You may have seen boxes appear in the last few months on people’s blogs that look like:

I have one on the right hand side of my blog.  This service is called Blogrush.  The idea is that you sign up your blog and they will display your posts headlines on other people’s blogs the same amount of times as you display the widget.  This is a good idea and I would like to do anything that will get people to read what I have written and to contribute to my blog.  They have had all sorts of problems with not initially having any quality standards for the blogs that are displayed and have had problems with reporting and dashboards.

Today, they have upgraded their dashboard and you can view statistics in numbers and graphs about how many times you have displayed their widget and how many people have clicked on them.  I have included some of the images about what it looks like after the refurbishment on either side.

I love the idea of this service the reciprocal nature and the way of getting my headlines seen- I also like that you can get bonus credits if you refer people to use their service.  The thing that I don’t like is that it takes up a lot of real estate on your blog which I could be using for other things.  I don’t like that the super large blogs have so many credits that often you see the same thing when you view the widget.  I also dislike that it looks like an ad, I’m not sure how to make it different - maybe as a news ticker; but I would not have clicked on it if I did not know what it was.  I also find that most people hide it on their sites, so you are getting your headlines displayed is rather redundant, so it dissuades you putting it in a prime position on your site.

Basically, My stats are - over the past month I have earned 40,000 credits (that many times my headlines have been displayed on people’s sites) and I have had people click on my links 7 times.  For my money this is a pretty poor conversion ratio.

Do you know of a way to attract more people to my blog? What tactics do you use? Have you had any good results from blog rush?

I am going to leave my judgement until I see the results of your feedback, but I think that I am going to stop displaying the widget.

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