Paul Baloche
Desperation Band
Brian Doerksen
Don Moen
Desiring God
The Practice of the Presence of God 
Blogrush is continuing to claim to make big improvements to their service, which should make it even more appealing to Christian blogs. These changes were mooted a couple of weeks ago but most have not come to fruition yet. One of the key updates they have just made is to improve the quality of the blogs and remove all the spam blogs. Unfortunately for me they have deemed this blog as spam and de-activated my account! Nice! I am just assuming it is my content that got me excluded, as they provide a list of seven possible reasons why the blog may have been de-activated but don’t actually tell you why. Regardless, in the spirit of Christian grace it is still possible that Blogrush may be of use to your site so here are the main changes promised:
- Improved statistics
The initial and current statistics available are both minimal and also relatively inaccurate. All that will change with the new dashboard. One of the key changes to Blogrush is the ability to track which of your posts are being clicked on the most. This will be vital in allowing you to see what titles people tend to look at, allowing you to drive more traffic to you site by using more popular titles. There is also a few graphs to help you easily see what is happening, as well as the ability to create custom reports. - Higher positioning on blogs
Blogrush are going to make sure their widget is placed higher on peoples blog. You may not want it higher on your own, but this will create a level playing field and help to really increase the number of people clicking through to your blog. - More categories
The Christian category is now up and running on Blogrush! This will ease a lot of fears over what content is being shown on your blog. - Bonus credits
There will be bonus credits given to blogs. These will be weighted towards the smaller blogs to help them get more benefit from using Blogrush. So if you felt you Blogrush wouldn’t work for you before, now it might! - Tighter controls on Blogrush blogs
All blogs are being checked to root out the spam blogs or ones with inappropriate content. Once again, this will help reduce fears about the type of blog posts that may be shown on your site by Blogrush. It seems to me if this blog was deemed inappropriate then quite a lot of others must have been too.
Blogrush had accounted for approximately 2% of my traffic. If you consider this costs nothing, and is quite literally no effort once you are set up, then Blogrush is an appealing opportunity. However you do need to have appealing headers for your posts. If you use wordpress then the MaxBlogPress website has a superb plug-in that lets you choose which posts to include, and allows you to give a different and shorter title to the post.
There has been a lot of discussion on the internet about Blogrush this week – it seems you either love it or hate it with a passion! Many have lambasted the perceived (or actual) weaknesses in the Blogrush set-up.
My initial post highlighted how many people were seeing very low click through rates. Darren Rowse, also known as ProBlogger, posted a message on free Christian resources adding that some were also seeing a 1% click though and that realistically it would be too soon to judge the validity of Blogrush.
Too soon maybe, but I have been impressed by the speed with which Blogrush have responded to the various suggestions or criticisms. This really bodes well and shows that the Blogrush team will be very proactive in doing their utmost to make this project work. Within a week of launch the following improvements have already been made:
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I recently mentioned the new site Blogrush and how it could be added to Christian websites. One of the issues raised was the current lack of categories available to position your blog in. This can result in some blog titles being shown that you wouldn’t want on your site. The big question is, regardless of how well Blogrush may or may not perform for you, is this is a risk worth taking? Are you willing to loose control over your sidebars and have sites recommended that you actually disagree with?
What is the worst that could happen?
The worst case scenario is that you end up having a glut of inappropriate blog post titles displayed on your site. For instance, I have already seen on my blog: CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
There has been a lot of interest recently about a new website called BlogRush. BlogRush is free, and is designed to increase traffic to your site. It achieves this by adding an item in your sidebar that shows 5 feeds from around the web, and will also show your feed headings in other blogs. You can get a good rundown in a video on their website.
So will it work?
My initial concern about how well it will work on Christian sites is the lack of categories. The closest match is a category called “Religion and Spirituality”, which as you can imagine is rather broad in scope. You can see from the box on the right, that this throws up a large variety of posts – many distinctly non-Christian! BlogRush also mention that they use other techniques to improve relevancy. If this is similar to the methods google use it may take a few posts to gage what type of content they will include. Certainly when I looked at the posts chosen one day later they were more focused on Christianity.
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