A couple days back, BlogRush released their “Phase 2″. It is now active and can be seen on your dashboard now. There are new statistical information which they have added. Now you can see which post has been highly click by others from the BlogRush widget. On the category side, there are now more specific categories instead of just having a couple main category. You can edit your blog category under “My Blogs”. Besides that, if your sidebar is slim, you can opt for the slimmer BlogRush widget as well. I prefer the wider widget as I can see the blog post title much better. What do you think of the new BlogRush Phase 2. Has it been worth for all the wait?

BlogRush is a project pioneered by the internet marketing legend John Reese. It is a new traffic exchange program content syndication network. You can see it on action on the right side of my blog. BlogRush has been the talk of many in just matters of days since their launch. They have just recently had a major change over and it is now at the BlogRush “Phase 2″ period. A lot of changes had been done and it really look nice compare to its previous layout and design.

The concept of BlogRush is simple where you place a piece of code on your site/blog. The code will display a widget where it grabs 5 RSS feeds from a category that you have specified. You will earn credits each time your site/blog shows the BlogRush widget. With the credits that you earn, your site post will be shown on other widgets. BlogRush will keep track of the last 12 post which you can track from your BlogRush dashboard. Invite or refer friends to join BlogRush and you can earn extra credits when your referral shows their widget. Sign up with BlogRush and feel the traffic rushing in to your site/blog.

WidgetBucks is a new Pay-Per-Click method of making money with your website or blog. You can see it in action on my sidebar. Since this is new, I’m still testing this out and see what are the earnings like. If you do know about Chitika’s eMiniMalls, it does have some resemblances to it.

Anyway, WidgetBucks is paying publishers or bloggers by CPC which means anytime someone clicks on and ad, you will earn some money. As part of its promotion to encourage sign ups, they are giving you $25 for that. Do note that the minimum payout is at $50 but don’t worry, you are already half way there. Payments are made by Check and PayPal. You can select which option you like in your account setting panel.

With WidgetBucks, you can choose what products to appear there. There are 13 main categories which you can select from. If you can’t decide what to category to use, you can let MerchSense to crawl your page to find relevant products to be inserted into your widget. I tried the MerchSense but it doesn’t work well here yet as I haven’t posted much post yet. Those product or gadget sites and blog will benefit from WidgetBucks a lot.

There are 5 types of ad size which you can choose from. Not too much of a choice yet but I believe they will add more in future. According to their FAQ, there is no limit as to how many of these WidgetBucks widget you want to add on your site or blog. Oh, did I mention that you can earn a 10% referral fees as well for a total of 12 months for each referral?

This blog will be using Theme Leia which is made by Kapikua. This theme is really nice and simple with plenty of headers that you can change from including Christmas headers. There are other themes from Kapikua site which you can download. The only thing is the site isn’t in English.

However this theme doesn’t support the popular widget function. I have customized this theme with widgets and added in widget 3 widgets control for now. There are Leftbar, Rightbar and Postbar. The LeftBar and RightBar is just like the normal widgets for sidebar. The Postbar will be located right at the bottom of the post.

I have already added the AuctionAds which is made to float to the left inside the content container. I haven’t added any plugins yet. Currently the only plugin I’m using will be Akismet. There will be more customization to this theme more when I have the free time to do so.