It seems that BlogRush (the traffic generating tool released earlier in the week which I gave a first impression review of here) has updated the member dashboard to give publishers statistics on how things are performing.
I’d be interested to collect some data from readers on how it is going for everyone.
My own results have some good and bad things about them.
On the positive side I’ve referred quite a few bloggers to the program which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of credits. I’ve earned a lot more credits so far than they seem to have been able to serve.
On the negative side – while my headlines have been shown around 70,000 times I’ve only had 35 clicks on them. That is an extremely low Click Through Rate of 0.05%! I didn’t expect it to be high but thought it might have got somewhere in the 1% range (which would have brought in 700 clicks from the 70,000 – but this is pretty disappointing.
I know it is still very early days and they’ll find ways to improve things but it’s not a great start in terms of driving actual traffic so far.
Now that could have something to do with my headlines (although I try to write engaging ones) – however I suspect it also has something to do with the positioning that a lot of bloggers are using for the widget. I’ve seen a lot of widgets low on pages where I suspect they’ll rarely be seen by readers – let alone clicked.
It’s easy to look at these results and give up on BlogRush – I personally think it’s too early to jump ship or write it off completely. This is just a few days into launch and the only way is up in terms of performance. I suspect that the BlogRush developers will test and tweak their design and add new categories to make links in the widget more relevant to content on blogs.
I’m going to try to improve the CTR by trying a few of the techniques in my Tips for Using BlogRush post – particularly experimenting with different categories.
PS: I’m looking forward to seeing more detailed reports (still under construction) as I can’t wait to see how my different blogs have performed as compared to one another. Having this information will help bloggers improve their own CTR as they test different categories and watch to see how they convert differently.
I only have a credit balance of 27, the rest is all ZERO.
I guess my site has not showed up in anyone’s widgets because of the category I chose (Parenting).
I also found the topics extremely unrelated, and now I switched to Health & Medicine, and it’s a bit better.
My blog is about pregnancy and childbirth, I am not sure in what category that belongs!
i think they need to introduce different sizes for the widget, colors as well. maye be even diff styles.
Here’s a fun challenge for you all. If we don’t provide you with a better click-through rate than BlogRush, we’ll paypal you $10.
We’ve been working on some fun software that is already beating BlogRush on click-through stats (by a lot). I’d like to take advantage of this meme, put some money on the table, earn some valuable feedback, and have some fun.
Details on our blog at http://blog.othersonline.com/2007/09/the-others-onli.html. Let the games begin?
Okay, my blog is in it’s beginning stages, so I don’t get a lot of hits yet. But checking today’s stats, I’ve had 30 visitors to my site today, and 4 of them came from a BlogRush widget. Which is quite a few, comparitively.
However, has anyone had trouble with sleezy and inappropriate content in the widget on your site? Mine has been featuring some stuff I am appalled at. My site is family friendly; I’m thinking of taking the BlogRush widget OFF.
I recently added the BlogRush to my site… (yesterday) i can’t wait to see what the statistics are… if the traffic isn’t what they say it is then i’m freeing up the space on my site for more ads…
I just read an email from BlogRush, he goes into detail explaining how most of us could be getting low CTRs. Fraud was one of the reasons cited…
and I just saw on mint that I got a visit from a blog rush widget! But my stats on blogrush still show Zero :”(
I’ve solved one of the BlogRush problems I mentioned above — the ability to select what posts I want to include in my feed. I have free download and instructions here for anybody that is trying to do the same:
http://www.smoblog.com/custom-rss-blogrush/
Nothing I can do about the ugly widget problem though :-)
I dunno, guys. I wouldn’t click on any of your headlines, either. Clicking through to some of your sites, the headlines seem to be almost TOO “optimized”. When I see a bunch of them together in the Blogrush widget, they look like spam, and when I click through to the articles, they’re not much better. Plus, they’re typically about something so specific that it does not apply to me. I think that’s something that’s going to hurt “niche” sites using Blogrush, unless they can also find a way to make the widget display headlines that are similarly specific. Your sites might work well with Google searches, but to a random person not looking for anything in particular… your sites are going to bore the hell out of them. When I see a blog post so heavily crafted to attract hits… it doesn’t come off much better than all the male enhancement messages in my inbox. You’re using the same tactics, you know.
I have a personal site that I’ve been switching up between humour and personal categories, and I’m still seeing better than 1% CTR. My stats on the Blogrush page itself are also incorrect, though… I’ve just been counting instances of widget.blogrush.com in my stats.
