BlogRush – Is John Reese’s Blog Traffic Project Worth It?

Writing by Blog Marketing Journal on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 Comments (2)

I added blogrush to a couple of blogs. So far I haven’t seen any traffic from it. John Reese has promised updates. But basically they ask you to place a widget on your blog that lists topics other bloggers are writing about. You get points for the traffic you send to other bloggers, then you get more views on other people’s widgets based on the number of referrals you send.

Here are some comments others have made about blogrush.

“Britney Beers Says: October 8th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
I know that some people arn’t getting their blog to show up. But people you cant just crap on there. Just so you know John. I have visited some of the blog from the widget and they are hopeless. Some people just realize that you cant put cr@p up and expect blogrush to accept it. If you want to get noticed build a big blog with great content, not some piddly lil advertising place full of advertising spam and adsense. I can see now why John is getting fed up with some of these people. The cheats and spammers think that they will overun the place, But think again. Just build a nice loooking blog and you will get noticed…the others can leave.”

“David Bean Says: John – about widget placement: My blog income is dependent on my few product sales and AdSense clicks (diddly though those amounts are). You aren’t taking into account that probably most of us bloggers would prefer that visitors clicked on OUR product links or AdSense links, and not depart from our blogs by clicking on some other blog link. While most of us legitimate bloggers write about stuff we are interested in, most of us probably aren’t doing it “just for our health”, and want some income. That is why the low placement positions of the widgets. Are you just looking for blogs that are just for “ego-boo”, saying look at me and my babies or drunken friends? Now, with BlogRush, maybe we will get more visitors, but what good is that if they click away to some other blog? How would we determine the tradeoff between more visitors, but less value per visitor with BlogRush, vs. fewer visitors, but more likely to provide some income by us not having BlogRush? There has to be some sort of tradeoff between putting the widget where it will be the first thing someone sees and so clicks away (at the top), or where a visitor is more likely to see our product or AdSense ads first and clicks away giving us some income.”

wallybanners Says: Blog Rush is the best thing thats happened to the blogging world sine it was invented! behold my stats all due to blog rush I cant even count how many emails I get now because of new readers via blog rush!

Credits Earned Today: 855
Credits Earned Last 7 Days: 4,806

Your Traffic Today: 387
Your Traffic Last 7 Days 1,850

Total Referrals In Your Network: 22
Referral Traffic Today: 468
Referral Traffic Last 7 Days: 2,956

BLOG RUSH OWNS!!

Jeff Says: John, If I read correctly, this post said that people will receive a “warning” BEFORE they gey banned, or as your site says “Blog Not Approved For Network”. well I submitted a blog and your site disapproved it so fast my head was spinning. Funny thing is, I didnt receive a warning, or suggestions, or help or anything to guide me to an approval. How is this system “FAIR” or “COOPERATIVE” when you don’t even consult/advise the publisher before banning them? P.S. How many comments + emails to blog rush support does it take to get a response?

Mark Says: Hmm. Not sure about the strong attitude towards widget-placement. Not only is it too wide for me, but I find it a little garish. Can’t make it fit with the theme of my site at all – so I stuck it lower down. IF I could style it a bit to make it fit the look of my site a bit better, then sure, I’d be glad to put it above the fold. The most webmaster/designer/developer friendly would be if it output plain markup that we could apply some CSS to. Of course, then you have the challenge of people hiding it in CSS. Go some way to solving both those problems by weighting credits towards actual clicks rather than impressions. Then if someone wants to place the widget less prominently, it’s them that takes the hit. To be honest, the tone of this update makes me wonder about using the service anyway.

John Reese Says: MARK — there was no intended “bad tone” etc. We have no choice but to make some tough decisions. There’s no “gray” area here that can be used. All active members either contribute equally, or it doesn’t work. Either people are willing to give the widget higher placement or they aren’t and are choosing not to participate in the network. We don’t have a choice. It’s not fair to make exceptions and therefore we cannot. We’re working on some different customization options, but if at anytime what we have isn’t good enough for your blog (or anyone else’s) then it’s probably best that you just don’t use it. We will never be able to please everyone with what they want and we can’t do anything about that. So each person just has to make the decision for themselves.

John Reese Says: Deborah — thanks for the feedback. I don’t actually recall what article you are referring to or what was recommended. We didn’t officially release anything like that. I can tell you this, our users that place the widget higher on their blogs are the ones that are achieving better widget performance (their visitors are clicking more.) Widgets placed at the bottom of a template get very little activity and will, ultimately, run the risk of being removed from the network. We WILL do our best to give users a warning if this happens to give them a chance to correct the problem — we definitely want to be as FAIR as we can with everyone.

There are a lot more comments, many positive, many negative. These were all in response to BlogRush telling people they need to place the widget closer to the top of the blog. They want prime blog real estate for basically a link trade deal. For some blogs it may work out. For others it won’t just like John Reese says. I’ll continue to test it on a couple of blogs and see how it works out before I make a decision on it for myself.

You can read the original post from blogrush and the rest of the comments here.

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