John Reese, the promoter who brought “Blogrush” recently announced “TrafficJam.com”; evidently TrafficJam will help our blogs even more than Blogrush. The Blogosphere seems to have ignored the announcement. . .
But I won’t ignore it! John Reese is now promising loads of traffic through “TrafficJam”, requesting bloggers be patient and telling us feed back is positive. He has also closed comments at his blog. Given this marketing push, I think, bloggers do need to make decisions based on data; sharing information helps other bloggers make decisions.
What’s Blogrush done for Big Bucks Blogger?
- Did Blogrush send much traffic?
Nope. In one month, this blog received 11 visits from the Blogrush widget. The increased number of categories in Phase II might help- and for this reason, I’ll leave the widget in my footer. - Were the 11 Blogrush visits targeted?
Blogrush traffic doesn’t seem to include people interested in reading my posts. According to Google Analytics, Blogrush visitors remained at my site, on average, 19 seconds and had a bounce rate of 64%. In contrast, Stumble visitors stayed for 1 minute and 25 seconds with a bounce rate of 36%. The average visitor remained for 2 minutes 33 seconds with a bounce rate of 56%.Stumble visitors appear to read; Blogrush visitors don’t.
- What sorts of blogs appear on my Blogrush widget?
It’s been weeks since John Reese supposedly implemented his quality standards. Despite that, the widget is still full of blogs I would not recommend to my visitors.
When preparing to write this article, I clicked the Blogrush links. I visited: a missing page, an author “about” page, preview.tinyurl.com, ( a fine resource. Too bad it’s not a blog.) and a blog article about lawyers’ need for virtual assistants. One click sent me to the affiliate page shown in the thumbnail to the right. Mind you, I have nothing against affiliate marketing; the problem is the site is not a blog. In case you are wondering: No the page did not blink.
Oh, notice the ?hop= in the url?
- Do Blogrush’s Phase II filtering features help me block the non-blogs? In principle, now that I’ve discovered the “Affiliate Splash Page” blog, and the “TinyURL imitation blog”, I could visit Blogrush and block them. That would require me to a) regularly click my own Blogrush widget so I can catch the bad blogs, b) copy the urls of these pages, c) open a new tab, d) log into Blogrush, e) go to the appropriate filter page f) paste the url into the box and save.
Of course, I would only be able to block blogs I actually identify. I can’t discover every blog that populates my widget. Who knows what my visitors might visit.
Blogrush: Only good for conversation
So, there you have it: Blogrush has brought little traffic, the traffic is poorly targeted, by displaying the widget, I promote non-blogs and blogs outside my niche.
As usual: It’s still free. Blogging about the widget fits this blogs niche. For this reason, I’m willing to leave this in the footer until such time that John Reese kicks me out of the program.
What’s Blogrush done for other blogs?
It’s mostly wasted Blog Real Estate that could be used for other widgets, ads or the bloggers own blogroll. In return, bloggers got very little traffic. When posting her stats for October, Caroline Middlebury, who has experienced phenomenal traffic growth, noted that Blogrush doesn’t bring her traffic; like many bloggers, she’s bagging the widget in favor of other widgets that really can bring traffic or income.
What about TrafficJam.com?
Supposedly, TrafficJam will publicize the “hot” topics that appear in Blogrush widgets, helping quality blog posts get more traffic.
But is TrafficJam likely to be a resource for identifying great posts? I’m not so sure. It appears “hotness” will be based on the clickrate on titles appearing in Blogrush widgets. I don’t know about you, but I have no idea if a post is great until after I click. So how would this sort of “hotness” indicate quality?
I think it’s pretty obvious why news of TrafficJam.com did not set the Blogosphere on fire. Blogrush didn’t fill its promises. TrafficJam doesn’t sound promising. Still, who knows. It might be great. But one thing is true: