Well if this isn’t the most talked about topic in the blogosphere I don’t know what is! Every blogger is raving or complaining about how good or bad BlogRush is so I thought I should do a little follow up to my original post – BlogRush – Will It Increase Your Blog Traffic? – and throw in my opinion.
First though, let me share my BlogRush stats since a few people have been asking me how I am doing.
My credit balance as at today, Friday the 21st September Australia time, which is about 5 days of running the program:
As you can see I have no shortage of credits and plenty of bloggers under me delivering more credits. Quite frankly, as long as BlogRush doesn’t go completely under, I don’t think I will run out of credits in a long time since all the bloggers in my referral downline are delivering nearly 70,000 credits to me a day, and growing. At this stage, I don’t think BlogRush can deliver enough impressions to me to even spend the credits, although I hope that changes.
If you are wondering how I managed to build such a large downline, it really wasn’t that clever, I just blogged about it as soon as I could on the weekend and was one of the first to do so (of other bloggers I only noticed Jack Humphreys and Andy Beard blogging about it before me, although I know others did, I just noticed their posts about it in Google first – Andy went on to write two more posts about BlogRush – and counting!).
However the real clincher for me was having a targeted email list of nearly 12,000 bloggers who I emailed about BlogRush. As I wrote about in – Will Blog Marketing Replace Email Marketing? – being able to send an email is still more effective at eliciting a response than RSS is because email is “in your face marketing”.
People read their email on weekends, but they might not read RSS feeds and blogs, so I had a distinct advantage in that I could tell all my loyal subscribers about BlogRush before they read about it elsewhere. Plus people tend to respond to emails better than blog posts, click through rates are higher and they are “forced” to read it since everyone watches their inbox like a hawk.
If nothing else, this should serve as a lesson to every blogger – make sure you are building a loyal email subscription base at the same time as you build your blog readership. These two assets work brilliantly together. AWeber and GetResponse are great email autoresponders if you need an email list service by the way 
.
Here is my referral downline:
For the last few days I have added 50 new bloggers or more per day, which like I said was primarily due to my first, or at least, early mover advantage. I think this is the first pyramid scheme I have ever been at the top in 
.
I hope John decides to offer a way to convert credits into cash – I’d be rich!
That might not be as unlikely as you think, I could see BlogRush offering a way to both make money from the credits you build up and also buy credits, much like Stumble Upon lets you buy traffic. I expect that is part of the plan for how Mr. Reese intends to monetize the 10% of inventory BlogRush gets to keep – by selling it to advertisers who want to buy traffic from the blogosphere. He could also let BlogRush members sell some of their inventory direct to advertisers, perhaps having BlogRush take a 10% share of the revenue in exchange for providing the service, thus turning BlogRush into a monetization tool as well as a traffic tool for bloggers.
Once we get the function to decide what site gets to use our syndication credits, bloggers could decide to sell their credits directly to advertisers outside of the BlogRush system, as long BlogRush doesn’t have any problems with people doing that.
Even if you can’t sell your credits, I would like to see a way to spend the credits by sending traffic to other sites you own. I wouldn’t mind using BogRush, for example, to send traffic to a landing page, like mine at BlogTrafficKing.com. Technically using John Chow type tricks we can already manipulate how the traffic is distributed, but I would like to see a more kosher (an in-built BlogRush function) that lets us do this.
Lastly, my all important click-through data:
As you can see, the click through is not too good and for some reason the amount of impressions I’m receiving from the network has dropped significantly. During the first days I received 5,000+ impressions per day, but now it’s down to about 1,000 per day. With 1,000 impressions going out and 70,000 coming in, and my own blogs delivering about 4,000 a day alone, the system better start catching up on actually delivering me impressions or this clearly won’t do much to increase my traffic.
Yes, The Click Through Rate Sucks
27 clicks from 11,000+ impressions is a terrible click through rate, but I don’t think it’s fair to judge BlogRush too early.
