There’s a few bloggers commenting on a new widget called Blogrush, it’s a service that is supposed to increase your traffic by sharing links to relevant stories on other Blogrush users blogs and your posts being displayed on theirs and so on.

It’s a great idea and I expect it will work for a while with all the buzz happening but, here are 7 reasons why I wont be using it…

1. The rich get richer…

The person with the most traffic and established blog will benefit most, sure if you refer them and they get the 10,000 views a day on their pages to give you your credits and all the other people referred by you and them get you credits (10 levels they say) then surely there’s going to be the situation where there’s more credits than available blogs? I thought about this and it seems they can just rotate the links to be shown enough times on high traffic blogs so it uses the credits up.

If you have 1000 credits and your link is on five or six high traffic sites, it will only be seen for a very short time before it gets pushed out by another site. 5 blogs getting 200-300 hits a day means your link will only be shown for part of a day.
If you already have lots of traffic, you will get even more! but, if you only have a few hits (credits earned) a day then your links will be gone in no time at all.

2. You lose credibility

What I don’t like the most’est is the referral nature of it, people will be referring others, not because it’s a great site or service but only for the traffic they can harvest from it. They wont care if your blog is good or not, they just want the credits! Not to mention the inevitable, someone creating an extremely high traffic spammed page with a widget it on it so they can rack up credits by displaying links to yours and other peoples sites, showing your blog link on a spam site is bound to affect your credibility with the search engines. Showing a link to your blog on a spam site will lower your value to surfers

3. You’re working for someone else

It’s MLM for nothing, now MLM and word of mouth are great tools for promotion but only if you get something valuable enough for it, like money! (I worked very hard with elottery and make a bundle from it, I plan on doing the same with uVme). If you’re going to promote someone else’s product then you should get paid for it with money, not promises of ‘exponential’ traffic. I feel that Blogrush is benefiting only Blogrush, they are getting everyone else to build their list for them, they’ll have thousands if not tens of thousands of peoples email address and topics of interest, powerful stuff when you want to market to targeted people!.

4. You will be sold stuff by email

I would expect to receive marketing emails from Blogrush after registering with them, maybe not straight away but definitely in the future. Their privacy policy states

If you are a registered user of an Income.com website and have supplied your email address, Income.com may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Income.com and our products.

Their main site is due to launch soon and it’s targeted at entrepreneurs, so you can be certain they’ll be hocking a “make money with this” product real soon.

5. Where is the luv?

If you’re gonna put links to posts that are on other peoples blogs, why not do it for your loyal readership? Send traffic to your readers blogs, proper linkluv!

6. You could be promoting your competition

They say it only links to similar sites and articles but, if you’re in business as an affiliate or you like to promote your own stock then the last thing you want to do is send someone to another site where they can get the same thing!

7. No control on the quality of external links

I’d prefer to link to posts and blogs that I have personally found to be useful, that way the reader knows I’ve approved that site and my credibility isn’t damaged by sending someone to a high traffic splog that just happens to have some of the same things I write about! Why tell your readers, go read this on another blog, I haven’t visited it yet or endorse it but go there anyway!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t smell anything ‘evil’ about the service, in fact, I think it’s an extremely clever way to create a buzz (not to mention create a massive list of people and their likes and dislikes), it’s just not for me, I think I’ll stick with writing good content and only linking to sites that I have found or are for the people that participate in the discussion here.

It’s a clever tool but, I think blogrush and income.com will benefit the most from it. You don’t get something for nothing when you download a tool from someone that makes money from marketing! It’s one of the first rules listed on marketers ebooks, build a list and market to it, or, provide a tool for free and then ‘upsell’ to the takers.

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