I REMOVED Blogrush

I don't know about you but I removed the Blogrush widget from my blog today. I will give you my reasons below. As you know, I was one of the guys who said that Blogrush was bringing in traffic. Well, it was correct at the same when I said it. However things changed after John Reese began his famous Blogrush slap.

Now, my blog was NOT made inactive. But I have been testing my stats for quite a while and this is what I get to see:

1. I am getting regular visitors from live.com, digg.com, google.com, propeller.com, warriorforum.com and a host of other domains.

2. I am NOT getting any traffic from Blogrush. Traffic from Blogrush stopped right when John Reese decided to roll out a major 'clean-out of splogs' (no offense to him by the way; it is his business, his project and he can do whatever he thinks fit). As far as I have heard, even some legitimate blogs were slapped in the process. Anyway, I am digressing here. The last time I received any visitors from Blogrush was on 19th October, that too, only about 2. Well, I value my blog and for the sake of just one or two visitors every once in awhile, I won't keep a widget for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To me, keeping the widget on my blog any further made no sense. So,

I REMOVED it.

People in the Warrior forum have started ranting against Blogrush sometime ago. But I kept silent, because my aim was to keep an eye on my stats for a certain period of time before taking any decision.

My friend, numbers don't lie. Yes, if I had not checked my stats, then maybe I had blindly believed that Blogrush is still working, that it is still sending me traffic and so on and so forth. But since I test and track my results, I can tell you which domains are bringing me traffic and which are not. And this helps me the other way round as well: I can focus on the domains that are bringing me traffic, and discard the losers.

So, did you get the moral of the story? Always test and track. Always SEE with your own eyes instead of making guesswork. Let me repeat: 'Numbers DON'T lie'. To tell you the truth, I have not placed any Digg widget or any Google widget on my site, still they are bringing me traffic. Do you think you would keep a widget and waste your precious virtual real estate (a.k.a., your blog) without any benefits? I mean, you can do much better by placing a Clickbank affiliate product banner on the same place and make some cash (I have not done it myself because I want to keep my blog ad-free). I forgot to tell you – after I removed the Blogrush widget, my blog is loading faster. :)

Now, if Blogrush is bringing you quality traffic, then fine. But if it is bringing you a few visitors only once in a while, well folks then it is time to get REAL.

Food for thought. I will leave the decision on you.