If you are a BlogRush member you should have received the email from John Reese about the changes they are making to help improve click-through. Obviously the key is better contextual matching (BlogRush’s responsibility) and better blog headlines (our responsibility), which is what John talked about. As I said previously, I don’t expect a massive click-through rate from traffic exchanges, even an advanced one like BlogRush that attempts Google-style content and headline optimization tricks (John says BlogRush will learn which of your blog articles pull the best click-through rate and circulate more of that article so you get more traffic).
The bottom line is you won’t get a huge number of clicks – ever – from a traffic exchange, but I think it’s possible to do better than 27 out of 11,000 impressions, in fact it has to, or BlogRush won’t be around very long.
Can John Reese Make BlogRush Work?
John Reese is a terribly successful Internet marketer and he knows his stuff. He understands he must deliver clicks to bloggers or he risks loosing his inventory source, so all his energy will be devoted to this goal for the short term future. Once things stabilize and his system is delivering more clicks, he will move on to monetization, bring in paying advertisers or perhaps promote related Income.com projects that will surface over the coming months. In fact this whole BlogRush project could just be a way to leverage the blogosphere to create a means to build the profile of his Income.com site…time will tell.
Personally I have great faith in John and I know BlogRush will succeed. I don’t expect BlogRush will ever do amazing things for my traffic, but given my position in the pyramid I’m sure I’ll be getting as much traffic as I can from it for a long time coming, whether I use the widget or not.
For most bloggers, you are not sitting at the top of the BlogRush food chain, but that’s okay, you have to start somewhere. Even if you only deliver 500 impressions a day – and a blog with about 100-200 unique visitors on average can deliver about 500 impressions – and in return you get 5 clicks from BlogRush, that could bring in one new loyal reader a day. In three months you have nearly doubled your unique visitor traffic and the law of compounding will increase your return over and over again if you stick to it for long enough.
I suspect BlogRush will turn into yet another “little stream of traffic” (see the Blog Profits Blueprint for details on that reference), something as bloggers we can use to add just a little bit more traffic to our blog. It won’t make you famous, but the ease of implementation means it’s worth using BlogRush just because you can.
BlogRush As A Research Tool
As an added benefit, BlogRush is a good tool for discovering blogs you didn’t know about and this could become the best reason to add the widget. I often tell Blog Mastermind students to seek out complimentary bloggers for joint ventures, guest article swaps and for good old fashioned blog comment marketing. Many students come back to me saying they simply can’t find any related blogs, even after a thorough search on Technorati, or through the MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog communities.
With BlogRush you don’t have to look any further than your sidebar to find potential blog partners. Sure not every blog is going to be a good target – many won’t have any traffic to leverage from (hence they are using BlogRush), but there will be many mid-level bloggers, those with 100-1000 daily readers you can find to make friends with.
This is one of the BEST strategies for you somewhat successful bloggers to get traffic – work with your peers. Find bloggers talking about similar subjects as you using BlogRush, then get to know them. Thanks to the contextual matching BlogRush provides, you should be able to find plenty of similar blogs simply by refreshing the widget a couple of times (now don’t go doing that too much though – you don’t want to artificially inflate your impression count).
I think BlogRush, even though it’s based on a very simple and old system (by Internet years anyway), does add to the blogosphere. Not everyone will like it and some will quit early after not receiving enough clicks, but I suspect it’s here for the long term.
Yaro Starak
BlogRushing
Wow.. that is a great promotion you did of it. over 700 bloggers under you! congratulations.
Yaro . . . thanks for the reminder. I hadn’t really checked it out, but you reminded me to look and I’m glad you did. Looks like a great thing for any blog. I signed up right away.
Hi Yaro
It looks very impressive. I signed up straight away. I’m having a bit of trouble with adding the widget to wordpress. I followed the Camtasia video tutorial that the Bogrushers have available, even tried adding a few other different widgets just in case it was a general wordpress error.
