I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it already: According to a post on John Reese’s Income.com blog, Blogrush is “dead”.
Sometimes, even the most successful entrepreneurs create projects that don’t work out for them.
The thing is, you never know if something works until you try it. And that’s something where we can all learn from John Reese. At least he acted upon an idea he had. That’s more than can be said about many entrepreneurs who come up with “million dollar ideas” almost every week but never act on them.
The idea with Blogrush was to get your blog content syndicated on hundreds of even thousands of blogs so your posts would reach a huge readership which probably wouldn’t know you, yet. It was a simple tool you could add to your blog to increase your readership automatically. I’ve been using his Blogrush Widget on my own blog for quite a while, too.
John hadn’t monetized the Blogrush Widget in any way as he wanted to make sure that his users would be benefiting from it, first. But now it turns out that people weren’t clicking on the headlines within this Widget. The click rates were too low and John thinks that’s because people “tune out” links and ads to other sites.
This could be true but personally I think, it’s because most blogs are overloaded with links and stuff so in most cases the Widget wasn’t overly exposed to the readers on a blog page. Because the goal of a blog is to keep your visitors on your own site and not to give them reasons to click away to their competitors even if the links would open in a new window.
That’s why most blog owners weren’t giving the Widget the best position on their blog pages and thus they weren’t getting any attention which caused the low click rates. Maybe, a stricter restriction to certain locations on a blog where the Widget HAD to be placed would have helped. But that is only speculation.
What I find admirable is that John has decided not to sell Blogrush to an investor to at least monetize it for him and make up for the financial losses he’s experienced. It will simply die and not be taken over by anyone else. I have respect for such a decision!
Popularity: 15% [?]
Sometimes altruism just isn’t good business.
Mr. Reese can up with a great and selfless idea, one that would drive traffic TO blogs, but it required the blog owner to also drive traffic AWAY from his/her blog. Maybe a variation of this – like a central BlogRush site that then distributes traffic to rotating blogs – would work and be profitable for everyone.
I’m also wondering if it has to do with the nature of a blog, which has been seen to be a personal expression on a topic. Any successful links I have are crafted to be included in the natural flow of the prose as a personal recommendation.
That said, I’m taking a good look at some of the google gadgets. But as you say it is a placement problem.
Colin