How To Control BlogRush Headlines
written by John Chow
One of the ways to improve your BlogRush click through rate is by using really eye catching titles in your blog posts. However, sometimes that is just not possible, especially if you’re going off topic. I put my blog in the business category and I doubt many people click on a headline that reads, “The Dot Com Lunch at Feenies.”
Another problem is BlogRush doesn’t show off my best work. It only displays the headline in your most current post. While that may be OK with many bloggers, I would prefer to send the visitors to some of my most popular articles. Fortunately, there is a way to do that.
BlogRush doesn’t auto detect a blog’s RSS feed. Instead you have to enter the feed URL yourself. What you would do in this case is create a new feed just for BlogRush and use that to control the headline and link to your best article. Here’s an example of a feed I made.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>John Chow dot Com</title>
<link>http://www.johnchow.com</link>
<description>The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul</description>
<language>en-us</language><item>
<category>BlogRush</category>
<title>August Blog Income: $17,828.61!</title> <link>http://www.johnchow.com/john-chow-dot-com-income-report</link>
<description>
This description is not used by BlogRush.
</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Edit the above to your own settings and save it as blogrush.rss. Upload that file to your site and then add the new feed to your BlogRush account.
Now when someone sees my link in the BlogRush widget, it will say August Blog Income: $17,828.61! and link to my August blog income report. I can edit the RSS file to promote whatever story I want. BlogRush won’t allow you to change the feed URL once you submit a blog so you’ll have to submit your blog again. Headlines impressions will be divided between the old feed and new feed.
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Great post. I’ve seen some decent results for BlogRush in the first 2 days. Linking to your best articles will only help. Thanks!
Agreed - FANTASTIC post! Is it possible to add multiple feeds/items to blog rush?
Ooops! Pardon my ignorance - two comments down I have my answer.
Hehe…
Excellent Idea!
I’ve just posted on my blog how to get 4.5 times more traffic from BlogRush. I’ve checked it’s within their terms before posting - worth a read!
http://blogsformoney.com/post/Clever-Trick-Getting-45-Times-More-Traffic-From-BlogRush.aspx
Hey John, do you have an update on this? Will this be construed and ruled out as “cheating” by the BlogRush people? Is this totally legit? I’m just scared because in John Reese’s latest post, he made it clear that all blogs will be manually reviewed from now on. Thanks.
Great, i’ll try that. One of my post on selling used golf balls has been stumbled more than 1000 times in the last two days and i’d like to keep that going.
Definitively going to give it a try. Hah nice find John
While that’s an interesting idea, it would be a pain to keep updating that file to promote your popular articles.
You can add multiple RSS feeds into BlogRush, with each feed linking to one popular article. The system will evenly spread out the impressions among all the feeds.
Sounds like a lot of work, but definitely worth it in the long run.
But i guess its worth the pain. I’ll give it a try
Sigh.
I should have read this article before signing up. Now I had to split the feed into two, with the first having all the crappy articles. Oh well. How did I not think of this first! Thanks, John! 
It would be a pain to keep updating, but fortunately with some screen scraping you can create a custom feed of your favorite or most popular stories and just submit that feed.
I am gonna fix John one and see if he’ll use it.
http://www.dapper.net/services/jcpopular
John,
.
This is an rss feed of of your “popular articles” section in the header. I tried to do an rss feed of Make Money Online Category, but it wouldn’t work in dapper. I could do it with a little php script that I have though. Hope it helps
Chris Finke has a script that turns everything that you drop into a directory into an rss feed. I would imagine you could create a php redirect page like you use for affiliate programs and just drop those into the directory.
Great tips, I’m going to try it
Now that’s the John Chow we all know and love! Great work.
My sentiments exactly
Eh, doesn’t seem worth it for us that don’t have many referrals, and therefore minimal amount of credits.
Good thought, though.
Good thinking… curious to see if this nets you more clicks or not.
OMG, I have seen an incredible increase just with the standard install of BR. I can only imagine what this new evil strategy will bring.
That’s a tricky way to get what you want. I don’t know how happy I am so far with the BlogRush widget. So far it seems to be down half the time. I’m sure they will work out those kinks.
This is actually a pretty decent and useful tip. Thanks.
