The Rush Is On For BlogRush

Right about this time hundreds of thousands of people are writing about a new application called BlogRush. Why are they doing this? Well, for one it appears to be an incredibly useful tool for getting traffic to your blogs and therefore they, as bloggers, want to tell the world about it. On the other hand they also want you to click on their affiliate link so that they get your referral. Neither reason is bad, of course. I am blogging this for both the reasons above.

How Does BlogRush Work?

BlogRush is the idea of John Reese, and on the outset looks to be a fantastic tool for building traffic to your blog. The way it works is that you sign up for an account over at BlogRush, fill in your blog details and are presented with a piece of code that you insert in your blog. Then when you view your blog you will see a box similar to the one at right, with a list of other blogs in it that relate to your subject matter. Elsewhere, on other blogs that are in the same subject matter as yours, your blog will appear in the list. For each person that visits your blog in a day, BlogRush will place your blog in their little interface once a day. So if 100 people visit your blog, your blog will appear 100 times throughout the day on other people's blogs. Theoretically, this will increase your blogs traffic which in turn will increase the number of times you appear on other BlogRush interfaces, increasing your traffic - and so on and so on.

The real meat in the sandwich happens when you get referrals. As you can see also on the interface there is an "add your blog posts - FREE" button. If a blogger clicks on this button on your blog and signs up then you get the referral, which means that for each person that visits their blog you get an appearance on BlogRush. So if someone with 1000 visits a day signs up through your blog (that already gets 100 visits a day), then you will appear 1100 times a day (100 for your blog = 1000 for your referral's blog). Then if someone visits your referral's blog and signs up to BlogRush, not only does your referral get the referral, but you do too! In fact, you get referrals 10 deep, which can equal a huge amount of increased traffic. You also get a special referral link that you can simply email to other people to become referrals for you. Sounds fantastic, but there are problems associated with it for some people.

BlogRush Problems?

For one, Internet Marketers like myself don't want people clicking off their page, so sticking an interface that asks people to do just that may not work out to be the best idea. If someone does click on a link in the BlogRush interface the new blog opens in a fresh window, which is supposed to reduce the amount of "click away" that your site will get. IM'ers are worried that this will reduce sales and it's a fair concern indeed. People love to click on links, so giving them something else to click on (other than their affiliate links) that looks nice and possibly has blog titles that are more appealing, might not be such a good idea.

Another concern that I read in Caroline Middlebrook's blog, was that once everyone gets on board the BlogRush train, that referrals will drop off. As she writes:

Most bloggers will optimise their blogs to encourage readers to either read more of their content, or to click an ad, subscribe to the RSS feed, join a newsletter etc. Generally speaking a blogger does not want the user to click out of their blog so I don’t imagine this widget to be prominently displayed on many blogs. You’ll notice that I put it right at the bottom of my sidebar. I may be wrong here as it looks like quite a lot of bloggers are pushing it in order to get the referral links but once every blog in the world is signed up, the referrals will drop off and then it all falls on the shoulders of the readers.
Source

It's a good point, and one that a lot of people who are rushing for a piece of this 'ere BlogRush might have failed to take in to account. Like Caroline, I am a follower of Ed Dale's internet marketing techniques. I've only been on to him since the start of this year when I accidentally came across him on Google, but in a very short space of time I have grown to trust the man and his word. The thirty day challenge is testiment alone to the massive amount this man is willing to give back and when he vouches for a product or service I have no doubts that it is the top of it's game and worth my hard-earned bucks. Anyway, Ed put out a blog post a couple of days ago saying that he would be giving BlogRush a try very soon and will document his results. I know a lot of people will be waiting to see what he has to say on the matter, and I think at this point a large portion of BlogRush traffic is dependant on his opinion.

As it is BlogRush has been so overwhelmed with traffic that they are having troubles keeping up. Originally the stats from using BlogRush were supposed to be up within 24-48 hours, but yesterday a notice was published on the BlogRush site, by John Reese, that said (in part):

The first 60 hours since we launched the BlogRush public beta has been nothing short of EXPLOSIVE. We knew that we were developing an exciting tool that many bloggers could benefit from, but we had no idea how fast the 'word' would spread across the Web.

With this explosive growth has come some challenges, and our entire team is working very hard to solve any potential bug and issue that we've been alerted to. We're improving things at a very rapid pace and we hope to have the entire network completely stabilized very soon.

