If you have been anywhere in the blogsophere in the few days, you must have noticed that there is a lot of talk around blogrush, the new service that promises bloggers to drive a flood of targeted traffic to your site. The first email I got about this service was Friday night. Since then, I must have received close to 10 emails from friends who were asking about it. On a hunch, I checked out the number of links the site had Friday night. Yahoo told me that there were 340 links to it mentions of it. When I checked the number of links mentions on Monday afternoon, the count had gone up to 2,400 links mentions:

On Tuesday they reached a whopping 44,000 links mentions! As of writing this post, Yahoo is reporting 62,300 links mentions.

62,300 links in three days is amazing. As a metter of fact, the huge demand for the services caused some technical difficulties.

I expect we will hear a lot more about the service before things calm down. John Reese the founder of blogrush successfully designed his marketing campaign to spread virally. I compared some of the elements I outlined to creating a viral campaign to what John did.

Do you have something worth talking about?

Obviously John had something that created a lot of discussion and excitement amongst bloggers. Getting more traffic to a new blog is one of the main problems bloggers struggle with when they start a new blog. Provide a good solution or at least claim to provide one and bloggers will talk. The speed the campaign picked in the first two days is also a good indicator on how big the problem is for bloggers. When creating a viral campaign, most of the time is invested in coming up with the initial idea.

Simple Idea

You have to agree with me that the idea of blogrush is fairly simple. There is nothing creative about it. It is easy to explain. We do not necessarily have to come up with something too creative for a viral campaign. We need to find a problem or a need that people face every day and provide a solution to it.

Find the talkers

This step was probably one of the easiest steps in the blogrush campaign. The product is designed for talkers. From what I gathered based on the emails I received, John emailed few of the big name bloggers about the product. These authority bloggers did the initial talking, and their readers did the rest of the job. When you sign up for the blogrush services the first time, it asks you to input the names and email addresses of your friends who might be interested in the service.

I hesitated in the past in emailing other bloggers about new materials we publish or blogs that might be interesting to their readership. To be honest, I did not want anyone to think I am spamming them. I have learned since that if you have something relevant and of value, bloggers do not mind hearing about it.

Is blogrush really that good?

Good product or good services are essential elements for the success of a viral campaign. You can succeed in all of the above elements but your product must carry you the rest of the way. Creating a viral campaign for a poor product most likely will backfire. That is the main area where blogrush will fall short. In order for blogrush to be successful, the service has to be automated. You subscribe to it, you get some javascript code to place in your blog and that is it. From blogrush perspective, this is a model that can easily scale up. However, this model does not provide real way to review the blogs subscribed to the service. Subscribers to blogrush have no way to ensure that blogs appearing on the rush widget are good quality blogs. Here is a good example:
Nusuni is a blog about seo and blogging news. Links on the blogrush widget included on it are to

• Create I-phone ring tones for free
• Inside of windows vista
• The smallest 50 inch TV screen
• get coupon codes to amazon, ebay and many
• New firefox

None of these really relates to the topics discussed on nusuni. I clicked on one them just to see the quality of the blogs linked via blogrush. Not too impressive.

We spend a lot of time choosing the blogs we link to. As a matter of fact, I can spend close to an hour looking for good blogs to link for each of my posts. Quality of the links matter a lot. This is where blogrush falls short.

All good things come to an end or get copied

Blogrush obviously provided a solution many bloggers need. Others will copy it. Since the service is not at the level where many bloggers will accept it, I think this even provides a greater chance for other services that provide something very similar but with more quality control mechanisms.

So, at the end I give the viral campaign ran by blogrush two thumbs up but the service itself gets a thumbs down!

Do you think many bloggers will continue to use the widget? Did you install the widget on your site? What do you think of the service?

Update #1 : Ben from blogging experiment reported today on his statistics after using blogrush for three of days. His blog titles had a total of 595 impressions with 1 click to the blog.

Update #2: Problogger is reporting that his blogrush click through rate is around %1 0.05%. There also seems to be some problems with the way credits are calculated in the system

Update #3: well, it seems that i was using the wrong command to show the number of links. The command I was using shows the actual number of times the words “blogrush” was mentioned in text format with or without a link. Of course it is still impressive that blogrush was actually mentioned almost 63,000 thousand but these are not actual links.