If you’re a blogger and you want to drive traffic to your site, you ought to check out Blogrush. It has overtones of multi-level marketing (not good) but uses these along with the viral nature of the internet to your advantage, potentially. I will say the jury is still out on this one as I can’t yet see the impact, but I can definitely see the potential.

If you look at the left bar on this page, scroll down to the Tools section, you’ll see a box that looks like the image below.

If there is one thing every blog author wants, it’s an audience. There are all sorts of ways to generate traffic to come to your blog and they all require money and work. This one requires a little work (and we’ll see how much money in due course) to embed the widget code in your blog in the right spot. The basic premise is this: each time the widget is served on your blog, you will earn a “syndication credit.” As time passes, you will amass syndication credits that are then used as a bank to supply a link to your blog in other blogs related to yours as the widget is served on those sites.

Here’s where it gets interesting. If you notice the little tab on the widget that says Blogrush, each time someone clicks that, signs up for Blogrush, and embeds the widget, you get syndication credits for their blog traffic in addition to your own. This credit accumulates through 10 levels of referrals from your widget. It’s this multi-level marketing component coupled with the network effect that gives this Blogrush approach great potential for success, and, great potential for abuse by the “get rich quick” crowd.

So far, here’s what I like:

• Fast, easy sign-up – minimal personal information required
• Clean design to the widget, easily embedded in sidebar.php
• No observed degradation in page serving performance
• During sign-up, a warning that this is for “real” blogs, not just Adsense delivery vehicles
• The potential of how this could work in practice

Turn about is fair play, here are my concerns:

• No validation that my blog is “real” – low signal to noise ratio as the MLM crowd rushes to get in on this.
• Dashboard, Statistics, and FAQ aren’t available yet (it is Beta, they have been live for less than a week – they get some time to address these.)
• Association with “single” category, like Sports, Technology, or Pets – if you have diverse content like I do, it’s tough to find a good category.
• Potential for abuse, I don’t want to advertise for questionable content in this widget. While there are keyword and URL filters, it’s unclear how well these work as yet.
• Future model changes, as the company grows and matures, it’s sure to want to monetize. In the case this really works, I hope it’s a palatable monetization strategy.

Well, that’s what I know about this tool right now. If you click the links in this article, you’ll be associated with my Blogrush account. If you don’t wish to do that, simply open a new browser tab or window and type in https://www.blogrush.com/. Your mileage may vary. As I learn more about how this works in practice, I’ll write more.