HEY EVERYONE… John Reese from BlogRush here.
Thanks for all the great feedback. We’re working really hard to make some “must needed” improvements due to some unforseen issues we’ve encountered. Fraud has really hurt us in the early going and is dilluting the CTRs across the entire network. We’re moving to a 100% Manual Review Process and this will not only eliminate most of the cheaters but will also eliminate all the low-quality blogs in the network.
I wonder if anyone’s referral network has filled to the 10th level?
For me I’ve registered directly under the company (from JR’s blog) and that means all the referral credits (9th levels above me) now belongs to the company. Similarly, 8 levels of my first line goes to the company too, and 7 levels of my 2nd line goes up…etc.
If my case is common, which is very probable since a large number of us got in NOT from a 2nd tier referral, then there’ll be a huge pool of credits being use for serving public feeds or paid feeds…
i.e. the company will have tons of un-used credits which could otherwise be serving member’s feeds instead. Thus there’s not enough impressions to go around to show everyone’s feeds and we have more credits than we can spend.
Re: the “abuses” that the company cited in their latest update; I’m just surprise why no measures to prevent them have be pre-empt prior to the release. Some of the exploits seems obvious.
Great spirit John — nice to see that you are working so hard to make improvements. Manual review should help a lot. It would be great to see something that could incentiveize mega-popular blogs like this one to keep running their widget even after they’ve racked up zillions of syndication credits.
I installed Blogrush on my personal blog a few hours ago. 144 page impressions, no clicks. Also, even though it says I’ve gained 100 credits, my credit balance is showing as minus 45, I just don’t understand that. So far, it’s done nothing for me. I’ll give it a couple of weeks, and if I get no extra traffic from it, their ugly-looking widget will be removed.
LAST 7 DAYS IMPRESSIONS:495 CLICKS:1
Credits Earned Last 7 Days: 666
LAST 30 DAYS IMPRESSIONS: 2,667 CLICKS: 1
At least you’re beating my CTR!
That said, I’ve seen at least 2-3 referrals in my stats, so I suspect it’s not counting right :-(
If you want more visitors, you can be your own 10th generation referral and earn 4.5 times more visitors!
http://blogsformoney.com/post/Clever-Trick-Getting-45-Times-More-Traffic-From-BlogRush.aspx
:D
16 referrals, 36,000 credits, 10,000 impressions and just 4 clicks.
That’s useless
No referrals and really, I just signed up for Blogrush but it’s encouraging that people are seeing some increase in traffic.
I find it interesting to also see where everyone’s credits are coming from.
Many people are generating the majority of their credits from their own traffic. For me, most of them have come from my referral network.
I give a full screen shot of my stats on my latest blog post:
http://myideaguy.com/blog/is-blogrush-working/
I only see it getting better as they refine the system more and more.
That’s my two cents.
Take care.
Stu
I received an email from Blogrush last night to say that CTRs are so low because spam bloggers have been cheating the system and stealing traffic from legitimate users. This information also appears on the Blogrush website. They have promised to remove the cheats, and are now introducing a manual sign-up process, to prevent future abuse and make the system fairer for genuine users. At least they seem to be making a genuine effort to help legitimate users.
@Stu McLaren
I will respond here because you force people to register to comment :(
You are not reporting accurate click stats because the Blogrush stats do not (or didn’t) account for the bonus impressions which are most of the traffic on the network currently.
There are some weird things in the Blogrush stats that just don’t add up currently.
For instance I have had a sudden burst of 5000 credits allocated to traffic in the last 24 hrs, but I have no way of telling where those came from.
Clicks in the interface only
You really need to track referrers using other forms of tracking such as MyBlogLog or Google Analytics.
I went into the reasons why, and demonstrated the difference in this post about Blogrush Testing and Tracking
As you will see, there is a huge difference between the traffic small blogs receive, and
Results are poor just like everyone else. A click through rate of around 1.8 – 2%.
Here’s my report on the BlogRush experience:
http://www.someuseless.info/internet-marketing/blogrush-poor-performance/
oops…that should be 0.18 – 0.2% ….sorry.
DON’T TRUST THE BLOGRUSH STATS! I’m getting a 0.7% click rate, but I don’t have a single click showing on my BlogRush dashboard, so before any of you go and chuck the idea, check your own stats.
