In the end, I never signed up.

Though I was patiently waiting to (“Thank you for your patience!”), all through the 6 weeks until he deactivated those 10,000 blogs and through to the release of the new “shocking” BlogRush.

That did it for me. No way was I going to be part of this long-overdue, over-hyped, inefficient, botched, re-hashed system.

Based on John Reese’s reputation, my expectations were way up. Not only did I want to use it for my own blogsites, but I was going to recommend it to my networks, and to my clients to use in their blogsites which I had set up for them.

My clients and networks depend on my word. And I was depending on John Reese’s reputation. Well, he let me down with the way he handled the launch of BlogRush.

I’m now thankful I never went ahead to install BR for my clients. I couldn’t bring myself to recommend BR, it being the way it was, to my clients and subscribers.

I don’t want to hear the excuses that it’s new and in beta and therefore needs to go live to have the bugs worked out. Being a webmaster, I just don’t buy that.

You don’t give half-baked, barely-working goods to your customers. They’re paying me for what I give them. I cannot throw shoddy goods at them and still expect to succeed in my business.

Yes, BR is free. But it is a tool, for generating traffic. If it’s working and we can use it, by all means we will. If it’s not working, then we won’t. It’s purely a business decision.

It’s not a question of oh, it’s John Reese, and it’s free, so we should to give him his chances and as much time as he needs to fix his buggy system, and then we’ll use it.

And it’s not about my expectations with the numbers either. Being a John Reese product, the numbers should be good. (They weren’t, practically from Day 1, but I won’t go into that.)

It’s rather that he (of all people) saw fit to release a system which was most definitely not ready for the market. And after sorely trying our patience over several weeks, even scolding and threatening us, then telling 10,000 members they’re deactivated, and then John himself scrambling around doing damage control…I mean, who would have any more faith in BG or John Reese?

You have a solid reputation yourself, Andy. But I doubt you would risk it and plan things so you yourself go through the same experience John Reese had. Nobody with any sense would do it that way. It was one big fiasco.

If your numbers are now looking up, good for you. I congratulate you! And wish you ever more BlogRush traffic for the future!

As for myself and my networks, we won’t be joining BlogRush.

In my very first review I wrote

I wouldn’t expect to get a 1% CTR from other sites displaying your content, it is going to be far less based upon what I have seen from competing widgets of this type.

I haven’t worked out an average yet, but I frequently get above 0.2% CTR, and up to 0.5% before the v2 was launch, and that doesn’t allow for the errors in their internal tracking, because I have had more visitors than their internal stats count.

I am personally gaining what I predicted to my readers would be possible from Blogrush.

For a top guru, I agree John Reese was very unprofessional.

BlogRush did not only bring the cheaters out of the woodwork, as he said (and no-o-oh, that’s not HIS fault!), but it also brought out the worst in John Reese. It was uncomfortable to watch him loose it and degenerate into defensive blame and shame.

Well, I suppose that’s a lesson he did teach us. Though it needn’t have been such a public one.

Even with all the questionably bad blogs there are , There’s still a few very Exceptionaly well written and Highly informative blogs out there (ez-onlinemoney.com being one)

Thanks again Josh.

For some reason I too didn’t feel compelled to
join in the “BlogRush”. Probably because it was
too mainstream. Hence,I actually let the thought
of using it sit in my mind for a little while longer to
see how the steak turns out to be…. like what you
mentioned… it got “burned”!

Anyway, I still have some respect for some guru’s
still even if they make cross offers between each other.

Not that I’m in awe but it just shows that birds
of a feather flock together. Wait, am I saying it right?

Also, I just got your AMD like we discussed via email.

I’ll be studying it this week then putting it to action
the week after. Great work by the way!

You are definitely one of the few rare genuine marketers
people can find nowadays. Love your honestly and
simplicity in teaching marketing to others.

Until then, I’m just holding up until I revamp my
“kick-ass-trash” blog to something else. My current
one is full of my marketing baggages. I’m not shy to admit it.

It was my first one. LOL!

Take care,
Vern

We all have projects that don’t do as well as we thought, guru, newbie and everyone in between alike and that’s when the persons true colors shine. Maybe it’s just me, but I lose respect for people when they lash out after one of their projects doesn’t do well.

Now if people were just calling him an idiot etc. I would totally understand. I’d be pissed too!! But most the criticism, if not all, is of BlogRush not John. When the criticism is geared toward ones product, one MUST be extremely careful what they say in defense! I think John started out very professional, but it all got to him and he started saying things that were very questionable.

I think the biggest problem for John is the opposite of “Englishmen love underdogs” – bloggers, especially in meta blogging, SEO and marketing love linkbait.

This is true, I don’t know anyone who would do that though

The post on Warrior forum hinted that at least one person still has auto-generated blogs in the network.

I reported one site manually to John that might have slipped through and I only spotted that one was scraping content by chance, following a related link to older content to an article written on the plentyoffish blog.

I think the biggest problem for John is the opposite of “Englishmen love underdogs” – bloggers, especially in meta blogging, SEO and marketing love linkbait.

I think the biggest problem was providing stats that were confusing, especially about the bonus credits, and of course the targeting could have been improved immensely.

Lots of the other gripes that people are making are equally true of Facebook and Digg.

I’d like to know but I won’t bother emailing them because clearly, it’s not worth the effort – but wtf! LOL