By the way, I have just finished your Blog Profits Blueprint. Thankyou, thankyou thankyou very much for making this available …and free of charge
tony Hogan
It’s going to be interesting to see how many of the people arriving at a blog convert into subscribers. Even if the CTR can be quadrupled from about 0.23% to 1% do you really think a 20% conversion rate is attainable?
Hi Yaro
I am still sitting on the fence on the email list – AFAIK Aweber and Getresponse still don’t have a feature to send out a digest of all daily posts at a specific time.
I really do appreciate how responsive an email list can be, plus you can give an incentive to sign up
As for the stats, check your other analytics packages. It is most likely you have had a lot more clicks the first few days.
My click through rate doing pretty sucks too, well since they annouce that somebody are playing cheat. We’ll see how it’s going to be in the next few week.
For me they should add more privilage for those who have great click through from their site. I think I should change my blog into 2 colume now. XD
Good comments, Yaro!
I just wonder why the amount of impressions drops so dramatically.
The main problem with the click-through rates are due to people not even seeing the widget when it is loaded, which has two reasons:
First, cheats that are manually loading their page to pad their impressions of the widget mean that those 5 articles aren’t displayed to a human and have no chance of being clicked. It seems like John is trying to weed those out of the system.
Second, most of the widgets are not that prominent, so people aren’t scrolling down far enough to even see it.
For myself, I’ve clicked on it from my site a few times when I’ve seen something interesting, and I make it a point to see what it is serving up, but haven’t been too impressed yet. Especially today, when the widget served up one of my own articles to me on the site that the article appears on, which had moved down the page to appear right next to the widget. It looked a bit strange.
Hi, I would love to try it out, and from all that I read, it’s better to do so now that it’s HOT. I must admit when people describe it as a pyramid style technique or multi level scheme, it leaves an icky taste in my mouth. Now if everybody would stop rolling their eyes when I tell them I would like to try it…maybe I will !
sia
WoW, you have a lot of referrals.
but i want to say that the click through rate sucks as but what blogrush has to do to raise click through rates ?
i think that users don’t click on the topics viewed by the widget, may be the topics titles are not very interested or may be the widget itself is not interesting for many people.
so, what do u think ?
Hi Yaro,
Thanks for blogging about BlogRush, since I was thinking to try BR but not yet sure.
Now I’m sure to try this under your refferal. I hope this worthed. Thank you.
I signed up for blog rush. I see the only draw back being the lack of style the widget has. Then today i saw that they are coming out with different “flavors”. I think that happens then you will see a lot more people signing up for them.
Their flavors remind me of ipod colors.
BlogRush gets to keep 10% of the inventory if an impression goes through the full 10 referral levels. But the other extreme is when your widget is displayed on your own blog. In that case there are no other referral levels that need to be credited, just you. BlogRush charges other bloggers a total of 5 credits (one for each headline displayed) and pays you one credit, pocketing a cool 400%. Reality is of course somewhere in between.
With these numbers it’s even more surprising that you are able to amass such a large amount of credits. Maybe the content targeting algorithm needs a bit of tuning so that your headlines can be displayed on a more diverse set of blogs. But that could lower the click through rate. So many parameters to tweak and tune… It would be fascinating to get a peek under the covers of BlogRush.
I’ve noticed in the stats on my blogs that I am getting referrals from Blogrush but according to the statistics on the Blogrush dashboard I haven’t gotten any clickthroughs from them.
I think part of the problem is that Blogrush is still in its early stages and is going through teething difficulties.
I have blogrush on my site and I have seen an increase of traffic. It is a nice addon so far.
Everybody pays close attention to their Inbox. This is the most insisghtful observation that registered with me. It behooves one to think of how their communications can be maximized this way, while deftly skipping around any possible spam problems. (This is a topic, by the way, that I have never seen adequately covered.)
