The hottest new widget on the web is BlogRush.com (yes, that’s an affiliate link). You put their widget on your site, then they syndicate your headlines out to other blogs in your same category. On your blog you’ll see five headlines from other blogs. You’ll get one of your headlines displayed on some other blog for every time the widget is loaded. Plus you get credit for people you refer to the service. Their Terms of Service says not to spam people, or to otherwise harm the Internet, but I’d be willing to bet we start seeing BlogRush.com spam fairly soon.
The system is still gearing up. I think they may have been better off to have a limited beta system (take a tip from Google – invite only is good for gearing up) so they can iron out the bugs. After one weekend, they already are having trouble with generating the reports for user’s Dashboard. Once you’re logged into the site, you can’t get to the site homepage. You also can’t get to the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. Actually, it might be a simple HTML error, the footer of the page doesn’t show up once you are logged in.
I also wonder if the system will scale well. Getting credit for up to 10 generations of referrals is nice, but eventually the numbers will overwhelm and you won’t be able to actually use all your credit. This is very similar to the model that Banner Exchange used back in the mid 1990’s. For every two ads you showed for other web sites, you’d get one of your ads shown elsewhere.
How do they make any money? It appears that 10% of the blogs showing up in the widget are actually ads. I think that might bother me, since there’s no disclosure of ad vs. blog in the widget.
So be aware that BlogRush is coming, it has potential to increase your site’s traffic. But I’m concerned by the advertising embedded within the widget.
I am not using BlogRush. The only people who gain from a link exhcange service like this are the creators of the service. Free publicity and all the data they can evaluate.
Michael
I’m using BlogRush but I rarely get any traffic from them. I agree with Michael that BlogRush creators are the ones who will gain more. But I think it’s fair…they did create and developed BlogRush.
Rosie
I won’t jump on this too early. I’ve had similar promises from BlogMad and other traffic exchanges, and little has happened. I want to hear some reviews first. Risky? I know.
I’m trying Blogrush on one of my WordPress powered blogs and it took a bit to implement properly (I’m not overly computer literate – I’m more of a “plug-n-play” guy). I got a few random visitors from them but it was not nearly a “rush” of traffic — more like a trickle. It’s still in place but I’m considering removing it as I agree that it seems to be more beneficial to the BlogRush folks themselves and other bigger blogs more than mine. 🙁
I’ve used a couple of these type of services, and I’ve got to agree that most are total junk and bring you very little to no traffic. One of note that actually does bring in some pretty consistent traffic is called Entrecard. But even though it gets you some visitors, the just “drop” their e-business card and run 99% of the time. Still not worth it in my opinion.