Affiliate Programs

Well, don’t look now, but it looks like the much hyped BlogRush is on it’s death bed. More and more bloggers are taking the BlogRush widget off of their blogs and bidding farewell to John Reese and Blogrush, including many top A-list bloggers.

The main reason that I’m seeing is that BlogRush didn’t live up to the hype it got from Bloggers. At one point, ProBlogger.Net’s BlogRush widget was shown over 70,000 times with only 35 clicks. That’s not pretty bad, that’s a damn shame!

I don’t want to be the “I told you so” type, because, honestly, it was just a lucky gut feeling that I had at the beginning, but I told you so.

Let me start out by saying that the inventor, John Reese is an freakn’ genius marketer. There are few who have his talent for marketing.

Having said that, this whole BlogRush thing just didn’t smell right from the get-go. I’m not sure if John and his team rushed to get BlogRush out or if it was never thought out well to begin with….or both.

To me, BlogRush seemed like a Pyramid Scheme. That’s one of the biggest reasons I didn’t join…well that and the privacy concerns.

BlogRush Autopsy

Below is a link to an Alexa graph comparing Blogrush with Problogger.net and Shoemoney.com. As you can see, BlogRush is not quiet dead yet, but it looks like the Hearse is backing up.

Click here to see the graph

So what went wrong?

Several things that I can see went wrong.

1. When you hype something this much, it had better perform. As you can see from the graph, traffic started dropping off just after all the A-lister hype.
2. When you get the top A-listers in the Blogging community to hype your product, don’t piss them off a few weeks later by banning their blogs or declining their blogs inclusion into the BlogRush program. Apparently many A-listers and large blogs were banned or had their accounts put into an inactive state. It seems that the editorial staff over at BlogRush didn’t know a good blog when they saw one and sent out a lot of these type of emails. Hey, perhaps it’s the same editorial staff at ezinearticles???
3. The widget relied on bloggers using it correctly. The blog owner had to put the BlogRush widget above the fold where it would be seen the most. From what I saw, many bloggers were putting the widget below the fold and saving the area above the fold for their money makers. Who could blame them? Besides, we know that not everyone reads the instructions!

 Lessons We Can Learn From BlogRush?

• Just because an A-Lister says it’s good, doesn’t mean it’s true.
• Even a trusted and skilled Marketer like John Reese can have a Ugly Duckling every once in a while
• If you want something to work properly, read the damn instructions
• If you manage to get Bloggers to hawk your product or service, don’t piss them off. Many of the same bloggers that hyped BlogRush also were the cause if its death by blogging about their negative experience with BlogRush.  Look at the graph again in late October and through November. This is where Blogrush really screwed up and the negative blog post started rolling in. You can see where the traffic started plummeting.
• I may not always be right…but I’m damn close! LOL (okay, okay, so I said that this whole Social Networking-Web 2.0 crap was a fad and would blow over in time…geez do you people ever forget?)

Watching John Reese over the years, I bet he’s not crying over spilled milk. He’s probably already moved on to bigger and better things. That’s what good marketers do.

So have you taken the BlogRush widget off your site or did you ever put the BlogRush widget on your site to begin with?

R.I.P. BlogRush