If you’re not an Amway millionaire avoid BlogRush like the plague!
Do not click BlogRush affiliate links before you’re fully awake. Oh no, you did it … now praise me because I’ve sneakily disabled the link and read on.
- My BlogRush Summary:
- You won’t get free targeted traffic to your niche blog.
- You’ll make other people rich.
- You’ll piss off your readers.
- You’ll promote BlogRush and get nothing in return.
- You shouldn’t trust a site fucking up the very first HTTP request.
- Pyramid schemes just don’t work for you.
You won’t get free targeted traffic to your niche blog
The niches you can choose from are way too broad. When you operate a niche blog like mine, you can choose “Marketing” or “Computers & Internet”. Guess what great traffic you gain with headlines about elegant click tracking or debunking meta refresh myths from blogs selling MySpace templates to teens or RFID chips to wholesalers? In reality you get hits via blogs selling diet pills to desperate housewives (from my referrer stats!) or viagra to old age pensioners, if you see a single BlogRush referrer in your stats at all. (I’ve read a fair amount of the hype about actually targeted headline delivery in BlogRush widgets. I just don’t buy it from what I see on blogs I visit.)
You’ll make other people rich
Look at the BlogRush widget in your or my sidebar, then visit lots of other niche blogs which are focused more or less on marketing related topics. All these widgets carry ads for generic marketing blogs pitching just another make me rich on the Internet while I sleep scheme or their very own affiliate programs. These blogs, all early adopters, will hoard BlogRush’s traffic potentials. Even if you can sign up at the root to place you at the top of the pyramid referral structure, you can’t avoid that the big boys with gazillions of owed impressions in BlogRush’s “marketing” queue dominate all widgets out there, your’s included. (I heard that John Reese will try to throw a few impressions on tiny blogs before niche bloggers get upset. I doubt that will be enough to keep his widgets up.)
You’ll piss off your readers
Even if some of your readers recognize your BlogRush widget, they’ll wonder why you recommend totally unrelated generic marketing gibberish on your nicely focused blog. Yes, every link you put on your site is a recommendation. You vouch for this stuff when you link out, even when you don’t control the widget’s content. Read Tamar’s Why the Fuss about BlogRush? to learn why this clutter is useless for your visitors. Finally, the widget slows your site down and your visitors hate long loading times.
You’ll promote BlogRush and get nothing in return
When you follow the advice handed out by BlogRush and pitch their service with posts and promotional links on your blog, then you help BlogRush to skyrocket at the search engines. That will bring them a lot of buzz, but you get absolute nothing for your promotional efforts because your referrer link doesn’t land on the SERPs.
You shouldn’t trust a site fucking up the very first HTTP request
Ok, that’s a geeky issue and you don’t need to take it very seriously. Request your BlogRush affiliate link with a plain user agent not accepting cookies or executing client sided scripting, then read the headers. BlogRush does a 302 redirect to their home page rescuing your affiliate ID in an unclosed base href directive. Chances are you’ll never get the promised credits from upsold visitors using uncommon user agents respectively browser settings, because they don’t manage their affiliate traffic properly.
Pyramid schemes just don’t work for you
Unfortunately, common sense is not as common as you might think. I’m guilty of that too, but I’ll leave my widget up for a while to monitor what it brings in. The promise of free traffic is just too alluring, and in fact you can’t lose much. If you want, experiment with it and waste some ad space, but pull it once you’ve realized that it’s not worth it.
Disclaimer
This post was inspired by common sense, experience of life, and a shitload of hyped crap posts on Sphinn’s upcoming list where folks even created multiple accounts to vote their BlogRush sales pitches to the home page. If anything I’ve said here is not accurate or at least plausible, please submit a comment to set the records straight.
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Sebastian | Internet Marketing, Blogging, Social Web, Crap | Related posts
hey, cool blogrush widget
I’ve only had a few dozen referals so far, the probationary period is nearly over and it’s about to get axed off my site as well, but as you I’m keeping it on for now out of curiousity. Seems like it wasn’t ready for launch based on the amount of blank screens I see coupled with the slow stats.
I couldn’t agree more. Nothing says junky blog like a pryamid scheme hogging screen space, no matter which a-listers have endorsed it.
wow great summary - goes along with what I say as well on this issue, where it will not help the little bloggers
I’m enjoying reading all the conflicting opinions about BlogRush.
I didn’t promote it specifically but I couldn’t resist throwing up the widget either. Although I already knew of your blog I clicked through from BR so if you want to discount me from your stats that’s fine
I’ve had a handful of visitors out of 400 impressions but that’s probably got a lot to do with it being new and people just trying it for the sake of seeing where they land up.
I don’t see it being any more useful or harmful than a BlogCatalog type widget, but then I’m not in a well defined niche. Maybe over time they will improve the targeting categories.
My widget stays for now on an experimental basis.
I was instantly wary of this widget, as I heard about it in a spam email! (I check the junk every now and then, just in case).
Anyone who tries to get me to use their widget, using spam will fail.
Besides, I’m trying to cut down on the blog clutter these days.
I’m not a big BlogRush supporter, but you don’t have any evidence to back up those claims. You are gaining attention by deliberately going against the buzz, which is fine, but it’s a risky game to play without any hard facts.
