Blogrush – does it really work?

There’s been a lot of buzz about lately from blogrush. In case you’ve been living under a rock, it’s being widely hailed as the best way to drive free traffic to your blog. Free traffic. Free, as in beer.

All you need to do is put a widget on your blog with links to other people’s blogs. You get credit for displaying links to other people’s pages which, in turn, gives you credit to display a link to your blog on other’s pages, hopefully driving some traffic your way.

Sounds great in theory, right? But hang on a moment – does it have that niggling feeling that it might just be too good to be true? And you know what that means…

Well let’s take a look. I signed up for blogrush and put a widget on my highest-traffic blog on blogger. I’m getting upwards of 220 page views per day consistently. I rank #3 in google for my target phrase. The page isn’t converting however and I’ve left it be for a week or so now to focus on a new project. Perfect candidate for a little blogrush testing.

Here’s my graph from google analytics for a day or so after I added the widget. I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions here…

So where to from here? Explosive traffic growth depends on a few things:

1. People clicking on the blogrush links. As Ed Dale is saying, people like to click around the ‘net and stumbleupon stuff (All hail ADD!), so even if your blog title isn’t relevant to the page on which it’s displayed, people may still click. Apparently I’m getting more traffic from somewhere at the moment. Google is still telling me that 90.9% of my traffic comes from search engines.
2. People signing up to blogrush using my affiliate link. That means that I’m entitled to more traffic because I’ve referred people. Should those referrals themselves generate referrals, I get an exponential traffic growth. In theory.
3. The blogrush effect taking hold. I think it will, but what do I know. People get tired of things pretty quickly online.

There are a couple of downsides that spring to mind as well.

1. People have an exit from your page that is beyond your control. Granted, it opens in a new window, but that doesn’t mean they’ll come back to your page and re-read it. In addition the “new window” thing quickly fills a screen, or your firefox tab bar. It could be a thorn in the side of blogrush once people realise that you can’t stop it doing that.
2. Traffic from other sites that are unrelated to your blog do not mean more sales. We want targeted traffic, not random traffic. The success of blogrush from a marketing perspective will be how well it places links on other people’s pages. At the moment my page seems to be showing a lot of unrelated links based on my content. It’s early days yet of course.
3. Once the buzz dies down, will what’s left be links to quality content, or will we be overrun with spam? The more traffic your site has, the more opportunity we have to put links on other peoples pages. We all know what the highest traffic stuff online is, right?

So the jury is still out, but the initial signs look somewhat promising. Stay tuned!

(Do your own Blogrush experiment by clicking here)

Technorati Tags: blogrush, blogging, linkbuilding

Jaiku is the sh*t

Really.  Twitter is good, but jaiku is twitter on steroids.  Perhaps the only downside is that less people seem to know about Jaiku at the moment.

It’s definitely similar to twitter, but jaiku has more functions that are useful to me.  Check em out.

Twitter   vs   Jaiku

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Martial Arts that are neither martial nor art…

Let’s do the background thing first. I’m a first-degree black belt in karate and I achieved the rank of shodan ho way back in 2003. At the time, that was a massive deal. In fact it was fair to say that getting my black belt was my life’s mission for the entire six years leading up to that point.You’d better believe it means something to me to hold a black belt. It pisses me off to hear people dismiss the fact that they “got their black belt once”: They no longer train. It’s ticked off their list now, and forgotten. Perhaps they thougt that once they had the black belt, they’d be bullet proof … and what do you know, the day after their grading they’ve woken up and discovered that they’re still just as mortal as the rest of us. Oops!

I should mention, while I’m here, that I don’t train with that school so much these days. Indeed, I checked black belt off my list and found myself face to face with my own post-black belt void. I wanted more training, more depth. Unlike others perhaps who expected black belt to be the magic bullet, I was confronted with the realisation that there are plenty of bullshit artists, and not so many martial artists.

I think I was hoping that when I hit black belt there’d be a moment of enlightenment – the instant where it dawns on me that there really was something special about those other folks wearing black belts walking around the dojo. They really were uber martial artists, somehow better then the other students. Black belt, after all, was always explained as something that couldn’t be understood until you’d done it.

To some extent, that’s true. Six or seven years were spent learning about bushido or training as a warrior. I froze on the beaches in winter doing pushups in the sand at 6am. I Learned to demonstrate the type of respect that is given based solely on someone’s rank and without any consideration to their character. People that, anywhere else, would be treated with contempt were heralded as paragons of virtue…

Ever heard the term “martial arts widow”? Plenty of relationships have failed to survive a partner commencing martial arts training. Marriages dissolve, affairs between students and teachers are commonplace. These people then stand in front of a class and talk to the students about the “seven virtues of bushido”. Amongst these are honesty, loyalty, courage and rectitude. Don’t get me started on ego. Especially with kids and tournament wins. Blech.

Genuine martial artists are rare. Very few people walk their talk. There are some excellent technicians, even great fighters out there. But give me an instructor who doesn’t compromise on what he or she believes over someone who can do a jumping spinning hook kick or break a pile of bricks any day. If you find one of these people, consider yourself very fortunate. I’ve met two or three in my ten years in the martial arts.

It’s hard not to become disheartened when schools start approaching the martial arts as a linear progression, or an education in the western sense. Sure, there are exams, lessons and skills to be learned and perfected. There’s also the tempering of the psyche, and that really isn’t something that can be achieved properly with a “must grade every six months” type model. If that were true then we wouldn’t have any egocentric black belts.

Sadly, more and more schools are bowing to pressure from parents and financial issues and compromising their art. All that’s left is a facade, and once you’ve seen through it, it’s hard not to be just a little jaded.