Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Blogrush: Pros and Cons

On the heels of the Quechup disaster, I'm not about to invite everyone I know to anything, let alone something that sounds like MLM for bloggers.

Blogrush is yet another viral service for bloggers that promises a lot, but may actually deliver something (small), rather than nothing.

If you look on my sidebar (scroll down on the right), you'll see that they install a small widget with links to posts from other blogs in the same category as yours. You get your post headings displayed on other sites for each impression you display. Furthermore, you earn more display credits for impressions of people you sign up.

Good or bad?

The Good

At it's heart, it's just displaying relevant links to other sites, which is good. No money is changing hands; it's just a service for your readers.

Furthermore, the site doesn't say, but it seems to be possible that links to your post will appear on larger sites than yours, which might actually drive some traffic your way, if your headlines are good.

The Bad

Like any MLM scheme, the early adopters will make a lot out of this, while the vast Johnny-come-latelys will see very little difference in results, all the while channeling traffic back to the larger sites.

While the site promises extra traffic for "doing nothing", you still have to work hard at writing your blog, and especially at creating linkbait headlines for your posts.

And what do they do about people who view their own page constantly?

And there is no "Board Games" category. I had to choose between Hobbies, Law, Technology, or Video Games (I chose the latter).

And the damn things takes up a lot of sidebar real estate and the look and feel isn't configurable.


Like others, I don't mind providing links to other sites which may be relevant to my readers. So check out the widget on my sidebar, and let me know if you ever find anything useful there.

If you want to sign up, click here, and we'll both be earning credits for your impressions, which is no loss to you. I won't be emailing you to sign up.

Yehuda

1 comment:

Dave The Game said...

Sounds interesting, like Sphere related content but that interlinks blogs instead of going to big news sites. The weird categories are a problem, though. Maybe late adopters will get less exposure, but I'd probably want to wait until they develop better categories (maybe if they get more users?) for it to be useful to my readers.