BlogRush – Will It Increase Your Blog Traffic?
I’m sure this one is going to be all over the blogosphere soon enough – it’s already hitting the social networks and the Internet marketing forums.
John Reese, Internet marketing mega-guru, has released the first part of his master plan for Income.com, which is a blog traffic exchange widget called BlogRush. You can read over the release process as John talked about it on his blog over the past few days.
BlogRush is essentially a way to syndicate content across blogs. It reminds me a lot of a service that one of Mike Filsaime’s websites offers where you can put a widget on your website to display text box ads and for each impression you delivered from your site, your ad would be displayed on other sites who used the widget. Looking back further and this concept was taken from the old banner exchange networks, where you receive exchange credits for showing banners on your website, which were “cashed in” by showing your banner across other sites in the network.
About a year ago when I first heard about Mike’s system I thought to myself the concept would work well for blogs too and lo and behold, BlogRush has made it a reality.
BlogRush is a simple idea. Place the BlogRush widget on your blog and earn a credit each time it is displayed when your page loads. You are rewarded by using your credits to display your blog content on other blogs that use the widget. This happens automatically and it’s set and forget – stick the widget on and you start earning credits immediately.
BlogRush works by taking your RSS feed content and syndicating articles across the network at blogs that are topic-related to yours. Using a combination of context matching and the category you choose for your blog, BlogRush attempts to place your articles on blogs that it thinks are similar to yours. This should increase the click-through rate and I’m sure as more blogs join and the technology improves it will be possible to quite tightly match content, probably not quite to the level of Google AdSense, but certainly better than just random impressions.
Referral System
BlogRush has a ten-tier referral system, which means you earn credits for bringing people into the program up to ten times below you (yes, it’s like a super pyramid scheme or MLM program). When someone you bring into BlogRush begins earning credits you are rewarded with credits. When you referral brings in someone else and they earn credits, you get some more again, and so on and on until ten levels below you.
Obviously because of this structure it pays to join and promote early before everyone is on board, hence I’m writing this post on the weekend 
.
Will You Get Traffic From BlogRush?
The short answer is yes, of course you will get some. However don’t expect miracles. Even if the uptake on BlogRush is significant, which it will be, in my experience the click-through rates on these sorts of traffic exchanges are terrible. Even with BlogRush’s context and category matching, the placement of widgets like these in sub-prime real estate (usually in sidebars below the fold, just like on my blog), means that they don’t get a lot of attention in the first place and there are five links competing for what attention there is, so the chances of a visitor clicking through to your blog is low.
That being said, as with all small communication channels for bringing traffic, which BlogRush is one, the effect of compounding does make a difference and all traffic helps, so it’s worth giving it a shot.
If you would like to get in on the BlogRush and grab referrals before everyone is on board, now is the time to join and stick the widget up on your site. Here is the link -
