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DealDotCom and BlogRush – The Power of Hype

written by John Chow on September 17th, 2007

blog-deal.png

Ever wonders what happens to the traffic of some sites when nearly everyone in the blogsphere talks about them? Take a look at the Alexa traffic graph comparing my blog to that of BlogRush and DealDotCom.

Billing itself as the Woot! of Internet marketing products, with a great affiliate program that pays 35% commission on the first tier and 15% on the second, DealDotCom exploded onto the blogging world. And the amazing thing is, the site doesn’t officially go live until tomorrow. If the rise of DealDotCom was impressive, then rise of BlogRush has been nothing short of meteoric. Pretty much every blog I visited today has a post on it. At the rate it’s growing, BlogRush will have every blog on the Net signed up within a month!

BlogRush Growing Pains

This kind of growth level always puts the developers on the edge. Logging into my BlogRush control panel today, I see a message from BlogRush founder, John Reese.

The first 60 hours since we launched the BlogRush public beta has been nothing short of EXPLOSIVE. We knew that we were developing an exciting tool that many bloggers could benefit from, but we had no idea how fast the ‘word’ would spread across the Web.

With this explosive growth has come some challenges, and our entire team is working very hard to solve any potential bug and issue that we’ve been alerted to. We’re improving things at a very rapid pace and we hope to have the entire network completely stabilized very soon.

To make up for the growing pains, BlogRush is giving everyone bonus credits. Their entire surplus of syndication credits will be given to the BlogRush users. They will randomly distribute all extra credits amongst the entire network for awhile to reward the early adopters. To get maximum benefit from BlogRush, you pretty much have to be among the first to sign up. It’s only been live for a day so you should still be good.

Now, I hope DealDotCom’s grand opening goes well tomorrow. I wonder what the first product will be?

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By N2H
  1. Whoa, that just goes to show the power of blogs.

  2. Are John Chow and John Cow mirroring each other now? Say it ain’t so!

  3. It’s hard to be prepared for success. I ran into a similar problem with a restaurant/pub guide I made. It wasn’t built to scale, and was a little too successful!

  4. That is a really clear graph giving a great picture of the strength of great marketing and tapping on the shoulder of the right people(bloggers). I was glad to see the email from them this morning, after a lot of the comments I was reading this weekend they were starting to sound a little hokey. The email has cleared up a lot.

    I had a widget in a post as well as on my sidebar, that was a violation so I corrected it. Unlike Google they gave me an opportunity to correct my error, before just closing my account.

    I have had an increase in travel related traffic as well.

  5. The power of being first never ceases to amaze me! On the Web, early adopters (assuming they have a decent product), always win.

  6. Well thats a huge achievement and with a success like this there is always a added responsibility to maintain that success for longer time.Lets hop they do exactly the same
    Cheers
    Abhishek

  7. Thats what I wonder too, whats the first product going to be. I got couple things in mind that I will wait to get on DealDotCom and buy them (if the price is reasonable of course) :P

  8. I really hope to see what dealdotcom will offer in their first product.

  9. Ok. I’m doing it. I’m signing up right now to Blogrush.

  10. The hype has certainly taken over. I am seeing new people’s blog on my blogosphere for sure.

  11. I can’t wait to see what the first product is!! :mrgreen:

  12. I think their targeting is a bit off, as I just recieved traffic from a xxx porn site coming through Blogrush :shock:

  13. So if I have some great service to offer I know where to go to get exposure. :smile:

  14. I have not received any click from blogrush. I have signed 1 day ago.

  15. Yeah these programs must be getting an incredible amount of users to their site.
    Btw John – I emailed you about it – but I interviewed the Owner of DealDotCom yesterday – thought you might be interested ;)

  16. Hm..this new program explode..
    I also using this tools now…
    hope it will explode my blog too…

  17. I got to read a lot blogs today in my niche that I would not have found if not for BlogRush. So far so good…

  18. I have the next product coming soo. All about making money..helping you make money, helping everyone make money :)

  19. Quite interesting graph there John! Also, haven’t commented in awhile so let me just say that I love the new design!

  20. I haven’t seen this much buzz since the last Harry Potter book was released. :roll:

  21. it seems like you have donated some traffic to them, as john chow have given both dealdotcom and blogrush some advertisements

  22. I’ve been following the progress of John Chow’s blog for several months and there’s no arguing that it’s a great resource and a massive success, enriching the pockets of John Chow and his legion of readers alike.