Matt, besides the facts I have (mentioned in my post or not) I think I can post my opinions in the way I did. The risk for BlogRush is not joining the discussion. I saw them commenting on a few blogs, and I’m sure they do ego searches, that’s why I’ve invited them to drop a comment here. If I said anything which appears to be plain false later on, I’ll be happy to update my post. Unless someone proves that I’m wrong with my warning I stand by my post.
Thanks all for your comments.
I’ve not yet seen any related headline in my BlogRush widget, except a lot of generic “Hello World!” posts which are related to everything. To my surprise my stats tell me that I got 200% more clicks than BlogRush reports on the dashboard.
Not sure why people are getting so wound up over this widget, try to see the big picture. It’s not all about driving traffic. I use it to find blogs with related posts and interesting titles to mine then I pop over there read and comment.
I usually get the #1 comment position which is where a lot of traffic will come from as blogrush picks up lots of fresh feeds.
Of course the link love from the other blogs as well helps
[…] The last couple of days the SEO blogosphere has gone a bit Blogrush crazy, while some people seem to be getting real results from the blog widget, which promises you traffic if you share traffic, others have decried it as a obvious Pyramid scheme. […]
Todays failure report:
Credits increase crazily, impressions sunk, traffic next to zilch, the first of my referrers gave up. And no, I will not shorten my titles just because they can’t design a widget that features longer headlines properly. Who the fuck is BlogRush to tell the blogosphere how to title posts in order to fit an insane restriction of a widget that actually not even drives traffic. That’s a lame excuse. The outage error messages suck ass. I don’t have technical problems, hence they must not display such a fucked out message on my blog. My crap-o-meter blinks red and rings incessantly.
BlogRush now has a working dashboard with statistics.
[…] looking widget (it won’t even integrate into most blog themes nicely) but I’m not alone Sebastian also has decided against BlogRush his reasoning […]
Yep, stats to proof failure.
How is it that people always fall for pyramid schemes? Everyone knows that by definition they have to fail at some point.
The only way to get ahead is to cheat
I give it 4-6 weeks more life (or less if everyone starts spamming and jamming)
So true Richard. I’ll move the widget to a links page soon. It makes no sense to advertise hello-world posts on splogs in exchange for less than a handful of clicks daily.
It was no fun while it lasted. My sidebar looks better without the BlogRush widget. Only because I hate abandoned nodes I left one instance on the links page.
They’d have a fighting chance if their statistics actually showed all of the referrals but it doesn’t when compared to actual site stats. Removing it from my sites is on the to-do list. Shoemoney and friends already have enough traffic, they don’t need my minuscule contribution.
They rejected me because the quality of my blog was too low. I didn’t have enough “unique content” (I wrote all of it myself, so WTF?) and they “carefully” reviewed by blog “by hand”. Yah, in about 20 minutes at 1:00am. I’m sure they did. Well, no love lost there.
Oooh, interesting about that HTTP redirect thing.
So does that mean that we simply won’t be credited with our downlines, or that our downlines are going to bypass us and get credited to someone else, or both?
Or does it mean something else altogether?
My Blog was rejected also, even though I don’t show adverts, have no dodgy content, update each day with fresh home made content and have the site content sydicated on other quality blogs! I guess not being a ‘get rich scheme’ or a HYIP scam means that our blog is not ‘high enough quality’…. Another pyramid scheme bites the dust…
I got this ridiculous email yesterday:
Judging from this email the BlogRush review was done by an amoeba. *OR* the Reese dude didn’t like this post. Never mind.
[…] Tampon Blog are considered “high quality” by clueless amoebas hired by BlogRush, many great blogs like Tamar’s were banned by the Reeve […]
This is a cop-out, big-time.
JR has taken the easy way out. Make ALL blogs inactive and invite all inactive blogs to apply again, which is when the much-vaunted, so-called audit finally happens.
IMHO, a dumb thing to do.
Don’t think they’re going to to a good job even so. They messed up hugely before and it appears they still don’t know what they’re doing.
Another dumb thing. JR has closed all comments about BR on his Income.com site. Okay, he had to because of the profanity coming in. But now everyone is going to take their comments about BR to other blogs. Resulting in negative publicity for BR (and more traffic for other blogs).
This latest move might just kill off BR completely.
LPF, I second that. A “service” hiring brain dead monkeys for quality reviews kills itself on the Web. John Reeve’s on-line suicide is plain pathetic.
[…] BlogRush, You’re Kidding Me BlogRush amoebas ban high quality blogs in favor of crap It Ain’t No Cure For BlogRash Farewell BlogRush Blogrush is a scam BlogRush was a waste of time Avoid BlogRush like the plague […]
This article rocks. It couldn’t be more accurate. I am totally linking to this.
You hit the nail on the head with everything you wrote. BlogRush is a huge scam. They closed my accoutn because my work from home website is “pornographic” - PaidOpps.BlogSpot.com. Check it out. lol.
Oh, did I mention I have over 100 referrals? Bastards!
I notice this post is almost a year old, I have recently gave BlogRush a chance to see how they work. I am wondering after a year to solve their issues what you think of them now? I notice there is no widget in your sidebar. .. Does the widget really promote “junky” on blogs?
It’s junk. It promotes junk.