Sorry Blog Rush, 3 strikes, you’re out

Based on my personal experience with BlogRush and after hearing some other bloggers talk about the large number of impressions and the drastically low number of clicks they were receiving, it was becoming quite obvious that the real winner in all of this is BlogRush themselves. I certainly don’t have a problem with a company offering a service but yet reaping the rewards. Heck, isn’t that what Google does? They seem to be doing OK and I don’t hold it against them that they benefit off me checking my email on their site rather than another. But, I digress…

Strike 1 for BlogRush came Monday morning when there had been dozens of impressions and zero clicks on any of my served up headlines. That was actually only half of it. The other half being that I had still yet to run across my own blog title and link in a BlogRush application on any other site.

Strike 2 came Tuesday morning. By this time, my interest in keeping the app on my page had already hit the skids. So when I loaded up my front page and it took an extra 10 seconds while it tried to load the BlogRush app, if I had not been at work and heading in to a meeting, I would have removed the code right then and there.

Tuesday ended up being busy and I never got back around to removing the app from the site. Then came Wednesday.

When I loaded up the page on Wednesday morning, in place of the BlogRush app was an error message. Apparently they were having troubles with their system and they would be back up soon. Strike 3. This time I was not heading in to a meeting so I removed the app from the site immediately.

This is certainly not the first web tool that came on like a lion and left with a wimper and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I wish the guys over at BlogRush all the success they can handle. But, you’ll need to get there without this geek.

Why aren’t you Blog Rushing?

There is certainly no shortage of people writing about BlogRush.com this weekend. And, for good reason.

If you haven’t already heard, BlogRush is a new services that takes the RSS feed from your blog and displays a headline on other blogs who are also in the BlogRush network. The sites you will be displayed on is based on the category you select for your site. This keeps the article headlines related to your site’s content.

The base idea behind this isn’t new. This is the Web 2.0 version of a Banner Exchange network. The different being, rather than being stuck with 1 banner to display in a network across thousands of sites, instead your headlines and your site name get displayed on like minded sites. It looks to be quite powerful. Like so many others, I’m testing it out to see how much extra traffic it will bring to the site.

To give you a quick idea on how it works, you sign up your blog and then place a small chunk of code that will display a box like the one shown here. Then, each time your page is loaded, your account gets credited with 1 view. Now, when somebody loads up a different website in your same category, a listing for your site will be shown 1 time. It’s a 1 for 1 exchange. You can earn extra credits by referring others to sign up for an account. For each page view on their site, not only do they get 1 page view credit, so do you. The referral credits are given 10 levels deep. If you happen to get a popular site to sign up under you, you can really rack up some valuable credits.

If you are using Google Adsense on your site, you should probably steer clear of BlogRush for the time being. This post from the Google Adsense blog suggests that traffic exchange programs are against the rules for sites using Adsense.

While this is most likely not the be-all-end-all of traffic generators, it is certainly worth testing out. I’m sure in a week or two you will see another set of posts from the Blogosphere telling you how good or bad the Blog Rush is treating them. I’m sure I’ll be one of ‘em.

Let the rush begin!