BlogRush - Value or Valueless
There was a huge buzz in the blogosphere when Blogrush hit the market back in September, including a post from my own hand about this brand new “laser targeted” approach to bringing in traffic.
But it seems of late BlogRush has been getting some bad press - not least from the likes of Gobala Krishnan at Easywordpress and the ProBlogger.
So I started to wonder how much value Blogrush has been for me. Of course the only way to find out is to head for your stats, or with the much talked about Blogrush, the stats analysis in the admin system. As I hadn’t logged into my account since installing the widget I’d clean forgotten my username and password. No problem I hear you say, just request a new one. So I did, over three days ago….. still nothing.
Rather than try again, I figured I could just as easily head to my own stats package instead. I logged in and by looking at the last three months I was pleased to see an upward curve, in fact I’ve had a bit of a step change just this last month which is nice - see the chart.
But how much of this could be attributed to Blogrush? The next step then was to drill down a little further into the referring sites analysis. Unfortunately I was disappointed to see the following figures from the BlogRush widget:
Nov - 9 page views
Oct - 2 page views
Sept - 0 page views
What does this mean then?
Well, generally it means that BlogRush is doing diddlysquat for my blog. Eleven referrals in over two months means it’s essentially useless. But what’s worse is that in all likelihood it’s also been leaking readers away from my blog. Unfortunately I can only tell this for sure by logging into my BlogRush account - which I can’t do without my username and password.
So we go full circle. Or do we? I think the best bet is to just delete the widget from my sidebar and right off the wasted time. After all 11 visits is more valueless than value.
Tag:blogging
This may be oversimplifying the situation but I think Blog Rush’s main problem is that it looks like another ad. I’m sure their designers thought the widget looked cool when they built it but it’s just not practical. If Blog Rush released an all-text widget with customizable colors, I think it would make all the difference.
Have to agree with Matthew. Blogrush does look spammy.
However its traffic is good when you first use it, but as you have experiences my traffic has also gone down a lot after a week or so.
Blogrush is good if it can work consistently, but it can’t and thats why im looking for other alternatives.
Blogrush is just a nice little widget that a bit of life to a site. I hardly get any traffic from them and doubt it will get any better. complete wast of time in my opinion.
It is a nice thing. I think it is not bad at all.
I hate blogrush… now a days i can’t even listen about that.
i was just thinking about this today, i’ve noticed other bloggers who used to rave about it, like john chow, have taken it down. which leads me to believe it isn’t doing very well at all. I havent signed up yet, but i think i might pass. I noticed you still have it in the sidebar, what is you verdict in the end?
The verdict is that it’s coming down. In fact Ed, your comment reminded me that I still need to delete it.
However I’m thinking of juggling a few other elements of my sidebar around after seeing a fantastic blog earlier today that I want to take a few ideas from.
BlogRush is driving traffic away. Ultimately all readers leave a blog to somewhere interesting and if someone else has a better and more enterprising title. The only way to drive traffic to your own site from BlogRush is if you have a very interesting topic that will pull in the traffic otherwise be prepare to lose more traffic.
I also took blogrush off my blog. There’s no point having extra widgets on the page that don’t help me in any way really!
Blog rush is really a great service which is going to Boom. As per my opinion if we follow the rules in it we will be more benefited.
Well it seems like unless it’s widely adopted, it’s not going to drive much traffic. There also may be an issue of it looking too much like an ad so people don’t click. On the bright side for blogs, google blog search now is in the top results page, not requiring the drop down to find like before.
I have 2.2 MILLION blogrush impressions just sitting there waiting to be used. I’ve still been testing it and yes if you write a sensational headline like the one I did about “How To Make Unlimited Income From The Internet” you can get a lot of traffic. But for most of the post, you need to filter them out or you’re just wasting your impressions. I wish I could sell my BlogRush impressions eh Andy, that would be great
A well-familiar awstats chart … do you use Google Analytics? They have some great javascript tracking, which has pluses and minuses … but generally filters out automated “traffic.” Which probably isn’t an issue here; still, I’d be curious how the results compare?
In any case, Analytics lets you track referrals and how the people they send move across your site.
Well UK HDTV I hope it works out for you. Since I dropped BlogRush I haven’t noticed a drop in traffic - although it’s early days.
Rapdirt. Yep, it does look like an advert which probably results in less clicks. In defence though you can customise the weidget to fit in with your theme, so you might be able to reduce this factor a little.
Gobala - good luck selling those impressions, that would be fantastic. OR what about a mega giveaway - wouldn’t it be great if you could donate al the impressions to struggling newbies…
Forrest. Yes it’s a awstats chart and yes I have started to use Google analytics but only just. As such I don’t have any interesting results yet.
Happy new year to you all!!
The question is, does the traffic from Blogrush stick around the blog or leave? Many of these company’s that say they will send you traffic, will send the traffic but if they don’t stick around it doesn’t look good in Google’s eyes.
For example, StumbleUpon sends a ton of traffic, but many people just pass by and continue stumbling. This is not good for your google rank. When google sees that the time spend on the site is low, it thinks its not relevant.
I would seriously look into any of these companies before signing up.
I am asking the same thing about the value of BlogRush. Is BlogRush doing anything for my site? I have a small time blog and my posts get about 100-500 impression to the widget. But I only ever about 1 click if I am lucky from those impressions. Here is my post about it and I would appreciate any feedback about others experience.
http://www.husar.us/blog/archives/1461