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Aye Carumba is all I can say, this is a PR nightmare for any company honestly and I think it started with a simple miscommunication. This started with an article written by Jane Sheeba about why she cancelled her Blog Engage RSS Syndication Membership and the responses she received. Due to a series of miscommunications originally by email a customer who wasn’t feeling she was getting enough value out of the service was lead to post an article which fueled quite a comment fire from both sides (supporters and opposers).
I have known Brian and used BlogEngage for several years, I have no indication that he isn’t anything but respectful toward others, but he has a 0 tolerance for network abuse. In the case of what is conveyed here, I think he chose a poor choice of words by suggesting Jane "writing about something else" this could be taken to be offensive, but likely wasn’t meant to be.
Honestly, I have the most # of articles submitted out of anyone to BlogEngage, I am in the #1 spot of submissions, but only about a 22% publication rate of my articles. This is because Blog Engage still caters to mostly "blogging, seo, social media" niche, my tech articles and my gaming rarely see publication. My personal blog occasionally and every once in a while one of my poems from my poetry blog reaches publication. This doesn’t mean we should change topic because gaming articles don’t get published, instead it means the audience/membership for these other niches/categories needs to increase to help balance out the system which was very blogger focused originally.
As far as the RSS Syndication plans, I do pay the $29.99 monthly membership, BlogEngage used to by my #7 traffic referrer per month, now it doesn’t make top 10, it accounts for less than .05% of my site traffic, but the links alone, showcases and the AWESOME guest blogging contests were more than enough for me to continue support. Also Brian keeps trying to innovate and find new ways to provide value for his syndication members, he experiments and keeps trying to come up with additional compelling benefits. It is an entrepreneurial business and there are always trials and errors, everyone has a right to cancel at any time and for any reason. There should never ever be any hostility toward a customer who cancels, always just use it as an opportunity to get feedback and learn and perhaps tune business to be more optimal for future customers.
Brian made a valid comment in the article that the CPC ratio from Blog Engage is better than that you would find with AdWords and you get all the benefits of the backlinks too, but $29.99 per month just may be too rich for some peoples blood. Honestly, I spent $50 per month in BuySellAd purchases on other sites with hundreds of thousands of pageviews, and I saw more benefit from the Blog Engage RSS Syndication than from purchasing random 125×125 banner ads on sites, so I just reduced my advertising budget to cover the RSS Syndication Plan fee’s.
This is one of the reasons why I am glad I don’t run a service over at DragonBlogger.com and I just do information articles, if I had a service or product that I created myself and sold I would be solely responsible for giving exceptional support and I like anyone else could make a misstep that could lead to negative experience backlash.
-Justin Germino
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