If you're a regular reader, you may have noticed the BlogRush widget that had appeared on the right hand side of the page. You may also notice that it's now gone. It seemed like it had a decent chance at bringing in traffic, but now that I've played around with it, I've decided that it's ultimately useless.

The Flaw

To participate in BlogRush (I'm just going to refer to at as "BR" for the rest of the post) you just sign up and add their widget to your page. This widget displays links to 5 posts of other BR users, and each time it's displayed, a link to one of your posts gets displayed on someone else's widget. Sound good? Yep, but the conversion rate is going to be horrible for a couple of reasons. First, you have a widget that almost resembles an ad of some sort, and most people have trained themselves to just overlook these. Second, and this is huge, most of the widgets I've seen are placed near the end of the page – a reader isn't even going to see your link in most cases.

Bugs

There's still a lot of stuff that they have to iron out before I would even consider the service usable. The reporting is screwed up, plain and simple. My stats show about 14 people coming to my site through the BR widget, their stats list 1 click-through.

Somehow I've managed to earn a negative credit for having my posts displayed on other widgets – why would I want to display something that's penalizing me for some reason? All my traffic is legitimate, but I think whatever anti-cheating measures they've implemented are docking me credits for some reason.. which means it's probably happening to quite a few other smaller blogs that are just looking for a few more readers.

Readers

You guys. I've seen some links displayed that are to some questionable/offensive content. That reflects on me and my credibility, and it's important to me that I earn and keep your trust. Having my efforts undermined in an attempt to get more traffic just isn't worth it. It should also speed up the load times for you (slightly) which is always good.

Am I wrong?

Are you using BR and have had a better experience and better results with it? I doubt there are many (any?) of you, but I'd like to hear from you if you exist.