Last Saturday I mentioned that I signed up for BlogRush, and that I’d be reporting back with the results today. Well the stats (Dashboard) section of BlogRush kicked in this week, so now I know how many folks I’ve referred, how many “credits” I’ve earned, and how many visits BlogRush has sent my way. Like others, the results aren’t great.
The first 7 days in a nutshell:
So as you can see, the stats aren’t great. To give them some credit, BlogRush has admitted that the CTR is low for most folks, due in part to some people “cheating” the system by falsely increasing their credit numbers. To combat this, they’re moving to a manual review system before accepting new blogs into their network. They also suggest that bloggers learn to create “more effective blog post titles”, which means using 7 word headlines, no more than 40 characters including spaces. This is a bit of a loaded suggestion, because 7 word/40 character titles/headlines might work well for BlogRush, but that doesn’t always make them ideal.
They’ve also announced that “Flavors” will be implemented at some point in the coming week. As the name suggests (kind of), Flavors are really just different coloured versions of the widget, allowing it to blend in with your blog theme.
I’ve decided to give it another week or two before I ditch it, so I’ll be sure to do at least one more post on the subject. If I do decide to stop using BlogRush, I’m going to see if I can transfer my unused credits to someone else (perhaps you?) or move the account to your name (currently the email address for each account is hard-coded, so it might take some sweet-talking to the BlogRush folks to get it done).
The truth hurts sometimes but it’s good to hear. Thanks for the info.
I’ve had roughly the same luck as you with the gadget…
I spent a little time computing potential numbers even with an optimized gadget that had better click rates…
Judging from how much people click on adsense I’d think a 1% clickthrough is the max you’ll get on a sidebar gadget.
Just think about it.. even at a 1% clickthrough rate you’d only have .. 9 visits per day through the widget? And that’s with your level of traffic, which is surely much higher than the average blog.
Pathetic.