Comments on: MyBloglog, Romlet or BlogRush?

By: Andy Roberts

Andy Roberts — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 12:34:46 +0000

Aha, threaded comments!

By: Andy Roberts

Andy Roberts — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:18:06 +0000

Thanks for the comments about MyBlogLog, ROMlet and BlogRush everyone. I’m still unsure about BlogRush myself. The “coming in 24-48hrs” message has gone and now I have a big red square that says I have ZERO referrals and yet I know for a fact that one person signed up through me. So put a note about that in the Facebook group

Jack, I don’t remember Autoroll or WayPath but I do remember when technorati tags and blogrolls sort of fulfilled the function of bringing related blogs together a bit. The internet doesn’t really need re-inventing.

Urbanist, thanks for the tip about excluding search engines from ROMlet. I decided to try that but it hasn’t worked through yet. Actually, I am quite interested in tracking the keyphrases but there are other ways.

By: CHESSNOID

CHESSNOID — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:15:18 +0000

I am using all 3 at the current time. MBL gives me regular referral readers who revisit. Romlet seems to give me new users but not as many as MBL for now. They do seem to be referring more lately. And Blogrush I signed up for and still waiting to see and traffic from them. Good post.

By: Urbanist

Urbanist — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:49:28 +0000

MyBlogLog: definitely established and good for seeing who has visited - though you’re right: it’s a pain to track back through multiple steps sometimes. Still, they have grown it well over time to have more and more creative and interactive back-end features.

Romlet: to my mind more valuable for me personally than for my visitors per say - I look at it daily to see if there are new sources of referring traffic, which in turns helps me ‘thank’ referrers and generally learn more (and more quickly) who is linking to me. Judging from all of your Google traffic, you may wish to generate a new Romlet widget without search engines (that’s an option in the generator) so it display only link-based refferals. I see Romlet as more of a companion widget to MBL than competitor - one shows visitors, the other referrers - both are valuable kinds of info.

BlogRush: check out Onemansblog.com for a scathing review - I and others have tried out the widget only to find that the sites being linked to are either (1) scammy/spammy and/or (2) most of the time they don’t even have the widget themselves, so they are somehow gaming the system and ending up on other peoples’ BlogRush widgets without sending any traffic back into the system. Basically, if you do try it: be sure that the sites on it are also displaying the widget. Also figure: if they all do what most will do and bury the widget down low on their sites, even if they are showing the widget it will likely have terribly low CTR.

By: Jack Vinson

Jack Vinson — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:43:43 +0000

Did you ever seen AutoRoll from Criteo (http://widget.criteo.com/)? It was intended to bring back links related to your blog and BlogRush reminds me of it. BlogRush has the added multi-level-marketing aspect that AutoRoll didn’t have.

I tested AutoRoll for about a month and never found that it offered fully-compatible references to the topic of my blog. The idea goes back even further. Remember WayPath? They had a article-based tool that would gather similar articles from the blogosphere. (I think they had a whole-blog gizmo too.)

By: Steph White

Steph White — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:55:41 +0000

Completely agree with you Andy, MyBlogLog is awesome!

I haven’t come across ROMlet, but I’m giving BlogRush a whirl to see what sort of traffic it can deliver. As many bloggers have commented already, too many of these widgets are a flash in the pan.

I wonder, if BlogRush had come from someone other than the mighty John Reese, would the buzz have been quite so explosive? lol

Cheers,
Steph.