The idea is that each BlogRush widget displayed earns you a syndication credit, which in turn earns you a reciprocal ‘widget view’ on another blog within your category. As far as I’m aware, traffic is NOT guaranteed. You’d still need to put some effort to come up with a great headline and quality content.

What’s blogging maestro Jim Kukral’s bone of contention with BlogRush? Read: Don’t Waste Time With BlogRush, It Won’t Work.

Jim’s point about low traffic blogs not benefitting from the network (which functions as a type of exchange) is certainly valid (and likely not to get much traffic)…Unless you’re buying credits as John points out in the comments section of “BlogRush is a smart idea, for John Reese”

BlogRush works well as a cornerstone lead generation for John’s Income project – It builds a huge database of prospects who are pre-qualified as wanting to blog and possibly wanting to make some Internet income.

If anything, BlogRush is the Yahoo! MyBlogLog’s social networking widget blown up to close to its commercial potential.

Rather than adopt the follow-me implementation of BlogCatalog, it’s leaped light years ahead in terms of feeding into the traffic/money making impulse of some bloggers.

The network-marketing element comes in where you build a downline up to 10 generations deep and they help you build traffic in the same way blog traffic syndicator BlogExplosion (of which I’m a member) helps you build credit.

This obviously has had some greedy Internet Marketers foaming at the mouth and firing unrelenting salvoes to their list, pushing the benefit of “free traffic”. [Do note that of the two dimensions – I think traffic quality is much more desirable than traffic quantity alone.] – I don’t have a gripe if you understand it and have actually used it. But as a list owner, if you’re merely promoting it in the hopes of getting traffic and because a big name is promoting it (rather than because you want to help your list members), you’re not putting your lists’ interests first…

While you might certainly get traffic by “doing nothing” as the BlogRush ads claim, I doubt you’d get more than a trickle if you really “do nothing”. You might as well set up a PayPal account and hope that some dummy accidentally transfers funds to the wrong account.

–

So we’re back to looking at BlogRush – It could be worth looking at if you aren’t already active in other communities such as MyBlogLog or PlugIM or BumpZee. I don’t think you should spread yourself further than 3 networks (seems silly to join 10 networks and never have time to participate in any of them actively).

I’d suggest that if you are serious about building your brand and expanding your content distribution, you will get better mileage out of applying to and getting accepted at a top-tier blog network like 9Rules,B5Media, Gawker or one of the established networks listed over at Blog Network List.

Or over at my friend and blogging supremo Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind.

If you’re not willing to put in some effort to generate the right kind of traffic, then I guess it doesn’t really matter which widget you put on your blog…

Laura attended the inaugural Elite Retreat and has been very successful in her brick-and-mortar computer business and is also owner of the popular NotebookForums site too.

Besides having 3 sweet kids (her 5 year old plays a mean game of warcraft), she’s pretty tech savvy.

Check out her blog:

Laura Alter’s blog

Laura’s got one of the prettiest WordPress templates I’ve seen and Matt Brett (a fellow 9rules member) did a great job on it.

If you need inspiration for your own Internet Marketing efforts, read Laura’s post “PC Torque – $25 million in 4 years“

Here’s a post from a 9rules Notes thread about 9rules Round 6 from the 9rules Head Honcho himself:

Round 6 has the “potential” to occur in April-May or maybe even March. Voting for this contest is open only to 9rules Members and will take place in the private forums.

See: 9rules Round 5 Contest

Keen to get into the highest valued blog network (a cool $72m) as rated by the BlogNetworkList?

Check out 9rules profile here: 9rules Blog Network details.

What I like about being in 9rules and especially the Marketing and Business communities is the access to a network of peers who’re on the same wavelength.

If you’re keen on getting in, here’s what I think helped me land a place:

• Strong Content

Focusing on quality content that will have your readers coming back for more. If you’ve already developed a readership base and they find your information useful, you’re already on your path to going to the next level. Membership in a blog network helps accelerate that process.

• Interaction

Although a blog is a personal publishing platform, the key difference I see between a content website and a blog is the ease of conducting a dialogue with your readership base. Often the comments add value to the original post and provide opportunities for further discussion, possibly springboarding into more posts (which are relevant to your readers interests).

