The long awaited Blog Rush update is here.
In the past couple of weeks, Blog Rush went through every blog that had joined and approved (or disapproved) each manually. A large number of blogs were removed from the network for various reasons. The goal was to get rid of spam blogs, but a number of legitimate blogs that looked a bit like spam to the reviewer were also removed. The make money online niche was subject to especially high standards.
The latest update provides some very nice statistics. You can see the number of times that each of your posts has been shown on the Blog Rush widget, and the number of times that someone clicked through to each post.
There’s also a metric called “Buzz”, that tells you how hot a topic is. Buzz is a combination of many factors, including click through rate, time on the site, etc, all compared to similar stats for other blogs in your niche.
You can also prevent your posts from being syndicated. Unfortunately, you can only do this by putting in a partial title. It’d be nice to be able to put in a category (for example, I might exempt my Site News category). Or, if there are posts you don’t want to show in your widget, then you can prevent them by entering keywords. So if you run a camera review blog, you can put in keywords to prevent other camera review posts from appearing in your BlogRush widget. Or you can block posts from specific blogs, such as competing blogs.
The most awaited update isn’t going to be live until November 2nd, though. That’s more specific categories for blogs, so that you can more closely target where your posts are shown. This will improve the click through rate by showing your posts on closely related blogs.
While there’s been a lot of controversy over Blog Rush, particularly over their referral scheme which earns you credits 10 levels deep, I’ve been happy with the results. I’ve always gotten a nice trickle of traffic from Blog Rush, averaging 3 or 4 a day. That figure has been rising in recent days.
If you’re not a member already, and want to check it out, click here for BlogRush.