As part of my ongoing process of spending my cash to find out how you can best spend yours I had a review done over at JohnChow.com a little while back. The review was actually part of the Blogging Mastermind course I bought (and liked to some extent) so rather than do what I would normally do in this situation i.e. pay for a review of a product of which I’m an affiliate and hope to get my money back, I just asked in a very roundabout way for a review of this blog. I wanted honesty and got it. My goal was to find out what spending $500 over at JohnChow.com would get you for your blog. Why is this important? Because John makes a lot of money pushing high value affiliate offers for products to improve your blog. If you take him up on his offer and try to use his blog as a springboard then this is what value you get. We all know it wasn’t a great review, but then again if you go back and look at Johns review history you’ll find very little in the way of positive reviews of other blogs. Even so the review post attracted quite a bit of debate and was certainly well commented on. So without further a do here’s the raw stats:-
How you define your own idea of value for money is really up to you. As you can see though neither set of stats really blows you away. I’ve paid for advertising at JohnChow.com several times (see this post for an example) and to date I’ve been less than overwhelmed.
But, and here’s the thing. John Chow is not really interested in what his advertisers do and don’t get out of paying for advertising, his whole blog is simply designed as something to capture email addresses and push prospects down a sales funnel in order to get affiliate commissions. There’s nothing wrong with that but just don’t get blinded by the big number hype when there are certainly more cost effective ways of getting traffic for your blog.
My Blog Business Model from John Chow on Vimeo.
15 Responses to “What Does A $500 JohnChow.Com Review Get You?”
Deneil Merritt
July 2, 2009
I recommend using the “Smart Archives Reloaded” plugin.
Deneil Merritt’s last blog post..How To Use Link Demon
|James
July 3, 2009
JC is an absolute waste, he’s good at branding and it stops right there. No value whatsoever from his blog, other than how not be an affiliate marketer
James’s last blog post..My Home Office setup a.k.a my affiliate workspace
|Vic-BusinessAccent
July 3, 2009
Hi, I discovered your blog through JC. I found the review an honest review. I believe you also got what you really wanted for, a lesson and a fact on how will your 500$ go through.
I still don’t have that level of money to spend 500$.
Vic-BusinessAccent’s last blog post..Ten features and qualities of a good entrepreneur
|marguerite
July 3, 2009
I also discovered your blog from a comment you left on one of John Chow’s posts a while ago. Unfortunately the review was not written by John Chow himself. I used to read his reviews when he did Reviewme reviews, you can tell the difference. The review of your blog is what I would call a “lazy review”, I’ve written a few of those myself though nobody ever payed me $500 for one. At least you got the link(s).
|Casual
July 3, 2009
Interesting statistics. I also discovered your blog through the JC review, but as far as the actual traffic, you could easily get more than that just by posting to a social news site like Reddit. Maybe if the review had been more positive, you have seen greater traffic.
Casual’s last blog post..Identity Criterion
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