I would like to ask that you are patient with us during this time and know that we are doing our best to help YOU drive more traffic to your blog and we will soon have things running smoothly.

You can view the rest of this notice if you login to your BlogRush account. If you don't have a BlogRush account you can get one here.

So if the experts end up saying this might not be such a good thing then I will most likely drop BlogRush from my IM sites, depending on their reasons. I do think I'll probably leave it on this site and any other blogs I have that don't produce sales for me, as my initial instinct is that it's a good tool for generating traffic and let's face it, this blog ain't exactly swimming in readers hehe. Time will tell, and you can bet when it does I'll be posting my thoughts about it - and with BlogRush's help I may even get some people to read it :o)

To Proceed Or Not Proceed

Day 24 of the challenge was a bit of a rehash with a side order of extra stuff. Ed started by talking about traffic, and said that now was the time to look at our niches and if they weren't getting the sort of traffic necessary for a successful start-up then we should probably cut them loose. The amount of traffic necessary isn't necessarily based on the stats we got from Gtrends, either, as that was really only showing what you could be looking at once you are in the #1 or #2 position for your keyword phrase on Google. Most of us, of course, are not at that point. We are, afterall, after 200 visitors to our blog each and every day, with a hope that a certain percentage of those clicking through to our product/sales page. I thought this was a little strange, since not all the SEO tactics had been discussed, so alot of people (myself included) were not ranking as high as we could be, as we probably would be, once all the tactics were put into place. Still, I did have to concede that even with the extra tactics to come over the last 6 days, my WiFi blog was possibly up for getting the chop. The only thing was, of course, that I hadn't given it the link love that it needed, as I wanted to concentrate on the best Wii games blog first. I'm actually contemplating making a post on the 30DC forum, asking for a team of around 5 or 6 people to become a "link love" team, and just work on helping each other out when necessary. I guess it can't hurt and who knows, I might get some interest.

It was interesting to note that if Gtrends is saying you should be getting 200 visits for a #1 or #2 rank in Google, that it will drop to about 60 visits for #3, and around 30-40 for #4, etc. Most people have their Google search results set to default, which is 10 results per page, and most people do not click onto the 2nd page of results. They will refine their search before they do that if what they want can't be found on page 1. So it's important to get to a ranking of at least 10 to really see results.SEO

Ed then went on to talk about clusters. A cluster is where you create content on a bunch of different platform and have it all pointing to your product. These platforms all work on your main keyword phrase, and you should be looking at 4 or 5 in each cluster. Clusters can include, by are not exclusive to, Blogger blog, wordpress blog, Squidoo lens, Hubpage, Ezine article. They should all have at least one link each that points to your product, as well as possibly having links to each other along the way, just to increase your authority/backlinks. Backlinks will be a topic that is discussed at a later date.

As you build up a cluster for your keyword phrase (sausage making tips), you can then create another cluster that centers around another keyword phrase in that same niche (sausage making recipes) and another (sausage making supplies) until you have several clusters, all in the same niche, all pointing to the same products, but using different keywords to capture different search traffic, increasing your chances of getting that illusive 200 visits per day.

Rinse and Repeat

On Day 21 of the challenge Ed had a problem with his video so instead we got a 25 minute audio presentation and a PDF with the slides that would have been used in the video had it worked. I, of course, didn't get clued into that until I was about 20 minutes into the audio - realizing then that I could have been looking at the PDF as Ed went along. No matter, I took a quick look through the PDF until I had caught up. Minor problem for me was that some of the images that Ed had placed in the PDF weren't showing up for me. Normally, with Ed doing an accompanying video with the PDF supplied as well, this problem didn't matter, as I could see the images Ed was using in his video presentation. For this one, I had to just guess. I think I did okay.

Basically, today was a sort of "rinse and repeat" of yesterday. Ed reiterated that we are still in the testing phase, and not to get too hung up on the affiliate product too much, as this was only being used to test our market. Some people have been lucky enough to make money while testing, and why not, but the ultimate goal here was to produce our own product down the track so that no only can we reap all the rewards from sales ourselves (instead of only receiving a commission), but we would then have an asset which we could possibly use to buy and sell. With our own product we can feed it out to affiliate marketers (like we are NOT hehe) and get them to do the work while we get a slice of everything they sell. Maybe our product will be so good that someone will offer us big bucks to buy it (our product being a website perhaps). But Ed was clear that this was something of a possibility only and definitely a far way down the track. I wasn't fussed - I'm just concentrating on making my first dollar through this affiliate sales part, the thought of selling my own product is, at this point, a dream.

