One of the biggest concerns to serious new bloggers is finding new sources of traffic to rev up their readership. This weekend I was invited by a friend to check out a new beta tool for bloggers promising to “exponentially expand your site traffic.” Being that I’ve been rather quiet on the blog channels lately I decided to give this new beta tool a try — Be sure to grab the link to my invite!
Behold:
The idea behind BlogRush is pretty simple, and in some ways reflects techniques used by other similar services. Basically you add their widget to your site which loads 5 articles from your category/channel. Everytime your widget is displayed you get a credit to have your latest articles viewed on other people’s sites. This is all powered by your RSS feed of course, which makes it pretty simple to set up.
If you’re interested in checking out here’s some tips to get you started!
5 Tips for Getting the Most from BlogRush
- Preview the Tour Video – To really get a grasp of what BlogRush is trying to accomplish you should watch the detailed video they’ve got on their site:
Once you’ve created an account there’s also detailed demos for setting up the widget for the popular blog systems like WordPress and Blogger.
- Select the Right Category – Put Niche Marketing to work by selecting the right category for your blog when you sign up. The current channels are pretty limited, but find the one that best suits your target audience.
- Use Filters to Block Competitors – BlogRush allows you to block specific sites and keywords. This comes in handy so that you can make sure you don’t inadvertently divert your traffic to a competing site — or if there are some things which you simply do not want displayed on your site.
- Sign Up Asap! – Early adopters of of the service are likely to see the largest gains since you share traffic with people on similar channels.
- Invite Your Friends – Much like Blingo, you get credit for everything else your invited friends earn, so the sooner you sign up, the sooner you can get your friends to try it out too!
- Optimize Your Post Titles – Probably the most potent advice here is to make sure you are writing titles that are going to attract the attention of readers who see the widgets on other sites. (This is an important rule whether you use the widget or not!)
Initially I did have some problem setting up the widget as I was getting an “Invalid URL” message, but as you can see it’s fixed now on my sidebars for this old theme. The only other downside that I could think of is that BR uses their own link directing service so you don’t get any PageRank credit for having your links displayed on bigger sites — only traffic. Ah well. Glass half full here.
I’ve already sent an email out to some friends, but if you haven’t gotten an invite from me yet, you can use this link to sign up for BlogRush Beta and give it a try!
For now I’ve got the service up and running and I’ll give you an update in a couple of weeks or so to let you know what kind of results I get.
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