How is BlogRush Going For You?
October 14th, 2007 | 27 commentsSince the launch of BlogRush a month or so ago, I’ve seen a few good BlogRush reviews, many, not all, but many of the positive reviews were to build up credits for the reviewing blog, and several bad BlogRush reviews.
Out of all of the reviews I’ve yet to hear about one blogger that has received much traffic at all from the network.
Since I haven’t tried it, and most likely won’t, I’d like to know what kind of traffic you’ve received if you don’t mind sharing?
I think John is honestly trying to make this the best it possible can be, but so far it seems nothing is happening. (from what I’ve heard from other bloggers)
Before the conception of BlogRush, I had alot of respect for John and I still have some. But I have to admit, I’ve heard him say some pretty unprofessional things after people simply stated it’s not driving much traffic. Calling people cheaters who place the widget in their footer (usually because the widget slows down the loading time of their blog) and I’ve even heard him say (not quoting but to the effect of) the people who are complaining about not getting traffic from BlogRush are the ones with crappy blogs. He said that on the Warrior forum and I couldn’t believe he said it, still can’t.
Anyway, like I said I haven’t used BlogRush yet so I suppose I can’t bash it. It seems like all I hear is “if I get one visitor, that’s one visitor I didn’t have.” uhhhhh ?? can anyone do better than that? 
I’d love to hear of others results though, whether good or bad.
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14th October, 2007 at 6:47 am
I finally removed the widget yesterday as mentioned in my latest post. I just got tired of it sitting there and not doing much, deciding that it just didn’t look comfortable in my sidebar. Not very scientific I know, but it’s gone for now; whether it’s gone for good, well the jury’s out.
It brought me about 12 visitors, none staying for even a minute.
14th October, 2007 at 2:40 pm
I’ve tried it as well for a few days, not had much luck but then I do think that this toy is made for the big boys and not little fish like me. I think it’s looks kinda pretty in the sidebar for now, but I don’t know how much longer it’s gonna stay there.
14th October, 2007 at 3:31 pm
BlogRush seems to be a traffic exchange for blogs.
In my experience, traffic exchanges only benefit the owner of traffic exchanges.
Needless to say, I won’t put BlogRush on my site.
14th October, 2007 at 3:50 pm
I just put it in day before yesterday. Generally John’s pretty good about the products he releases.
I think that BlogRush was probably rushed to market (no pun intended) given the problems that it’s had. I know I certainly would have thought about spammers and what not with the system.
As far as the widget, they really need to use the dcom mechanisms — jquery I think it’s called — so that it would not slow the loading of the page down.
I find the widget kinda fun to use cuz I get to see some new blogs out there. Titles are ever so important.
I’ll probably leave it up until I see how well it performs with the new blogrush 2.0.
Incidentally I find it amusing that John announced his income.com site sometime last year and *still* hasn’t really come out with anything for it
That’s neither here nor there tho.
G-Man
14th October, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Haven’t used it. Don’t intend to. While I have some respect for John, even the brightest minds are more than capable of launching half-baked money-making ideas. As far as G-Man’s comment about using it to find new blogs…I find that MyBlogLog works just fine for that, without the attendant problems.
Frankly, BumpZee has also been a bit of a disappointment to me. I really, REALLY like the idea of the No NoFollow community there, and I have visited many of the 500 or so members sites (although, not all of them are doing as promised and defeating the NoFollow attribute), but I find that the vast majority of those blogs are just like the vast majority of blogs in general….low-to-zero value. In many cases, they have so little to say that I can’t find a single intelligent post worth commenting on. That’s really sad…but it supports my general contention that a relatively small percentage of blogs have any reason to exist other than vanity…and that folks who believe they’ll ever make any money with them are just deceiving themselves.
It still boils down to value. And there’s just not much out there, from what I can see. So, for me, for now…MyBlogLog is the best-of-breed blog networking tool…followed by BumpZee.
