Lets face it, Google does a pretty good job with advertising tageting, especially all those Acai berry, colon cleaning, IMVU and flash games, plus the occasional Chitika ad with Darren Rowse that end up showing as remnant ads.
Google can only monetize a percentage of traffic effectively, and lots of traffic doesn’t click ads.

If you have a landing page for a product, then in most cases an exit pop with some kind of special offer, or page switch to another offer is a very popular option.

But what happens if you just have a blog on general stuff?
What happens if you have a huge site that brings in lots of traffic about “stuff” but you would much prefer to receive traffic than rely on Google for reventue, then somehow use that revenue to buy traffic, just feeding Google all the time.

Advertising Credits

Exit Fire has some kind of multilevel referral system and ad traffic swap.

There doesn’t seem to be any quality control, but maybe there is an army of outsourced workers in the Philippines – there is nothing wrong with the Philippines, I have recently hired a programmer there, I just know that Russell Brunson has or had a lot of staff there.

I can’t rip the math of this apart, or even defend it, as there is not enough information provided in the vague video on the landing page.

This is multilevel marketing that will never get to level 10 – I doubt anyone using Blogrush had referrals beyond level 6 or 7 – mine only went 5 deep.

The service has to be of value even without referrals, but at least it is targeting people who are exiting your site, and it isn’t blocking external links, just people who have already gone.

Exit Pops

The problem with these exit pops is they are rarely worded clearly

Someone has just tried to close a tab and this pops up…

Which button takes you to the partner page and which lets them take the action they wanted to do (close the tab) ?

It is never obvious…

Actions which cause a popup include closing a tab, the back button and a Stumble button – maybe other bookmarking plugins etc.

Junk Traffic

I don’t believe they are going to bring targeted traffic… I just don’t… at least not for niche sites, unless they have humans in the background allocating traffic.

Say for my blog on worm juggling (juggling.. not farming)…. ok yes I am kidding about the niche… kinda ;)

Your general bizop type traffic isn’t going to be targeted.

But say you have a site with lots of untargeted traffic and you wanted to arbitrage that into more valuable traffic… I can see a huge benefit, especially if you have a high bounce rate with TONS of traffic, and something you want to target in a biz op niche elsewhere, maybe even an affiliate link (there was no mention of whether you can use aff links)

Multiple Sites & Spam

I don’t think Russell has learnt very much from John Reese’s experience, other than to make money on the front end as this will possibly burn out very quickly…

The ideal setup is to have lots of untargetted visitors be shown an exit popup to a high quality landing page, or a site which is stuffed full of so much malware the average computer will grind to a halt in a frozen state of activex overload.

It is quite possible to “bait & switch” as well.

I can see an Exit Fire infestation on the horizon unless there is proactive monitoring of every site on an ongoing basis.

If you are going to use this, ensure you send traffic to a suitable landing page, not necessarily a squeeze page.

Make sure you track your results such as

http://andybeard.eu/?utm_source=Exitfire&utm_medium=exit&utm_content=homepage&utm_campaign=Exitfire1

(that isn’t a suatable landing page currently, it is just an example)

At the moment I don’t fully trust their traffic stats, I will need to take a look at my server logs, but I am already seeing referral traffic. It is at the expense of annoying regular visitors, thus I will have to work out a technical solution to fix that if someone else doesn’t.

Verdict

I slapped it on… I even upgraded (the downsell)… as an affiliate as far as I know you don’t get any money for referrals, only traffic.

There is a high chance I will now receive at least one phone call trying to sell me something as they have my phone number… something to bare in mind if you do buy the upsell.

This is a referral link, I might gain some additional traffic to some of my sites if you use it, but as far as I know no financial compensation.

http://www.ExitFire.com/1151

Do I recommend it?

For many niche sites, at this stage not at all.

I really wish there was a lot more information about how the credit system works, and the targeting system if there is one other than someone in the background assigning a category with enough traffic.

If I get the code on a site with a few million visitors a month, will ExitFire even have the inventory to send that traffic somewhere targeted?

I also wish there was more info on the abuse mechanisms, as I would hate someone leaving my site and landing on a malware site that had been referred to as my “partner” in the previous popup, that suggests some kind of vetting.

Hopefully more information will become available, but this is a service that could offer a suitable traffic arbitrage system for many sites who could use a way to leverage lots of traffic into quality referrals.

http://www.ExitFire.com/1151

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.

• does suck
• is amazing
• can bring you masses of targeted traffic
• can be used for market research
• can help you optimize your titles
• can be used for discovery
• is overrated
• is underrated
• is useful
• is a waste of screen pixels

Get the idea? It all depends on perspective and objectives.

Even if you have absolutely no interest in TrafficJam or Blogrush, I strongly suggest you read this post, especially if you are interested in viral marketing techniques that are guaranteed to build you an email list.

