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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{ 81 comments }
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.
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
Great suggestion, John… I’ve added my blog again with the new feed pointing to my Win My Motorola Q Smartphone contest, so hopefully that helps with my click-throughs.
This was my biggest gripe with BlogRush. This is an amazing idea. Not to be repetitive, but thank you, John!
Hey, where do we upload the rss file? is it in your ftp or for blogrush?
What folder is it in?
It looks like the major bloggers will get this way all traffic from BlogRush because they have eye catching titles like this.
Feed URL can’t be update. So thats means I need to add a new blog for the new feed. Why isn’t there a delete button? Whats the stats John for this trick?
don’t you need to put in the publish date so your post goes ahead of other blogs
Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00+0000
or is this just first in first out.
Here’s why BlogRush is doomed to being a spammy failure: A Blackhat’s Diary: exploiting blogrush, big time.
I’m pulling it off my sites because the results are becoming increasingly spam filled.
I ams thinking the same thing now that I am seeing the stats of all the users.
I haven’t seen world-changing results on my blog with BlogRush. Controlling the headlines would sure get more results.
Anyway, I removed it from my blog because of adsense issues.
Did Google actually contact you?
It was more like he read about BlogRush may conflict with the Google TOS and panicked.
I’ve got a different approach that has helped me handle this within Wordpress itself. The way it works is I’ve use a Custom Field in Wordpress to provide the alternate titles for posts I want to include.
Additionally, there is one Custom RSS file that needs to be dropped into the Wordpress root. I’ve got the download and instructions here for anyone that is interested in checking it out:
http://www.smoblog.com/custom-rss-blogrush/
John,
You want to read this guy’s post from above. He’s got your answer. I like the fact that you can pick which posts to add to the custom feed. You can even go back and edit old posts so they are added to the feed. Very nice tip!
mblair that’s a excellent resource man. Good work
Very good work on that one.
If you’ve tried BlogRush for a few days and were thinking of taking it off… then how can you say it didn’t work when you only have a few days of statistical data to calculate the worthiness of it?
I don’t think you really know until 3-4 weeks in whether or not a feature like that is worth having.
Very good tip, now to decide which one of my posts will get the best ctr
“August Blog Income: $17,828.61!” … If that doesn’t attract clicks, nothing will
John, Thanks for the great info and blogrush coding. I will try that
–blog for dream–
Great tip JC really impressive
This tip is really worth!
Wow, I love it! ::gets::
nice tip, I just wrote up an easier way to do this with wordpress. thanks for the inspiration
Thanks for this trick John
Has anyone found a way to do this with Blogger?
I’ve used this trick to show “YOUR BLOG HERE” and linked to my BlogRush referral url. I wonder if it’ll work (I hope they link to the post, and not your blog url with the text!)
it wont work for bloggers. this is not something that will get you tons of traffic. why? read here …… http://www.successonline.in/the-rise-and-fall-of-BlogRush
Of late i’ve been seeing a lot of blogs promoting the new Borush offering. For those who are unaware, Blogrush is basically like a Banner or Link Exchange system. Bloggers sign up at Blogrush to get an embedded widget code that they can place in their blog sidebars. Everytime your page loads, the widget displays a set of 5 blog post heading links, from other blogs that are part of the BlogRush network (just like you) and are in the same category as you. These links are displayed inside the nice looking widget. An example is shown below.
For every one display of the widget (which ultimately results in 5 links being displayed) you get one exposure of your blog post on the network – on other blogger member website widgets. This sounds fair, but if you look deep into things you will realize theirs a defect. I will come to that later. But irst another important trick thats going to work like viral marketing on steroids for BlogRush…
For every blogger you refer – when they sign up by clicking on the BlogRush logo at the bottom of the widget, you benefit. For every direct referral you also will get one free link exposure everytime your referral displays the widget. If this referral refers another member – you get the same benefit again… gaining one more exposure for a two level deep referral. And so on … 10 levels deep.
This trick is absolutely fantastic, because it will cause bloggers to start promoting this new exchange service to fellow bloggers immediately in hope of getting referral bloggers before others snap them. Bloggers can see the potential of the 10 level deep credit system. It can really balloon to a large amount of free link exposure. Which *could* result in traffic.
This is where I tend to differ. Blogrush is claiming that – bloggers should sign up right away to get a huge rush and volume of traffic to their sites in a short span of time. There is however 2 issues here.
The first one is that – if this is a 1:1 exchange network, and BlogRush is displaying only 5 ads inside the widget – then they are creating an excess of 4 ads per display – which they can then distribute to the referring members. So, the excess credit of 4 ads can help them – BUT only 4 levels deep. As the system grows and referral lelvels start to get deep and aproach 10 levels of depth – how will BlogRush maintain the 1:1 ratio? The answer is – that well, now all members will have referrals of 10 levels deep. So there will always be member whose widgets display 5 expousres, and get one credit exposure in return and therefore create an excess of 4 credits for the system. This will help BlogRush.
And if it doesnt, and the excess exposures being created are geting close to zero – they can always simply increase the widget size or make it scrolling and display 10 links!! This will immediately create a larger excess for BlogRush on every widet exposure. Super!
Super for BlogRush, but bad for members.
I can already see a very very very low CTR on this network. Although the links displayed are in your category and may match your sites content – the CTR is going to be extremely low. A standard ad on yor blog post probably has a CTR of half to one-and-half percentage. This widget firstly may not be placed by bloggers on the top of their sidebar / page – and will probably be tucked away at the side bottom – is my guess. My guess is that the CTR for this widget will probably be around 0.1% ( or one-tenth of one percent. ). Now, if your blog post title appears with 5 others – your CTR will be further reduced by a factor of 5 or 20% of 0.1% which is 0.02% which is 2 clicks out of 10,000 page views or 1 click every 5000 page views!! Now, what kind of rush of traffic is that?
And, if BlogRush decides to increase the number of Blog Links inside their widget tomorrow (to compensate for excess credits being given to members for referrals) – then you can be assured that the paltry traffic and CTR will get even worse.
Nice try BlogRush. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. This is just a passing fad.
Read My tutorial also
http://www.miraztutorials.com/blog-rush-tutorial-get-more-traffic-now/
i spent alot of time putting this together hope you like it
Cool hack.
I might try it out myself. Good point about that you probably want to regularly have new headlines rotate – because people aren’t going to click headlines they’ve read before.
thanks…this is great trick
Wow… This is really a big boon for me to increase the traffic from Blogrush. Thanks for the post!
John are you getting many credits?
I still see 0 credits. To me it appears the system is screwed up. It is supposed to give me summary stats, but it shows 0 credits. That can’t be right. My blog isn’t that bad.