BlogRush :: Thinking Home Business

A couple of weeks ago, along with a lot of other people, I signed up for BlogRush, which was then the latest and greatest hope for a system offering the prospect of generating amazing traffic to your blog while you sleep.
In BlogRush: Traffic Klondike or Fool’s Gold? I rounded up a range of comments on the new system and indicated my mixture of mildly hopeful curiosity and scepticism.

A few days later I read a post by Yaro Starak who had been an early adopter of BlogRush. When I saw the stats Yaro displayed for his BlogRush account, including credits of nearly 300,000 and 733 bloggers in his BlogRush network, and then saw how pathetic my figures were against that, I thought it was game over, shut the gate, at least as far as I was concerned.

But further on in the post in question, Yaro made the point that because BlogRush is set up to display post links, from other blogs, with some affinity with your own blog’s topics, one of the benefits of BlogRush could be to help us find other bloggers of like mind or similar interests, whom we might not otherwise come across.

Tonight I’ve put that observation of Yaro’s together with a contribution he made last Friday when, moderating a discussion at the Australian Blogging Conference, I put him on the spot to come up instantly with three key ways people could use to increase their blog traffic. His first point? “The best source of traffic is another blogger linking to you”. And what’s the first thing that has to happen before a blogger can know about me/my blog, and vice versa? We have to find out that the other exists.

So maybe BlogRush could even be helpful for bloggers like me, who do not have the large numbers Yaro and some others can boast.

What is a bit frustrating is that I don’t have any idea what figures I may now have. And tonight when I logged in again in the hope of getting some up to date figures, I got the following message.

We don’t yet have enough data for your account. Please check back soon for custom reporting.

Odd, that. They had figures a couple of weeks ago.

Actually, on most of the occasions over the past couple of weeks that I’ve logged in to get a report there’s been some sort of “we’re working on it, please be patient” type message. No doubt they’ll have it all working properly, one of these days, but the lack of availability after the breathlessness of the launch reminds me that cautiousness may not be such a bad thing in the face of heavily hyped Great New Traffic Things for the Web/blogosphere.

I’ll leave the widget in place for a while, just to see if there is anything of interest. And if it helps me make contact with some interesting new bloggers I might not connect with otherwise, that can only be good.

I have however dropped the widget well down the page, out of the prime space it was taking up for a short while. That will mean even less traffic, no doubt. It will also mean I won’t need to fret about it.

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

Tips for Using BlogRush to Generate Traffic for Your Blog

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.