• Never Stop Learning

Way back in 2003, 9rules was founded on 9, er, rules.

Rule #2: Never Stop Learning.

Blogs like people, evolve over time, and as you check out many of the 9rules blogs, you’d notice them evolving over time as you get inspired and sometimes you inspire others in turn.

—

Here’s a tip for potential 9rules bloggers, update your blog regularly (That’s a tip from Boss Scrivs and Community Director Tyme White during their ScrivsTyme podcast #127).

The blogs which’ll make the cut are likely to be regularly updated and likely there’ll be a 1 week notice period when the round’s announced.

Good luck.

Quite a number of my 9rules compatriots have taken part in the meme project and we have a nice discussion going on on Michael’s blog.

Check out:

• Rashenbo’s What will 2007 hold for bloggers?

Read the post to find out why you might be seeing “a lot of dead blogs” in June. And whether you agree or disagree, leave a comment on the post.

—

• Michael Ono’s 2007 Year of the Blog: Predictions, Trends and Memes

Michael is a community leader for the 9rules Anime Community and knows just about everything when it comes to Japanese Animation. Michael is pretty ace when it comes to blogging and swung for the fences in coming up with his post.

Is all well in technorati-land? Check out Michael’s post and take note of the conversation in the comments.

—

• Tony’s weighed in with Blog Predictions for 2007 – Blogs as Resume

Will blogs end up as merely personal journals? Or continue as publishing platforms between authors and the rest of the world? Give Tony your 2 cents.

—

• David James Peralty’s (AKA David Cubed) 2007 Blogging Trends Predictions Meme

Contains some insider info from Automattic, the creators of WordPress. You are warned.

—

• Aidan Henry’s Blogging Predictions for 2007

Predictions about the blogosphere this year: Perception shifts, bridging gaps, deeper niches, more full timers and a load of new blogging tools. Check out his post.

—

Confused?

Check out what this meme thing is all about at:

–> Blog Predictions 2007 – An Internet Meme

Do include the trackback to the original post, so readers can follow the multitude of weird and wonderful posts.

To keep the ball rolling, I further tag:

• Dylan Loh
• Michelle Macphearson
• John Tan
• TofuMonkey
• Ashish Mohta

There’s a fair amount of link love going around.

What a great way to start the year.

Far from dying, there’s a resurgence in blogging, judging by the flow of private equity and growth of blog networks.

Just look at the nearly 1,200 submissions for the Round 5 submissions for the 9rules Blog Network or check the stats at the Blog Network List. Darren Rowse’s b5media blog network got a nice chunk of capital funding too.

2007 will see a further evolution of blogging as we know it.

Perhaps ‘blogging’ (a truncation of weblog) may evolve as a term to fully encompass what it represents.

Here’re 4 trends I see this year.

• Offline to Online Content Migration

Even without Amazon and Google’s efforts to digitize content for the Internet, a multitude of content publishers are bringing more content online every day.

Besides info portals, such as About.com and Wikipedia, individuals bloggers are blogging about their pet topics.

Aside from quoting online news sources, bloggers often cite print media, cable television, movies and other old line media (I guess this year someone will start call it media 1.0?). During this process, it’s inevitable that more content will migrate from a paper-based medium to an electronic one.

It only means that the online will will only continue to get more info-rich.

At the same time, it also means that third world countries where dial-up Internet connections (remember those?) at speeds of 28.8 kbps (that’s kilobits, not megabits) will only get further stratified by the digital divide.
Beyond food, water and shelter, the info-rich online environment will provide an opportunity to accelerate progress in the developing world.

• Blog Income Monetization Opportunities Increase

Bloggers increasingly have a number of options to generate income from their blogs.

Options like Google Adsense publishing, paid content posting (from the likes of PayPerPost), banners and text links, affiliate marketing and CPA networks, provide options for bloggers to go beyond just posting on a ‘passion’ (ie unpaid) basis to considering blogging as an alternative to a 9-to-5 job.

For newer bloggers however, it will take some time before they get their rhythmn going.

And I’d still advice newer bloggers to build up good content and develop a following before cramming as much adsense and banners on your blogs.

