Alex managed to get 457 visitors from BlogRush to one of his posts with only 3888 headline impressions
Yes… the headline he used was hype and a little controversial, but ultimately as he concludes, often that is what will draw traffic.
As a bonus he also gained 90 visitors from TrafficJam
Ultimately success with BlogRush is really down to the blogger. If they don’t get traffic from BlogRush, maybe they need to work a little on their headlines and experiment.
Note:This is targeted traffic who know what the article they will see is about before they read it, unlike something like Stumbleupon, and he didn’t have to run around reading 100s of blogs to achieve it. It is a scalable solution.
26 Comments
Thanks for the note Andy,
Yeah that experiment was a proof to myself as much as to others that my Failures to get traffic using service provided by John is nothing more then – Personal Failure!
Granted I used controversy but I have explained the reasons within the post and most people understood it. I think perhaps most importantly – it proved that before we mark something as failure we need to have a hard look at ourselves.
Cheers!
Wow, that’s pretty cool. I don’t know if I could ever accomplish this (at least not yet), but that is pretty awesome to get that high from blogrush :D
That’s a great CTR.
Yes, I agree that people will be attracted by an unordinary title of a story… so, think better when giving titles to your posts. A good way to get more visitors to your blog.
Andy,
HOW DARE YOU!
How dare you try and prove to people that BlogRush actually brings some people decent traffic for FREE.
We all know BlogRush is a horrible failure! ;-)
I’m still waiting for my refund.
-John Reese
That is very interesting, I do wonder how many of those visitors ultimately convert. My 2 cents is that visitors that never convert (or have very low conversion rates) only costs the publisher money.
Jim it can take multiple visits for people to finally decide to subscribe or purchase from you, or any other action, unless they are in a specific buying mode.
I am positive that there is a higher chance for those visitors to subscribe than the 100,000 visitors I sent John to the Income.com blog to see a picture of a guy cleaning his fishtank.
The thing about BlogRush though is even freak traffic (it was a freak, the post I submitted had been on John’s blog over a week, and I am hardly a power user on Digg) can be converted into Blogrush credits. 100,000 blogruch credits could potentially be turned into some useful visits if you use a very optimized headline using one of the many Wordpress plugins.
I think that’s a very interesting approach, but the question is how many those visitors actually convert? Otherwise, temp spike in users that never convert is not that useful.
Point taken. Though I do think that the ROI on it is often going to be less than well targeted SEM traffic where the user is in the right frame of mind (to purchase).
I hate to open the door to another debate, but won’t this just further encourage the use of non-descriptive and over the top titles just to draw attention? (which is a growing problem in the blogosphere).
I would disagree with this: Having never read “How to Get $27,497 In One Hour Blogging” I expected to read about how one individual made big money in an hour, not an experiment about writing catchy titles.
“Andy Beard Ran Over My Dog” – think that would get a good CTR? :o)
very interesting indeed. i didn’t put blogrush on my site (and entrecard, for that matter) because I thought all traffic exchange programs were against Adsense TOS. Boo me. :P
I just have BlogRush in one of my blogs though… but I kinda agree with the above comments about misleading titles though…
Andy, you should do a post about Mybloglog and how convenient it is as a social aggregation tool. It is also a great place to get new followers for your blog.
http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/igorthetroll/
The problem is that such traffic is good only when the visitor can be converted into a regular reader. If you cant do that, you might as well put an adsense block in place of BR and make a few cents from the click rather than earn credits for a one-time visitor.
And in order for the visitor to come back to your blog, just a catchy title would do no good. The article itself needs to be informative. Which brings us back to the old(boring) adage: content is king..
It is true in any form of marketing, a headline has to deliver on the promise, but it also has to be clicked or draw interest on a sales page for the content to be read.
Obviously just having a headline doesn’t work, but the sceptics claim that Blogrush itself doesn’t work for bringing traffic, which this article proves is not the case.
That is a pretty impressive CTR… it all depends on the headline and people that see it…
That a blogger excels by his headlines is proved by you but doubts about genuine customers still linger
Creating attention headlines is a talent. In this day and age that could be a full time job.
The question I have is: Have you noticed whether or not the education or emotional level of your audience demographic affects CTR?
A good title always gives better results.
The same for email marketing subject lines …
I’m new to blogging, so BlogRush seemed like a good way to find my true followers! Seems it works mostly for those with a large audiences already (the rich get richer… lol). I wrote an article referring to Andy’s “7 critical mistakes” in using this service — see my post at ‘Is BlogRush Giving You the Bum Rush?’Interestingly, this post has yet to appear on my BlogRush dashboard — i.e. it’s not being syndicated! Are they screening it???
I wouldn’t have thought they would screen anything, John isn’t that kind of guy, criticism is feedback.
Are you using Feedburner pingshot?
Ultimately you are crippled from gaining maximum potential from Blogrush (and blogging as a whole) by using blogspot.
I didn’t really think they would screen — just a bit ironic. I moved to feedburner recently and just activated the pingshot after your comment. Will also look into the article I saw about disadvantages of blogspot when using traffic directors. Thanks for your response!
Actually, more than just the title itself, your click-thrus increase with blog credibility…know what I’m saying? As people find certain headlines of yours interesting, the name of your blog on the widget gains street credit and most posts you write with a semi-decent title get traffic…I’ve been using the widget for a few months now and with unique content, consistently receive around 5% click-thru (sometimes more, sometimes less…but fairly consistent). It can be done!
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[...] really should get one for Blogrush and knock Tamar down a couple of spots. Since I wrote about the free traffic from Blogrush that Alex received, I have actually had one day when Blogrush combined with Traffic Jam was my [...]
[...] Many BlogRush users ARE getting the free traffic benefits that were promoted. But most of these marketers have a solid grasp on writing really click-worthy titles; which makes all the difference. [...]