He asked everyone to head on over to Mike Mendel's blog and check out his piece on Quality Content. A damn good read made up of a lot of common sense. He pointed out something that I could relate to - that quality is something that you know of, yet you have a hard time defining. You are aware of quality when it's around you, yet when asked to describe what is quality, you become tongue tied...well I do anyway. It's just one of those things in life that is there - you have a feel for it - but it hasn't really been until now that I've had to analyze what it is all about. Where does this quality come from. How can I produce it? For me, it comes down to a feeling I get when writing content, and that's the best I can do to describe it. I'm definitely one of those people/writers who is never satisfied with their work, but I can still tell when I have written something that would be helpful to someone else. Something that has merit, has meat, and is geared to serving the purpose for which it was created. On a creative level I may think it stinks, but I'm not writing a novel here, so it just needs to be interesting instead of truly captivating. I'm sure that will sound weird to people but I know what I mean ;o)

I did pick up some pointers from Mike, such as the use of sub headings in my blog pieces (which I have implemented over at my best Wii games blog), as well as cutting back on the use of affiliate links. I was never spammy with them anyway, but my last best Wii games blog post did have 4 links to the one game in it, so I cut that back to two. The use of pictures to space out your content was something else that Mike mentioned, but I feel I have that under control.

So the benefits of our Market research are now starting to show, as the sites we've put up should be receiving a certain amount of traffic. Obviously, that doesn't mean to say that we are getting as many visits as were in Gtrends for our niche, as our sites are still climbing up the Google page ranking, but we should be seeing results nonetheless. I certainly am for best Wii games. I placed tracking code from Statcounter.com several days ago and have seen, due mostly to social bookmarking, that I'm getting around 50 visits to my site per day. That number does include my visits, so it's probably more like 40 outsiders having a look. Plus, with Statcounter, I get to see where they came from, and I'm seeing that more and more people are finding my site based on their Google search term. For some terms I'm actually in the top position, others I'm no 2. Most I'm around no 5-10 but the point is people are clicking through to my site. In my Amazon.com affiliate stats I've seen around 60 people click through to products from links I have on my site (that includes my 2nd niche as well). All in all I'm pretty happy with the way it's going. It's still very early days but as long as I keep putting out content every 2-3 days and chip away at the social bookmarking then things will progress.

The next stage for me is to increase my profile by using another hosting platform for more content relating to my niche keywords. The goal, as Ed puts it, is to try and gather 200+ people a day to your product, so the more reels you have in the water the more chances you're going to have of catching more fish. So the plan is to start work on a Squidoo lens revolving around best Wii games. I notice there is actually a lens up there already, but I think mine will be better. In the lens I can link directly to the Amazon products also, as well as host Adsense ads on the page. I can discuss a variety of topics relating to best Wii games, but unlike a blog I'm not heaping content upon content. I make up the one page and can just tweak it every so often to keep it fresh. It's about creating a cluster of sites that all feel back to your niche. My niche lends itself to having a number of products available, and I think that will give me more chance of getting sales.

So for now I need to write another blog for each of my niches, and then start on the Squidoo lens, as well as get stuck into the Day 22 challenge content.

Ed Says I'm Ugly

Day 15 was just one video, on the WHY of doing all this stuff - social bookmarking, blog posts with affiliate links, etc). It is, as Ed would say, Marketing the Way The Internet Works (or more importantly, Marketing The Way Google Wants, because as we all know it's Google in whom we are targeting for traffic).

Ed broke it down like this:

Imagine each niche phrase as a nightclub, and Google is kind of like the bouncer (door man) for each and every club there is. Actually, Ed started by saying that Google was the nightclub, but I think the analogy works better with Google as the bouncer. So anyway, niches such as "Viagra", or "Diet Pills" are like the Viper Room nightclub in Los Angeles - notoriously hard to get into. You might as well save yourself the time and humiliation at this point. There are far too many other, much cooler, hipper and better looking people already trying to get into that club for you to even bother. However a term such as "Free Speed Reading" was, as Ed put it, more like a Blue Light Disco. Or perhaps for the purposes of those of us too old to go to Blue Light Discos these days, it's like a boutique pub. Much easier to get into but still it pays to have help. You see, Google your new little blog site and thinks, damn you is ugly! Pig ugly if you're going by the pics Ed uses on his video. So Google doesn't want to let you in, certainly not the Viper Room, but not even the boutique pub either...well, not on your own anyway. New sites generally look dodgy, with their sales letter and opt-in page, it's pretty obvious to Google that you're only interested in parting people from their money. So the trick is to have influential friends to help get you into those smaller clubs and boutique pubs. Influential friends come in the form of authority sites. There are basically two types of influential friends - the gorgeous intelligent friend, and the attention seeking friend. Partner up with both of these and you're practically a shoe-in to get into your desired club.