John Reese launched TrafficJam just a few days ago with the slogan – “Speed Read Thousands Of Blogs!”

TrafficJam vs Techmeme & Megite vs Activity Streams vs Feed Readers

Meme trackers are great ways to discover what people are blogging about. I stop by Techmeme on a daily basis and it brings me a great overview of what is happening in technology. It is a little elitist, the blogs and other news sources that get picked up are carefully selected, though the algorithms will also pick up other news sources if the central seed blogs link to them, or if other blogs link through to the lead stories or Techmeme, effectively saying “Hey, I have something to say as well”.

Megite allows you to create personal meme tracks, so I might also stop by the Search Engine marketing meme tracker based upon the Online Marketing Blog Biglist.
Some time ago I also created a meme tracker based upon my Technorati favorites, but because technorati Favorites is still broken and not showing all my favorites, this is proving next to useless and it can’t pick up the “undercurrent” of the z-list

Obviously I have my feed reader, but whilst I have subscribed to 300 or so blogs, I rarely have time to read them – using Google Reader with my current connection is cumbersome and the same would be true of other online readers such as Netvibes and Bloglines – I am currently also experimenting with FeedDemon which was made free not too long ago. It is a good option for those feeds which are “must reads”.

Blogcatalog’s Dashboard – the new activity stream is great, I have actually set it as my home page – my friends need to update their profiles so I can see what they are up to, but it gives me a good overview without getting bogged down. In some ways this is similar to what you can achieve with Netvibes or Pageflakes, but without the need to add all the feeds yourself.

TrafficJam highlights the undercurrent

TrafficJam highlights what is currently hot, without requiring high traffic numbers, a “trained audience” encouraged to click things to bring you more traffic, or anything else.

Clicks are based purely on headlines – if you have a headline that visitors to other blogs find interesting, you are going to gain a few clicks, even if you have a very low traffic blog – Blogrush already favours low traffic blogs in this regard because they gain lots of free credits.
How many free credits? Well I have had my WPPlugins site listed on Blogrush since it launched, and it is a very low traffic site, that hasn’t been updated in a long time, and the headline of the last post is hardly captivating.
The site certainly hasn’t earned many credits on its own – it has however been allocated almost 400,000 credits.

If you imagine the potential for a niche website, with a carefully optimized title being the one appearing within Blogrush, leading to a well optimized page which has been designed with a suitable traffic funnel, a CTR of 1% would give you 4000 visitors.

4000 visitors might not seem very much, but that is probably the equivalent to being linked to from 10 A-list bloggers in the blogging, seo and internet marketing niches with what I would call a “good” link, intended to send readers to look at something.

I know how much traffic I get from such links, and whilst they are not always sculpted to send maximum traffic, and there is an audience cross-over, there are very few sites that have sent me over 500 visitors from a single link in a short space of time.
If I delve into Google analytics and filter based on referrer, there are a few links that over a long period of time bring me more traffic, but those are invariably a well highlighted link in corner-stone content that attracts lots of links in itself.

Blogrush – Poor Click Through Rate

Despite improvements in targeting and improved quality filtering, the CTR from the Blogrush widgets has drastically reduced.

I think this is down to a number of problems

• Public quality perception – if you have moaned about or subjected Blogrush to public ridicule (some Internet marketing sites are very much like Ripoff Report in that respect) then you are unlikely to click.
• Different focus of attention – manual comment spammers are going to be focused on visiting the next blog on their list, entrycard droppers on their next drop zone, Stumblers are just as likely to hit the stumble button.
• Ugly widget – some people still don’t like it
• Poor positioning of widgets – it is an exit point, and people don’t really want to encourage others to leave their website, though to be frank in most cases other than sales pages, they are likely to do that anyway. Obviously many people are also looking for maximum monetization

My hope is that over time these things will be improved, but ultimately Coke tastes better than Pepsi.. right?

TrafficJam Is For The All List

A list like that makes me excited, because half the blogs I had never heard of or visited, and there was some great content to be found. Not all of it, titles alone can be a little misleading, and I am sure could be gamed, but often someone who can write a good title can also write good articles.

Well not quite everyone is an unknown, there is a post from the Income.com blog on the list, as well as from Alice Seba, and one from Lynn Terry @ Clicknewz – they probably have more paying customers than many A-list bloggers have subscribers

Then I noticed Kieron has had some problems with people gaining a front page Digg… with content they ripped off from him – whilst Kieron is in my feed reader, I missed this post because I haven’t been using it as much due to connection difficulties.

I also noticed a couple of posts from Linda celebrating 5 years in the affiliate management industry and an analysis of salaries for affiliate managers.

I am not going to pretend that one link from me is worth the advertising space that Blogrush takes up, but bloggers clicking through on specific content written by other people in their niche has the ability to magnify the traffic.
It doesn’t take many links and new visitors to enhance the effect of social media, and add subscribers.

