The launch of BlogRush has been a roller coaster… you are sure to see the widget on virtually every blog out there for the near future because of the promise of free traffic to your site in exchange for showing the widget on your own page. But can it really deliver?

I added the widget to this site on monday for a few hours, so that I could collect some "credits" on the Blogrush network and figure out if this thing really works, and answer some of the questions I'm sure everybody has about this new service.

How Many People Click Through?

I added the widget to the site for about 12 hours on monday, where it gathered 22,547 pageviews or "Credits". In addition, 6 people signed up via the referral link, so here's my current credit balance a few days later:

And here's the amount of impressions, or the amount of times my articles have shown up in the widget on other sites:

Only 3 clicks out of 7231 impressions, which is a clickthrough rate of 0.04%, which is just about as low as it could possibly be. But what does Google Analytics say?

Pretty much the same thing… 4 visits via the widget.

The Problem With BlogRush and Post Titles

The widget cuts off your post titles at the 40 character mark. This means that if you want your content to feature well you'll need to use extremely short titles to all your articles, which is the official suggestion on the BlogRush page.

As far as I'm concerned, this is ridiculous. Writing your posts in order to appease a widget is a bad policy, and will only hurt you long-term.

Making BlogRush Succeed for You

The best way that you can make it succeed is to try and refer as many people into the program as you can. That way you will generate credits from their pageviews, and potentially get some decent traffic out of it. It's a pyramid scheme, after all.

Let's take a theoretical instance of a blog that gets 20,000 pageviews a day, and assume that BlogRush can eventually generate a 0.5% clickthrough rate, which is extremely generous given typical clickthrough rates on similar widgets. In this scenario that's a total of 100 daily pageviews through the Blogrush widget.

So we'll take it a step further… imagine that you are a blogger that has referred dozens of other bloggers, and you are getting 100,000 total credits on your account each day through referrals. That's maybe 500 pageviews a day, which is still being generous… but that's what it would take for this to give you a serious benefit.

Chances are most of you aren't running websites that get 600k pageviews a month, and won't benefit much from this widget unless you can refer a lot of people into it.

The Real Answer: Focus on Content, Not Stupid Widgets

In the long run, good content is going to win over any widgets or traffic generating schemes. These types of widgets won't help you much if you don't have good content. Sure, you might find a few extra readers that way, but it's doubtful they will stick around if you don't give them a good reason to.

Becoming a StumbleUpon user would probably be more beneficial if you want to get new visitors to your site quickly.

You Still Want the Widget?

You can get your own free but marginally useful widget if you really want to. Just don't say I didn't warn you =)

Would you, the readers, be interested in more articles about generating traffic to your site?