Well, I finally got the long awaited email last night that BlogRush Phase 2 is active. I took the time to check out the new dashboard and even wasted 20 minutes of my life watching the video explaining how it all works.

For the most part, the new dashboard is fairly intuitive to use and you just have to make sure you read the column headings to understand what the charts are telling you. The only thing that really needed any explanation at all was the “buzz meter” for the recent posts and even the explanation of that wasn’t completely clear in the video so they will probably release an explanation of that in text format soon.

While the new dashboard does seem pretty useful and make BlogRush come off as a much more credible organization, the biggest thing it did for me was to help me be more confident in my decision to remove the widget.

In the video, John Reese apologizes for the poor click-through rates and assures us it is going to get better, but I’m not holding my breath. If my stats looked like the person whose account was used in the video, I would likely keep the widget because that individual is getting around 3-7 visits per day from the widget. Yes, the click-through rate is low, but at least there is traffic coming in.

During the time in which I have had the widget on my page, I have only received 2 clicks from other sites bringing visitors here. While it is better than nothing, I am going to remove the widget for now. However, I am not going to cancel my BlogRush account.

Perhaps sometime in the future I may bring the widget back. I also would be likely to be more satisfied with the program if I had some people signed up under me so I could earn credits from their traffic as well to help get more exposure. If I can make this happen in the future, I may also desire to get back in to the program.

So for now, this will be the last BlogRush post you will be seeing for awhile as it turns out my original reservations were correct.