Careful, This Blog Rush is Going to Hurt
My prediction is that Blog Rush will be just another form of Internet gentrification. It benefits the biggest and best blogs the most. Which means that the more you, the little guy, use it, the poorer you will be.
Since ProBlogger, John Chow and ShoeMoney are all better bloggers than you and I, our traffic will eventually end up with them the more we use Blog Rush.
They write better headlines, offer more actionable and higher quality content, and know how to make more money from their visitors than you do. By participating in any type of traffic sharing program with them, you are only going to lose market share.
The more you use it, the more traffic will be funneled away from smaller blogs and towards larger blogs. Is this bad? No, it will happen eventually anyway, Blog Rush just speeds up the process. Can you see where they got the name from? 
Blog Rush, in terms of its affects on the Blogosphere will function similar to AdSense. It becomes a massive Hoover that will go out to all the smaller blogs and dredge traffic up to the better and larger blogs.
The real question isn’t “How can I get more traffic?” but rather, “Do I deserve more traffic?” and the closely related, “Do I know what to do with the traffic I already have?”
For Blog Rush to not function as leverage tool benefiting bigger bloggers, more of the larger bloggers would have to be more generous as ShoeMoney is with his offer to rotate people who sign up under him into the impressions on his site. In the long run, he’ll still steal your traffic, but at least you’ll have a chance to improve while you get a temporary boost in visitors.
Hopefully this explanation will help you understand why all the big guys are SO FAST to jump on board with this (any any other pyramid style) promotional tools. The bigger you are, and closer to the top you get in, the more you are licensed to steal $$$ from the rest of the users.
[LOL...if you just got the a version of this post with BoguS rather than Blog Rush in it; honest it was the spellchecker ]
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Comments ( 11 )
[...] readers. One of them led me to one more good article about BlogRush; that one however takes a more cynical approach on the [...]
I had to write about it too « Karen Zara Dwells Here added these pithy words on Sep 19 07 at 11:07 amChris @ Martial Development added these pithy words on Sep 18 07 at 4:57 pmThey write better headlines, offer more actionable and higher quality content,
ORLY?
and know how to make more money form their visitors than you do.
Now that is the truth!
Jon added these pithy words on Sep 18 07 at 5:21 pmORLY? …yup.
According to the market, and what else matters, it is the truth.
Apollia added these pithy words on Sep 19 07 at 12:26 amQuote:
“Since ProBlogger, John Chow and ShoeMoney are all better bloggers than you and I, our traffic will eventually end up with them the more we use Blog Rush.”I totally disagree.
I like the various different unique perspectives they all offer, and I don’t tend to drop any good blog just because I’ve found a “better” blog on roughly the same category of topics – instead, I tend to look at them all.
Also, “better” is a matter of perspective. I’ve glanced at the ProBlogger, John Chow, and ShoeMoney sites, but for some reason, they just haven’t grabbed me enough (yet?) to add them to my list of favorite blogs. But yours did, months ago.
Apollia
Jon added these pithy words on Sep 19 07 at 8:51 amHi Apollia, thanks a lot for the kind words. I confess my statement is a bit of a sweeping generalization (but hey, I got you to comment for the first time
K added these pithy words on Sep 19 07 at 11:59 amThank you for this post.
I received an “invite” for blogrush today
and was thinking “what do I do with this?”
Stephan Miller added these pithy words on Sep 20 07 at 9:47 amI find blog post mainly from my feed ticker, 560 feeds or by going through MyBlogLog and haven’t really looked at the Blogrush things on other people’s sites. But your post has really got me thinking about taking BlogRush off.
blogstheme.com added these pithy words on Oct 09 07 at 1:06 pmIt’s this kind of program will only make people visit more the blogs that are already famous. It’s hard to survive for the little guys.
Always been like this. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer..
Creative Investor added these pithy words on Oct 12 07 at 4:10 pmEven though you make a great point, I have to disagree about its abysmal click-through rates. So far, it has been fairly decent in generating traffic for my blog and I’m certainly not running a huge well-known blog site. I don’t really create headlines to “catch” people either. But then again, I could have been lucky so far.
shoemoney added these pithy words on Dec 14 07 at 2:52 amI respect your opinion but I strongly disagree.
I rarely jump on bandwagons of stuff I am not 100% feeling good about. I never pushed agloco or widgetbucks or scratchback and a bunch of other stuff and unlike some of the other people you mention if I am going to talk about something its after I have used it for a while.
John Reese has a serious plan in place for the future of blog rush and that guy does not know how to fail.
Also blogrush is the single best source of new traffic that comes to my blog. I did a post a while back about the quality of widget traffic. Users coming in from blogrush have a very high conversion to rss subscribers.
I dunno I think if you did some metrics you might change your mind.
Jon Symons added these pithy words on Dec 14 07 at 5:10 pmHi Jeremy, Thanks for dropping by. You know in the past few weeks I have been examining a lot of things about myself and I realized that this post illustrates a key area of improvement for me. Testing new ideas to see if they work is a key factor in success. Sitting back and criticizing based on unfounded opinions (like I did on my post) is what people who are not successful people do.
Thanks for re-enforcing what I’ve been learning.