Pimp your Blog with Blogrush Part I

Blogrush is an interesting concept that is intended to mix up the gene pool a bit with regard to blogs. You place your blog in a category and then you put your own custom widget for that category on your blog. The widget has links to other blog posts in your category. Every link is tagged with your blogrush id so that they know who sent a page to that other blog. You get points every time someone clicks the widget to see one of the related blog posts. When you have enough points then links to your blog will pop up in other people’s blogrush widgets and supposedly bring traffic to your blog.

Blogrush works like those Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) referral schemes that were all the rage in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. You can get referrals, and you get credit for basically any blog reading action that’s caused by your referrals too. You’ve all heard the MLM line, join now before everybody in the world finds out about it and there are still blogrush virgins, so you can get this massive army of referrals and get lots of traffic to your blog. Some people believe that schemes like this are illegal. Indeed, the structure is the same as a pyramid scheme, which is totally illegal. The factor that differentiates illegal from legal is whether money is moving up the chain for nothing or not. Pyramids like BlogRush where you’re not moving money up the pyramid are OK.

Blogrush has very detailed and well presented statistics. It gives you an idea of how well-read your blog is. And of course it shows you all your referrals, all zero of them in my case. However, the general consensus (and I agree) for BlogRush is that it takes up too much screen real estate and causes too much visual clutter for the value it delivers so I ditched the widget. Interestingly enough I found on TysBlog that Blogrush can still pull you a few hits even if you ditch the widget!