Using Affiliate Skills to Pay The Bills!

How To: Control What the Blogrush Widget Displays

Posted by Kyle Eslick on September 22nd, 2007 | Category and Tags

If you aren’t sick of hearing about Blogrush yet, you probably don’t read that many blogs.Â The promise of increased traffic has people going crazy all over the blogosphere, trying to get credits, referrals, or whatever it takes to improve their daily traffic intake.Â Â

If the Blogrush team is able to deliver on what they’ve promised, this service definitely has a chance.Â Â The major flaw is that itÂ only displaysÂ your most recent post in their widget.Â Â Fortunately John Chow has shown us an easy way to create a feed so you can manually choose what posts to feature.Â

All you need to do is simply open Notepad or some similar program andÂ save the fileÂ as blogrush.rss.Â Once that is done, copy the following code and paste it into your new rss file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>Your Blog Title</title> <link>http://www.yoururl.com</link> <description>Your Blog Description</description> <language>en-us</language><item> <category>BlogRush</category> <title>Your Post Title</title> <link>http://www.yourposturl.com/</link> <description> Don't worry about this part, this description is not used by BlogRush. </description> </item> </channel> </rss>

Now that you’ve made your feed, make sure to fill in your personalÂ information (blog name, blog url,Â blog description, post name, and post url).Â Once this is done and you’ve saved your file, just upload it to your public_html folder and it should now show up as http:/ /www.yoururl.com/blogrush.rss.Â

Now go to your Blogrush account and request to Add New Blog.Â You will want to input your normal information, but use your new feed address instead of the old one.Â Once you’ve added this feed as a new blog, the widget should now start showingÂ the post that you’ve choosen to highlight.Â

Whenever you decide youÂ are ready to start showing offÂ a different post in the widget, just adjust your feed file and upload it to the same spot, which will override the old file and cause the widget to show your new post.Â

Note:Â The BlogRush widget divides your time between the two feeds, so this will actually only work half the time, but it still gives you considerable control over what post is displayed in the widget.Â

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Comment by Joe Justin on September 22nd, 2007:

Kyle,

Great post! I just implemented this post. It’s great when fellow bloggers help one another! Keep up the good work.
Comment by Ryan Wagner on September 22nd, 2007:

So how is this BlogRush performing for you? I thought about doing it because, well, everyone has hopped on the bandwagon. The system just doesn’t seem to add up though. There are too many sites that can bury the sidebar widget deep with an unnoticeable area, and therefore make the service worthless.
Comment by Kyle Eslick on September 23rd, 2007:

Joe - Thanks! Its always reassuring to know that my instructions made sense
Ryan - So far I’ve gotten four clicks out of about 10,000 credits, which I’m not the slightest bit impressed with. A couple things:
- Because they try to target traffic, I always give them time to get a feel for my website and start properly targeting traffic before I judge it. With that said, after a week they should probably have a good idea what my site is about and start targeting accordingly.
- The servers they have are amazing. I haven’t noticed any delay with the widget loading, so having the widget there isn’t causing any problems.
- I can’t view how many I’ve referred to other sites with my widget yet because the Reports page still isn’t available after a week.
Comment by Ryan Wagner on September 24th, 2007:

I’ve been watching the sites that have shown up in the BlogRush, and you may want to be careful. This type of stuff can also hurt your readership because in a way you are “recommending” these sites by placing widget on your site. From what I’ve seen none of the articles are worth while, and many seem spammy. Just make sure you analyze the benefits and that they outweigh any possible negative sideaffects. It’s the same thing with doing link exchanges on sites, and that’s what I see this as (except you actually have less control as to what shows up).
Comment by Joe Justin on September 24th, 2007:

I have to disagree with Ryan. I have found some very good articles and tools on the widget. Yes there are a lot of spammers out there and John Reese and company have assured us that they are looking into the “gamers”. John Reese has a stellar reputation so there no reason not to believe him. In my opinion all the bad stuff will work it’s way out and the folks who got in early will benefit the most.
Comment by Kyle Eslick on September 24th, 2007:

Ryan - I think you bring up a great point! I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but I suppose you are sort of recommending those posts by displaying them. I have found some good stuff on there though.

Joe - Yes, it is definitely early. I used to get some traffic from the Good Blogs last year, but it wasn’t worth it. The targeted traffic makes this a little better, but I still think it may take some time to know if this will be beneficial to me or not. As long as the widget isn’t slowing the site’s load time any, I will keep it up for now.
Comment by MaxBlogPress on October 15th, 2007:

I recently developed a free wordpress plugin called “BlogRush Click Maximizer”.

It will automate the whole process you have suggested and can do some more stuffs. By using it you can vastly improve your Click Through Rate.

This allows you to control what you want to display in BlogRush. You can even write alternate - short and catchy title just for BlogRush.

You will have total control of what appears over the BlogRush Network.

Check it out here:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/bcm/
Comment by Kyle Eslick on October 15th, 2007:

MaxBlogPress - Thanks for the heads up on this. Very useful plugin!