The crazy rush to free traffic for bloggers promised by the Blogrush network had came to an end without leaving the beta stage, unfortunately. The founder, John Reese, has closed the doors of the one year (or so) old company.

As he stated on the website’s frontpage “the service spread like wildfire all over the Web”. I don’t know if the bad economy or something else made them close the doors but Blogrush wasn’t monetized at all, not even with advertising. How did they survive? By losing a small fortune, the founder said. Concentrating on acquiring users and worrying about monetizing later? Well, I guess that was the mantra of almost every Web 2.0 startup which in this economy meltdown doesn’t cut it anymore.

The blogs from the network were scrutinized before getting accepted in the network (disclosure: my personal blog was rejected sometime ago) so they wanted to ensure the highest quality of it. It seems they have made some mistakes (not accepting my personal blog was one :)…ok,ok, I am joking) starting from selecting blogs, continuing with security issues and lower clickthrough rates, not to mention abusive users who tried to game the system (I don’t think there is a system which users won’t try to game).

The blogs then had to install a widget like this one on the right.
The concept looks very much like the free banner exchange concept in the ’90s (and which, by the way, was a failure – I personally tried them at that time).

What is surprising is that the founder doesn’t want to sell the service although he got several offers. Why? That’s a mystery and he won’t tell it, of course. I don’t see the point of not selling to somebody who can keep the service running and maybe deal with all the problems it had. If you care about your users then you find ways to keep the service alive, even if that means selling. Or, at least you recover some of the lost fortune, if nothing else.

We wish you more luck in your future endeavours, John!

bloggers, blogrush, free traffic, network, widget

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Here at the “Free Traffic, Search Engine & Social Media Optimization” Web 2.0 Expo session, social media expert and famous guest blogger at several influential blogs Muhammad Saleem talks about social media optimization. Most of what he tells is pretty basic and informative – start a campaign on Sunday night -, but I like his overall message the most: it’s about love and appreciation people! Here’s my interpretation of what he said.

Everybody on the web seems to be eager for some attention, but the best way to get some is to grant other people attention. For starters, write an evergreen post about your specialism. For example a Howto ebook about your hobby or profession that will remain interesting for a couple of years. As soon as people link to this quality content, show that you appreciate this and link back to them by saying: this blog picked up my news, read here what the blogger has to say about it. Or allow trackbacks. Other visitors will notice that it pays off to link to you, and start linking as well. Before you know it, you’ve started one big attention love chain.

One remark that goes hand in hand with the love-thought is that you have to be genuine. Of course you can act like you dig the social media revolution and that you’re oh-so open and honest. Yet if you don’t mean it, the savvy users will be able to look beyond your facade. Also, writing beautiful and spectacular headlines on social bookmarking sites is ok and truly effective, yet you have to deliver on the promise.

So if you haven’t yet: change your mindset before you enter the world of social media. Put some effort in relationships, reward active visitors and content-creating colleagues and participate in conversations and enjoy the attention.

free traffic, love, muhammad saleem, social media, social media optimization, web20expo

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