I hope someone will improve on that concept someday…but, in order to do that, they’ll need to do two things: (1) take a really long-term view on ROI (if money comes, it will come later and will be based on true value), and (2) even more importantly, there will be some sort of “means testing” for participants…i.e., a human being has to look at your blog and determine that you are actually providing real value. “No standards” generally boils down to low value.
14th October, 2007 at 8:51 pm
I’ll need to review how much traffic I got last week again. But I’ll be surprised if it’s up.
I don’t know why John assumes the blogs not getting traffic are poor quality. Why would quality of the blog make any difference on Blogrush? When it displays on my blog, I see blogs I’ve never heard of. I might click or not, but my decision is unrelated to the blog’s quality.
I’d never heard of John Reese before Blogrush. I have no particular opinion of him. All I know is that according to Google Analytics, which I trust, Blogrush isn’t sending traffic.
14th October, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Chuck’s got a good point. To be honest, I was surprised that John came out with this tool. It is a traffic exchange and those have typically never done so well for me.
However, I do think that it has potential as long as it’s not gamed AND it actually starts providing traffic. I’ll leave it as is for now given John’s reputation and see how it goes. Couple of weeks or so should show it’s colors one way or another.
As far as MyBlogLog goes, that doesn’t really show anything other than pictures on your blog right? I also put in the code today for that and it’s not working – lemme know if you DO see it on my blog cuz I can’t (should be on the right hand side below the fold – /shrug).
Blog quality – well, that varies widely. I’d say that I do tend to look at a post on a blog and click away rather fast on quite a few. It’s amazing the number of folks who don’t know what a return key is
G-Man
14th October, 2007 at 10:11 pm
G-Man…I’m not seeing MyBlogLog on your site, no. Yes, it just shows pictures…but when you click on them, you go to their profile and then their web page. It’s still a great cross-pollination tool…even if only because SO many people use it.
14th October, 2007 at 10:14 pm
That’s weird. I wonder why *I* can’t see the widget
Thanks for looking. I do see that on a ton of blogs out there – one of the reasons I decided to add it
G-Man
14th October, 2007 at 11:42 pm
I’ve gotten 2 hits in the first couple months I’ve used BlogRush. Yay.
I’m going to keep it while John Reese is making his adjustments, but if it doesn’t perform soon, I’m dropping it.
Why should I put my widget at the top of my page when I know others aren’t doing the same. I get credits based on pageload. I’m certainly not going to send a bunch of traffic to other blogs I don’t even know by putting the thing at the top of my page.
I think it’s a cool idea, but it’s just not performing.
What did John Reese expect? Everyone’s just going to put their widget right at the top of their pages and make the a main focus of their blogs. That’s where my opt-in goes. And not to mention more valuable assets. Sorry.
Let’s get real here.
15th October, 2007 at 12:56 am
Gman and Chuck,
MyBlogLog is definitely much more effective than BlogRush. It’s still not a “rush” of traffic
but it’s well worth hosting the widget. I haven’t checked my stats today, but I believe last I checked MyBlogLog sent around
50098 visitors in the past 30 days.Gman,
It’s not showing up on my end either, but it’s great that you’ve decided to use it.
Chuck,
Please see my latest post
Lucia,
With Blogrush the more traffic you send to the system the more “credits” you get. That’s what I understand anyway. So the big guys like Andy, Yaro etc. will naturally get more traffic from it. Blogs like yours and mine, which do well, but aren’t “authority” blogs yet wouldn’t get much traffic because we couldn’t send loads and loads of traffic to the network. Thats really what made his comment so bad in my eyes. It doesn’t mean all blogs are junk. I guess he forgot that not all blogs get thousands of uniques a day from the start.
Jason, It’s great to see you around again
Valid point as well. Unless a widget performs, it’s going to be hard to get bloggers to place it in a valuable spot!
15th October, 2007 at 5:41 am
oops, I was way off, it’s sent 98 visitors in the past month. I still like it though. I’ve found several good blogs through it for one.
