Blog Rush – Do Fools Rush In?

There’s been an enormous amount of noise over the last week about a new service called Blog Rush.

It’s a service set up by John Reese. The aim is very simple: get more traffic to your blog by putting a widget on your blog that displays links to other blogs. Every time you show the widget on your site, your blog appears on a widget on someone else’s site.

That’s the theory. And in theory it sounds great. But there are some serious rumblings going on. Seems a lot of people are not seeing any traffic in return for their displays. Now, teething troubles are to be expected with a new service, but the kind of statistics I’ve seen reported do suggest a major problem.

Whether this service will grow to be a valuable and long-term facility remains to be seen. The idea itself, however, is a good one.

Most marketers who’ve been around for more than a few weeks soon learn that fully 90% – or more – of their visitors simply wander off. That’s wasted traffic. If you can send that traffic to someone else and he does the same in return to you, you’ve just doubled your traffic (roughly speaking).

If a visitor is going to leave your site anyway, there’s really no harm in gently guiding him to another site that returns the favor.

So Blog Rush sounds like an excellent idea and over the course of the next few weeks we’ll see how well it turns out.

One thing’s for sure, it’s extremely unlikely that John Reese would want to tarnish his name and reputation so it looks like the current problems are just the growing pains such new ideas suffer.

Tags: blog, blogrush, John Reese, web traffic, internet marketing, web visitor