Warning: Make Sure Your Best Content Is Not Ignored By Blogrush
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I’ve been a booster of BlogRush since the day it went live. I like it and use it. I’ve received traffic from it, and sent traffic to it. I have a small referral network of ten bloggers, but I have a referral network, nonetheless. I’ve been considering writing a regular article about interesting content I find at random through BlogRush.
This will be my first down post about BlogRush. Sorry, buddy, but it has to be done.
With the new 2nd Phase dashboard, you can see how each of your posts are performing. You can see the number of impressions they’ve been given and the number of click-through’s they’ve received. This is excellent information. Let’s face it, most people judge a post by its title. A weak title will yield poor results to someone who is just browsing through a blog. This new information can not only help you improve future Blogrush click-through rates, but it should help you retain StumbleUpon users for more than three seconds, and it might help you get more Diggs, Zooms, Plugs and Sphinns. Strong titles yield strong results, and you can see that in the Blogrush dashboard.
What you can also see in the Blogrush dashboard, is when one of your articles is being ignored by Blogrush.
For some reason, my article What Does It Take To Achieve PageRank 7? has been given only a tiny number of impressions compared to the rest of my recent articles. This is disappointing, because I believe this article would be of interest to nearly any blogger, and would have been of even more interest during the week of PageRank upheavals. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll never know now, since Blogrush decided to only syndicate that article 179 times, compared to 2533 impressions for my tiny post bragging about my position on the Top 100 list, or 2270 for my quickie review of BloggingZoom.
The Top 100 post received only two click-throughs, and the BloggingZoom review has received zero click-throughs, so I know the problem is not with the fact that the PageRank article also received zero click-throughs. That was my first thought, when I saw that it was receiving no impressions… maybe it had received 178 impressions without a single click-through, so BlogRush decided the headline sucked and stopped wasting my impressions. Obviously, if that was the case, then the BloggingZoon review should have stopped receiving new impressions a long time ago.
My second thought was that the article was not at the top of my blog for very long. This seems more likely to have been a problem… I had a burst of energy that night and wrote three articles. The first, about the PageRank updates, I posted immediately. The PR7 article came second, and I post-dated that for early the next morning. The Top 100 post came third, and I post-dated that for late the next morning, giving the PR7 article only a few hours in the top spot.
But I know that BlogRush does not just syndicate your most recent article. OnePulseIM’s “ViralUrl - Finally Launches!” has been the #2 article on that blog since October 31st. But it still receives impressions on BlogRush. I know because I continue to see it on my own widget CONSTANTLY. For a tiny article of low value, it’s a little disappointing that that article has received over 68,000 impressions (more impressions than I have ever earned) despite having only a medium buzz rating.
My disappointment aside, that’s pretty solid evidence that Blogrush does not only syndicate the newest article. So why is my one article, the one I had such hope for, being ignored by Blogrush? I have to assume it’s a combination of bad timing and no immediate click-throughs.
What Can You Do?
In the future, make sure to take these steps to ensure that your more important content gets maximum exposure on Blogrush:
1. Better timing. If you have an article you think is likely to receive good traffic through Blogrush, make sure it is the most recent article on your blog for at least one business day.
2. Make sure to block syndication of lower-value content, such as site reviews and posts bragging about PageRank and Top 100 positions. You can do this from the Blogrush Filters screen. Be sure to do this before posting your article. You can’t retroactively filter your articles.
3. Better headlines. CopyBlogger has written a bunch of articles on writing better headlines. I used tip #1 from this article when writing the headline of the article you are reading now.
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9 Responses
Acopic Web Design
November 7th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
1Never liked BlogRush personally. I’ve said it a million times but I’ll say it again - it’s a pyramid scheme. Plain and simple.
