Being in the festive Thanksgiving mood that I am in, I thought I would change tradition and mention something I am not thankful for… BlogRush.
For people that don’t know what BlogRush is, it is a widget that is placed on your site that will pull 5 “related” articles from other BlogRush members. As a reward for putting up the widget your articles will be posted on other’s BlogRush widget. If you referred people to use the service, then you would get even more syndication. This was suppose to help gain traffic for other sites.
Two months ago, when this service first rolled out, BlogRush was the talk of the town. The company promised to drastically increase the traffic of websites. Almost any blog/site you went to, someone had an article raving about BlogRush (to increase their referral network obviously). This site was also suppose to cater to those smaller up and coming sites. At first glance it all really seemed too good to be true, and I guess it was.
Phase I
Problems first arose right when the service first launched. BlogRush wanted to put some ugly, non customizable image on your site. This factor alone could turn people away from clicking on a story. The amount of syndications you received depended on how many people clicked on your widget, some other horribly long confusing equation they use, and the amount of traffic your referrals are receiving. With the mixture of all those factors, suddenly the “big” websites began hording all the links. With the combinations of their massive referral networks and everything else there links would show up way more then the less fortunate. If this seems all cluttered and confusing, then I am right there with you.
Phase II
I gave BlogRush a two week trial and right before I was about to remove it for good they announced that BlogRush is going to roll out some updates, so I decided to stay on until I can test out phase 2. Apparently the new updates were suppose to include: smaller widget, more categories, and better stat tracking (might of been best for them to leave this update out). The smaller widget just turned out to be a skinner, more narrow ugly pencil. The new categories seemed promising, but what happens if your category is not populated with well-known sites or even that many, and the stat tracking just shows how this service is failing its original intent. As you can see in this picture below, the last couple of syndicated articles have received no clicks after more than 100 syndications; moreover, throughout the entire 2 month period BlogRush has only brought in 8 visitors.
With at least more then 500 syndications/article (around 60), that leaves just a terrible click per impressions.
Final Thoughts
At one point BlogRush did seem promising, but after examining all the factors it really just doesn’t seem that beneficial. Many times your success is dependent on the location of where other sites keep their widget. If they keep it at the bottom of the page most people would probably not see it. So its almost like you are doing work for other people while receiving no benefits. This means I am taking up valuable ad space or whatever else I might use it for, for something that basically isn’t doing that much.
Some things that I think could make BlogRush a much more viable option is to let you fully customize the look of your widget like Google Adsense or almost any other web service. It would help make it look like it was part of the site and perhaps persuade people to install the widget in a more prosperous place. I also think removing the referral network would help make a more even base for everybody.
So although this service may have worked out for some people, I am thankful that I will no longer be using BlogRush unless major improvements are made.