Blogrush is about getting traffic to your blog. But then, everything is about getting traffic to your blog. The idea with Blogrush is to earn ‘credits’ and the more credits you have, the more your blog titles are shown. At least, that is how I understand it. Blogrush just got through with a major update and I can actually look at my Stats now. They are a bit on the sad side. The graph looks like the lasts days of Enron. A mountain on the downhill side.
The credits seem ok at 92,647 earned, but not knowing exactly what they mean, how can I tell? That’s a total since September 17th, which must be when I signed up. There is really too little data to make any absolute opinions about Blogrush. But it has a number of things going for it. It doesn’t cost anything but space on the sidebar. And if you get twenty visitors you didn’t have before, that’s got to be worth something. There are a lot of charts and graphs and numbers you can look at, but I just don’t have enough numbers to make much sense of it all.
Still, here are some of the Stats that I can understand- Impressions and Clicks, though they call them Syndicated and Readers.
My blog post with the most impressions is Pushing Daisies-Looks Like Tim Burton which has 15,293 impressions and has two clicks. Others only have a few hundred impressions, but have a click. None of my posts have more than 2 clicks, so the click through rate is a bit better than what you get from an Adwords ad on those that got clicked. But the ones that didn’t get clicked, well, those are the majority of my posts. Some of them have lots of impressions, but to be honest, impressions on Blogrush are not exactly in the same league with impressions on Google.
I have a total of 22 clicks and 126713 impressions for a click through rate of about 1.7 percent. Again if we compare that to a CTR for Adwords, it’s pretty good. Anything over .05 percent is considered pretty good in the Adwords universe. Oh, btw I had to crunch the numbers myself as there was no total impressions or total clicks on the reports page.
It’s a well established fact that Adsense ads above the fold, the top of the page, do a lot better than Adwords on a footer or just wherever below the fold. But Adsense makes you money, maybe a lot, maybe not so much, but money is something we can all understand. Blugrush ‘credits’ are another story altogether. Why should a blogger use his valuable real estate on something that will earn them credits when they can use Adwords that will earn them cash?
The result is that the Blogrush widget is often at the bottom of the page, the impressions that are counted can be for times when the widget may not even be seen. Most bloggers, myself included, love to put crap on their blogs. What books are we reading, where in the world are we, what time is it, and so on and so forth. We also like ads for all kinds of crap. So unless the Blogrush widget is near the top, or at least near the top blog post, then no one is going to wade through all the etc of a blog sidebar looking for it.
There is no easy way to promote Blogrush, at least not that I can see. They have a little spot on the Blogrush site to paste in email addresses and there is that little add your blog posts bit on the Blogrush Widget, but I don’t know if that earns you any credits. There is a box on the Blogrush Dashboard that talks about earning more credits from referrals, but there is no clue as to how to refer anyone to the site. As others have noted, Blogrush is not a bad idea, but it sure as hell is a badly executed one. Maybe they will whip up some referral widgets in the fullness of time. It seems that you can get a referral code by sending yourself a email, or by asking for a copy of the email sent to a friend. Seems the long way round though.
I can’t quite give Blogrush a ringing endorsement yet as I have seen little or no results from using Blogrush. But hey, using Blogrush couldn’t hurt is about the best I can offer at the moment, and I am not totally sure about that. Anything that brings a few more eyes to the page, I’m willing to give a shot.
Maybe Blogrush will be the next Digg. Or maybe not.
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