Before you moan about Blogrush not bringing any traffic make sure you have carried out the following:-

• Read my previous articles on Blogrush
• Installed a plugin to create a custom RSS feed which you can use for testing

Mark was one of the first to offer a decent solution that doesn’t involve manual editing of an RSS feed, and since then a good solution was created by Pawan Agrawal of Max WordPress with his Blogrush Click Maximizer.

Pawan actually released a new version yesterday (22 feb), and even if you have no interest at all in Blogrush, you have to download this new version hosted in the WordPress plugin repository, and go through the activation process – it is a brilliant piece of coding by someone who really understands list building.
If you are doing anything to do with WordPress, whether it is plugins or themes, you have to see how he is doing this. Even better, the plugin is released under GPL, so you could easily reuse his code.

I think Pawan has a snse of humor as well. He said in the update notes that there were small changes made… that trebled the code size. Seriously this is list building artwork.

• Created a custom langing page or optimized your site to maximize conversions
• Actually clicked a few Blogrush links every day since launch – if you don’t use it, how can you expect any traffic from it
• If it turns out to be a good post, Stumble it, bookmark it – I have enhanced friendships and loyal readership by doing exactly that

TrafficJam Teething Problems?

Whilst I am overly positive that this is going to be a very useful service (if people give John and his team a little slack), there are things that should be cleaned up a little.

• Session IDs – for some reason clicking links from TrafficJam leaves ?PHPSESSID=llrg8vvclv49dko9ekp38uf2v7 or similar on the end of the links, and WordPress doesn’t clean that up automatically (and I hope they never do, unless used for other purposes) – this is something that needs fixing as it can mess up some things with social media, and looks ugly.
• Not displaying Blogrush – there are sites still listed that are not displaying Blogrush – I am sure this is because whilst they are no longer displaying Blogrush, they referred a lot of people – I am not sure how to handle this – as an example Linda isn’t displaying Blogrush on her blog, but from memory she was mainly displaying it on her forum previously. I am sure she referred tons of people, and will always have credits from referrals.
• Stats – make all traffic and credit stats crystal clear, and exactly how they came about
• Positioning – TrafficJam could be used as an incentive for good positioning of the widget. If blogs send more traffic due to good positioning, they should in some way have their feeds highlighted. Alternatively or in addition you could just have recent clicks highlighted.
• Design – I would like to see the category choices at the top or bottom, with the right side of the page reserved to highlight more content such as positioning benefits.
• Blogrush Widget – it really needs excerpts and maybe some kind of additional ratings for a post just read. A blog is gaining a benefit from a click based upon a title, but a title has to deliver on the promise +1/-1
• For Blogrush – I want to be able to promote my downline, I don’t really need more referrals, but my readers do

Unlike many, I am willing to give John a chance to make this a success – there is a need, and someone needs to fill it. This is only the second part of Income.com, I am looking forward to the third, and probably largest piece of the puzzle that John started launching over 1 year ago with a small green blob.

Do also make sure you check out Pawan’s plugin – there are actually a few flaws in the process which I am going to suggest need fixing for his next upgrade – it doesn’t seem to work with multiple lists, so I ended signing up to 2 lists of his this evening, when I have been on some for the last 2 years or more, and as it is on WordPress plugins, you don’t know who the referrer was – it would be good if there was a “where did you hear about this plugin” field.

From every single one of those communities I have possibly gained more traffic than I have given them in return, though it is very difficult to judge exactly when you start gaining traffic, and maybe that isn’t really the point. You can’t easily track RSS clicks to a site unless you destroy the SEO advantages of syndication by having nice clean links and ultimately you hope for people to discover you once, and then subscribe.
As you send people to a particular site, just like when you send people to a useful blog post, you don’t lose them as readers, and more often than not you get traffic back in return.

I posted these traffic numbers over on Tinu’s blog in a comment, but thought I would share them here as well.

• MyBlogLog – I have received 2600 visits directly from MyBlogLog since November, and that increased a fair amount once I hit the top50 communities which only happened fairly recently. I would also gain a small surge each time I was included as a hot member. I have never used their broadcast facility, and only rarely send messages to other users.
• Bumpzee – I am very active on Bumpzee running one of the largest communities (No Nofollow), and it really is only since I started investing time in building that community that I saw a major benefit other than for networking and discovery. Bumpzee has delivered … 3700 visitors in total.
  Remember that is over less time – I joined Bumpzee in January, and it was not until April that I started my community there.
• Blogcatalog is another community that I have been actively involved with for a number of months, and I even do a little consulting with them. The biggest driving force of traffic for Blogcatalog is without doubt being highly active on their forums, and I don’t have that much time for forums, but I have received a healthy 985 visitors in total, though many of those visits are from people who use Blogcatalog for bookmarking their favorite blogs. This is traffic since April, so half the time compared to MyBlogLog.

