Saved by the grace of San Isidro(look it up)

I first found out about BlogRush on saturday and when I first placed the widget on the sidebar all of the blog posts that showed up were from feeds not showing the widget, that were there just so early adopters wouldnt start off with an empty widget. I was fine with this afterall it did just launch a few hours ago. My first disappointment though was when I logged into the blogrush dashboard and saw that it was still under construction but it was just launched and I am pretty patient so I was going to give them 48 of the 24-48 hours before I wrote a negative post on them. 48 hours pass and I started this post going to write about how it was bad form to launch without a ready dashboard but the BlogRush team must have been reading my mind because while I typed the first paragraph they finished the stats portion. Which makes me happy because I am now able to write a decent review on BlogRush.

First Days of Stats

Also Digitalorder got 78 impressions in the network resulting in 4 clicks so thats not that bad of a ctr for free traffic.

Saturate the Temper of the Blogosphere
If you have a rough launch, what its the one thing you can do to appease the tempest monster that is the blogosphere? Offer free stuff to your users. This is exactly what BlogRush is doing, BlogRush built their algorithm so 10% of the impressions created by the combined widgets would remain free so BlogRush could make money by selling off those left over credit. As a thank you for adopting BlogRush early they will be splitting all those credits to any blog that signs up early, At the time of this post this offer was still available so Sign Up and take advantage of the extra credits. If you sign-up with my referall code leave a comment so I can send some linklove your ways.

Make the Most of BlogRush

How succesfull BlogRushworks for you to drive traffic to your blog depends heavily on how good of a post title your write. So here are a few good posts to read to help you write good click causing posts.

• Common BlogRush Mistakes
• Why Some People Always Write Good Post Titles?
• How to write headlines even the dead will respond too?
• Writing Effective Attention Getting Headlines
  

Is it Legal?

First I think its so funny whenever someone asks me if a certain something is legal when they really mean to ask if it violates Googles Terms of Service, so yes BlogRush is legal, you wont go to jail for using it ;). Second, BlogRush does not violate any term of Googles I know of, it doesnt transfer link juice as its javascript and its not artificially creating impressions because you only get impressions when a user chooses to click through to read your post.

What will happen next with BlogRush?

I dont think the first stats are very comforting because everyone has way more credits than the system is able to serve, plus all the “A-list bloggers” that have thousands of people referred are able to get their posts displayed with out showing others posts which isnt good for “smaller” blogs.   Also John Reese was talking about alot of features and upgrades he has planned with BlogRush such as being able to customize the look of the widget and a sister site called trafficjam.com. Reese has the money to keep BlogRush running and doing well but we’ll see in a week or two how well BlogRush actually ends up working.

All you need to turn you and everyone else into a walking billboard is a vector of your logo and a good shirt printer.

Creating the Vector

If you created your logo as a vector than your good to go. If your logo is currently in an image format like .jpg, .gif or similiar format than you’re going to have to convert it into a vector format(the links to a tutorial to convert images to vector). Every printer I’ve dealt with has preffered either .ai or .eps so try to get it in one of those formats. Of course the easiest way to get you a vector is do what I did and post on a large webmaster or artist website like digitalpoint or deviantart saying you’ll give $20 to whomever can create a good logo for my company and specify that it must be in vector format. If you already have a logo image you can pay alot less since it only takes a few minutes for an experienced adobier to convert into a vector.

Picking a Printer

The easiest way possible to get a custom shirt printed is to look in the phonebook and drive to your local custom shirt maker, hand him the file or sometimes just a printout of the graphic and say how many, what color and what quality. Of course alot of printers require a minimum order and for people who only need one or two shirts made at a time ordering a gross(144) just isnt cost effective. Which is where companies like Spreadshirt and ShirtCity come into play. They allow you to print your shirts one at a time(spreadshirt does offer bulk discounts as well.) and even sell your shirts to other people on demand.

I use spreadshirt myself to print Penguin Army swag and all the prints have come out great. They also have a huge inventory of all kinds of products. I just found out about shirtcity recently and have yet to order anything from them but they are a bit easier to get a good graphic since they provide graphic service at no charge, to convert your images into vectors.

Heres the latest Penguin Army T-shirt.
Until now Ive just ordered the logo on white so hopefully olive comes out well.

Tip:If you can afford to definently go with the American Apparel T’s as opposed to the
heavy or lightweight cotton, they are alot softer and nicer.

Also if you are going to print shirts in large quantities to hand out and not sell, spreadshirt,shirt city or any online shirt printer wont be the best option. You should deal directly with the printer. The only printer I know of and have bought shirts from is brunettotshirts and for the quality, his prices are very low.

I hope you found this post useful and please send me your experiences if you used one of the two online ones or went to a local printer. Im also interested in seeing what kind of Swag you created.

515 Site Requests - # of page views the adblock on your sites recieved.
9,526 Impressions - # of times your ads appeared on others pages
4 Conversions - # of times your ads been clicked on another users site
16 Clicks - # of times someones clicked the ad on your site
0.04 % CTR - conversions relative to impressions

Now this was when this site didnt get even close to the traffic it currently recieves and for the great value of $0 cpc its definently worth displaying on your site.  I also ran adgridwork on a few of my other ads and with decent ad copy they all got about 1 conversion per 150 site requests.  You can run adgridwork with every ad network so unless you dont want free quality traffic I dont see why anyone wouldn’t use them.

Update#1:they said it would take 2 days to approve my ad and it only took 12 hours.

Update #2: I wasnt getting any clicks with my max bid at .05 so I raised it and found I got good clicks at .30 so with my daily budget a $2 to make it last long I was averaging 10 clicks a day the first week, to try and make the money go farther I lowered my max bid to .25 and we’ll see how well that does.

$20 in FREE Clicks for everyone from BidVertiser - Click Here!