For me, any new visitors are good, I’m very new, and very small. Even better, they’ve all come from really relevant sites. I haven’t seen any spammy or inappropriate content in the widget, but my niche doesn’t have a lot of that anyway.
Honestly, tuck it down somewhere where you aren’t making money anyway, and then whatever traffic it brings will be better than nothing.
I removed it due to it really clashing with the minimalistic design of my site. Also, I only had 10 credits, and at one point it was in the negatives…
Darren,
Fora such experimented guy like you I was especting you won`t “rush” .. i`m dissapointed that, despite your internetmarketing knowledge (and not only), you still belive pyramidal and traffic exchange would work.
mlm died in `80`s … despite lot of people keep promoting it even crossing the scam limits ..
“I know it is still very early days..” – and so will stay…
Is a widget, widgets slow down big time site loading.
Is ugly and despite color schemes and eventual resize, it will be ALLWAYS a widget.
Is to big – everybody will put it lower – bottom, who wants to get rid of PAID position on top to put that ?
ntz ntz ntz …
I’m curious, does anyone know how to see/contact who they have referred? The past week I went from 0 referrals to 11 and they are giving me thousands and thousands of impressions (still have a horrible CTR: 5, but hey at least I have clicks now lol)
Valentin, I agree with some of your points, but to me this really isn’t a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme involves lying to people and either losing your money to stealing other peoples money. This is purely based on traffic and traffic alone, BlogRush makes their money from 1 ad in the 9 listings… but hey most of us run ads on our blogs.
I agree on the part that the javascript widget lags the site a bit, on my site it seems to jitter. Micheal and ProBlogDesign.com even reviewed my site and noted that as one of the drawbacks to our layout so if we remove that widget it would be due to performance issues.
http://www.problogdesign.com/blog-design-reviews/design-review-starfeeder/
@ starfeeder
No money involved ? lol, be patient … :-P
As about pyramidals required something paid or money, – don`t shoot the messenger – you are thinking to much “online”.
But for the sake (not that japanese drink) of conversation, please consider I replace “pyramidal” with “vertical”.
Rule number one of any comersial activity : client rulz ! my “master” is my client!
If this mean vertical relations, I`m the next pope. :-)
On the other hand, any refferal system is build to give advantage to one on higher position.
(sidenote – guess who are allways in top 5-10 highest levels ? No, wrong, are .. “gurus” !)
If refferals mean :
a
b1 b2 b3 .. b(n)
(cb1-1 cb1-2 …cb1-(n)) ((cb2-1 cb2-2 …cb2-(n)) ………
and if this “scheme” centred on page is not looking as a pyramid, I may need to re-learn geometry.
Yet, I`m sure egyptian pharaons would see it as a pyramid.
Pyramids on biz = mlm.
mlm = failure for 99% (see the above sidenote where were pointed who are the others 1% …)
By now, this “thing” was successfull in only one point, which was not said by none in plain english : tousends of link back to blogrush dot com.
I know what is wrong with the BR system and how to make it work. REALY !
Somebody intersted ? I have a contact link on my blog.
Yet attention, that would reset all “credits” earned … and would mean cut off (somehow) refferal system too ..
I think the reason for the pyramid scheme is really to make blogrush.com popular. It’s not only for thei own sake, though.
To make a system like blogrush.com work you really need lots of members. And a referral system motivates people to invite other users.
If the system has enough users i would get rid of the referral system.
I recently developed a free wordpress plugin called “BlogRush Click Maximizer”. By using it you can vastly improve your Click Through Rate.
This allows you to control what you want to display in BlogRush. You can even write alternate – short and catchy title just for BlogRush.
You will have total control of what appears over the BlogRush Network.
Check it out here:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/bcm/
BlogRush accepted a lot of members and got them to promote their service. And how did BlogRush repay them? They deactivated their blogs and removed them from the system.
They did this to over 10,000 people just this weekend.
I can see sites not accepting a submision. But don’t accept someone’s submission, get them to promote your site, and then turn around and screw them over.
I would recommend using a legitimate blog submission service. You might just find that you put BlogRush on your blog and promote it, and when they are done using you, they will screw you over too.
I have a super small site but have seen zero good things from BlogRush, and like someone mentioned, I got some non-family oriented ads.
It does not appear to be a winner.
You may want to try a similar content linking service thats based on relevance vs popularity. I found it to have better CTR because the links are more relevant to what users are reading.
http://www.arkayne.com
i havent gotten many clicks from blogrush but ive gotten a lot of refferals.
i think they benefit more from bloggers.