It is strange how communities develop from different directions

Blogcatalog Solving Problems – Adding Features

One of the biggest requests Blogcatalog received was that people were looking for more categories on the main discussion forums, or for a place where they could have a more focused discussion regarding a specific niche topic. Blogcatalog are now beta testing group discussions.

Currently you can only start a group if you are a contributor, but soon that restriction will be lifted. Any member of Blogcatalog can however participate in groups.

Bumpzee No Nofollow Community & Lack Of Bumps

A recent discussion on Bumpzee highlighted a problem, but I am not yet sure of the answer.
The NoNofollow community is fairly cohesive but people are not necessarily bumping stories even if they appreciate them.
It only sometimes takes 2 or 3 bumps to appear on the widgets, so just you and the author is enough, yet people don’t bump, but they might stumble or sphinn instead.

Note: in the following example I selected to randomly choose niches just to aid understanding, not to single anyone out because

The problem is that whilst the community is strong as a horizontal market with many shared beliefs and goals in building a community, only a fraction of the members are going to be interested in a vertical niche such as parenting or fiction writing.

The community on Bumpzee really needs to grow larger to gain sufficient members in a niche, followed or nofollowed blogs, for the niche sites to stand out.

Bumpzee grew from the original Affiliate Marketing community and there is plenty of overlap with the Dofollow cummunity. This frequently results in affiliate marketing articles appearing on parenting blogs which have joined bumpzee for the dofollow community.

The solution is to grow the number of parenting blogs in the dofollow community, or to grow the number of members in a dedicated community for parenting blogs.

Who is responsible to grow the number of parenting blogs to improve relevance?

In my mind it is a shared responsibility, Bumpzee need to maintain a stable and inviting platform, and parenting blogs need to promote Bumpzee to their topical neighbours.

MyBlogLog Decline In Usage?

It seems like eons ago, but around December/January when this blog had less than 100 subscribers, a full 7% of my traffic was coming from MyBlogLog, and the community was very active. I established many new relationships during that time with other bloggers who remain some of my hardcore readers, and who I can frequently count on for the occasional link, Stumble, Digg or Sphinn.
Some bloggers still use MyBlogLog for browsing occasionally, in fact many do and I even take the occasional stroll, and it may be that you grow beyond the biggest benefit or have problems with the way they make changes.
Once you have found your place within the blogging community and have an established readership, and a bulging feed reader, you end up going increasingly directly to the source.
You still see the same familiar faces on the widgets, but you know who they are, and quite often they are visiting because you have just visited them, and left a comment, but they might not visit you through the MyBlogLog interface.

This blog isn’t extremely high traffic – whilst feed subscriptions grow, that doesn’t necessarily increase page views a huge amount. I don’t have any front page Diggs to totally destroy any stats I might have. I can still remember the people who sent 10 or 20 visitors to me, and gave me a few new subscribers.

With total page views (counted in Google Analytics not the totally unreliable AWStats that reports 6x as many) of 192,000 over the last 10 months, and discounting a lot of clicks I have made from Mybloglog to some of my articles from the stats (I can’t use IP blocking), MyBlogLog accounts for slightly more than 1% of my direct traffic.

However I have only had 897 MyBlogLog clicks leaving the site, some of which are mine as well, so it might be that only 1/3 of the traffic is what I would regard as “browsing” traffic, people actively using the MyBlogLog widget for discovery, which takes new traffic down to 0.3%

The more you get involved with the communities the more you get in return, but that takes time, just like many forum communities.

If you are the only knitting blog using Blogrush, you will get poor traffic, but you will probably get some. There needs to be enough blogs in a category to achieve adequate distribution.

There might be a slight decline among people who have moved on to other blog networking communities for one reason or another, but overall MyBlogLog is still growing. What has declined is my own activity, and the amount that active involvement affects my total traffic.

Parallels With Blogrush?

I have sent far more traffic to Blogrush currently than they have sent to me? I am not worried about that in the slightest, it is very early days.

If you are the only one with a parenting blog using Blogrush, you are going to get very little targeted traffic.

You have a few choices:-

• Rip it off your blog and declare it as a load of junk
• Not put it on your blog and just sit back and do nothing
• Place it on your blog and suffer in silence
• Place it on your blog, give constructive feedback, and try to build your topical community.

One of the good things with Blogrush is that there is a relatively low time commitment in using it. You can just place it on your blog and do nothing, you might get a few visitors.

Can you imagine Stumbleupon if no one hit the “Stumble” button?

Can you imagine the “qualified traffic” you would receive if you were the only web design site currently listed?

Whilst you might not think of Blogrush as “community building” because there are no faces, and you click directly through to the article on the site, if there isn’t currently a topical community for your niche blog, you are not going to receive as much targeted traffic.

Are You The Hub Or The Spoke?

