For anybody that runs a website, the biggest news recently was the launch of a new "Widget" for your blog that would give you free traffic: For every pageview of the widget on your blog, you get one "credit" for your blog items to be shown in the widget on other blogs. You also earn credits for referrals to their service.

Those of you who are faithful readers of this site know that I despise widgets, and you might even notice that I've disabled ads on new articles for the first day. I believe in simple, clean designs that focus on good content, and sadly this widget has no customization options:

So why am I writing about this, especially on a How-To site? Glad you asked! I'm curious exactly how well this works, so I'm adding the widget to my sidebar for a few days so I can answer these questions:

How Many People Click Through?

I'm going to track this using Google Analytics… I added the widget at 2am EST time, so I should be able to get an accurate reading on how many views the widget has generated. I should also be able to see in a few days how many referrals are coming through.

Can I "Buy" Traffic to My Smaller Blog Using My Bigger Blog's Pageviews?

To me, the most interesting feature of this widget is that you can have multiple blogs that share the "credits" on your account. Theoretically this could be used to drive traffic to your smaller blog by using the pageviews on your bigger blog to "buy" traffic, if you have more than one blog.

I'm going to test this using my personal blog, which barely gets any traffic in comparison to the main How-To Geek site.

I'd think that using links within a blog post or article would be a better way to send traffic to your other blogs, but that might not always be feasible if your blogs are on completely different subjects.

But BlogRush sounds like a Pyramid Scheme?

It really does sound like one. For instance, you earn 1:1 credits for pageviews from each site that you refer, and then 1:4 for any sites that they refer, and a few levels further down.

I suspect that the really big how-to blogging sites will clean up when it comes to this. For instance, I used the referral link from Problogger, which means he's earning a ton of credits from my experiment on this site, and he'd also earn more credits if anybody signs up using the referral links on this page.

Side Note: Darren Rowse from Problogger has the best site anywhere on running a website, and in my few interactions with him, he's also a great guy. If you are running a website, subscribe to his feed. In fact, you should use his referral links to sign up for BlogRush.

Will BlogRush Visitors Stick Around?

While the idea of free traffic is fun, are the visitors coming through a click on a widget actually going to stick around, or more importantly, become subscribers?

Tracking new subscribers will be difficult, but should be more easy to do on a smaller blog like my personal one.

Tracking how much the visitors stick around, on the other hand, will be easy if you are using Google Analytics. Go to the Referring Sites report, select the BlogRush referrals, and you should see something similar to this.

Note: These are not referrals from BlogRush, it's just an example.

Here you can track how many pages per visit, the bounce rate and the average time on the site.

How Do I Get a Widget?

You can get your own BlogRush widget for free at their site. Note: All links in this article were referral links.

Conclusions

I'll post the results of my experiment in a couple days, but I don't think I'm going to keep the widget around after that, because it's cluttering up the joint.

Update: I removed the widget… we sent 20k pageviews to it so far, which should be enough to test out whether it's worthwhile. I'll update again in a day or so and see if any traffic comes through.