I’ve been a member of Blog Rush since January of this year and have experienced some highs and lows along the way, so I thought I’d blog about them.

The Good

1) It’s Free

I’m not usually a fan of free, MLM traffic programs because the traffic you receive is generally low quality and has a high bounce rate.

However, since I just got serious about blogging earlier this year, I was willing to give it a try to see how it would work for me — particularly because it was free.

Overall I’ve been pretty pleased. Yes, I’m sure a lot of the traffic is lower quality than some of my other sources, but I have gotten a lot of comments and emails from readers who say they subscribed to my feed after finding me on Blog Rush.

That was enough to encourage me to stick with the program… for a while anyway.

2) TrafficJam.com

When you create a blog post that gets a lot of clicks in the Blog Rush network, you earn a spot on TrafficJam.com, which brings in even more traffic.

Three of my last seven posts have gotten over 1500 clicks combined through the Blog Rush network and earned my blog a temporary spot on TrafficJam.com.

For an explanation of how TrafficJam.com works, click here.

3) Feedburner Subscriber Count Surge

I track this closely, and every time my blog appears on TrafficJam.com or I have a blog post that receives a lot of clicks from the BR network, my RSS feed subscription count goes up quite a bit the following 2-3 days.

Now, if you use Feedburner you understand that the subscriber count fluctuates from day to day for various reasons. But usually when I have more than average activity on Blog Rush, my RSS feed count goes up by more than my usual average.

At first I thought it was a coincidence, but I have noticed this pattern at least 4 or 5 times. The most recent example is my blog post about my 6 Figure Income.

That post received an enormous amount of activity throughout the BR network (407 clicks to date), getting my blog a #2 spot on TrafficJam.com for a day last week, and my Feedburner subscription count finally moved from the 800’s to the 900’s.

Coincidence? Maybe. But there’s a part of me that believes it plays a role. Particularly since my blog has a lot of content for other bloggers.

I do believe people who have blogs targeted to other bloggers have a huge advantage with networks like this.

The Bad

1) Clicks Don’t Add Up

In High #2 (above) I mentioned how three of my last seven posts got over 1500 clicks from the Blog Rush network. That sounds amazing, right? Well there’s also something a little fishy about that.

When I check my WordPress traffic stats, you’d think I’d see similar referral traffic from the Blog Rush widget. I don’t. In fact, the numbers aren’t even close.

So that makes me very suspicious about the how these clicks are being recorded and reported.

2) Credit Overload

As a Blog Rush member, you earn credits every time your BR widget is displayed. So the more traffic your blog has, the more credits you’ll earn. You also earn credits from your downline (people you’ve referred to BlogRush).

Those credits you earn are used to display your blog posts on other blogs. That’s how you get traffic.

Since my blog receives a decent amount of traffic and I’ve referred quite a few people, my account has over 154,000 credits.

That may sound great at first, but that number continues to go up and up and up. In other words, I’m earning credits faster than Blog Rush can honor my blog post displays.

The more traffic my blog continues to receive, that number increases and BR gets into more and more credit debt. So BR is having trouble keeping up with growth, and blogs that receive decent traffic get hurt the most — when in reality they should be rewarded.

After all, that’s the whole point of joining a network such as this. I promote them and in return they promote my blog.

3) The Amateur Feel

Free, MLM Traffic programs often scream “Amateur!” to readers. Let’s face it. You don’t see any of the top bloggers using any of these freebie traffic tools do you?

Of course, the argument to that could be they have enough traffic so they don’t need anything like this. Blog Rush can be good for newer blogs trying to get their feet off the ground.

(At least that’s the story I tell myself so I can feel better about using it.) ;)

Nevertheless, I do go back and forth on whether or not I want to continue using it, and that is one of the reasons.

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So as you can see, Blog Rush has its good and bad points. If it weren’t for the numerous comments and emails from other BR users who have subscribed to my feed, I probably would have dropped them by now.

They also need to do a better job of reporting, honoring their credits and answering their support emails.

Although it’s hard to complain too much. After all, they aren’t costing me anything and getting rid of them is as easy as deleting a few lines of code from my blog, right?

Yet, there’s a part of me that wants to stick it out and see how this story plays out.

The founder, John Reese, has a reputation for putting out some good stuff so I’m trying to be patient because I have seen improvements in the program since I first joined.

Don’t let me down, John. I’m remaining patient…

For now. ;)

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