Like many bloggers, I am a member of BlogRush, a free blog syndication service. I have the widget on this blog and a couple of other blogs.
What is BlogRush?
It’s a free service you sign up for at blogrush.com and then you submit the blogs you would like syndicated in the widget you and other bloggers must place on your blogs. It is labeled “Blogosphere”. The blogosphere is the blogging world.
To submit your blog, first you go to their site, get a free account, enter your blog’s URL, RSS feed and pick a category to match its content as closely as you can. Then you must place a widget on your blog and wait for approval.
Once approved, the widget goes live and you host about 5 post titles of other bloggers in your widget, and your titles are syndicated throughout the network through other people’s widgets on their blogs.
If your blog isn’t approved, you’re asked to remove the widget from your blog.
The approval process is supposed to insure that only “quality” blogs are available, and that they are in English. I’ve read some of what the BlogRush people consider quality, and it’s not what I would consider quality. Some blogs are of extremely good quality as well. I just don’t see consistency about what BlogRush claims to be a quality blog.
I also have little idea why some of my blogs were approved and some were not. No reasons are given when a blog is approved. Some of the reasons given in the rejection emails are not enough recent posts or too much advertising, which I can clearly understand. But some of the other reasons were very fuzzy.
When you go to the BlogRush site to find out what their quality criteria are, they don’t really give you a clear idea on what they will judge your blog. You just have to submit it and wait to see if it’s approved.
How is BlogRush Working for Me?
I’m going to be blunt. Not very well at all. My titles are syndicated a few hundred to a few thousand times per day or week, and I get extremely few click-throughs.
One thing that could cause this is my post titles could be too boring to attract readers, and that’s entirely possible. I’m not the best marketer in the world and I’m sure all my blog post titles could use sprucing up, but they’re not that bad.
Another thing that could be causing this is people don’t go to other blogs very often through the BlogRush widget, meaning it’s a crummy way of syndicating your blog.
What is My Conclusion?
I’m going with the second reason, BlogRush is not such a good syndication method. Here’s why I think that.
- I have several subscribers to all of my blogs through RSS readers and email, including the one I have for sale and have not posted to for months.
- I get several hundred to a few thousand visitors per month to each of my blogs through direct traffic, other social networking sites and search engines.
If BlogRush were such a good syndication method, I should also be getting a proportionally similar number of visitors from other bloggers’ widgets. But I’m not, and it’s not even in the same ball park.
I also have no idea if other bloggers are experiencing the same thing. I’m sure the big name blogs are getting plenty of visitors through the widget through name recognition of their blogs. But I seriously wonder about the rest of us.
Why other Social Networking Sites are Better
Other social networking sites seem to be much better at separating the wheat from the chaff in the blogosphere. Posts are submitted by readers and authors and voted on by readers when they give a specific post a digg or thumbs up (or down) or a vote of some kind on a social networking site.
A vote from the readers is much more important to me than an approval stamp by one website. It also seems to be much more important to the search engines.
I am evaluating whether to keep my BlogRush account over the next few months. The widget takes up critical sidebar virtual real estate I could be using more productively. So if you see the BlogRush widgets disappear, you’ll know what I decided.
What is your experience with BlogRush? Please leave comments and let us all know how or whether it’s working for you.
Sherri
On BlogRush
