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Intro

Almost every self hosted or Blogger, English speaking blog in the world seems to be using BlogRush, a JavaScript widget that helps you gain more traffic to your blog. Even some non-English blogs are using it, but that violates the terms of service, also quoted below.

-The blog should be updated on a regular basis (at least several times a month) and should not just go a few months between posts.

- The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted.

- The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs.

- The blog should not contain an excessive amount of advertising and links and very little actual content. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The primary content of the blog should not be “scraped” content from other sources and/or script-generated pages for the sole purpose of search engine rank manipulation. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The blog’s content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.

I’ve come across at least fifty blogs using BlogRush that have violated at least one, and mostly multiple rules. The following tips are meant to be used by BlogRush users that follow the terms of service. I ask that, if you do not follow the terms of service, please go and fix your blog, so that it does, and then come back and make use of the tips. I am now going to go over the common mistakes of BlogRush users and how to fix them.

Maximizing BlogRush

1. Negatively Reviewing BlogRush. This scares your readers. Don’t worry about BlogRush collecting IP information or any other sort of data. It doesn’t do that. Even if it did, though, your ISP is already doing that anyways, so what’s the difference?

2. Quitting on BlogRush, because they haven’t gotten a lot of traffic. BlogRush isn’t designed to bring in a boatload of traffic, it’s designed to bring in good targeted traffic (people who are interested in what you are writing about).

3. Not Including BlogRush on every page. If the people aren’t interested anymore in your content, they are going to leave anyway. So, do yourself a favor and allow them to leave through BlogRush. Everytime someone clicks through BlogRush on your blog, you get more exposure on other blogs’ BlogRush widgets.

4. Hiding BlogRush. If you don’t display BlogRush prominently, no one will click on it on your blog. If no one click on it on your blog, no one will see links to your blog in other blogs’ BlogRush widget. Don’t put it in your footer, put it about midway down your sidebar, and choose a color to match your theme.

5. Using Long Post Titles. BlogRush cuts the title off after 40 characters, so make your title short, sweet, and to the point.

6. Lying In Titles. If you make the title of your post something completely irrelevant, chances are no one, after following the link, will ever visit your blog again.

7. Writing uninteresting titles. No one will click on it if it sounds boring. Juice it up, get creative, that’s what blogging’s all about. Just don’t lie about the article.

7. Adding BlogRush to a blog with no content. This is also lying to the readers. If you have no content when they come, chances are, they won’t come back. Unless your 1st post is darn good. For example, after my first post, I already had 4 RSS subscribers. That’s the most I’ve ever gotten in under 24 hours of starting a blog. Not bad, eh?

9. Making it hard for readers to find their other, “good” content. Use a good Related Post(s) Plug-In, manually do it, or show your Top Posts somewhere. Make sure your readers can find the rest of your good content. If you are not sure, ask a friend, or even better, ask me, I’d be glad to help.

Read Me First

I haven’t been in the blogging business too long, only about six months really, and I have only been really reading a lot of blogs for around a year now, which means I’m still a newcomer to the blogoshpere. But, even someone relatively new on the scene has noticed a huge trend. This trend is a bunch of cluttered blog defacing the web. Some bloggers think that they need every widget, and every link viewable on every page, which is normally done through the sidebar and footer. This can get extremely annoying, especially when the sidebar is cluttered. Now, I refuse to read the blog if it is a royal mess of clutterness. Here are some tips to help you un-clutter your blog:

Unclutter That Sidebar

1. Move the archives to their own “Archives” page. If someone genuinely wants to dig through your blog to look at old posts, then they will follow links for monthly archives. No one wants to see every single post title on every single page of your blog. After a while, that list could get pretty darn long. If you want to show you best posts, then try utilizing a Most Popular Posts Plug-In .

2. Remove unnecessary widgets. This includes social site widgets, recent everything (except posts), widgets, top commenters, Alexa, Blogshares, Calendars, and all the rest of them.

3. Consolidate your RSS Feed Buttons. Remove all the “Subscribe using (specific service here), and just use one, generic subscribe button. If you must, though, choose your favorite service, and include put it in there, but remember, only one.

4. Cut down the blogroll, or cut it out. Move it to its own page if it includes over 8 links. If anyone is interested in looking at it, then they will go to that page.

5. Remove the “Meta”. Unless you have a multitude of people logging into your blog, no one will miss this.

6. Keep your category list small. Somewhere around 10 is a good number. Always strive for under 20, because the longer the list, the more your blog will look like it is jumping around from topic to topic.

7. Remove “spam blocked” counts. The readers don’t care how mush spam Akismet has blocked, they just don’t. Everyone who downloads WordPress gets this anyway, so it doesn’t need any extra advertising from you.

8. Remove e-mail subscription forms. Lots of readers, including myself, have confused these with search boxes, and popped in a search only to get an “invalid email address”. Barely anyone uses email anyway, just ride that RSS train.

9. Choose a category cloud or category list. Using both takes up too much space and is just redundant, avoid using both at all costs.

10. Remove buttons and badges for other sites. They will go great on your blogroll’s page, which you probably made after reading #4.

Final Comments

I hope you found these tips useful, and if you have any more tips, please share them with me and the rest of the readers.