How to control BlogRush headlines with WordPress

John Chow came up with a pretty neat way to control your BlogRush headlines but the whole process was a little too manual for me so I came up with an easier way for WordPress users.

I’m not that familiar with the other blogging tools these days, but I’m sure you can do something similar to this, if not John’s tip will work for you.

Ok, here’s what you do -

1. Install the category visibility plugin for WordPress
2. Create a ‘blogrush’ category on your blog
3. Go to the settings for the category visibility plugin and hide your new ‘blogrush’ category from your home page, archive, but leave it in the feed. It’s just 3 checkboxes
4. Put your best post into your new ‘blogrush’ category. You only need to do one as BlogRush only uses the first one in the feed, you can do more, but only the most recent one will show across BlogRush.
5. Sign up for BlogRush and when it asks you for your feed url don’t give them the full feed url just give them the url to your ‘blogrush’ category. On WordPress blogs the category rss feeds are generally here:
   

   http://example.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=42
   or

   http://example.com/category/categoryname/feed

That’s it! Now you have a category that your visitors can’t see, but BlogRush can. This enables you to put whichever post you wish, whenever you wish into that category and have it go out across the BlogRush network without having to create an RSS feed by hand each time which is what John suggested.

With this set up running you should be able to easily try all kinds of techniques for getting more clicks from your BlogRush headline. If you aren’t sure why I’m talking about BlogRush, check out my post about how much traffic they sent me already.