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Some days back I decided to try out BlogRush, seemed like a neat idea and I definitely wouldn’t mind getting a new source from where to get visitors.
If you are a blogger and still do not know what BlogRush is, then read my post on that subject so you better understand it by clicking here.
So now after 3 days of this it’s time for a first review on this, I’ll be presenting the features found in BlogRush and whine about features I miss from a tool like that.

BlogRush Dashboard

Right now the Dashboard is where all your attention should go, in fact it’s the only area where your attention can really go for now, as the site is in a rather early stage and things are still developed.
But don’t worry, it’s still pretty neat and gives you pretty much the information that you need right now.
The first thing you see is a graph, which displays the syndication credits that you have earned.
See image below, click on it to see the original size.

Syndication credits earned, every time your BlogRush widget is shown you earn a syndication credit, which means that a link to one of your post will be shown on another blog using the widget, basically you get a ratio of 1:1.
Every time you refer a new member you’ll get “paid” in syndication credits and another thing is that the people you referred to BlogRush will also generate credit for you but obviously at a smaller ratio depending on the “referrer generation” or you could call it depth.
In BlogRush you earn syndication credits all the way down to the 10th generation, which is pretty deep, don’t know about another network that uses that many generations yet. Anyway I don’t complain, this means more traffic for you.

The next thing you see in the dashboard is your current credit balance.
This basically is a list that displays the credits you earned from your own traffic and from your referral traffic today and some days back, more precisely you have stats for 90 days back.

The number you see in the “header” of that box, is basically the credits you have left, and the point when I took that screenshot I had 509 credits left, which means that my posts will be displayed on other widgets at least 509 more times.
Moving further down in the dashboard next you see the Activity by generation.
This basically shows you stats for the other blog in your network, like the previous list but instead for the blogs in you network as I already mentioned.

Last up on the dashboard is the Syndication Activity.
Which pretty much is what everyone is most interested in or at least that’s what I’m interested in.

I was pretty disappointed with this feature, I thought it would be a lot more detailed, well what can you do I’ll bring this up again in the Features I miss part later in this review.

So this simply shows you how many times your posts have been showed on other blogs, and the amount of clicks the links received. As you see in the image above the results weren’t all that great.
Sure it’s the fault of the post titles not being that appealing but I also suspect this has to do with links showing up on blogs that aren’t really in my genre.
Again too little information, I can only speculate at this point.

Applying Filters

Another thing worth mentioning on BlogRush is the filters you can apply, to control what’s shown on your widget. Well that’s at least what they state it’s for on the page and I have some reservations against it’s effectiveness at this point; I’ll come back to this later in this review.
To apply filter for your widget navigate: Settings -> Filters
What you can do here is basically list keywords to control what’s shown in your widget, you can also set URL keywords, basically topics/words/genres that you would want to be displayed.

Setting let say banana in URL Keywords should filter the URLS without banana in it, well maybe not completely block them out, and let me rephrase that, it’s more a setting for what topics you’d prefer to be shown in your widget. As I have seen this does everything but filter efficiently so you only get let say posts about bananas. Hopefully this will get better with time and it does make a slight improvement on what posts are shown so it still is usefull.

Featues I miss on BlogRush

And now to features I miss and weak points with BlogRush I’ve seen.

First of all I’d like some better improved statistics, sure we have some right now but they are just basic and don’t tell us much really. First of all I would very much appreciate better stats for the click rate thingy. It would be awesome to have information from what blog those visitors come from, where were those clicks made?
I’m not talking about a full detailed report on exactly each and every click, time and day but more of a list of let’s say the 10-20 recent sites someone came from.
And while writing the last sentence I also discovered that it would be cool if BlogRush displayed let say the 10 recent blogs where a link to one of my posts were shown.

Another thing I don’t feel works well is the posts displayed in the widget, not only are the majority of the posts shown not on the same topics that my blog is about but some even are for readers speaking another language.
Yes I’ve seen links to posts in Spanish, German and most recently a language I do not recognize and I thought that BlogRush had a rule for blogs in English only for now? To see what I mean check out the image below.

I think that more categories would be good for BlogRush, to better specify the niche your blog operates in.

The Verdict

To be honest I do not have a verdict on BlogRush yet, and it wouldn’t be fair if I had one at this point either. This system is too young to even evaluate as it’s still in such an early faze.

More features and improvements will be done over the next couple of moths, so choosing side right now is just stupid.

I’ll be running BlogRush for the rest of this year, after which I will take a new look at what it accomplished in terms of features but also for my blog.
And maybe then I’ll have an opinion on whether I like it or not.

And if you haven’t joined BlogRush yet and would like to then you’ll find my referral link beneath.
Join BlogRush

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 1:22 am and is filed under Personal, Review. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.