I don’t think anyone writes every post with a Digg headline. I was wondering how to get around that issue.
I have submitted in health category.This one of your trick has lighted the bulb in my head.BlogRush made me think,”oh,now I have to keep
google and blogrush both in mind while constructing a headline”.Keeping both in mind would help in getting clicks from both.Anyway,thanks for the trick.
Very good info, is it possible to have several feeds, so I can specify each article I want to spread with BlogRush, but to have all those one article feeds in one big feed and submit it to blogrush ?
how can I do this ? any ideias ?
Nice tip! I think I will give this one a try.
hmm……this is interesting…..I may have to try it, and to think I was gon to remove the BlogRush widget from my blog
I was too, especially because sometimes it comes up black and reads, “we are having dificulty etc.” and there is a white blank space in its place. That’s not cool. The same thing was happening with AuctionAds and I removed them because of it.
90% of the headlines BlogRush serves are worthless crap. While your tip is excellent, it will mostly be used by people who want to make sure that their spammiest make money blah blah blah garbage is what gets syndicated. That will turn the BlogRush headlines into even more of a garbage pile than it already is.
BlogRush had great promise, but it fails in two crucial ways: 1) the crappy headlines mean your readers get NO value from it and 2) Most people will not get traffic.
Don’t be lazy.
I think its early to be jumping on BlogRush for the quality of their product or the tag lines of the posts. I like to think of this period as the beta with the early adopters working out the bugs. These early adopters will build the biggest downlines though so kudos to them for jumping on board early. The system does have some tremendous flaws now, but i’m sure they’ll be patched up .
On the other hand
, I’d never use the product as its too cumbersome and large without putting any money directly in my pocket. If they agreed to pay me a few hundred $$ /month to place that on our site i’d probably think about, but not for free!
Screen real estate is valuable, and its important to think about ROI before you jump on the bandwagon and throw up widgets everywhere
P.S. Not sure how i feel about having links inserted into my comments. BlogRush BlogRush BlogRush BlogRush BlogRush BlogRush
I hope they will let us change the way the widget looks like e.g colour, font etc to better match the themes .
Maybe its the people writing the posts that are the problem. Blog Rush is only showing you what is out there. If the majority of it is unoriginal worthless crap, its not bog rush’s fault.
I hope that’s not the code you used…because that link returns a 404. You left a couple words off of the URL.
Of course that is not the code I used. I shorten it to make it fit the example. The BlogRush.rss file has the correct URL.
good tip, but this is something BlogRush must provide… like “Edit your feed titles”.. is not that hard… I say is again, they rushed.
Good tip, if I go with BlogRush I will give it a try. The click through rates sound really low so far. And none of the blogs I visit have given it even moderately good locations.
Very smart John. Nice one!
No wonder you are making over 17k a month
No he will make even more…
vexa is gonna try BlogRush for a short time.
i just wonder how long it will take before all blogrush headlines look like the contents caught in the akismet filter.
hahaha,
not long. already getting forex titles, how long before we get all the pharmaceuticals?
Great tip, I’m hoping that BlogRush will live up to the hype. So far I haven’t gotten a click yet, I’m hoping that will change soon. I tried putting it up as high as I could, but we will see how it works out.
So basically all the link that will show up in the BlogRush widgets all over the place will all be the same. Everybody putting their best post in. If we’ve read that post, we won’t click on the link again. We don’t think this is a good idea.
That’s why you mix it around. Change the post once a week or every 3-4 days.
Ha, that is a pretty nifty trick
good idea
Way to go John, that’s a really great tip
Wow, that’s a clever trick. I don’t know how well it will work out when all bloggers start adapting it. You’ll be competing with other popular post titles.
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Nice … I’ll have to try that!
Darin
i did it, u r genius lol
have allok at my blog
http://egy-tourism.blogspot.com/
Very smart idea. Question… how often would you change your Blog Rush RSS feed? Thanks !
A few days ago super internet marketer John Reese launched the Blog Rush Widget to great fanfare. Over 15,000 bloggers added the RSS syndication tool to their sites on the first day alone! Now critics are bashing John Reese and attacking him personally, calling Blog Rush a scam. They have been very hurtful and malicious in their attacks.
People are coming to his defense…people like this angry young man. I found this on You Tube and posted it on my blog at