AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

I’ve noticed that a couple of bloggers have signed up for blogrush during the week by clicking on my widget. For the first time I have gotten a Blogrush ‘referral network’! This has had the benefit to me that for each time someone in my network earns a credit by having the widget displayed on their site then I also get a credit and that credit leads to one of my posts being advertised on someone elses site.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with a bit of free publicity and that is what Blogrush gives you. I have found - and this seems to have been everyone elses experience too - that Blogrush will only bring you a small trickle of traffic. The widget is only worth displaying until you find something more valuable to occupy that space. Of course for many bloggers, including myself, anything that will bring you even one or two extra visitors is more than welcome.

One of the big failings of Blogrush is that only the headline of your post is displayed in the widget. This really is like judging a book by its cover, buying a pig in a poke or even just assuming that the headline will have any remote connection with the contents of the post.

Since the launch of Blogrush Phase Two you are now able to see which of your headlines are being displayed in the widget and how many views they are given. Those headlines which attract the most clicks are displayed more often. This has led to the regrettable situation for me that one post I wrote with an inaccurate and sensationalist headline AuctionAds Increase Earnings 500% is my most successful headline on Blogrush. This is especially regrettable since I have now dumped AuctionAds because I think it’s completely useless. I would be happier with Blogrush if I could have control over which of my headlines were displayed.

Another interesting thing I found about Blogrush was that I found that visiting the Income.com blog and commenting on it about Blogrush brought me more traffic than the widget ever did! Unfortunately John Reese turned comments off after they began to carry out manual reviews of the blogs in their network and that turned that tap off. Then last month he announced that he was taking a break from blogging and simply stopped posting! I miss that blog

Summing up, Blogrush is free. It doesn’t do any harm having it on your site so long as you have the space for it. It does bring you some extra visitors and every little helps

Blogrush continues to be one of the new hot topics among bloggers trying to increase their traffic. With the widget installed on my blogs for a week now I am starting to get a better picture of its effectiveness.

The first thing to be aware of is that the statistics offered by Blogrush themselves are not accurate and in fact are understating the number of clickthroughs from the widget.

According to the Blogrush dashboard I have received no clickthroughs from the widget whatsoever. However when I look into the stats on my blogs I get a different story. Referrals from widget.blogrush.com now account for ONE THIRD of all referrals to my personal blog. Referrals to my gardening blog and to this one have been lower. Only one or two in each case.

My own unscientific explanation for the difference is that my personal blog fits neatly into the ‘Personal Diary’ category whereas this and my niche gardening blog are languishing in the very broad ‘Computers and Internet’ and ‘Home and Garden’ categories respectively. Once the categories are adjusted I would expect to see an improvement.

Since my personal diary is doing so well as it is, I can hardly wait for the promised removal of cheaters. I have seen a few of them myself by following links on the widget and search as hard as I might I couldn’t find any trace of a widget on their sites to link to anyone else.

I installed the Blogrush widget onto my site today. This is a new service, only a couple of days old at this stage, which promises to bring targeted traffic to your web-site for free. It’s a pretty good promise.

The way it works is by requiring everyone who signs up the service to install the Blogrush widget on their blog. Mine is in the sidebar. The sidebar features headlines from five recent articles published on five different web-sites. The articles are supposed to be on themes similar to mine.

Every time the widget is loaded on my page that gets me one Blogrush credit. That credit allows one of my recent headlines to be advertised in a widget on somebody elses site. That’s all there is to it.

I’ve read many articles about this on the web today. There is already a big stack of articles on the Blogrush widget and I am only adding to it. Most articles give more than gushing reviews to the widget, talking about ‘more traffic than you can handle’ etc. I don’t believe that hype.

What this widget does is it gives you some free advertising on blogs with broadly similar themes to your own. That’s as targeted as it is. It won’t ‘drive’ traffic to your site but one or two people might click on your link from time to time. Free advertising is better than paid advertising so I’m installing the widget on my site to see how it fares.

It’s downfall at the moment is that it only requires people to install the widget on their page. It doesn’t say where. While I have mine in a pretty prominent position someone else could have theirs buried at the bottom of their page, well out of sight.

When I read about the widget first I started to get a little suspicious about it because of the pyramid scheme nature of it. If I refer someone to Blogrush and they sign up I get a percentage of the credits they earn when the widget is loaded on their page. If the person I refer then goes on to refer someone else they get a percentage of those credits and so do I. This continues onto the tenth generation, which has a biblical ring to it.

While all this does sound like a pyramid scheme, it’s good to remember that no money is changing hands here. The video clip on their web-site explains it and sells it well. Blogrush have stated that they intend to sell advertising credits as a means of generating revenue, which is good to know because otherwise I’d be left wondering why they’d be going to the trouble of launching this widget.

All in all, at this stage I think it’s worth a shot so I’m installing it here. If you want to sign up yourself you could click on my referral link! Otherwise the url is blogrush.com.