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If your idea of a good weekend does not include reading blogs or checking your emails, you probably missed the flurry of activity around the launch of John Reese’s BlogRush.
The BlogRush deal is that you install in the sidebar of your blog a widget which displays titles of posts from other blogs with BlogRush. You can see the widget in the sidebar of this blog. Yes, I have signed up so as not to miss out!
A master of creating eager anticipation for the launch of a new product or service, Reese has not disappointed his many fans. Trying to get some information on BlogRush today was not a problem – there was no shortage of posts about the new product, in line with the advice for new signups:
*** We highly recommend you make a blog post on your blog to tell others how you have joined BlogRush — and make sure to link to BlogRush using your direct link so you will be credited if anyone signs up from following your links!
No surprise then that the tone and content of many posts was upbeat, not to say boosterish.
Not everyone was swept away. There were some bloggers asking some questions about whether this new product was really the answer to the blog traffic seeker’s prayer or something rather less than overwhelming.
Eschewing the “BlogRush is amazing!” posts which you can find easily by checking, for example, Google Blog Search, I sought out and found a few blog posts about BlogRush, ranging from “what’s it about?” through “worth a try” to sceptical. In no particular order, here are some of the posts which I found interesting:
Scott Hendison – Blog Rush, What’s the Story?
Darren Rowse with not one but two posts -
Find New Readers for Your Blog – BlogRush First Impression Review
As I’ve been pondering the new BlogRush traffic building service (which I did a first impression review of earlier) over the last few hours I am increasingly thinking that it has potential to help bloggers find new traffic.
Krishna De – Blog Rush Teething Problems
Antone Roundry, White Hat Crew – First Impressions of “Blog Rush”
Sean P. Aune on Mashable – Blogrush: Traffic Generator or Pyramid Scheme?
Has some spirited comments by BlogRush owner John Reese, obviously put out by implications of the post header.
Pete Cashmore on Mashable – BlogRush: 8 Reasons to Be Wary…and Optimistic
Comments include an interesting “been there, done that” comment by someone identifying themselves as the “original owner” of BlogExplosion.
“It will take this program months to ramp up before it has enough users to make it worthwhile.”
Cashmore’s take:
While we’re skeptical, BlogRush might be “worth a try”. Although traffic exchanges are notorious for driving poor traffic, BlogRush’s targeting means you may get more interested readers, not just passers by.
Yaro Starak’s very thoughtful, sober piece, probably the most useful I found – BlogRush – Will It Increase Your Blog Traffic?
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.
I’ll give it a run and report back here. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from others using BlogRush about your experience.
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My initial skepticism in my post was the fact that when following the links in the widget from my blog, the landing pages did not contain the widget. This seemed to me like an opportunity for people to game the system.
On the Blog Rush homepage today, they offer a plausible explanation, – that they are using public RSS feeds because they have no large user base yet.
We’ll see how it goes, but yesterday they did send me 13 visitors, and that’s 13 more than I would’ve gotten otherwise, i guess.
I doubt this will bring a “rush” of traffic, and I’m sure that the code will be easily identifiable for filtering out any link juice, but I’ll keep plugging away as somewhat of a skeptic, and watch reports of others… Thanks for the mention
Scott
And I will keep watching what you and others have to say. My apologies for mis-spelling your name in the original post – very slack of me: now corrected.
My experience with it has been less than spectacular. I just posted on this topic today.
I haven’t gotten very much traffic at all. All most everyone I have seen running it has it under the fold so I don’t think the widget is actually getting many eyeballs. My guess is that the average click thru rate will be .025%. I guess that is okay if you have a huge network that gets millions of page views a day. It is still really early and only time will tell. Please keep us informed of your experience.
I have heard very little of this service since its original “blast”. In reading blogs I am also finding fewer and fewer blogs using the service. What happened?
I know in the past similair “attempts” have fizzled out after a short time also. It seems a certain “few” are pouncing on this stuff and overuse it to the point everyone gets turned off. I was really hoping that since it was aproduct from John Reece that it would be different this time.