Markk
November 7th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
2When I checked the Dashboard, I noticed my blog’s traffic has gone up but I’m not sure whether the widget was doing it’s work or not. Simultaneously, I’ve been busy submitting post articles to Blogging Zoom. I’m more inclined to believe BZ is driving traffic to my blog. One good indication is that I’m getting a “rash” of comments which I had not experienced before. And quite a lot of new comments were planted on older posts in the archives. Don’t think BlogRush is behind all this positive experience. I’ve been around some blogs with the BlogRush widgets and I have yet to see some titles from my posts. Thanks for the effort to decipher the BlogRush behaviour.
Lin
November 7th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
3Very good suggestions Rich. I wanted to add one negative about the BlogRush dashboard. There’s been several times since the launch of Phase 2 of BlogRush where I’ve clicked on my own BlogRush widget to check out stats.
I was shocked to discover that I was actually viewing someone else’s blog information and private data! I’ve seen several dashboards of other users, including seeing their private email address and stats. That’s not a good thing, so I think it’s very important to use perhaps a gmail email address instead of one you use often. Just my two cents.
Rich
November 7th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
4Acopic, mathematically, BlogRush is an inverted pyramid. It’s never possible to get out of it less than you put in. I still mostly like the content, but I’m starting to think I’m rare in that regard
Markk, BloggingZoom is definitely sending more traffic than BlogRush. WAY more traffic, in fact. If this continues, BlogRush may be a goner even on my page, and I’m one of its more solid fans.
One of the weaknesses of Blogrush is, in fact, one of the greatest strengths of BloggingZoom… Blogrush only displays content within your niche, which means the readers of your blog are more likely to already be familiar with the bloggers they’re seeing, and the lack of diversity can be a little boring.
My blog may be stuck in the Business niche, but that doesn’t mean my visitors and I are only interested in business topics. At any given moment, I’d be perfectly happy to jump to blogs about television and movies or motorcycles or parenting or neuroscience, but I’ll never see those on Blogrush without first going to a blog outside my niche and starting from there.
John Sadler
November 8th, 2007 at 8:22 am
5Thanks guys for all the info about Blog Rush and Blogging Zoom. I am part of both, but because I am new here I am not getting loads of traffic yet, but I can see some. Very interesting what you say about BZ maybe getting the upper hand, because at least you have control over stuff being posted, rather than waiting for someone else to make that step. I also see it has little to do with the number of syndicated hits, rather the readers that makes you hot, but I read your comments Rich with interest about using filters to ignore earlier posts.
Dear BlogRush, Have You Forsaken Me? at Planet Saedel | PlanetSaedel | PlanetSaedel.com | Saedel Pensoy
November 12th, 2007 at 12:19 am
6[...] Nothing in between, unlike my story. A certain Rich from Ohio says he’s been “a booster of BlogRush eversince it went live”. On the other hand, Caroline Middlebrook was not thrilled with the 14 [...]
Rob O.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
7I’m pretty disappointed with BlogRush. I jumped on the bandwagon on day 1 and I use it constantly, clicking through to others’ blogs very frequently to do my part in supporting the system.
But I’m still not seeing any appreciable amount of traffic from BR. And only 3 out of the past 2 dozen of our posts have been syndicated despite every effort to make our post titles short, grabby, & relevant.
Overall, there’s still far too little randomization in the BlogRush widget - very often it serves up the same blog post repeatedly. Aesthetically, I know lots of people have issues with the design of the widget, but my biggest issue is that I’d like to have a horizontally-oriented version of the widget to better integrate into my blog’s “sidebarless” layout.
I’m not giving up on BR yet, but it’s getting harder & harder to keep the faith…
Rob O.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
8Actually, I’m sorry - that came out wrong. What I meant to say is that of the past 2 dozen syndicated posts, only 3 blog entries have been clicked through to.
Bluehost
June 10th, 2008 at 2:32 am
9BlogRush didn’t work for me at all. no one looks on the side in a tiny box and absolutely no one clicks the links in it. its a pos if you ask me
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