Discovery is a pretty powerful thing when you use it to leverage other networks. Being the first to discover a blog that happens to be created by one of your readers, and then stumbling it can bring about some strange reactions.

The story is up on Sphinn and on Andrews local search blog. I didn’t realise it at the time but Andrew is actually one of those less vocal regular readers of my blog, and even signed up to Blogrush under me.

• Do you think I am likely to stumble his content a little more?
• Do you think Andrew will remember to stumble my posts occasionally?
• Will we find an occasional way to link to each other when topics cross over?

Now I am sure I might have come across Andrew’s blog sometime in the future, if someone else had come across it, or maybe he had submitted an article to Sphinn or gone on a linking spree, but Blogrush in this particular case provided a bridge that might otherwise not have existed.

The Value of Blogging Communities

This is just a clinical look for those sterile types that are just crunching numbers rather than looking at relationships.

• Conversational Bloggers are linkerati
• Conversational Bloggers are often sophisticated users likely (but not always, bribery helps lots) to subscribe without paying them with free gifts
• Bloggers typically leave useful content in comments, and might return to carry on the conversation

To the sterile number crunchers I would point out that whilst those seemingly horrible figures such as 1% of traffic from MyBlogLog might seem meaningless, I would estimate that I have gained 70% of my subscribers from my involvement in these communities, either directly or through the relationships I have built.

Might I have gained that traffic regardless? It is possible, if you are really a believer in destiny. I am more a believer in hard work.

I do know I could set up a squeeze page and pay for traffic, and have 2000 email subscribers for less than $1000, but they wouldn’t be the same.

It is much easier to launch a new blog or a whole business if you already have the attention of a reasonably sized audience.

Update

Adding a Grazr widget to aid in the discussion. With Grazr you can import and OPML file to display feeds. There are lots of other widgets that do something similar.

I am writing this article because I keep on being asked the same questions, not with the intention of beating the drum about Blogrush, or to promote my referral link. In fact you won’t even find my referral link in this article. Go and use someone else’s, or look at one of my previous articles.

I thought about adding some “notice me” links in this post (that was more just to say thanks), but that isn’t my style.

Lots of the people who have been making mistakes in their professional analysis in theory subscribe to my blog, thus I am not going to single them out.
There have been a lot of anti-hype articles, and I also still have some reservations, but that doesn’t justify articles full of criticism that don’t contain facts, or contain interpretation of facts that are so obviously full of mistakes, I am amazed they were written by the person credited.

I thought I would show you a little bit of proof that Blogrush sends traffic to small blogs.

First of all here is the traffic to my WordPress Plugins site which hasn’t really been touched for 12 months.

So that is 60 readers, and 131 page views since Blogrush launched – the site is 2 years old, PR5, so it does get a little seasonal search traffic, which is picking up this time of year.

Here are the stats from Blogrush

So when I took that screenshot earlier yesterday to show to someone, I had had 5 referrers. I should have possibly waited with my screenshot, it is actually 75 readers, 179 views and 10 clicks through from Blogrush.

That Doesn’t Mean I Had A Great CTR

That blog hasn’t only received 149 credits, it has gained lots of bonus credits, though it is impossible to tell how many.

Many people really didn’t understand this message on the stats page.

Special Note: All Members are currently receiving BONUS CREDITS that are not yet reflected in these statistics.

Your referral credits are not being used currently… there is no way to allocate them if you have multiple blogs.

Some blogs are in categories where they can’t use all the credits they have been generating.

John Reese said in an email to members yesterday (summarized) CTR problems can be solved with:-

1. Better titles, and gave some great examples
2. More categories are needed for better targeting – also of note in that point is that if you have people averaging 0.5% CTR, the widget itself is averaging 2.5% CTR – that is a conceptual difference people might not realise.
3. Fraud – expect a big clamp down and permanent bans – I hope people weren’t being evil and expecting to get away with it.

I am not going to show off a load of referrals, though I have got quite a few. I am also even more happy that my downline have got referrals and are benefiting from the free credits in the system. Not everyone has had great success, there are some inherent problems, but these things will be ironed out.

Here is an easy way to understand this.

A few people are referring to Blogrush as a pyramid scheme

However there isn’t any money changing hands, and there is another problem with their theory. What happens with all the excess inventory that isn’t spoken for by referral credits?

Until the referral matrix gets deeper than 10 levels, and referral credits are actually used, there are a lot of spare credits that need to be assigned to something, and those are the credits that created additional visitors to my plugins site.

Lots of the high traffic blogs are in the top level of the referral structure, so there will always be a large amount of these free credits. Blogrush had a very explosive start, and there are 100s if not 1000s of blogs in the top level.

A blog with 30,000 pageviews per day in the top level is generating 150,000 RSS impressions, but only gaining 30,000 for itself. Blogrush use 10% to cover their costs.

That leaves 105,000 credits per day for Blogrush to hand out for free. They are not being handed out to an upline that doesn’t exist.