First up there is the gorgeous intelligent friend - also known as sites that allow you to post content, such as blog sites. Google likes them because there is usually plenty of backlinks to them (backlinks are kind of like other sites putting a good word in, as far as the Google bouncer is concerned). They may have been a round a while and so are well-known to Google - but best of all (for you) they are happy to associate with you (post content and tags). This is a real help and alone can definitely get you through the door, although you'll probably be waiting a while to get to the bar if you only go in with the gorgeous intelligent friend. That's where the attention seeking friend comes in handy.

Attention seeking friends are your social bookmarking sites, such as digg, stumbleupon.com, etc. These sites already have a high page ranking with Google and they get noticed. So when they say you're good, then Google is not only much more inclined to let you in, but you're getting a drinks card and a path cleared to the bar. The problem is, like with life, if you continue to only hang out with the party people (attention seekers) you'll crash and burn, and wear saddle bags under your eyes and be deaf from the constant dance music, and be coughing and wheezing from the smoke and other ingestants. The Google will see you as a washed-up party doofus and bump you from the V.I.P list altogether, never to be heard from again. You'll be pawning off your 6 inch disco platforms and selling the gold in your teeth before you can say "Paris Hilton is going to jail".

So that was it...a painless day of theory, but very important and worthwhile going through. I'm really liking Ed's analogies. They certainly make digesting the theory that much easier.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that another 3 pieces of content have been requested. I think this is going to be a daily thing and I think I know why, but I'll expand on that more if it turns out I'm right.

Day One on Day 7

So I finally got to start Day One of the challenge today, on day 7 of the challenge. I'm sure I have a lot to catch up on but I figure if I can manage 3 days of the challenge each day then I will be caught up by the end of Friday, just in time to hopefully have some time over the weekend to focus on what I've gone through. I'm looking forward to just having one day of learning each day, as there is so much stuff contained in these videos and podcasts that I'm sure to have my work cut out for me over the next couple of day.

I realize that most of the people writing blogs of the thirty day challenge will be going through the same stuff I am, and seeing as I'm a newbie in the world of blogging it's doubtful that I'll have a particularly original slant on what's going on. It will take some time to get comfortable with all this documentation so excuse me if I start doing things by merely going through the facts of the day. To be honest, I'm sure this blog will really only be used for me down the track to keep track of what I've done so I can continue to run the processes and hopefully make more money from Internet Marketing, so it's unlikely at all that I'll be offering anything new to people reading this who have read other blogs on the thirty day challenge.

So Day One was running through the Internet Marketing symphony in 4 parts. I'd seen Ed do a video on this some time ago, either on the Undies website or through the Immediate Edge, I forget, but it helps to have a refresher on the important aspects of Internet Marketing...especially since I'd forgotten the order of the four parts (and actually forgotten one of the parts entirely), so here they are again, forever etched in 1's and 0's.

1) Market Research - The most important of the four aspects of Internet Marketing. As Ed put it, imagine if you wanted to open a coffee shop and could find out not only exactly how many people would walk past your shop in a day, but also how many would come in to your shop for a look-see. This stage is all about testing to see if your idea/niche is up to snuff, so to speak. Does it have enough searchers per day to justify the time you're about to take on promoting it? Even if there is enough interest, how is your competition? Will you be fighting for a Google ranking amongst millions of other hungry competitors, all perhaps most gifted than you in Internet Marketing, as well as being far more established? There are many many ways to make money online and pretty much everything out there is a potential niche. If your eyes and ears are open to it you can find niches anywhere...at the moment I'm still working on my eyes and ears but I have faith in Ed's word. I know what it's like when you open your mind to something. I know how when you're interested in buying a particular brand of car all of a sudden, wherever you go you'll see that make of car. So it's all about just writing down ideas from every-which-where...magazines, internet, TV, markets, going for a walk...seeing what appears to be selling and then going through the process of market research to see if it's a viable niche to be putting your time and effort into. Ed says the smallest niches are usually the most successful in the 30 day challenge game, and it makes sense, so the larger ones have a great deal of competition, as I stated above, that have been working at it far longer than myself. And lets not forget that within a particular niche there are often sub-niches. Ed used the example of Trout Fishing being a niche, and Trout fishing with a spinner in a stream being a more focused sub-niche. If people are searching for this stuff then there is a dollar to be made, and Market Research is all about finding out if there are people searching.

