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Of late i’ve been seeing a lot of blogs promoting the new Blogrush offering. For those who are unaware, Blogrush is basically like a Banner or Link Exchange system. Bloggers sign up at Blogrush to get an embedded widget code that they can place in their blog sidebars. Everytime your page loads, the widget displays a set of 5 blog post heading links, from other blogs that are part of the BlogRush network (just like you) and are in the same category as you. These links are displayed inside the nice looking widget.

For every one display of the widget (which ultimately results in 5 topic links from other blog posts on the network in your category, being displayed) you get one exposure of your blog post on the network – on other blogger member website widgets. This sounds fair, but if you look deep into things you will realize theirs a defect. I will come to that later. But first another important trick thats going to work like viral marketing on steroids for BlogRush…

For every blogger you refer – when they sign up by clicking on the BlogRush logo at the bottom of the widget, you benefit. For every direct referral you also will get one free link exposure everytime your referral displays the widget. If this referral refers another member – you get the same benefit again… gaining one more exposure for a two level deep referral. And so on … 10 levels deep.

This trick is absolutely fantastic, because it will cause bloggers to start promoting this new exchange service to fellow bloggers immediately in hope of getting referral bloggers before others snap them. Bloggers can see the potential of the 10 level deep credit system. It can really balloon to a large amount of free link exposure. Which *could* result in traffic.

But wait!! Is this real traffic or just link exposures? This is where I would like to caution fellow bloggers. Blogrush is claiming that – bloggers should sign up right away to get a huge rush and volume of traffic to their sites in a short span of time.

There are however two issues here.

The first one is that – if this is a 1:1 exchange network, and BlogRush is displaying only 5 ads inside the widget – then they are creating an excess of 4 ads per display – which they can then distribute to the referring members. So, the excess credit of 4 ads can help them – BUT only 4 levels deep. As the system grows and referral levels start to get deepe and aproach 10 levels of depth – how will BlogRush maintain the 1:1 ratio? The answer is – that well, not all members will have referrals that go down to 10 levels deep.

So, there will always be direct sign up members who are not referred, and therefore whose widgets display 5 exposures and they get one credit exposure in return (and no referral credits will be given to anyone on the network as they signed up directly) and therefore create an excess of 4 credits for the system. This will help BlogRush.

And if it doesn’t, and the excess exposures being created are getting close to zero – they can always simply increase the widget size or put a scroll bar and display 10 links!! This will immediately create a larger excess for BlogRush on every widet exposure. Super!

Super for BlogRush, but bad for members.

I can already see a very very very low CTR on this network. Although the links displayed are in your category and may match your sites content – the CTR is going to be extremely low. Here’s the reasoning behind my my calculation…

A standard ad CTR on most blog posts is about half to one-and-half percentage…. that is, 0.5% to 1.5%.  Now, this widget will probably not be placed by bloggers on the top of their sidebar or top of the page fold – and will probably be tucked away at the side bottom. Therefore, my guess is that the CTR for this widget will probably be around 0.1% ( or one-tenth of one percent. ).

Now, if your blog post title appears in a widget on another site along with 5 others – your CTR will be further reduced by a factor of 5 (or 20%) of 0.1% which is 0.02%.

This is  2 clicks out of 10,000 page views or 1 click every 5000 page views!!

Now, what kind of rush of traffic is that?

Further, if BlogRush decides to increase the number of Blog Links inside their widget tomorrow (to compensate for excess credits being given to members for referrals) – then you can be assured that the paltry traffic and CTR will get even worse.

Nice try BlogRush. Good hype and viral elements – but your basic system is at fault!! I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. This is just a passing fad.

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