These monetization strategies generally require planning to create quality content, effectively publicize your blog, generate sufficient viewership and readership numbers, to successfully create a decent income from your blogging efforts.

Most bloggers will be able to generable a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dollars worth of blogging-related income once they learn the ropes. But to step up to the next level of a professional blogger, it’ll require effective blogging strategies. (For which I’m currently developing products to address those needs).

• Blogging Goes The Rich Media Route

Perhaps it’s due to it’s traditional association with maintaining an online diary, but blogging still remains very text-based. You might sometimes get the occassional graphic or photo accompanying the posts.

To date, the number of blogs with audio or video still remains quite low. In fact, a number of blog directories have dropped the vlog (or video blog) category altogether this year, due to underwhelming demand.

Attaching a video from YouTube can sometimes be a bugbear (even if it’s as simple as pasting HTML code into your blog).

Plus, you’ve probably encountered the ‘bandwidth traffic jam’ which hits many of these video hosting sites at peak hours.
In the coming year, we might see more Internet bandwidth expanding as Internet Service Providers buy bigger chunks of bandwidth, and increase bandwidth to the video service providers.

We might even see new video caching services available which will help ease the video bandwidth bottleneck.

As for the immediate future, podcasting looks like it has the next lowest barrier of entry, especially as bloggers become more adept at audio applications like Audacity.

Looking for inspiration? Check out Webmaster Radio

• RSS Goes Mainstream

Email went mainstream approximately in the mid 1990s, when email addresses started appearing on business cards, despite the fact that email has been around since the 1960s.

The predecessors to RSS (really simple syndication) were developed in the mid-1990s. And although push-type services like BackWeb and Pointcast were a little ahead of the curve, bloggers are among the early adopters of RSS services.

To date most casual Internet surfers have no idea what RSS is, much less how to subscribe to a RSS feed. (You could’ve included me in that category about half a year ago).

Added to that is the fact that RSS readers tended to be web-based or required third party applications to access. Which makes RSS a mess for most net surfers to get into.

Will 2007 be the year that RSS readers become more user friendly? (I still have problems successfully subscribing to Atom and RSS feeds sometimes)

Here’s a thought, if all email clients supported RSS feeds and even better, RSS appeared as almost indistinguishable from email, wouldn’t we see widespread adoption of RSS?

—

The Blogging Predictions 2007 meme

Those were my blogging predictions for 2007 and I intended to launch an Internet meme off this post.

(check out the classic Leeroy Jenkins World of Warcraft Internet meme. Avoid if you’re offended by gamer vulgarity)

Here’s the meme topic: What’re your Blogging Predictions in 2007? (Include your top prediction or a selection of your expected trends)

How to play:

1. Blog about the meme topic
2. Include a trackback to this post at: –> Blog Predictions 2007 Meme Trackback
3. Pass it on to another 5 bloggers.

Come back here and check out the trackbacks for the link madness. What better way to start out 2007, eh?
To kick things off, I’ll send this to a selection of 20 blogs:

1. 9rules Network Official Blog
2. Darren Rowse AKA Problogger
3. Yaro Starak – Entrepreneur’s Journey
4. Apogee Weblog
5. Rachit Dayal
6. Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney
7. Andrea Schoemaker AKA PlanetAndrea
8. Neil Patel
9. RumblePup
10. Robyn Tippins AKA Sleepyblogger
11. Chris Hooley – ThinkBait
12. Michael Gray – Graywolf
13. Andy Beard
14. Scott Jangro
15. Kevin Nair
16. Shawn Collins
17. Steven Wong
18. Gobala Krishnan
19. Rashenbo
20. Dazzling Girl

And lest I forget, the TickMe bloggers crew:

which includes fellow 9ruler Cameron Olthuis

hmm…this is almost too much work for the new year…

PS: If you’d like to play, do your own meme post and trackback to: Internet meme trackback

PPS: Meme project updates can be found at: Blogging Meme Reloaded

2006 was an interesting time for me as I plunged into Internet Marketing.

Although I didn’t have a clear idea in the beginning, it was very clear that the path of least resistance would be to go with blogging.

In the course of the last 5 months, I’ve had a series of interesting experiences and the questions I’ve dealt with appear to be common with all new bloggers, whether the questions originate from a blog, a forum, a blog network or a social networking site.

