Blog Rush - Consider This

Every blog I visited last night and today, including Shoemoney, Dosh Dosh, Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim and John Chow, had something written about Blog Rush.

What is it? Blog Rush is a new javascript widget that you can place on your blog to display the latest headlines from other blogs that are in the same category as your blog. You get to display your latest post on other blogs for every page view of the widget on your blog. Of course that is not all Blog Rush is, it also has an affiliate program built in so for every person that signs up under your referral you will also get more displays from your referral page views.

It sounds great doesn’t it? A great way of getting the word out there about your blog and displaying your latest headline. Since everyone was talking about it I had to check this out for myself. I signed up using my Video Rambler blog. I tried several categories and placed the widget in the template and republished. I then went to check to see what kinds of headlines I was getting. I was not impressed. Check out the headline of the second story? I clicked through to see the content of that story. Not the kind of site I want to be linking too. Perhaps I have to high of standards, but I don’t need to advertise that on a site that I know I have kids visiting. The widgets I have seen on blogs similar in content to the LGR Webmaster Blog has been not bad. I suppose it might just be the categories I choose for Video Rambler. Needless to say the widget was off of Video Rambler as fast as it went on.

Giving it some thought since I tried the Blog Rush widget I have a few things for people to consider before trying it out.

• Currently they only have one layout for the widget. Hopefully they will come out with more options for the widget so people can make it blend in with their blogs more.
• How are they going to keep the spam blogs out? There seems to be no check at all when I signed up. You could end up linking to blogs that you really don’t want to promote.
• Do you really want/need another widget on your blog?
• There is no guarantee of the amount of traffic you are going to get, if any.
• There needs to be a better way to filter out blogs and posts from appearing in your widget. There is a filter that you can use to block certain keywords and url keywords from appearing, but I could not get it to work when I tried to block certain keywords.
• If your blog receives little traffic your headlines will not be shown very often. You might be better off building links and taking part in others blogs to help build traffic before placing the widget. If you already have a high traffic blog, do you need this widget?

Given some of these current issues with the widget if you feel it is right for your blog you can sign up at Blog Rush. I will be interested to hear other people experiences with it, but I think I will leave it off of my blogs until the filtering is better. It might be worth joining to be a part of the affiliate program, just to gain some referrals and some page views through your referrals to judge if it is worth placing on your blog.