I’ve added the Blog Rush widget to the far right sidebar.
Blog Rush is, basically, a traffic exchange for blogs. We’d talked in the comments on a previous post about there being a market for something like this. You show the Blog Rush widget somewhere on your blog. Every time it shows, you get credits toward your posts appearing in the widget on someone else’s blog.
When you join Blog Rush, you specify a category for your blog. There are thirty some categories to choose from, and that category controls the blog posts that appear in your widget. So you’re earning credits from and showing your posts in blog that have similar topics. That’s a nice feature, since it means your gardening blog posts won’t be showing up on an automotive blog.
Unfortunately, there’s no “make money online” category. I tried Computers & Internet, Marketing, Career & Jobs, and Business. Business seemed to get the least irrelevant posts, so that’s what I ended up choosing. You can change your blog’s category in Blog Rush and then refresh your blog to see headlines in the new category.
Picking the right category is important. That way you’re more likely to attract interest from the people seeing your headlines, since they’re already reading a blog on a similar topic.
Blog Rush has just launched this weekend, so it’s a good time to get involved to start building up credits. There’s also a referral program of some sort, although the site is low on documentation right now. The rumor is that it’s a ten level referral tree, so you’ll earn credits from ten levels below you. Quite a lot of bloggers will be involved in this, so getting the widget on your blog early increases your chances of getting referrals to it through the widget.
What I like most about this is the set and forget nature of it. You don’t need to surf a traffic exchange, instead your normal blog visitors generate credits for you. You run the risk of losing some traffic to the widget, but that’s offset by the increased exposure you have on other people’s sites.
They do need to expand the category list a bit, to allow more highly targeted traffic, but that will no doubt come in time.
Hi Jay
Good stuff, I’ve clicked your link and joined your network.
Thanks! Hopefully we’ll all see some extra traffic through this.