John Chow has an interesting post about how you can control the headlines that the BlogRush program displays. The way he does it is with a static rss file that contains one “post” that has a custom title and links to whatever it is that you want to push at that time. When you sign up your blog, you give BlogRush the static rss as the feed location and it always displays that one “post.”
Sounds pretty cool for increasing click through to your blog, but it got me thinking as well. Why couldn’t you use it as a sales tool? If you were to add a new “blog” for each item and give them a corresponding static rss for each, you could effectively use it as a advertising venue much like adwords.
Say I wanted to push Text Link Ads and try and reap the benefits with the $25 referral revenue. I would simply add a blog to my blogrush account that had a catchy title like “Make Hundreds a Month with Text Links!” and that linked to my redirected affiliate link. When someone clicks through to that “blog” they would then be routed through to the sign-up for TLA. The same could be done for any affiliate item. Cameras, Blogging programs, etc.
Of course, it’s a gross perversion of the use of the program. If only a fraction of the users were to use the program in this way, it would quickly get discarded as a worthless addition to any site and go the way of the dodo. As a blogger who was using the program as it was designed, I would be slightly unhappy with giving out free advertising to affiliate programs without getting any revenue from it.
Another issue that would have to be solved would be to find a way to get enough credits to keep an advertising program like this going. You could do most of it with your MLM referral credits.  That would demand that you have a rather large referral downline. It is possible for people like John Chow or Shoemoney, but most of the small fish like myself would have a hard time getting it done.
Yet another reason that I’m not signing up for BlogRush though.
About Shane Ede
Well, I don’t have a large blog, definetely not, so I have to do it with referrals too. I posted on a forum that I regularly visit my referral link, while writing about blogrush was released. Someone with like 300-400 pageviews registered through my link (and he was the only one until yesterday), and he got me credits.
So far I have had around 1800 impressions, and 2 clicks. Not much, but that probably is because of this freakin cheaters 😉 I hope they will soon go over to manual checking, and release the flavors (of which you probably already heard). Also, releasing a tool to view which sites you referred, won’t hurt either 😉
So you can wait with it, and try it when stuff will be better, or register now, and at least try to get a referral or 2.
Just my 2c 🙂
I recently developed a free wordpress plugin called “BlogRush Click Maximizer”. By using it you can vastly improve your Click Through Rate.
This allows you to control what you want to display in BlogRush. You can even write alternate – short and catchy title just for BlogRush.
You will have total control of what appears over the BlogRush Network.
Check it out here:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/bcm/