I have no specific details of how the credits are being shared out, but it seems smaller blogs are receiving windfalls (in my estimate) of 1000 credits or more per day.

The Blackhat Threat

Alex Goad pinged me about some of the blackhat games that Blogrush faces. It is true, but I wouldn’t class any venture by John Reese as low hanging fruit.

Over on Problogger John Reese has stated:-

That’s 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.

Don’t doubt for a minute whether John has the resources to hire 10 or 20 people to manually review every single site if that becomes necessary, but lots of tools are fairly easy to create to make the process much more efficient.

Lots of people have asked me about what traffic I have received. It has possibly decreased over the last couple of days due to the spamming, but here is a screenshot I took yesterday.

So we don’t just trust MyBlogLog tracking, we also should compare it to another source. Google Analytics will do for this purpose.

I actually waited for a day so that the Google Analytics data could be compared.

How to see this in Google Analytics?

1. Go to Traffic Sources >> All Traffic Sources
2. Find source medium [containing] widget.blogrush.com
3. Click on what is probably just a single result listing containing the combined referrals

Now whilst there is an obvious decline, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is all caused by spammers. It might also mean that the free credits in the system are being applied differently, or that they are being spread thinner.
If they are being spread thinner, that actually makes me happy, because that means more of my referrals are gaining a little free traffic. Maybe it is just an extra 10 visitors per day, but when you have less than 100 visitors per day, that is significant if it is targeted.

The decline can also be caused by articles that are just not compelling enough for people to click on them. I am sure this article will not receive a lot of traffic, and will probably only be read by my regular readers.

I don’t write articles specifically to get high traffic from every single one. I just try to provide useful information and title it appropriately.

I have lots of referrals, and so do many of my downline, but those credits are not being used currently, because there is no interface to allocate them.

My guesstimate is that I have probably had 15,000 to 20,000 impressions so far.

• Do your own testing and tracking
• Compare it to the value of screen real estate
• Decide whether it works for you
• Give it some time, and think of your readers (sharing traffic is good for you)

Update

John Reese responded to the discussion on Alex’s Blogrush post with a couple of comments, one explaining the algorithm a little explaining why Blogrush shouldn’t be looked on as a Pyramid or Ponzi scheme (all credits in the system are earned, nothing is projected forward, upwards allocation of credit), but also made the following statement which I feel is very significant.

The only reason some impressions are “held back” and not immediately delivered are because the system continues to ‘adjust’ based on the network size itself, as well as how many members in each category — because we serve each members’ credits in the category they choose. There ‘can’ be an imbalance of inventory in certain categories, but we’re able to make up that adjustment based on the “breakage” of math that occurs because all the accounts that immediately signed up essentially joined ‘under’ BlogRush — and so the network has a large percentage of surplus; which we are currently auto-distributing to all the members equally to help them get more traffic. We have plans to eventually give most of the bonus credits to our SMALL USERS since they need the traffic the most.

Whilst many people are looking on Blogrush as being a pyramid scam and the rich are feeding off the poor, I am increasing feeling that in many ways this will become more of a Robin Hood scenario.

Whilst the big blogs will generate more credits themselves, and lots of referrals, they will not gain the same CTR as smaller unknown blogs, because people are using Blogrush for discovery.
With John highlighting that the surplus inventory is mainly going to go to smaller blogs in the future, this really is going to be robbing the rich to feed the poor, and a blog like Shoemoney or Problogger probably signed up directly.

Andy Beal being such a smart marketer probably signed Marketing Pilgrim up under his wife’s Hawaii Vacation Blog. Despite the drama, if he removes the widget, his wife’s blog will receive less credits to allocate – what a dilemma to be in ;) – note those credits can’t be allocated currently.
Andy hasn’t yet published any real stats (from 3rd party tracking), but I would love to see what traffic his wife’s blog has received in Google Analytics, and whether that traffic was more worthwhile than the traffic Marketing Pilgrim receives.
I honestly wouldn’t click on one of Andy’s ads, because I am already a subscriber, but I did just see my WordPress Plugins site advertised on his site, and that doesn’t have a compelling title.

However so many people are making critical mistakes with Blogrush, I thought it would be a good time to give them a few tips and clear up some misconceptions.

1. Don’t Scare Your Readers

   I have seen a number of negative reviews of Blogrush by people worrying about privacy, data collection, what happens to data collected etc.
   Let’s face it, your ISP sells your user data
   Advertising companies are collecting data all the time
   Whatever widget or image you place on your website, quite often some smart person is collecting data

   It is worth evaluating the ownership of a widget, for instance if they are a direct competitor, possibly they are a blog network, but as far as I know, John Reese is moving away from the massive number of niche sites model and has been for the last year.

