502-442-7914 howdy@nowsourcing.com

Does BlogRush’s Phase 2 Halloween Candy Suck?

Blogrush Phase II has been unveiled this HalloweenBlogrush has just released the long awaited Phase II, on Halloween no less. I knew that their orange and black color scheme was no coincidence 🙂

And I must say, the upgrade isn’t half bad. Maybe I’m just saying that because I was sick of seeing that work in progress graphic and partial stats, but some of the new tools in here make Blogrush appear to be worth a second look.

When you login to the new version, you will see a link to the walkthrough video of Phase 2. If you don’t feel like sitting through a 20 minute video, I’ve put together a summary of what I thought the best features are. By no means is this an exhaustive list, but here we go:

Improved Dashboard

There are now cleaner graphs representing your traffic as well as your referral traffic. What I like best about the dashboard is a report on your most recent posts:

Blogrush recent posts show how hot your posts are compared to others in your niche.

These stats show how many impressions and readers each of your posts have had, as well as a buzz measurement. This buzz is based off of how popular your story was in relation to other stories from all BlogRush bloggers in you niche. It isn’t 100% clear where all the data comes from on this, but it is an interesting concept. Perhaps it can shed a little light for you to see which of your blog post titles are most effective to the BlogRush audience.

There is also a reports page for you to drill down and see traffic under the date range of your choice. Andy Beard had a great statistical post about Blogrush traffic before, and I hope he does more analysis now that Phase 2 has rolled out.

 

Filters

Blogrush control filter

Unless I missed this one before, you now have the ability to filter out specific posts from your blog. This is good if you post an occasional off topic to your readership. Would have worked nicely when I was writing about the Lymphoma benefit party at SMX New York.

Future Improvements

Some things that I’d still like to see come out of Blogrush:

  • Automatic split testing
  • Ability to monitor activity for more than one blog through a single Blogrush account
  • Ability to change blog URL (can change feed URL)
  • Actual Traffic! 🙂
  • Ability to download stats to csv for more data manipulation
  • Clarification on what credits will actually do, and the point of bonus credits.
  • These questions aren’t really addressed in the FAQ.

    It looks like the jury is still out on Blogrush. Now, I turn the question to you, the reader – does their Phase II candy suck?

    2 Comments

    1. iantrepreneur

      blog rush hmm…….I am letting my referrers do my syndication credits and it is still a solid system – yet u need a good title to get users to bit and maybe even placement of the widget – I like the new redesign and the new phase, but I do not think I will still be writing about it or using it on my blog

    2. brian

      @iantrepreneur: good info. Jury’s still out on it for me too. Sometimes I think more traffic comes from writing about BlogRush than BlogRush itself 🙂