My Thoughts On My John Chow Review
A month has passed since ordering a review on John Chow so I thought I’d review the process and my thoughts:
Why the need for a review
A part of my marketing plan to promote Base Sites - A service whereby we design custom sites fully loaded with unique content - was to order paid blog reviews from some big name bloggers in the “make money on-line” niche. One of the first blogger’s I contacted was John Chow who has 15,000 RSS subscribers.
Ordering the review
The first step was to try and cut out Review Me, a service whereby they handle the review transaction and take a cut of the review price. John replied saying that he wouldn’t offer me a discount if I ordered with him direct and that I should go through the blog review service.
Review goes live
I got to admit, I fount myself checking John’s blog around 6 times per day to see if it had gone live. I guess I was getting a little excited to see what had been written and what people would make of our service. The review went live on 15th January.
The review
I got a message from a friend telling me the review had gone live, I checked the site and sure enough… there was a whole post dedicated to my service. I was extremely happy with the review, they covered the right points regarding my service, pointed lot’s of links to our site and generally did a good job. The only thing I didn’t like about the review, with is debatable, was this sentence:
“Base Sites consists of a group of highly creative individuals working their nuts off producing high quality web sites.” Working their nuts off? Doesn’t sound too professional to me.
We are a small team of designers and programmers, not a high flying corporate organization. Arr well…
The comments
This is where I got really disappointed… a lot of people were saying that our rates were too high and that our content was not original. We run all of our content via copyscape.com to make sure that’s it’s unique and after one commenter had said it’s not unique, the others just followed suit without even checking. I now understand that readers, or more specifically commenter’s of John Chow are very price sensitive… i.e - they could not understand why someone would pay extra for cutting out 20 hours of their time.
You know, I’ve been making money on-line for 7 years, have 12 full time staff, have over 400 projects and receive JV funding when I click my fingers… and you know what? I can’t code, I can’t write copy and I can’t design… I’ve always outsourced my work.
I could also tell that most of the people leaving comments were just replying in hope of getting some traffic from their user name link… I decided to check out a few the commenters sites and to no surprise the sites were a pile of shit. My Dad says: “Son, there are doers and there and dreamers” John Chow’s commenters are dreamers. I guess the doers haven’t got time to leave useless comments on other peoples blogs.
The traffic
I’ve never seen anyone else post traffic stats from their paid reviews from the big name bloggers so I thought I’d be the first.
The review sent me a total of 863 visitors… divide that by $450 for the review and you end up with $1.91 per visitor. Here is a screen shot from my Google Analytics:
Please keep in mind that different reviews/products/services will drive different levels of traffic.
The conclusion
The review was great although the business I got from the review wasn’t so great… I did however generate enough business to cover the cost of the review. John Chow has a lot of readers, so I guess the only way to know whether a review will be successful or not is to give it a try. If you seriously believe in your product, $450 is a small price to pay to reach 15,000 people.
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I wrote this a while back and since then I have sold Base Sites - I’ll be uploading a video next week explaining what I learned from the project and why I sold the business so make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss it!
“I could also tell that most of the people leaving comments were just replying in hope of getting some traffic from their user name link…”
You hit the nail on the head with that line (and the whole paragraph actually.)
A funny thing to watch is how everyone hangs on John’s every word, so anything he does, they think is awesome. Anything else, they don’t get it…
I always wondered how profitable those reviews were. It’s good to see an honest opinion on John Chow reviews.
I think reviews on John’s blog are starting to lose their value. He is doing so many of them that I think most people are now just skipping over them. He doesnt seem to be listing very much decent content lately.
If anything, his review is accurate, and you simply don’t understand what original content means. Passing Copyscape means absolutely nothing. Content is only “original” if it’s not simply re-written or compiled from a few other sources (someone’s own words and information about a topic). If you’ve re-written other content in any way, shape, or form, you’re likely violating copyright law, whether or not Copyscape calls the text “unique.” Write truly unique content (things people can’t already find all over the Web), and you’ll get the kudos deserved. Don’t, and you’ll get ripped in reviews (and deservedly so).
Agreed… to a certain extent. When you have other people writing content for you it’s hard to know how they wrote it… whoever it is. Our copy writers were not experts at every niche they wrote about, so they did what anyone else would have done… researched it on-line and wrote the copy in their own words. For me, this is unique content. Copy scape means nothing? What planet are you on? Search engines do not like duplicate content… running your articles via Copy Scape will prevent you getting penalized via the search engines for duplicate content - period - This makes Copy Scape a very valuable service for people outsourcing their copy writing.
Well, 1.91 per visitor is way to expensive imho. It would have been much better to run an adwords campaign and get targeted visitors at a fraction of the cost.
As for backlinks, there is are much cheaper methods of getting them.
Thanks for your review, for me your review is yet another reason why I would never purchase a review from John Chow
Thanks for sharing your experience. Seems that there may be other ways to spend your money better. However, I guess it is good that you at least recovered your money and it was a nice review by John Chow.
It’s interesting how things sometimes just come together. I was doing some late night surfing and wondering if it was finally time to start dumping some cash into promoting my sites. I think I’ve only been to JC’s blog a handful of times but have wondered about the benefits of a review. It’s funny how bloggers who write reviews for PayPerPost and the other paid to blog advertising programs have been truly pummeled for their participation. Yet, the more “in” bloggers like JC have developed a following who can’t wait to see who he’s paid to write about next. While he would be loathe to admit it, I wonder if he is publishing more of these paid reviews to compensate from lost revenue from being slapped by Google. I guess the good news is that you didn’t lose money on the deal. Thank you for sharing your experience.
They are all just pets of Johnchow.
Also I read your review too. I check out your site 2-3 times.
I am just wondering Did you gets sales or any at all?
You don’t have to reply but I am just curious.
Thx.
H Usman - Stay tuned for the video I will release this week regarding the ins and outs of setting up and running Base Sites