John Reese is the consummate scientific marketer. He’s brilliant.
He, of all people, understands the power of good numbers. In his time he’s made millions off very smart online marketing and self-promotion. He has seen first hand that creative and effective marketing to a huge list of qualified leads can yield massive returns.
Now, with BlogRush, John has turned his understanding of numbers into the Amway of the Blogosphere.
Follow me as I explain how BlogRush is structured like an MLM, and how only very few will see the big traffic numbers…
Referrals Are Everything
BlogRush talks about referrals like Amway talks about downlines.
In BlogRush’s case, your total “credits” are calculated based on widget clicks going down 10 levels into your referral network. So immediately something is pretty obvious: whoever signs up the most bloggers wins.
When someone joins BlogRush, our system knows exactly WHERE they came from. The originating blog gets permanently marked in our system as the “referrer” for that new blog. And as you may have already guessed, the original blog now earns additional “syndication credit” on all the traffic that the referring blog produces — every single day. But it doesn’t stop there. If that new blog refers another user, that original blog then earns credits based on THAT new user as well. It continues through 10 “generations” of referrals with no limit to the number of blogs and/or traffic that can be produced by any level.
Now, if all those referrals (and referrals of referrals, etc) you’d seen sign up to BlogRush all had lame-duck websites with no organic traffic, you’d be unlikely to see any great volume of credits accrue to your account.
So it’s both about how many blogs you have in your 10-levels-deep referral network, as well as how popular those blogs are in their own right. In other words, the dream scenario for a BlogRush aspirant is to sign up as many A-list high-traffic blogs, as high up in their referral network as possible…
This ‘process’ provides incredible LEVERAGE. You can have a blog that gets just 1 visitor a week, but if that next visitor happens to be someone with a blog that gets 25,000 visits a day, and they click your widget and sign up, you’ll start having your blog posts promoted over 25,000 TIMES A DAY. And that doesn’t even count all the potential “viral growth” that can then occur from that blog referring other blogs. It’s very, very powerful.
Get In Quick! It’s a Land Grab!
In this sense, BlogRush is a land-grab. If Robert Scoble, say, can be convinced to put the BlogRush widget on his blog, he will only be one person’s 1st-level referral. For all the click-traffic Scoble’s widget will receive, only nine “upline” referrers will receive distributed credits.
Now, how many high-traffic blogs are out there? And how many of those bloggers do you know well enough that they will sign up to BlogRush using your referral link? And how many A-list bloggers do you know who would even put the BlogRush widget on their blog at all?
(I’m only testing it, and it doesn’t have long to live on my blog, that I can tell you for sure!)
So here’s the rub: if you want to make it big with BlogRush, stop everything you’re doing and RIGHT NOW go and email every blogging man, woman, child and dog, in the desperate hope that they’ve not yet signed up via someone else’s referral link. Because once they’ve signed up, game over for you.
This “land grab” explains why the person who emailed me with an “invitation” is someone I don’t know, who maintains a fairly obscure SEO blog, somewhere in the nether regions of the blogosphere. I am guessing she understood what I’m explaining here and went nuts compiling a massive invite list. Because this is what you have to do to make it on BlogRush!
And The Winner Is… BlogRush (Not You!)
John Reese is smart enough to have seen this “land grab”, this “mad flurry” of invites, this “blog-rush”, from the very start. He designed it to be this way!
I have seen John use the “scarcity” strategy in his marketing superbly, over and over again. And BlogRush is all about the “scarcity pitch”… the old “you’d better hurry before we run out” line.
Here’s a concluding remark John left on his Income.com blog a few days back, in introducing BlogRush:
If you have a blog, you’ll definitely want to join the public beta as soon as it goes live. There’s a definite advantage to being an “early adopter” of this service as far as referrals are concerned.
Never afraid of going completely over the top on superlatives and hyperbole, John wrote this in an email on “launch night”:
On a serious note, I really think we’re about to make Internet history tonight, and if you happen to still be awake whereever in the world you are, please come to the blog and enjoy this historic night WITH US.
Yeah, right up there with the Berlin Wall and New Year’s Eve 2000! But before we all get too snide and critical, remember that the people on John’s newsletter list love this stuff and lap it all up like salivating kittens.
Still unsure whether he had done enough to “bait” his email readers into clicking through, he added two more cheap sales “hooks” to that same email:
Check out my latest post (I’ve been updating the blog non-stop) that has a photo of me in total ZOMBIE-mode.
You’ll also see a mystery guest in the background… an incredible marketer, actually.
There we have the funny photo hook and the Pandora’s Box hook, thrown in for good measure. Man, he’s a copywriting MACHINE!!
Everyone is on BlogRush… Already!
BlogRush, no more than a few days old, ranked 342 in Alexa yesterday. Now, not withstanding the fact that most of John’s “tribe” have the Alexa toolbar installed, that’s phenomenal uptake in anyone’s language. John is truly a brilliant marketer.
And of course, I’m exaggerating… not everyone is on BlogRush already. But what I see happening here is that all the valuable high-traffic bloggers are in one of two camps: they’re either already registered via invitations that went out immediately after the BlogRush launch, or they’ve not registered yet because they don’t need the widget (i.e. the traffic) and/or don’t have that kind of “real estate” to give it on their blogs.
That leaves everyone else: the 99.9% of bloggers receiving a few dozen visits a day. And you’re never going to get a “rush” on your blog from all them.
What You Need to Do Right Now… the Amway Thing
If you would like to earn yourself enough credits from BlogRush to warrant decent levels of exposure for your blog, there is one thing and one thing only you need to do: invite every blogging man, woman, child and dog to sign up (making sure to include your referral link in there properly). Because unless you’re an A-list blogger yourself, don’t be so naive to think you’ll get the sign-ups from just sticking the widget on your blog and hoping people will click the link at the bottom of it.
That won’t happen. Every blogger of any worth will have already been invited by someone else, see!
If BlogRush Really Is Like Amway…
If BlogRush really does prove to be like Amway in the long run then we will see a relatively few blogs do really well out of it, traffic-wise. The referral network (that massive tree-like hierarchy that credits travel up) will grow rapidly at the start, as everyone signs up and sticks the widget on their blogs. Then soon enough people will for one of a number of reasons start removing the widget.
Maybe it looks ugly, maybe the traffic isn’t coming. Whatever. But as the widgets drop off people’s blogs, the hierarchy will compress (dead “nodes” will drop out of the referral networks, I assume). In time the usage of the widget will “steady out” and we’ll see that, like Amway, that vast majority of people don’t get much out of it at all, while a select few who got in early are doing really really well.
It’s possible that if BlogRush can stabilize in this way, then there may be some monetary value to blogs with very very strong and steady BlogRush referral networks under them. Think about it… it’s one thing to buy a domain name that has a PR5 and a bunch of good on-topic back-links. It’s another thing entirely to buy all that along with a BlogRush account and a widget dumping hundreds, maybe thousands of visitors per day to your site!
But that’s all speculation.
Anyway… you’re not supposed to be here. You have no time to waste… go send off some more invites!
