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.

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

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!

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…

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

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.

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.

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.