TrickBlogger: Increase Your Blog Traffic with BlogRush

There’s no such thing as too much traffic, especially if you’re blogging for profit. John Reese, the creator of BlogRush, knows this all too well.

John launched BlogRush a few days back, a blog traffic exchange service based on a widget an points system. The reception has been mixed, with some people calling it nothing more than a “web 1.0 traffic exchange” in disguise as a Web 2.0 service. Others absolutely love the idea.

When you sign-up for BlogRush and place the widgets on your blog, you will earn credits for displaying the headlines of similar blogs. In return, your blog headlines will be displayed on other people’s blogs as well, with the ratio of 1:1.

Another way you can earn credits is by referring other people to BlogRush, and by doing so you can earn an equal / lesser amount of credit (whatever your referrals earn by using the widget on their blogs) up to 10 levels deep.

Some people complain that this reminds them too much of MLM and pyramid schemes, but since there’s no payment involved it can’t really be called by either one of those names. What’s clear is that it works to a certain extent, but to maximize your traffic you need to get in early and refer as many other blogger as you can.

That would probably mean you stand a better chance of getting more traffic if your blog readers themselves have blogs and can join BlogRush as your “downline”. If your blog is about blogging, chances are you’re going to benefit more from this than if your blog is about trout fishing..

Here’s some stats from my account:

It shows that over 7 days, I have referred 465 people in my network, and have earned 214,613 credits both from my traffic, and those of my referrals. In terms of actual traffic, I got about 62 clicks so far, so the click-through rate or CTR seems to be very low.

Here’s what others are saying about BlogRush:

From Mashable:

But while we try to be open minded about new sites, the BlogRush idea does hark back to “Web 1.0? traffic exchanges. In these systems, you would earn exposure for your site by browsing other sites. However, these services eventually flamed out when they failed to deliver on their promises. Our take: don’t get your hopes up, because this one may not last forever.

According to Yaro Starak:

The short answer is yes, of course you will get some. However don’t expect miracles. Even if the uptake on BlogRush is significant, which it will be, in my experience the click-through rates on these sorts of traffic exchanges are terrible. Even with BlogRush’s context and category matching, the placement of widgets like these in sub-prime real estate (usually in sidebars below the fold, just like on my blog), means that they don’t get a lot of attention in the first place and there are five links competing for what attention there is, so the chances of a visitor clicking through to your blog is low.

From Dosh Dosh:

I’m really not a fan of blog widgets. There’s a lot of hype about BlogRush at the moment and I am personally doubtful that it’ll actually generate traffic that’s worth the real estate on my blog. Why? Because the click through rate may not be fantastic as it will also depend on where the widget is placed on other blogs.

According to Problogger:

.. my suspicion is that titles will be particularly key in the success or failure of BlogRush for many.

Indeed, there’s a message on BlogRush now that the click-through rate is low across the network, which they attribute to several people trying to game the system. The message says that they are doing something about it, after which the CTR should improve tremendously.

At the time of writing however, other than the CTR and referrals no other statistics are available, so it’s hard to comment if BlogRush is just another fad or is here to stay long term.

However, it’s a free service and it’s easy to use, so there’s really no harm trying. Make sure you do the following: