Over the past week there has been a sensation brewing amongst head bloggers like Shoemoney and JohnChow. What sensation? BlogRush. During the first 60 hours thousands of bloggers rushed to use the newest blog widget which promised more traffic, me included.
My analysis of the newest widget is this: if you aren’t Jeremy Shoemaker or John Chow, your widget will do nothing more than annoy visitors or give the big guys more traffic.
How?
It’s simple really, BlogRush says so themselves:
Your Traffic = 1:1 1st Generation Of Referrals (Directly From You) = 1:1 2nd Generation Of Referrals (i.e. Jen in the video) = 1:1 3rd - 6th Generation Of Referrals = 1:4 7th - 10th Generation Of Referrals = 1:8
The problem is most bloggers won’t receive this added benefit. Guys like Shoemoney or John Chow will get the most traffic, simply because they will be able to refer more and started pimping it when it launched. It’s somewhat of a pyramid scheme. You refer one person, they refer more, and so on and so on… except it doesn’t work.
In theory, bloggers will show the widget, a few visitors for every hundred will click on a link, then the bloggers link will be shown on a few hundred and their link will be clicked on at least the same amount of times, returning almost the same amount that left.
The reason why it won’t work:
Bloggers are able to show the widget where ever they want on a page, meaning the footer, the sidebar, in content, just where ever. Which sounds OK right? Wrong.
Guys like Shoemoney will be showing the widget way below the fold, but still receive a substantial amount of traffic generated towards it (plus all the visitors who he referred). If say, 10,000 people view Shoemoney’s site, how many will click on the widget? Say 1%, which is equal to about 100. That means he is providing traffic to 100 other people. How many times do other bloggers around the world show his site on their widget? 100,000? 1,000,000? Well, no one knows except Shoemoney, but it is far, far, more than what the average blogger will get.
Conclusion
I strongly recommend staying away from the widget, at least for now. And if you do decide to take the chance and try something new and ‘innovating’, be sure to not be a referral for someone in your own niche.
Disclaimer:
I have nothing against John Chow or Shoemoney. I was just using them as an example. Shoemoney has said the traffic won’t do him much good and already stated that he will give the traffic to readers of his blog. Shoemoney’s just cool like that, and John Chow was just pimping something for a friend.
Edit
The past few days I have received a few clicks from Blog Rush, each viewing more than one page. Also, their Dashboard states:
IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Click- through rates are very low right now due to problems with some users cheating the system. We are a few days away from removing all abuse from the system and you will see your click-rates increase. We are also moving to a Manual Review Process for all member blogs which will also increase the traffic you receive. Thank you for your patience — we’re working hard to improve this beta version of our service.
So hopefully the problems I discussed will be addressed (besides the tiered system, there’s nothing that can be done about that. Anyway, I’m giving the service a second chance to see if I can get something going with it. I’ll check back in again on probably a separate entry.
Written: Sep 18, 2007
Tags: blog rush, bloggers
Rudy
December 20, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
I got a warning from BlogRush that they’ve deactivated my account and will be removing it in 30 days. I should’ve replied: DO IT NOW. What a useless piece of widget.