   My evaluation of the Blogrush privacy policy? I am not a lawyer, but it seems the intent of the data collection is for internal use, plus they may issue reports or use the data to highlight hot stories currently in the network.
   Lots of widgets and social network sites for bloggers collect the same data, and use it in the same way, where is the problem?

2. Blogrush Won’t Bring Much Traffic

   How useless is social media traffic? You get 10,000 to 100,000 visitors to your site, and very few leave interesting comments or subscribe to your blog.

   Blogrush promises targeted traffic – not just category based – how good the contextual algorithms work is yet to be proven, but the hope is that the traffic will be more focused.

   If you can convert 100,000 untargeted visitors into 1000 targeted, that is actually quite valuable and worthy of consideration.
   If you gain a few referrals, things get really interesting – I now have an incentive to Stumble and Digg the people who signed up under me, because that will give me traffic even if they didn’t link to me directly.
   This introduces a totally new level of cooperative traffic arbitrage.

3. Not Including Blogrush On Every Page

   Are you scared of leaking readers? Maybe your blog isn’t set up to retain interest and encourage people to read more content.
   Blogrush gives you circulation credits for each time the widget is displayed.

4. Prominent Positioning

   There are huge long-term benefits in referring people to Blogrush and having the widget prominently displayed on your blog will help referrals.
   If you don’t use it yourself, how can you recommend it?

   Don’t be worried about sharing a little traffic

5. Ultimate Incentive

   John Reese is counting on these widgets to remain on blogs, so he is going to do everything he can to ensure that the smaller bloggers get some traffic from it.
   There is a whole load of excess inventory “above the pyramid/matrix” that needs to be disposed of – 10% is sectioned off for Blogrush to sell. It is my hope that this inventory is distrubuted “flat rate” or at least “flatter rate” to all publishers, not pro rata their existing credits in the system. This could prove to be the great leveller.
   Based upon 1% CTR on Blogrush currently (it is really hard to pin down), $1 CPM for the advertising adds up to an awful lot of money, though I would hope it will be as low as $0.20 because CTR will drop.

   The critical mistake – people are thinking that for some reason only the big bloggers are going to benefit

6. Titles Maketh Traffic

   Short, possibly controversial titles are going to perform better than titles that aren’t topical within your niche but you certainly need to test and track

7. Traffic Analysis

   Use your normal tracking software and see where the traffic is coming from, and how it is interacting with your site.

   Blogrush is already referring more traffic to me than MyBlogLog, Bumpzee or Blogcatalog, and I have a fairly broad network in each of those communities.

   You might think that my best performing story on Blogrush was my slightly controversial story on John Chow Reviews, but my analytics prove otherwise, with more people landing on my Gmail story from Blogrush.

   Content is being very widely distributed on Blogrush already, in fact half of the sites that have sent me traffic I have never even heard of.

   Blogrush allows you to reach new sites you may never of heard of, and have never heard of you, that are highly relevant to your topics, it has nothing to do with who referred you

   Whilst you might think that the “blogging A list” are going to benefit the most, lets face it, a high percentage of people interested in content on Problogger within the blogging niche already read it. The big bloggers might get more credits, but they will likely have a much lower CTR.

   The biggest benefit for the more prominent bloggers will be if/when they will be able to use credits towards other sites they wish to promote, such as in Darren’s case using credits to promote his photography blog or other B5 properties.

Click On It

If you see something interesting from an unknown blog shown on your site, click on it. Not only might you find the story interesting, but if the blogger also uses some tracking, they will see where the click came from, and possibly come and pay you a visit.
Many widgets clicks don’t really mean very much, because they can’t be seen as coming from your related site. Hopefully the stats Blogrush create will also help to highlight this, as not every blogger uses tracking effectively.

Blogrush is not just an advertising tool, it is a discovery tool

Bonus Tip – don’t add Blogrush to a blog that doesn’t have any content – lots of people are adding it to new blogs that just have the first “Hello World” default post. They end up on my permanent block list.

p.s. I have been going around stumbling the people who wrote about Blogrush and who mentioned they signed up with me and linked through to my initial review. Even if you haven’t linked through (with a trackback/pingback), let me know – I will be setting up some ways to help promote your widgets and content in various ways in the future and I would like to help you gain more referrals.

Blog bling, blog community and blog traffic widgets are becoming quite a conjested marketplace, so what makes Blogrush, the newest contender something to take note of?

John Reese

I have a lot of respect for John Reese. People talk about The Digg effect, John Reese can send Digg like traffic to a site just by sending an email, and what is more important is that he sends qualified traffic, buying traffic.

Funding

I am fairly sure Blogrush won’t have any need for immediate funding. They have launched on a cluster of 8 servers for scalability, there is no intention of starting this off small.
John has a team of programmers working for him, and established support personnel. Blogrush is apparently just one small piece in the puzzle which is Income.com, which he has been building up to for over a year.

