chee

    September 18th, 2007 7:16 pm

    Replying to WarriorBlog’s comments, I read so much on similar question so I’ve just added a table of illustration for blogrush credit system in my lens:

    http://www.squidoo.com/blogrush

    It’s my own understanding so far scouting around and from the horse’s mouth, so if there’s a mistake in it I’ll appreciate some feedback on it.

    Thanks
    Hans

  • Kevin

    September 19th, 2007 5:13 am

    It’s nice to see all the large bloggers jump on this, I mean with the referral credits you will get what does it really harm you? People are pimping this thing like crazy and in all honesty look at other traffic exchanges like this or widgets that host headlines. (ie: blog explosion’s widget) Does anyone click on them? Is it really that good of a traffic source?

    They usually get passed over like a lot of things on sidebars.

    However no large blogger says anything negative about this or looks at it critically because if you even give it a lukewarm review you should have a ton of people using your referal link. (Which may or may not supply you with a large traffic source, if it doesn’t so be it, what do you have to lose)

    And just like every other pyramid type setup it rewards you from getting in early. So people are justifying using it before we can get hard numbers. I would never question your credibility Dareen because I have the up most respect for you and your knowledge but be honest, aren’t people jumping the gun on this out of greed?

    Why aren’t people looking at this critically other than the fact that they don’t want to miss out on a potential traffic source? If it flops everyone can bash it after the fact, why question the logic and the mismanagement of it now…

  • David

    September 19th, 2007 6:32 am

    In regards to you not being able to customize the widget, John mentioned in his blog that eventually (although not sure exactly when) there will be additional features to BlogRush including the ability to customize the widget to your liking as well as having widgets in various languages.

  • John Hood

    September 19th, 2007 9:11 am

    This could be a compelling way to drive and share top-driven traffic! Hopefully this will be more successful than Rojo’s offering, which I removed from my blog when it developed technical problems that weren’t resolved!

  • Urbanist

    September 20th, 2007 3:50 pm

    I have watched BlogRush take over the blogosphere and all I can think is: it is way overhyped and overvalued.

    1) Many of the links it displays on sites are scammy or spammy. I’ve read numerous complaints from bloggers who wish they could filter out links - and that would be only a stop-gap measure, since there is always more spam where that came from!

    2) On some widgets, I have clicked all five links to find NO widgets on ANY of the sites being linked to. I’m not sure how, but clearly people have figured out how to game the system and get links to pages without the BlogRush widget on them.

    I will stick to MyBlogLog Recent Visitors and Romlet Recent Referrers. Between those two widgets, I get a great deal of information about who is visiting that I can use as both general feedback and to boost my traffic!

  • Marc

    September 20th, 2007 10:56 pm

    It seems like a good theory. It is just beginning so maybe a month would make a difference. And free is not a bad price at all.

  • walkingbetween

    September 21st, 2007 12:12 pm

    I don’t see this mentioned anywhere but WordPress.com blogs are not supported by BlogRush widget, or to say they don’t support the BlogRush widget.
    Those javascript code cannot be added to a WordPress.com blog because WP.com do not allow javascript. If the widget were a link to a server side script hosted at Blogrush site (like what sitemeter does) things might have been different.

    I wonder if the founder is aware of this. Millions of user at WordPress.com are out of luck on this…

  • DavidYin

    September 22nd, 2007 6:15 am

    Just signed up.

  • Vishal Lamba

    September 23rd, 2007 10:34 pm

    Guys! This wont work! Here is a simple calculation why……….

    For every one display of the widget (which ultimately results in 5 links being displayed) you get one exposure of your blog post on the network - on other blogger member website widgets. This sounds fair, but if you look deep into things you will realize theirs a defect. I will come to that later. But irst another important trick thats going to work like viral marketing on steroids for BlogRush…

    For every blogger you refer - when they sign up by clicking on the BlogRush logo at the bottom of the widget, you benefit. For every direct referral you also will get one free link exposure everytime your referral displays the widget. If this referral refers another member - you get the same benefit again… gaining one more exposure for a two level deep referral. And so on … 10 levels deep.

    This trick is absolutely fantastic, because it will cause bloggers to start promoting this new exchange service to fellow bloggers immediately in hope of getting referral bloggers before others snap them. Bloggers can see the potential of the 10 level deep credit system. It can really balloon to a large amount of free link exposure. Which *could* result in traffic.

    This is where I tend to differ. Blogrush is claiming that - bloggers should sign up right away to get a huge rush and volume of traffic to their sites in a short span of time. There is however 2 issues here.

    The first one is that - if this is a 1:1 exchange network, and BlogRush is displaying only 5 ads inside the widget - then they are creating an excess of 4 ads per display - which they can then distribute to the referring members. So, the excess credit of 4 ads can help them - BUT only 4 levels deep. As the system grows and referral lelvels start to get deep and aproach 10 levels of depth - how will BlogRush maintain the 1:1 ratio? The answer is - that well, now all members will have referrals of 10 levels deep. So there will always be member whose widgets display 5 expousres, and get one credit exposure in return and therefore create an excess of 4 credits for the system. This will help BlogRush.

    And if it doesnt, and the excess exposures being created are geting close to zero - they can always simply increase the widget size or make it scrolling and display 10 links!! This will immediately create a larger excess for BlogRush on every widet exposure. Super!

    Super for BlogRush, but bad for members.
    I can already see a very very very low CTR on this network. Although the links displayed are in your category and may match your sites content - the CTR is going to be extremely low. A standard ad on yor blog post probably has a CTR of half to one-and-half percentage. This widget firstly may not be placed by bloggers on the top of their sidebar / page - and will probably be tucked away at the side bottom - is my guess. My guess is that the CTR for this widget will probably be around 0.1% ( or one-tenth of one percent. ). Now, if your blog post title appears with 5 others - your CTR will be further reduced by a factor of 5 or 20% of 0.1% which is 0.02% which is 2 clicks out of 10,000 page views or 1 click every 5000 page views!! Now, what kind of rush of traffic is that?

    And, if BlogRush decides to increase the number of Blog Links inside their widget tomorrow (to compensate for excess credits being given to members for referrals) - then you can be assured that the paltry traffic and CTR will get even worse.

    Nice try BlogRush. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. This is just a passing fad.

  • Saim Baig

    April 19th, 2008 7:06 am

    I have tried it.It works ok in the start then i don’t know what happened it just lost its actuality.Strange sort of pages were being displayed.So i removed it.

  • Fanatic

    April 28th, 2008 6:26 am

    Never helped me.My traffic remained the same.Just getting it from the search engines.

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