Online Media Cultist

Last week, Mapping the Web alerted me to BlogRush, a neat little service that lets bloggers promote their wares on sites similar to theirs. The “viral effect” comes in that the more page views your site gets (promoting five headlines from similar sites each time in a BlogRush widget), the more times your site’s stories are promoted on BlogRush widgets across the interwebs.

In just several weeks of existence, BlogRush has already cracked the top 1,000 on Alexa. While Alexa isn’t a perfect judge of a site’s popularity, there’s no doubt that BlogRush is seeing explosive growth.

Like MyBlogLog, BlogRush makes sense in that it’s a tool that provides real value for bloggers. In the case of MyBlogLog, it lets you see the faces of fellow bloggers who have visited your site, fostering a sense of community while allowing for simple social networking on the MBL home site. BlogRush also appeals to the core need for bloggers to promote themselves.

While web rings and banner ad services that serve links to similar sites have been around for years, BlogRush puts it all together in a tight little package, making it really easy to sign-up and feel the benefits of putting a widget on a blog sidebar.

Don’t be surprised to see a BlogRush widget on OMC in the near future!