Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

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 -

www.blogrush.com

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Here’s an interesting post by Self Made Minds listing the blogs with the most RSS feed subscribers.

Here’s the top ten at the point when I posted this:

1. Engadget 595,000
2. Boing Boing 410,000
3. TechCrunch 379,000
4. Simply Recipes 226,000
5. Xataka 172,000
6. Interesting Thing of the Day 134,000
7. Mashable 111,000
8. 43 Folders 104,000
9. TechCrunch.fr 83,566
10. Dumb Little Man 74,839

[ Full list ]

It goes to show there’s always someone with more readers than you, unless you are Engadget of course
What’s really impressive is that many of the top blogs have a wider circulation than top offline newspapers.

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As an entrepreneur and a blogger I’ve been afforded a unique outlook on the whole blogging as a business discussion. Bloggers look at blogging as something they do for fun, for creative expression, for meeting people, for making money directly from advertising and affiliate promotions or indirectly by promoting a business. Most bloggers are either not blogging for money or are self employed content publishers. While there is nothing wrong with that, and I’ve been living the self employment life myself for a long time, it’s not my end goal.

Because of my entrepreneur mindset I always look at things from a strategic business point of view, not an employee mindset. This attitude has led me to study business strategy and systems and implement what I learn both in my business and in my blogging. I doubt there are many other bloggers out there who think and act as I do in this regard, which is why I enjoy writing about blogging as a business model so much - it’s not territory many people cover since they just don’t think about it.

Today I have a topic for you that clearly is from the entrepreneur mindset and if your goal is to use blogs for business, possibly as your business (the blogging business model), as a lead generator for your business, or as a cashflow source for bootstrapping your business, you will definitely find the ideas below of interest.

How To Leverage The Talent Of Others To Help Grow Your Blog

Read the rest of this entry >>

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I just wrote a piece for the Blog Traffic School Pre-Launch Blog were I covered some statistical data regarding the growth of Entrepreneur’s Journey (this blog) from January 2006 to May 2006.

During this period Entrepreneur’s Journey more than doubled in size - that is the traffic to the site more than doubled, so thank you and welcome to all you new visitors.

If you want to see the numbers check out the post - How To Double Your Blog Traffic In 5 Months

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I’d like to think most readers of my blogs know about this already but I’ve not actually made a post specifically about my blog traffic tips newsletter so it’s about time I do.

You can sign up for free blog traffic tips, which I’ve been writing for the past few months by going to BlogTrafficKing.com (and listen to my spiel on audio about building blog traffic), or just fill out the form below.

I’ve queued up over 3 months worth of weekly newsletters with some of my best advice on finding readers for your blog. This is not a fluff e-newsletter - It’s full of real content of the same high quality as you find on this blog (though not quite as long - about 300 to 700 words per newsletter, I know how you guys have trouble making it through my monster articles sometimes).

I’ve covered many different topics on building blog traffic with the focus being on bloggers just starting who want to take their blog from 0 to 1000 daily readers. The materials are for beginners, so if your blog is already at 1000 or more readers this newsletter is not for you.

Even if you don’t have a blog (yet) I suggest you sign up for the newsletter. Blogs are going to very quickly become a standard component of online business (if they are not so already) and being ahead of the knowledge curve is an advantage for any entrepreneur.

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

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