Here’s 2006 in retrospective in a FAQ format with money making tips and 7 Reality Checks for bloggers and internet marketers.

• Blogging Reality Check 1: Making Money from Blogging is Evil

I’m not sure of the intent of this often heard objection.

I guess some might have ‘pure/purist intentions’ and expect that blogging is some form of ‘cathartic release’ for heavy/philosophical/ponderous thinking.

I see blogging as a form of personal journalism. And journalists have to eat.

Like it or not, the reason why your newspaper or magazine doesn’t cost $100 a copy is because it’s sponsored by advertisements and the classifieds. Likewise, blogs can be financially self-sustaining through adsense, affiliate marketing and other monetization strategies.

Expecting bloggers to provide free content is akin to expecting musicians to provide music free of charge.

It takes time and resources to produce blog content and there is a measurable value to it.

In a utopian society, writers, artists, musicians would be able to freely practise their craft without fear of finding their next meal. We don’t live in that world yet.

• Blogging Reality Check 2: I Will Make Millions Overnight

On the other extreme, I have spoken to bloggers who expect to make huge sums of money overnight.

It’s unlikely to happen unless you are some sort of celebrity, likely a mega celebrity if you’re planning to bring in the megabucks.

If you are not however, it’s time to face a reality check.

We’ve also heard about products or software that can automatically build blogs by the hundreds every hour, and we’ve also heard about how if each blog earns a dollar each day, you’d be earning thousands of dollars in your sleep.

While you might have some degree of success using these blogging-related “quick buck” schemes, it might not necessarily be sustainable (ie you are ‘de-indexed’ and disappear from the search engine results, or your ‘innovative’ monetization exploit is soon negated.) It then becomes a mad rush for the next “black hat template” or the next automated, broadband-enabled, stealth, power-enhanced, web2.0-enabled, ajax-enhanced, php-powered widget.

Rinse and repeat until it gets disabled by one of the higher power. (see above paragraph)
If you are a serious blogger for which blogging is a long term strategy to help you achieve your goals, here’s what I would advise you to do.

Think of your blog as a business tool. Consider:

• How does it fit in with your adsense or affiliate marketing plan?
• How would you go about establish trust and credibility for your business.
• Who would your strategic partners be.
• How are you building your “me” brand?

• Blogging Reality Check 3: Free Tools and Services

New Internet Marketers ask me this all the time: “What are the free tools we can use besides blogger/blogspot to growing our blogging efforts.”

I’d add to the list of useful tools such as GIMP, PingOat, Squidoo.

What troubles me however, is that some who aspire to earn online income aim to do it only using free tools.

I think you could probably earn $50-$100 per month using free tools, and if you’re good earn maybe $500.

Beyond that could be highly challenging. I guess if you put your mind to it, you could come up with very interesting business models.

For the vast majority of us however, I’d advise counting the value of your time.

Sure you could surf 1,000 websites and gather the same information, or as one participant at the World Internet Summit said to me, I can just google for everything, I don’t need to buy anything (which was weird because he invested in a World Internet Summit ticket…)

To build a sustainable business, you need to value your time.

Is your time worth $5 an hour? $10? $50? $500? $5,000?

If your time is worth more than the cost of the product or service, you’d be foolish not to subscribe or invest in the product.

Even if your time was worth $1 per hour, I couldn’t see how it’d make sense to manually maintain a mailing list of 1,000 and send them emails on a bi-weekly basis.

I use a combination of free and paid tools and you’d generally be able to tell the difference between the two.

If you have the mindset of starting and operating a business, your tools will generate many times their investment for you.

Some of the useful tools which outweigh their investment include:

• Secret Blog Weapon (Blog Optimization)
• Ultimate Affiliate Weapon (Affiliate Marketing)
• Bluehost web hosting
• Autoresponder: Aweber / GetResponse

Once you have these fundamentals in place, you’d find that building your business is much easier.

• Blogging Reality Check 4: It Takes Tough Times

It’s taken 4 months to get to the stage I’m currently at.

Although I’d have preferred to get here within a week of starting up, building a business, blogging-based or otherwise is as much about the process of getting to your goal, as much as merely achieving it.

