After John Reese announced his new viral marketing widget for blogs, BlogRush, it experienced a rush indeed - a rush of blogs that joined the bandwagon that did NOT meet John’s perceived quality standards. Non-English blogs were clearly requested NOT to apply to be part of the network, but they did anyway. So did tons of other spam, scam and scraper sites.

So as expected again, many bloggers thought it was cool to throw brickbats at John, saying that the widget was not getting them traffic. Well, John clearly stated that one of the best ways to get traffic was to create interesting titles. After all, millions of posts will be competing for that all important click, so who wants to click on a post title “Find a girlfriend for XYZ”. Lots of blogger imagine that the BlogRush to be a miracle, hands-free, sit-back-and-chill widget that would get millions of visitors to their blogs.

Anyway, as a result of this avalanche of low quality sites joining the BlogRush network and clogging the widget with post titles for the mentally challenged, John put on his battle gear and went into action. He recruited a small army of reviewers to weed out the blogs that didn’t meet the minimum standards.

Okay, so while that’s in the process of being completed (he says it will take about a week’s time), John is gearing to push out Phase 2 of BlogRush. You can read about Phase 2 on his blog here, but I thought I’d like to give my 2 cents for some of what he’s written :

New User Interface :
More options, more reporting, more features.

Nice. I like. Orange is a good color for old men who need reading glasses like me.

Per Post Statistics & Addition Of “Buzz Meter”
& Custom reports
Now you’ll be able to see how many times each of your posts is syndicated across the network and how many people clicked to read that individual post.

Next to the statistics for each post you’ll see a “Buzz Meter.” This new meter will tell you if that post is HOT, COLD, or somewhere in between. The meter ‘temperature’ is calculated based on the average click-rates per headline for your blog’s category.

Obviously he’s listening to his network members.

Bonus Syndication For All Users, But Weighted Towards Low-Traffic Members
All members of our network will be receiving bonus syndication but we’ll be giving more bonus credits to our members that need it most — ones with low-traffic.

A boon for new blogs who are trying to compete with the big boys for prime space. I think this is just goes to show you that John is in tune with how difficult it is for new bloggers to compete in the open battle field for traffic.

More Categories! (A lot more) &
Improved Security & Abuse Measures (We’ve already squashed 95% of the cheaters!)

Can you ask for more? Remember that BlogRush is FREE.

100% Manual Review & New Quality Guidelines

We’ve already launched our Manual Review process… all new users as of today (and for good) will have their blogs manually reviewed BEFORE the widget will even load on their pages. Their posts will not be syndicated across the network until they are APPROVED and meet our Quality Guidelines. If they are not approved the widget will not load on their pages and none of their content will ever be syndicated on the network.

We’re almost finished with manually reviewing all the existing blogs in our network. We should be done with this massive ‘audit’ within about 7 days.

As soon as we complete this full audit there will be a MAJOR SWEEP of our entire network. All the blogs that don’t meet our quality criteria will be REMOVED from our network.

Say goodbye to all the non-English blogs, junk blogs, and any low-quality blogs you may have seen from time-to-time in the widget.

With thousands of junk blogs out of the way, your blog’s titles will have a much better chance of getting noticed. Then again, since we don’t know what the criteria is for “junk blogs”, I might just find out that the widget doesn’t load on HomeWithAndrew anymore!

We are committed to maintaining the highest level of INTEGRITY and QUALITY for our network.

We know that you only want great blog posts and resource links showing up inside the widget you serve on your blog and we’ll do everything we can to maintain that.

It will now be a PRIVILEDGE for a blog to be accepted into our network.

Let’s hope that the standards are maintained from day one.

Widget Performance Monitoring
One of the biggest contributors to some of our low, average click-through rates (i.e. less traffic for our members) is due to some of our members giving the widget POOR PLACEMENT on their blogs.

Some of our members have placed the BlogRush widget at the very bottom of their blog templates, or very low where most of their visitors don’t even see it.

This is targetting the scammers who have joined BlogRush expecting a free ride. I want my post titles to be seen prominently on someone else’s blog, so it’s only fair to give others the same treatment. Burying the widget where the sun don’t shine in some obscure place in my blog is just not fair to others. I believe in adding the “Karma” in the BlogRush equation.

With all the work being put into BlogRush, I’m excited at the possibilities it presents. If you havent joined the BlogRush network yet, you can sign up here.

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