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.

Tags: Blogging, blogs, generate-traffic, online-marketing, viral-marketing, word-of-mouth-marketing
Posted in Blogging, Business, Sales & Marketing

Everybody’s looking for that quick fix to increase their traffic.  So is there something out there that’s really fast and effective?  Well, there’s an option of signing up with sites that will most likely scam you  out of your money, or you can implement any of the following tips:

• Get with the program: start blogging!  So if you haven’t noticed yet, everyone is blogging.  Big companies, small companies, and professionals at every level have taken on blogging, and so should you.  Don’t think that your line of work or your organization doesn’t require a blog; if you have a website, you need to blog! It’s such a great way to drive a natural traffic to your site.  People will begin to link back to beneficial posts and may refer friends to check out your site.  Don’t underestimate the power of a blog.

• Don’t write regular posts:  Too many bloggers think that posting short 100 words blogs is enough to get readers interested and to keep them coming back. I have to admit I was guilty of that when I first started blogging. Although there are no rules about the length of a post, what matters is that your posts are intriguing enough to create a faithful reader base. Most successful blogs will publish at least one lengthy and well researched post per week. Some call these lengthier posts “pillar posts” because they are a pillar to establish a great blog.

• Establish Strong Social Media Connections:  Well there isn’t much point to blogging if you haven’t established strong connections with other bloggers, forum members, and users of social media sites.  Why is this so crucial?  Because great content is not enough; you have to market that content. And social media marketing is probably when of the best ways to market your content online. So remember:

• The more you comment on someone else’s blog, the more likely it is that they will comment on yours. 
• The more you participate in forums, the more you encourage people to visit. 
• The more you link to other blogs within your own entries, the more bloggers will link-back to you, thus helping you generate more and more traffic to your site.

• What about Articles?  Usually blogs can range from 200 words – 1500 words. Those entries are very valuable for ranking well within search engines because of the new content you’re offering.  However, writing SEO articles is a valuable technique as well.  SEO articles are keyword rich, useful content that can be designed to target specific words and phrases that you would like to rank for within search engine queries.  This can help generate a lot of natural traffic for you.  Additionally, you don’t always have to publish these articles on your site: consider article submissions or notable online magazines.  The amount of link-backs you will receive, in addition to the recognition of publishing on a worthy site will help double and triple your traffic in no time.  Article publishing sites use to work very well couple of years back but I believe that search engines discount the authority of these sites to a great extent nowadays. So the real value is not in these sites themselves; it is one someone picks up an article from these sites and publishes it on his own site or forum. I know we got couple of good clients when our articles were published on web pro world. 

• Make it easy to subscribe:  Once you have an RSS feed to your site, you can easily expect people to subscribe to your blog, thus generating more traffic. Of course, be weary of partial vs. full feed  because this will impact whether or not people will continue to subscribe to your blog.

• Give them a reason to come back:  Offering a valuable resource such as a whitepaper is a great incentive to get people coming back and referring others to your site. If you have the capability to write a whitepaper that is going to offer valuable information to your community and/or client base; than write one and offer it as a download.  If you are just starting out, offer your whitepapers for free. Most websites require visitors to subscribe to your site before downloading whitepapers. That can work very well in building up a mailing list.

• Can I trust you?  Nobody likes to subscribe to, our visit a site that seems fishy.  If you want to get more people coming to your site, you need to show that them that you value their privacy.  This can happen through simply stating the importance of their privacy, become a member of authentic groups, and placing the icons of your memberships throughout the site.

• Winning something:  If you want a surefire way to get you publicity throughout the web, then hold a contest and offer prize money or some material reward.  Our $400 blog contest generated tons of link backs from other bloggers as well as a ton of traffic to the site. People love it and will come flocking to your site, write about you, and give you lots of link love.

• Widgets and more…:  There’s no secret that if you offer something valuable on your site, traffic will come. And online tools do just that! You’re offering something free and useful to online visitors, and as a result you become bookmarked, referred to, linked to, and even mentioned throughout the web. But please, no more calculators and calendars.  If you want good ideas for tools, visit any forums and see what people are actually looking for!

So, let’s come up with an action plan:

1. If you have not started blogging, then plan on installing a blogging software in the next three days!
2. Come up with a list of 20 blog topics that you can write about. At least 5 topics from your list will be lengthier posts of 1200 words or more.
3. Select two online forums which you will start participating in regularly. At a minimum, you should post in each forum once a day. Your comments should be meaningful and enhance the discussion on the forum.
4. Select 10 different blogs that write about something that interest you and start reading and commenting on them regularly. Just like forums, no spammy comments. The goal is to establish real relationships with bloggers.
5. Come up with a list of lengthy articles that will be of interest to your client base. Plan on publishing one article per month.
6. Come up with a list of authority sites in your field that accept article submission. Contact these site to understand what editorial guidelines they have for publishing articles
7. As you go through forums and blogs, be on the look out for ways to create tools. If someone is complaining about a problem that does not have a real solution, that might your first tool.

There are more ways to get traffic, but these ways will help you significantly see growth in less than 60 days. What other great techniques do you implement?

Tags: generate-traffic, increase-readership, increase-website-traffic
Posted in SEO, Sales & Marketing