In mail order a profitable return can be had at around 2.5% return. I have no idea of what it is on the internet. Just guessing, I’d say somewhere around .5%. No costs, only labor-intensive. Does my guesswork sound about right?
IT WONT WORK. WHY? THE MATH IS SIMPLE…..
For every one display of the widget (which ultimately results in 5 topic links from other blog posts on the network in your category, being displayed) you get one exposure of your blog post on the network – on other blogger member website widgets. This sounds fair, but if you look deep into things you will realize theirs a defect. I will come to that later. But first another important trick thats going to work like viral marketing on steroids for BlogRush…
For every blogger you refer – when they sign up by clicking on the BlogRush logo at the bottom of the widget, you benefit. For every direct referral you also will get one free link exposure everytime your referral displays the widget. If this referral refers another member – you get the same benefit again… gaining one more exposure for a two level deep referral. And so on … 10 levels deep.
This trick is absolutely fantastic, because it will cause bloggers to start promoting this new exchange service to fellow bloggers immediately in hope of getting referral bloggers before others snap them. Bloggers can see the potential of the 10 level deep credit system. It can really balloon to a large amount of free link exposure. Which *could* result in traffic.
But wait!! Is this real traffic or just link exposures? This is where I would like to caution fellow bloggers. Blogrush is claiming that – bloggers should sign up right away to get a huge rush and volume of traffic to their sites in a short span of time.
There are however two issues here.
The first one is that – if this is a 1:1 exchange network, and BlogRush is displaying only 5 ads inside the widget – then they are creating an excess of 4 ads per display – which they can then distribute to the referring members. So, the excess credit of 4 ads can help them – BUT only 4 levels deep. As the system grows and referral levels start to get deepe and aproach 10 levels of depth – how will BlogRush maintain the 1:1 ratio? The answer is – that well, not all members will have referrals that go down to 10 levels deep.
So, there will always be direct sign up members who are not referred, and therefore whose widgets display 5 exposures and they get one credit exposure in return (and no referral credits will be given to anyone on the network as they signed up directly) and therefore create an excess of 4 credits for the system. This will help BlogRush.
And if it doesn’t, and the excess exposures being created are getting close to zero – they can always simply increase the widget size or put a scroll bar and display 10 links!! This will immediately create a larger excess for BlogRush on every widet exposure. Super!
Super for BlogRush, but bad for members.
I can already see a very very very low CTR on this network. Although the links displayed are in your category and may match your sites content – the CTR is going to be extremely low. Here’s the reasoning behind my my calculation…
A standard ad CTR on most blog posts is about half to one-and-half percentage…. that is, 0.5% to 1.5%. Now, this widget will probably not be placed by bloggers on the top of their sidebar or top of the page fold – and will probably be tucked away at the side bottom. Therefore, my guess is that the CTR for this widget will probably be around 0.1% ( or one-tenth of one percent. ).
Now, if your blog post title appears in a widget on another site along with 5 others – your CTR will be further reduced by a factor of 5 (or 20%) of 0.1% which is 0.02%.
This is 2 clicks out of 10,000 page views or 1 click every 5000 page views!!
Now, what kind of rush of traffic is that?
Further, if BlogRush decides to increase the number of Blog Links inside their widget tomorrow (to compensate for excess credits being given to members for referrals) – then you can be assured that the paltry traffic and CTR will get even worse.
Nice try BlogRush. Good hype and viral elements – but your basic system is at fault!! I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. This is just a passing fad.
Thanks for sharing this great tool Yaro. Only concern is that as it gets more popular it can take the course of traffic exchanges or FFA adverisement. It has to be carefully managed and changes made as it becomes more viral.
You also made reference to Aweber and Getresponse both of which I am familiar with but another very flexible autoresponder is Mailloop by The Internet Marketing Center which uses a unique technology that can automate up to 25 pieces of data plus much more flexibility.
John just launched Traffic Jam, let’s see how it goes.