Link Bait Me

(This is also posted on my other blog, JoeTech.com, but I thought it would be important to share here, too.)

What’s Bla.st? I’ll get to that, but first, let’s talk about why BlogRush has failed.

1. BlogRush has a horrible CTR.
BlogRush has a horrible click through ratio. It may come up with tweaking or it may not, but it certainly doesn’t help that they’ve made a few other mistakes below. Look at my stats above. I might not win the Blogger of the Year award, but it’s not just me, either. Everyone has been complaining about the low click through ratio. Even though John Chow has 400+ people sign up under him (at a couple levels), earning more credits in the system, his own stats indicated a very low return on the investment made with that amount of screen real estate. This was problem enough for John that he wrote an article about how to control the headlines BlogRush displays for your site.

2. Too easy to game
These days, any new start-up or unique site needs to plan for explosive growth from the beginning. BlogRush seems to have missed a couple steps here. First, their site did not launch with safe guards against people trying to game the system. This was seen pretty early on, when a blog called A Blackhat’s Diary posted an article detailing how to exploit BlogRush, and soon enough, a lot of people were gaining credits they never earned. BlogRush found themselves scrambling to block cheaters, ultimately deciding to move to manual account approval, which is a nice bandaid, but it won’t stop the bleeding.

3. Where’s the revenue stream? Sustainability?
It seems the business model here might simply be to get lots of users and be Internet Famous. That’s all well and good, but nobody can expect to last without some means of paying the bills. I don’t know if they’re planning a “pro” upgrade model like Flickr or if they plan on selling the excess credits in the system, but I can’t see either making them rich. Maybe Yahoo will buy them and it won’t be their problem anymore.

4. It looks like an ad.
OK… I know they’ve now got their new “flavors“, but it may just be too little, too late. The original design was OK and all, but why not throw a javascript color picker in the “Get Your Code” page and let us pick out the colors that work for our sites? Even the resulting new color choices could have been available at launch with a couple extra hours of work.

5. Loss of loyalty and faith.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. BlogRush got a lot of great buzz and sucked us in. Whether they orchestrated the initial push or just got lucky, it worked brilliantly. The loss of faith came with the problems mentioned above happening so quickly. The fixes have been rushed and I, personally, worry about how well stuff is tested and over all stability of the system. The more you rush code, not to mention changing the was it is intended to work after launch, the more room there is for mistakes.

For me, it’s just not worth it to roll the dice and see what happens. I have removed the widget from my blogs, but you’ll notice that I’ve added something new. I’m talking about Bla.st, the free advertising directory. Just look to the right (under the Alexa ranking box) to see Bla.st in action. Below is an example of previewing a card on the site.

Bla.st is a system of “cards” displayed in a grid and categorized. A card is simply an image that should give a visitor a good idea of what to expect from your site or otherwise entice them to visit. Cards are free to add, but if you want to get noticed, you can bid to be the highest placed card. A single bid (per day amount) will position your card above all free cards and cards with lower bids in not only the main page, but up to 10 allowed categories to which you’ve added your card.

I set up 2 cards the other day as a test. It’s too early to make a good guess at how well it’ll do, but already, they’re performing better than expected. Here’s the free one, which I have pointing to my Win My Motorola Q Smartphone contest on JoeTech.com (my other blog):

Only one click, but it’s still free traffic, right, and it’s only been a day. The second card is one linking directly to JoeTech.com. It’s a paid link, so ovbiously, the higher rank (and more categories) has produced better results so far:

The important thing to note is that you don’t have to have the highest placement bid to be on top (and I’m on top of the main page for $1.37 a day). The key is to create an enticing image that draws the visitor to your card on the page. I spent about 12 seconds creating mine, but you should spend a few minutes if you want the ideal results.

The site, itself is still growing, but the bulk of the traffic, as seen in my stats above, comes from the widgets. They’ve done a nice job of making it easy for a website owner to create a widget that fits nicely into nearly any layout. You can choose how many cards to display, a number of columns, card size (small or big), a category and sub-category, and colors. I went pretty simple with mine.

You may wonder, as I did at first, why people would put a widget on their site if there’s no “view credits” to earn. It’s quite simply a referral program, but it’s one of the best I’ve come across. You get 50% of any sale made within 30 days of a click on your referral link. While you’re removing BlogRush from your site, you might as well replace it with the Bla.st widget and make a few bucks.

Bla.st has some pretty impressive numbers for a site that I think is lacking the buzz it deserves. At the time of this writing, they have 1,507 cards in 7,283 categories, which have been viewed over 27 million times.

I really encourage everyone to check it out, even if just for a free card. It’s definitely worth a look.

Popularity: 11% [?]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 8:32 am and is filed under Other SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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