15th October, 2007 at 11:59 am
I get good traffic from Bumpzee, and that traffic sticks. From Google analytics, I know the people who do visit from Blogrush tend to linger on visits, but I don’t really know if they subscribe or come back. Unlike old web rings, the widget is broad, so if they don’t subscribe, they probably won’t remember my blog and never return. On the other hand, unlike Stumble, there is no thumbs up, so if they do like it, they don’t do anything to send me more traffic.
Oh well…
15th October, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Yeah, along with my grouching earlier about the quality of a lot of the blogs I’ve found thru Bumpzee, I should also have mentioned that they still represent quality traffic and I continue to use them as well. I think it’s a decent service…I’m just disappointed that the No NoFollow thing can’t be of even more use than it already is.
That’s not anyone’s fault…just the (shallow) nature of most blogging (although those who continue to block links should not do so…and those who use Lucia’s Linky Love plugin should probably disclose that (I’m a DoFollow guy myself, since I hand-moderate ALL comments). In many cases, I don’t visit a particular blog that often, but my comments are always valuable. I feel that 10 comments (I think that’s the default, right?) is a pretty high standard, but not unreasonable…but I don’t always know that that’s what I’m dealing with.
So it would be nice if there were a standardized logo to accompany the plugin so that bloggers could encourage additional comments, if that’s the path they’ve chosen to follow. Just my two cents’ worth.
15th October, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Chuck. Are you suggesting there should be a standardized logo for “Lucia’s Linky Love”? If you make one, I’d be happy to include it in a file with the download and suggest people use it. (There’s no good way to auto-include such things with use. )
Currently, you can generally tell when my plugin is used because it shows the number of comments you’ve added and/or “new comment” next to a comment.
15th October, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Hey, I see that now. LOL…I never noticed it before. Thanks for the tip! That makes the need for a logo, etc, unnecessary.
15th October, 2007 at 9:17 pm
[...] know you plan to improve things. In the meanwhile, my answer to Josh, who asks How is BlogRush Going For You? is, “not so [...]
15th October, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Darn… I tried to trackback…. visit. You’ll laugh. This may be the best blogrush post ever
15th October, 2007 at 9:40 pm
LOL I saw the trackback shortly after you posted it. I believe you’re right. Best BlogRush post I’ve seen
Thanks for the link.
btw, if you come up with a LLL logo I’ll put it up. I nofollow site wide links, other than my own
but I link to it within posts every chance I get.
15th October, 2007 at 9:46 pm
I was in an online department meeting and couldn’t keep myself from blogging when I saw that. (I wonder whether I’ll get funny search engine visits now.)
15th October, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Oh heck.. I just gave my own story a sphinn. (I usually don’t do that, but hey. ) http://sphinn.com/story/9612
15th October, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Be sure to check your analytics. I’m sure you’ll get some weird traffic for sure lol I just gave you another sphinn. Thanks for mentioning that. I’ve been wanting to add the sphinn plugin for a while and kept forgetting. I just installed it
16th October, 2007 at 1:49 am
I am up to 183 visitors.
I get more traffic from free credits than I do from my own page views, and credits for referrals as far as I can tell are not being used yet.
Free credits in the system benefit the smaller bloggers.
I might get more clicks due to name recognition, but not having enough saturation (such as Problogger) for the name saturation to have a negative effect (because you read every post anyway)
16th October, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I recently developed a free wordpress plugin called “BlogRush Click Maximizer”. By using it you can vastly improve your Click Through Rate.
This allows you to control what you want to display in BlogRush. You can even write alternate – short and catchy title just for BlogRush.
You will have total control of what appears over the BlogRush Network.
18th October, 2007 at 7:19 pm
I just installed the blogrush widget two days ago and before then have received about 20 to 30 visitors a day. And checked the stats today and find that I’m now receiving around 100 to 120 visitors a day. Not exactly sure though, because I see only around 40 to 50 uniques. Spiders and bots maybe? My 2 cents.
Rodney
18th October, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Who knows, you should really track your visits!! http://www.google.com/analytics
22nd October, 2007 at 3:40 pm
[...] recently stated that I still have some respect for John Reese, despite his unprofessionalism while dealing with bloggers who don’t run blogs that are [...]