As you’re building your blogging business you will encounter setbacks, perhaps days in which your visitor numbers or income drop drastically.

Here’s something that people don’t often talk about.

The measure of a mature blogger is not what happens when good times are rolling, but what you do when things go south.

Do you merely throw in the towel? Do you kick your efforts up a notch?

Often the most spectacular successes are built on the backs of the most dismal circumstances.

Look at the rise of Japan after the Second World War, or Apple after an ousted Steve Jobs rejoined and the company’s fortunes turned not once, but numerous times with the launch of the MacIntosh, the iMac and the iPod.

If you’ve watched real life events unfold during 9-11, you’d know that true heroes are forged in the moments of greatest adversity.

A couple of months ago, I blogged about: Are you ready to give up on Internet Marketing?

It’s still relevant now. Perhaps more so.

Some people seek to avoid difficulty and challenges, others actively seek it.

Which are you?

• Blogging Reality Check 5: I Will Make Millions Overnight

Are you an ‘everything under the sun’ blogger?

If you are one of the myriad of blogger who blogs about “internet marketing”, “health and fitness” or “women’s issues”, you could be biting off more than you can chew.

Catchall blogs work best if they’re run by a panel of bloggers (sometimes as many as 10), or by especially prolific bloggers.

If you’re specializing in everything, you’re specializing in nothing.

Finding your niche and entrenching yourself deeply in it means that your position is virtually unassailable.

If you do choose to tackle “internet marketing”, maybe you want to niche it by focusing on “internet marketing for high school students”, “internet marketing for midcareer professionals” or “internet marketing for single mothers”.

The brick and mortar businesses have moved towards speciality stores, rather than general concept stores (with Wal Mart being one of the few exceptions). Likewise, becoming a niche specialist helps you expand from a position of power.

Blogging Reality Check 6: Build A Community

When you’re starting out, you might be working in isolation.

If you’re fortunate, you might be able to tap into a community. By tapping into these resources, you gain significant leverage as you’re expanding your efforts.

“Leverage”, comes in a few flavors. There’s technological leverage that a software or tool can help by automating your efforts. But far more powerful is social leverage or people-oriented leverage.

And social leverage can easily move mountains.

During the launch of Russell Brunson’s Conquer Your Niche Internet Marketing forum, the site’s traffic went off the charts.

Other sites I frequently visit include:

Forums such as:

• Warrior Forum
• Digital Point
• Digital Keiretsu

Blogs such as:

• Shoemoney
• ProBlogger
• PlanetAndrea
• 9rules Blog Network (of which I am a member)

At it’s simplest, I believe build a community is nothing more than making friends, and I appreciate the opportunities to interact with the likes of Ewen Chia, Jo Han Mok, Social Media specialist Michelle MacPhearson, and my buddies Ryan Chua and Rachit Dayal.

Blogging Reality Check 7: Change the World

This is probably the most important step.

Have a focus bigger than yourself.

You don’t necessarily need to choose ‘world peace’, but you want your blogging efforts to mean more than pounding out 300-700 words every 24 hours, inserting a few photos and hitting the publish button.

We need meaning to keep going.

Meaning is the glue that creates our motivation.

We all have 24 hours a day, and we can choose to spend that time focusing on big project, or on small projects.

When you embrace something huge, something weird happens to your thinking too, it expands.

Your world view blows up and suddenly your universe is not just your neighbourhood, or the people in your village, city, state or country.

If you’re seeing and blogging through the eyes of a world citizen, life (business or personal) can only continue to be a rich canvas to blog about.

A little juvenile, but that was my reaction when I checked my email this morning.

9rules Network Community Director Tyme White dropped me an email with details of my acceptance into 9rules.

I have to thank Kloudiia for informing me of 9rules’ Round 5 admissions as I was busy with projects at that time and squeezed in my entry in the late hours (I think my entry was submitted 2 hours before closing).

The 9rules team must’ve had a Herculean task sifting through the 1191 entries for round 5, and kudos to Tyme, Mike and Scrivs for squeezing this out before Christmas. (I think the suspense might’ve been too much to bear).

9rules continues ranks at the top of Blog Network List’s rankings by value:

And that valuation can be expected to increase at the end of Round 5.

