As Agloco dies a much-predicted death, my thoughts turn to Blogrush, another much-virally-publicised scheme, supposedly for "Driving a flood of targeted readers to your blog" by installing a sidebar widget which syndicates articles from related blogs in the widget, and in return syndicates your articles to other related blogs. Like a big, happy, network of blogs. It gained initial publicity by way of a referral scheme which promised even more torrents of visitors by way of a credits scheme, though was slightly more salubrious than Agloco in that it did not promise any money per se!
What happened?
It should have worked, I am still scratching my head to figure out why it has been such an abject failure. But the fact is, after TENS of thousands of impressions (i.e. syndications of my blog article links to other people's sites via the widgets) I have received a grand total of something like 7 visits through this channel. Are they just plain incompetent, is the widget not catchy enough (it would have to be positively repellent to give me a clickthrough of 0.01% - give or take), or was it all just a scam of some kind (hmm, let's run a failed business, cunning scheme!)?
I probably left the widget in prime position on my blog for longer than most. But now it's got to go, here and on my other blogs. I won't bother waiting for the announcement like I did with Agloco...
"A unique, wry and often satirical look at the Internet, the modern age and life in general" (there is way too much search-engine competition for the phrase "incoherent ramblings")
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Blogrush - a trickle of targeted readers...
Comments welcome, nofollow and comment moderation are OFF, but our patented, human-powered spam-detector is most definitely ON, and we can tell that stink a mile off!
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2 comments:
s for having the perception to recognize a dead horse. In my view, I feel BlogRush is nothing but a gigantic opt in email squeeze for John Reese ... a big time traditional Internet Marketer ... and, of course, his Joint Venture partners ... of whom there are legions.
The incompetency issue you mention may come into play as well ... mr. Reese's team knows a lot more about IM than they do about the physical workings of the 'net.
These things aside I looked forward to BlogRush because I felt it would be a great popularity aggregator tool ... instead I often see bloggers cluttering their sites with widgets full of inane, unrelated "posts" that don't even seem to come from real blogs.
I get much more satisfaction ... and revenue ... from an AdSense unit of similar size than a BlogRush widget.
BlogRush ... a solution in search of a problem to solve ...
Thanks for your comments (not sure what got cut off at the beginning).
You really think that is all it might be, just an elaborate way of harvesting email addresses? Certainly seems like a complicated way to go about it, and I still think the idea could actually have worked..!
Anyway, it had definitely outstayed its welcome - apart from anything, the widget was just too intrusive, and as you say, taking up valuable ad space...
Frankly, the main blog where I was hoping for results from Blogrush was on my mountain-biking blog, but there are so few blogs in that niche anyway, I think I will just keep creating my own network the good old-fashioned personal way. Blogrush was certainly no help whatsoever...
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