    That being said, I feel as though John is starting to lose significant credibility and slip into the same category as the same unscrupulous ebook marketing gurus that he denounces on his blog. Get more in depth on my blog.

  23. Blogrush has blasted the entire blogosphere. Every blog worth its while has a writeup on it. I hope they make enough money to pay for all that publicity. Looking at a few comments over this, people don’t seem to happy with it.

  24. YOUR STATS WILL START DISPLAYING WITHIN 24-48 HOURS.
    (Thank you for your patience.) I’m running out of patience :sad:

  25. it wont work for bloggers. this is not something that will get you tons of traffic. why? read here …… http://www.successonline.in/the-rise-and-fall-of-blogrush

  26. it wont work for bloggers. this is not something that will get you tons of traffic. why? read here …… http://www.successonline.in/the-rise-and-fall-of-blogrush

    Of late i’ve been seeing a lot of blogs promoting the new Borush offering. For those who are unaware, Blogrush is basically like a Banner or Link Exchange system. Bloggers sign up at Blogrush to get an embedded widget code that they can place in their blog sidebars. Everytime your page loads, the widget displays a set of 5 blog post heading links, from other blogs that are part of the BlogRush network (just like you) and are in the same category as you. These links are displayed inside the nice looking widget. An example is shown below.

    For every one display of the widget (which ultimately results in 5 links being displayed) you get one exposure of your blog post on the network – on other blogger member website widgets. This sounds fair, but if you look deep into things you will realize theirs a defect. I will come to that later. But irst another important trick thats going to work like viral marketing on steroids for BlogRush…

    For every blogger you refer – when they sign up by clicking on the BlogRush logo at the bottom of the widget, you benefit. For every direct referral you also will get one free link exposure everytime your referral displays the widget. If this referral refers another member – you get the same benefit again… gaining one more exposure for a two level deep referral. And so on … 10 levels deep.

    This trick is absolutely fantastic, because it will cause bloggers to start promoting this new exchange service to fellow bloggers immediately in hope of getting referral bloggers before others snap them. Bloggers can see the potential of the 10 level deep credit system. It can really balloon to a large amount of free link exposure. Which *could* result in traffic.

    This is where I tend to differ. Blogrush is claiming that – bloggers should sign up right away to get a huge rush and volume of traffic to their sites in a short span of time. There is however 2 issues here.

    The first one is that – if this is a 1:1 exchange network, and BlogRush is displaying only 5 ads inside the widget – then they are creating an excess of 4 ads per display – which they can then distribute to the referring members. So, the excess credit of 4 ads can help them – BUT only 4 levels deep. As the system grows and referral lelvels start to get deep and aproach 10 levels of depth – how will BlogRush maintain the 1:1 ratio? The answer is – that well, now all members will have referrals of 10 levels deep. So there will always be member whose widgets display 5 expousres, and get one credit exposure in return and therefore create an excess of 4 credits for the system. This will help BlogRush.

    And if it doesnt, and the excess exposures being created are geting close to zero – they can always simply increase the widget size or make it scrolling and display 10 links!! This will immediately create a larger excess for BlogRush on every widet exposure. Super!

    Super for BlogRush, but bad for members.
    I can already see a very very very low CTR on this network. Although the links displayed are in your category and may match your sites content – the CTR is going to be extremely low. A standard ad on yor blog post probably has a CTR of half to one-and-half percentage. This widget firstly may not be placed by bloggers on the top of their sidebar / page – and will probably be tucked away at the side bottom – is my guess. My guess is that the CTR for this widget will probably be around 0.1% ( or one-tenth of one percent. ). Now, if your blog post title appears with 5 others – your CTR will be further reduced by a factor of 5 or 20% of 0.1% which is 0.02% which is 2 clicks out of 10,000 page views or 1 click every 5000 page views!! Now, what kind of rush of traffic is that?

    And, if BlogRush decides to increase the number of Blog Links inside their widget tomorrow (to compensate for excess credits being given to members for referrals) – then you can be assured that the paltry traffic and CTR will get even worse.

    Nice try BlogRush. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. This is just a passing fad.

Trackbacks

  1. BlogRush - The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer!!! - September 18, 2007 at 5:27 pm