—

I was reflecting on the value of joining a blog network and beyond just the increase in traffic, what’ll be interesting and important for me will be:

• Community: While there’re bloggers who blog their thoughts in isolation (perhaps as a form of catharsis), the bulk of bloggers will blog to be read. And to network with a community of your peers will help bring a different slant to your blogging. Besides ‘being’ a part of the community, I believe bloggers will actively ‘shape’ the community too.
• Learning: Each blogger brings something different to the table, whether it’s a perspective, or a technique, a paradigm or a set of principles. As blogging cuts across geographical, social and cultural divides, there are ample opportunities for cross pollination of ideas. And a single idea can change the world.
• Guilty by Association: I’d been reading Neil Patel’s blog and listened to a broadcast of Shoemoney’s Net Income show where Jeremy interviewed Neil. And I realized ProNet Advertising’s on 9rules Marketing community too (I must’ve been too focused on the content to see the 9rules leaf icon…). On another note, I’ve been deeply influenced by Guy Kawasaki’s books, Selling the Dream, Rules for Revolutionaires and my wife came back from Atlanta with my copy of the Art of the Start. His blog (also a 9rules blog!) is located at: Guy Kawasaki

I have the feeling that there’ll be some interesting blogging days ahead.

See you on the inside.

I’m more than 3/4 through the list (first pass). That’s when I bumped into some serious organization problems. What worked with 700 sites doesn’t work with 1191 so…thanks to Scrivs helping me out today, Tyme is more organized.

My goal is to finish the first pass this weekend, start the second pass (smaller) by Tues.

—

It certainly is a mammoth task sifting through 1191 blog entries, especially since the near doubling of entries since the last round.

I’ve enjoyed visiting the 9Rules blogs as they’ve managed to maintain a community atmosphere and there’s a sense of camaraderie among the bloggers. (to the extent that founder Scrivs feels comfortable to wear funny hats for his Halloween greetings message: Happy Halloween)

I think the 9Rules crew will have to start boosting their numbers soon, and the challenge will be maintaining the ‘home’ feel to the community.

But that’s a happy growing pain, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, I’ll keeping my fingers crossed about my blog submission.

Even after the buzz at the conclusion of round 5, which had a whopper 1,190 blogs being submitted for inclusion into the content network, things are still humming along.

9Rules blog submissions received for Round 1 to 5: Up and up!

And if you’ve submitted your blog for inclusion, Mike Rundle in his 9Rules Round 5 Analysis points out: Traditionally we’ve added between 8-16% of the total number of submissions to 9rules, so if that holds true then “you can assume” we’ll pick about 160 blogs this time (though it’s all up in the air at the moment).

That’s encouraging. Results expected by the end of this week.

But wait…What’re the 9Rules anyway?

The original rules (circa 2003) are:

1. Love what you do: [After all, if you’re not enjoying it, why do it?]
2. Never stop learning: [On the Internet, the power of your mind truly manifests itself]
3. Form works with function: [One must follow the other, musn’t it?]
4. Simple is beautiful: [A polite way of saying, keep it simple, stupid!]
5. Work hard, play hard: [100% commitment to all things]
6. You get what you pay for: [It really shows!]
7. When you talk, we listen: [Communication is a 2-way street, isn’t it?]
8. Must constantly improve: [Similar to (2), though the ‘Must’ is an imperative]
9. Respect your inspiration: [And it will continue to inspire you time and time again]

Note: comments in the [brackets] are my interpretation of them.

What’s yours?

9 simple rules, still equally valid three years down the road.

Like to be continually inspired by the 9Rules?

Install: The Nine Rules WordPress Plugin

But you might have a chance to slip in before the door slams shut.

Blogging network 9rules has opened a 24 hour window to accept new submissions into it’s network.

The benefits?

If accepted, you can expect greater exposure and access to an established blog network.

They’ve a whole bunch of categories and have gone as far to be open to new category suggestions.

For more info, check out: 9rules Round 5: October 25th

It’s only open for a 24 hour window and I’m not sure which time zone they’re in, so you should submit your entry now.

Here’s the submission link: Submit to 9rules:Round 5

Good luck!