Jason Murphy

Website Producer

If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably heard about BlogRush this weekend. It’s been riding the hype wave this weekend like a pipe dream. Everyone seems to be talking about it, so I decided to take it for a test spin myself.

BlogRush is to RSS feeds what BannerExchanges were to banners in 5 years ago. I used to run a very large and profitable traffic exchange, and you could almost say that BlogRush is a traffic generator. Basically, you display a widget, like the one I have in the sidebar, that will display recent headlines in the category you select. I wasn’t sure whether to select “business”, “marketing” or “technology” for my blog, so I’m testing it under marketing for now. BlogRush then aggregates headlines from related blogs and uses a formula to select which headlines from other blogs to display on your site. The formula is part relevancy, part recency, and a big part pyramid scheme to determine which ads get displayed where. Let’s not put a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This is definitely a referral based program. The more people you refer, and the more people their referrals refer, the more impressions you earn. BlogRush uses your impression balance to place your most recent blog post title in other blogger’s widgets.

The headline titles under marketing have so far ranged from all out spammy to informative and helpful. I’ve seen pure spam-blogs (or “splogs” if you’re so desperate to use an poorly coigned term) to extremely popular blogs such as John Chow, Problogger and Mashable. The cool thing about BlogRush is that you can filter out URLs that you don’t want displayed on your site, or even go so far as to filter out keywords that you’d rather not include. Problem is that this is a very manual process. If you don’t keep tabs on it, you’ll get overwhelmed badly, just like the early days of comment spam. If BlogRush is truly going to work for the masses, they should pre-filter content using a corporate Akismet account. This will at least reduce the amount of moderation needed by individuals.

As with any new memes, I’m willing to give a try. I don’t have to worry about getting Google bitch-slapped for creating artificial links either. First, this is a javascript widget. Each of those links are found only within the widget and not crawled by any bots visiting my site. Second, if the bots could follow JS (oh the consipiracy!) the blogs are indeed relevant to my site and targetted to my audience. But I’ll stick with the first since it deems most true.

I’ll report back in a week or so to show some of the results of any traffic that BlogRush generated. You have to remember that BlogRush doesn’t deliver hits, they only deliver impressions on other peoples sites. So just because you’re earning massive amounts of impressions, that doesn’t necessarily convert to click thrus to your site. If that’s the case, then I’ll brush this off as a gimmick and try something else. But at the very least, having impressions on some high exposure blogs, such as those mentioned above, equals a free branding opportunity. One would normally have to pay hundreds of dollars to get seen on those sites. To me, this benefit alone is worth trying out BlogRush.

BlogRush.com