If your blog is meant to be a personal journal, one that will only be shared among a small group of friends, then growing your audience isn’t exactly the biggest priority. If you’re not interested in making money from your blog, then it doesn’t matter if there’s a revolutionary new monetization method out there for you to try. That said, I think that those kinds of blogs are in the minority, because even if your blog is little more than a personal expression of your thoughts, you want those thoughts to be read (and you want to get paid for it). Yes, even if all you write is bullshit.
Most of us want to grow a huge following and have as many people reading our blogs as possible. Some of us strive to become professional bloggers, but we have to realize that consistently writing quality content oftentimes isn’t enough. There’s the marketing and SEO aspects that you have to worry about too. You can try Digg, StumbleUpon, MyBlogLog, and a variety of other networks to drive traffic your way. One of the most recent additions to this family of services is BlogRush.
Dubbed “your blog syndication network, BlogRush is designed in such a way that if you send traffic to someone else’s blog, you get traffic in return. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. You’ll notice that I’ve installed the BlogRush widget in the sidebar, just below the SiteMeter, BlogCatalog, and Spotplex buttons. This widget displays links to five posts from the blogosphere, more or less at random. The system is credit-based: for each hit received by the widget on your site, you get a link to your blog displayed somewhere else one time. Show the widget 1000 times and your link appears elsewhere 1000 times.
What makes the system even more lucrative is the referral program, because it goes ten generations deep and it’s on a full 1-to-1 basis. Say you refer someone to the BlogRush and they display the widget to 100 visitors. You also display the widget 100 times on your own blog within the same time period. This will earn YOU 200 “credits”, to be viewed elsewhere in the blogosphere 200 times. And like I said, this is ten generations deep.
Still confused? Let the official video walk you through it.
I’m always interested in ways of growing traffic to this blog and BlogRush sounds like a good idea. I’ll see how it goes over the course of the next couple of months, taking a look at the stats through Google Analytics.
Signed up a couple of days ago but it seems that BR is experiencing some major growing pains. We’ll see how it works out once they stabilize their network.
It’s a great viral idea. But the thing is, everybody puts widget in the bottom of the page, so the click through is extremely low.