Viral Concept

Blogrush is designed to encourage people to promote it with a 10 tier referral program. It hasn’t been specified how the breakdown works on each tier, but the benefit of viral referrals will be substantial for early adopters.

That will be one of the keys as with any program of this type. To get maximum benefit from Blogrush, you are going to have to sign up early and promote it… hence why this is going to explode.

The Blogrush Widget

The Blogrush widget looks par for the course, as they have lots of competitors. It is lacking a lot of the technology of similar widgets. Many widgets for instance have built in browsers for RSS feeds or to stumble through content that is being displayed.

What John claims is that Blogrush has advanced technology to match what is displayed on the widget with your blog content… that it is in some way contextual rather than just category based.

This hopefully will make a significant difference with click-through rate, though as far as I know traffic ratios are based upon impressions rather than clicks.

Hopefully we will see improvements in the future.

Free Traffic Potential?

If you look on your screen real estate as a way to generate more traffic by various means, Blogrush is going to be of interest. I believe it has more potential than many similar widgets, simply because it will gain so much attention over this launch period.

Get people signed up early to benefit from the viral effect.

If you have a lot of traffic already, then that will be leveraged into more traffic on the network.

If your screen real-estate carries high value advertising, you might have to think differently, either about including the widget at all, or positioning both now, and when it is more mature (harder to get new users)

I wouldn’t expect to get a 1% CTR from other sites displaying your content, it is going to be far less based upon what I have seen from competing widgets of this type.

There isn’t a community feature which might encourage repeat visits when someone bookmarks your content, thus you have to value the widget based upon its one click traffic potential.

You are going to have to test and track to see if the amount of traffic you receive is enough to justify the space the widget takes up. Initially you will benefit from viral referrals, but long-term you might be better using the space to generate revenue, and then investing that revenue in other traffic.

Lets Get Viral

Despite my long-term reservations, as it has just launched just hours ago, now is the opportune moment to sign up and promote it. It will grow exponentially for a few weeks.

Test and track, if you are gaining possibly 10 new visitors for every 1000 times the widget is displayed, that might be looked on as a reasonable return on screen real estate unless you have very effective monetization, or cheap methods to generate traffic.

Think about traffic arbitrage – I believe there is going to be a way to specify which sites benefit from your traffic credits. Get cheap traffic on one site, use the traffic credits to promote a better monetized site. You might be able to turn Digg and Stumbleupon traffic into higher quality traffic from another site – well, unless it turns out traffic credits are based upon clicks, but even then some headlines are going to generate more clicks than others ;)

Bugs

There were a few problems in the first hour of launch, but they are working around them quickly. Email delivery for registration was the biggest problem.
I had a problem registering with a .eu TLD (top level domain) so I had to use another URL which redirects here with a 301 redirect. That resulted in me not winning a free copy of Traffic Secrets 2 on launch – I would have won it.. honest.

John is promising some more launch competitions over the next few days, and I am sure they will be well worth entering.

My suggestion is to sign up, add the widget to your blog, and give it a little promotion. test and track and see if it works for you. That is what I am going to be doing.

Update – Full List of Categories

To avoid confusion, this is not just a widget particular to one niche such as blogging or internet marketing, it is hopefully suitable for all niches giving relevant content, and delivering your content to relevant blogs – I suppose if you have the only blog in existence on a particular subject, it is only going to be traffic based upon the categories.

Anyway, here are the available catagories

• Automotive
• Business Career & Jobs
• Celebrity
• Computers & Internet
• Education
• Entertainment
• Environment
• Finance & Investing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Medicine
• History
• Hobbies
• Home & Garden
• Humor
• Law & Legal
• Lifestyle
• Marketing
• Music
• News & Media
• Parenting & Family
• Personal
• Diary
• Pets
• Philosophy
• Photography
• Politics
• Real
• Estate
• Religion & Spirituality
• Sports
• Technology
• Travel
• Writing & Literature
• Video Games

Update 2 – Power Tip – Filtering

If people are reading a review you have just written about a product, you might not want them to click through to read someone else’s review, no matter which niche you are in.

Now in the case of this review, I want people to click through to read the site and sign up, not click to someone else’s site writing about Blogrush.

Blogrush provides a useful filtering mechanism based on either keywords or URLs, or both if you are that way inclined.

Yes, I am blocking the keyword Blogrush at least for now – it seem to be case insensitive.

This might seem a litle mean, but if you are writing good content, and then someone clicks away to a very poor review, but then buys a product using their affiliate link, that isn’t rewarding you for creating good content.

I would advise blocking keywords if they present a leak, though if you are running a golf blog, you might not want to block a keyword as broad as “golf” as then the widget wouldn’t offer any useful content for your readers.

Disclosure: I do some minor consulting with one of the blog community widget sites, Blogcatalog, for which I might receive some monetary compensation if they ever manage to flip the site. I try hard not to let that involvement affect my judgement of other similar sites