I eagerly awaited the promised new blog categories at BlogRush. Now I’m really disappointed! The new categories have really hurt some of my blogs. As bad a fit as some of the overly general categories used to be, some of my blogs no longer fit into the new BlogRush category scheme at all!

Why Should We Care About BlogRush Categories?

BlogRush now apparently filters your posts and decides whether or not to sydicate them. So if you categorize your blog as being about, say, Painting, and you make a post that is mainly about drawing (which of course is an important aspect of most paintings), your post may not be syndicated (listed in the BlogRush widget). As near as I can tell, it would now be considered to be off topic!

By getting too specific with categories (and get rid of general categories as an option), they are crippling the more general blogs and also the specialized blogs that do not fit into BlogRush’s new, very narrow specific categories. Following are examples from my own experience.

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It’s not enough to design and write a great blog. You still have to promote it. Preferably you should promote it in as many cost- and time-saving ways as you can, as long as they are legal, are search engine safe, and they work.

One of the best, proven ways to promote your blog is by writing and placing articles on the blog’s topic in free article directories. If you do that already, you know how much time that can take.

If you simply place the same article on several directories, Google filters them out, negating some of their value. If you rewrite them in your own words, and change the bio box, that can take a lot of time.

Generally if you use article spinner software, you get a mishmash that does not sound like any real human being wrote it. That isn’t going to make people want to read your blog.

What to do? You might want to take a look at a free service that makes things easier, called JetSpinner. You enter pieces of your article in your own words, in phrases or paragraphs called “snippets” in several variations. So you might break up a 500 word article into 100 pieces.

But then JetSpinner automatically reassembles the snippets (all of which *you* wrote) into a new article anytime you want. Best of all, the service is free! So you might want to give it a try. Multiply your article submission power with Jetspinner

Blog design is my priority, but let’s face it. We all have to be constantly on the lookout for good ways to promote our blogs. Especially quick, easy and free ways.

So I was thrilled with the idea of BlogRush.com, and I told you about it a week or so ago in a post called Promote Your Blog Instantly With BlogRush. No Charge!

At the time, the service had no track record. But I was betting on the brilliance of the concept—and of the founder, John Reese, who has made many millions on the Web. The results are in. It works! It is especially good for younger, less-well-known blogs, like this one.

The only thing I didn’t like was the widget itself, which was ugly. It really clashed with some of my blogs, but I used it anyway.

Early on, John promised colors, or “flavors” of widgets, and I could hardly stand the wait. Now they’re here! And they are beautiful, well-chosen colors.

I’ve chosen a conservative dark blue to blend with this blog, and various other colors for my other blogs. (Feel free to go look, please.) Talk Like a Texan got Ice (pale gray) to go with the colors of oaks, bayou and spanish moss.

New Health Ideas got a Plum widget. Art Fun Cheap got a Watermelon (emerald green) widget to match the accent color of the WordPress theme. And so on. It was so much fun.

And here’s (almost) the best part. You do not have to cut and paste any code/scripting/whatever to change the widget Flavors. Let me say that again: No cutting and pasting. No wp-admin.

Once you’ve registered and added your blogs, you can just go to the BlogRush site, log in, and apply whatever flavors you want to. Anytime. It all happens remotely.

Sheer blog design bliss! It’s my favorite new toy!

And the widget works with other blog engines. I have put one on a Blogger blog, Tengsha.com, and it works great there, too, including changing widget colors.

As far as the service itself goes, I’m delighted. There have been problems with cheaters lowering the overall click-through rates, but I’m confident that those will soon be sorted out.

BlogRush is truly a fantastic service! And it is free, quick and easy—three of my favorite things.

Viral Reciprocal Carousel is a great free way to raise the ranking of your blog with Technorati and other opinion leaders while getting new blog readers and helping out other bloggers. Sound great? It is.

This system has resulted in great success for many bloggers. Now that it’s starting up again, this is a great chance to join in. After all, no matter how good your blog design is, people have to know about it before they can read it.

Here’s how the Viral Reciprocal Carousel works:

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I’ve removed the footer ads from this blog for now. The Close button kept creeping down the window. Today when I got here, the Close button was completely gone, and there was no way to close the ad window.

Yikes! These things are like weeds. I keep deleting the code, and the ads keep reappearing. Very Twilight Zone. So you may still see them, and I don’t know why. Yet. But I will find and zap them.

When I have time, I’ll contact the publisher/vendor and see if there’s a fix. Meanwhile, I can’t recommend using the Footer Ads. If you find out what the problem is, please post a comment and let me know. Especially if you find that there’s a way to fix it.

Today I ran across a site that offers free traffic to your blog or website in a very nice way. (You do not get bombarded with emails.) Instead, here’s how it works:

You paste some code, supplied by the company, Footer Ads, into the footer of your blog or website. That displays to visitors a strip of text ads at the bottom of your page, which they can close after reading.

In return, you earn credits to use to display your own text ads on other sites. Your visitors do not have to click on the ads or buy anything for you to get credit. They just have to visit your site.

The ads look like Adsense, Yahoo or MSN ads, but they are not embedded. The user can click and close the ad window like the one that appeared at the bottom of this page after the page loaded. (To close the ad window, click the X button in the lower right corner.)

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Somehow or other, Technorati found my Talk Like a Texan blog, so now I’m “claiming” all my blogs so I can track them there.

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