2) Traffic - Of course this makes sense as being the second most important aspect of Internet Marketing. Sure, you've found a niche that people are interested in and has a small amount of competition, but without getting people to your product/service, how do you ever expect to sell anything? You could have the greatest coffee in the world but if people are not going into your shop then you won't sell a drop. No traffic = no sales, it's a no-brainer. Developing a steady flow of traffic will take time and effort and that what it's all about on the 30 day challenge. I expect this aspect to have the most time spent on it, as some of the pre-season videos have shown the ways in which traffic can be developed. A lot of the Web 2.0 applications will come into force, no doubt, and will hopefully help channel the people you saw in your market researching, who were interested in your product/service, through your virtual shop door. This year the 30DC'ers are going down the free road for traffic. In the past, the 30 Day challengers would pay a small amount of money to places such as Google Adwords, in order to increase their ranking in searches...this year, as the entire 30 day challenge is being run free as a bird, it means that traffic must be generated differently. This will take more time and effort on my part, than if I was using PPC (Pay Per Click), but in the long run I thing it will be much better for me, both in a financial sense as well as an experience one.

3) Conversion - This is the sales part of Internet Marketing. Getting someone from being interested in the product/service you are offering, to actually throwing down their hard-earned bucks and paying for it. This section Ed and the gang will be, for the first time in a 30 day challenge, be showing us how to test what works in the ways of converting people into sales. This is obviously the trickiest aspect of the entire process, and can be the most frustrating. In the past it was often done with a sales letter, and had a lot to do with razzle-dazzle and good copy writing. Nowadays there are plenty of other tools at our disposal as Web 2.0 incorporates video and audio tools into the mix. Ed says that those who are able to work with these tools will have a better chance of making their first $10 in time. Thankfully, it's not necessarily about standing infront of the camera and talking, or else I might as well drop out of the challenge right now. I'm definitely not comfortable infront of the camera and I dare say looking comfortable when making a video is probably quite important when it comes to having a person buy your product/service. But as we've seen with the 30 Day Challenge Film Festival, it's not always about putting your mug on screen. Plenty of people have made videos with just images or footage of other things. I'd like to think I'm creative enough to come up with a few ideas in that area when the time comes...This year it's going to be about making a list (of email recipients) and then having a special "launch" to promote your product/service, and I assume, continuing to lavish great deals on them as you go, while gathering more names for your list. I remember Dan Raine saying when I first started the Immediate Edge program, that lists were the most important part of making a conversion.

4) Product - Finally we get to the last (but by no means least) of the 4 aspects, the product. Obviously without a product there is no sale but the product is the last in terms of importance as there are so many markets and niches out there it's more about finding the product to fit the market, rather than the other way round. In the past Ed and the gang have usually gone down the route of E-Books, either affiliate products or generating their own, and that is still quite a viable way of going about things (and one that I still plan to get into after the challenge has run it's course), but now, again using the latest audio and video tools that Web 2.0 has for us, we are able to offer a whole new range of products and services. I'm not exactly sure what they are at the moment...although for some reason belly dancing lessons comes to mind as a possible idea that could be sold through video...and some may say I have the belly for it, I'm sure. Again, it's about starting in small niches, staying away from the big guns like health foods and supplements, and picking away at the lesser known products and services that have a variety of interest levels available through the long-tail phrases. I'm sure Ed and Dan will talk more about long-tail phrases later, but it's one that I find really interesting and am planning on exploring in greater depth down the track.

So for the most part that was Day one of the challenge. I watched the video, listened to the podcasts, checked out some niche ideas from ehow.com, random niche generator (don't install the tool bar), trendhunter, and made a preliminary list of niche ideas that I will then go to market research work on as Ed takes me through the process. Most, if not all people on the challenge, will naturally have already gone through that so I'd better quite dribbling and get onto Day Two...