Leave BlogRush Alone!

Posted 5/27/08

Mitchell Blatt, owner of Juiced Sports Blog’s Sports Blogger Forums and AirRaid81 on StumbleUpon who would love to add you as a friend!

BlogRush Can Still Bring Decent Traffic if Used Properly

Alright guys, so many of you know about BlogRush and chances are if you know about BlogRush, the first thing you know about it is that is sucks. That is only partially true. BlogRush does suck in it’s default state, but if you make some modifications to the RSS feed, it came bring good traffic.

BlogRush, for those of you who don’t know about it, is a blog syndication service that puts a widget up on your site with links to related posts, and it will put your links up on the widget on other people’s sites if you add it to yours. You can sign up here: BlogRush

The problem is that it uses the default RSS feed of your blog to display the links and titles. That leads to terrible click-thru rates, because the title space is pretty small in BlogRush, and even if the titles fit, they won’t get many clicks unless they catch the reader’s attention with controversy or whatever.

Now, you don’t want to be writing BlogRush titles for your blog titles, because that would probably annoy the direct visitors to your blog. So, what’s a blogger to do to have good BlogRush titles and good organic titles?

Just modify your RSS feed. Here’s a hack for anyone who uses Wordpress to create a custom RSS feed for BlogRush that will display only your single best post and title:

Create a Microsoft Word or other text-editing file, and use this code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <rss version="2.0">

<channel>
<title>Your Blog Title</title>
<link>http://www.your blog url.com</link>
<description>Your Blog's Description or Tagline</description>
<language>en-us</language>

<item>
<category>BlogRush</category>
<title>Featured Post Title</title> <link>http://yourblogurl.com/permalink to the post</link>
<description>
This description is not used by BlogRush.
</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Leave everything alone except the variables that are marked for your individual use.

Save the file as blogrushrss.rss or whateveryouwant.rss and then upload it to your ftp. This is only possible with Wordpress, unfortunately.

When it comes to your Featured Post Title, write something short and funny or interesting. That will get clicks. I had done some experimenting with this in the past, and some of my top titles were things like “Brett Favre is a Disgrace!” (in regards to his thoughts about unretiring) and “Mark Cuban was Right!” (about blogging and banning bloggers from his locker room).

Don’t expect 10% click thru rates to your blog. (Hell, don’t even expect 1%.) But, right now, most people are struggling just to get 0.1%. I’m getting 0.5%. With as many displays as BlogRush gives, that translates into 10-20 visitors a day for me. Consider this is free traffic. The traffic from all these sources adds up, and the more traffic you get, the more impressions you get. My impressions have been growing exponentially.

Do the same thing, and your hits will be growing exponentially as well.

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