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Scared That Blogrush Leads Visitors Away?

Written by John W. Furst, has got 5 Comments.

Blogrush is not so hot!

Having the Blogrush widget displayed on your blog can mean two things:

You are getting thousands of additional visitors a week.
You are loosing visitors, because they find the headlines as advertised on Blogrush more compelling than yours.

Looks like nothing to gain, you get more visitors, but you also might loose visitors. Well, that's not exactly what happens. You could be afraid of loosing visitors with any form of monetization. Be it AdSense (that I just wrote about in the last post), banner ads, affiliate links and banners, …, etc.

“Keep your headlines ‘hot’ and your content valuable!”

That's the best and only medicine that should be prescribed to keep and extend your readership.

Every once in a while I click on a title (in the Blogrush widget) myself that seems to be kind of interesting, but most often I get disappointed.

“A title alone is not enough of an indicator to signal, if a post or a blog is worthwhile visiting. In the majority of cases it is not.”

The review based listings of Digg, Stumble, Propeller, and Co. are much more useful.

That's why I don't blame my readers for not clicking themselves away from my Blog via Blogrush.

To answer the above question: Blogrush does not lead my readers away. So it does not hurt me, as well as I don't really benefit from it. I actually should start looking for a better use of that screen real-estate.

Some major A-Blogs still show Blogrush, probably because they got a huge referral network that works better for them.

It was a hype, it's days are counted and if you look at John Reese's Blog. Not much going on there. Didn't he promise a promotion network for “hot topics”? I think he did.

The classic theorem of physics seems to withstand the test of time in the Internet Age, too.

“No output, without any input!”

Displaying someone's widget — the Blogrush widget — doesn't solve your traffic problems. There must be more action going on.

Yours
John W. Furst

Posted by John W. Furst in Marketing, Miscellaneous, Web Site Development on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 has got 5 Comments.

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Comments

I tried Blogrush for a couple of months and was very disappointed in the overall effectiveness of the program. I neither gained nor lost traffic, but my page rendering slowed down considerably because their servers don't seem to be able to handle the load.

The only practical benefit I got was being able to find new blogs to read and comment in but this is easy enough to do if I visit someone else's site who has Blogrush so there is no need for me to host their widget.

#1 Carl Galloway from www.carlgalloway.com on 2008-01-17 04:21

Absolutely correct. It looked a bit promising in the beginning and people actually stayed longer on the Blog than others coming from social bookmarking sites. Anyway, after they threw out the so-called spam-blogs, the performance suffered tremendously.

I guess it was people coming to my site from the spam-blogs and they were happy to finally find a 'good' Blog. So the spam-blogs worked for me.

Watch my next post, I will present someone, who has a solution for slow loading widgets. It's a Wordpress plugin, but I am sure, you could port the principle behind it easily to Serendipity S9Y. Yours John.

#1.1 John W. Furst from www.fcon21.biz on 2008-01-18 05:37

If you're worried about loosing traffic or you fall into category #2 then try a linking service based on content. I'm using Arkayne on my blogs and it seems to do the trick. The linking is pretty relevant and so far no spam.

For the curious: http://www.arkayne.com

#2 Paul from www.arkayne.com on 2008-01-19 05:24

Thanks for your tip. Can you tell us sites(s) with this widget in action?

#2.1 John W. Furst from blog.fcon21.biz on 2008-01-19 10:34

I tried Blogrush from September to December and although I had over 12,000 credits and many thousand impressions, I quit it this month because I only received about 30 clickthroughs.