Thank you for the details on how your review from John Chow faired Alvin. Because I was considering purchasing a review from him for a product launch in the near future. Will take your words into consideration.

Something you mentioned in your report regarding the link to your product being an affiliate link from John. You mentioned that we should ask them for a direct link to the product and not an affiliate link, is that possible? Because I would gather they would want to profit again too if the product sells.

Overall for reviews, I guess its best if there is some viral element involved within the product so that the traffic can continue to have a life on its own after the review.

Anyways, is it possible to take up your special review price first and use it at a later date? =P Before the end of the year? If so I can immediately make payment first. haha. If not its alright.

Regards,
Alvin Huang

Because you know why I say that? because if you go read the review.. there are some people from his readers say that they comment he sure say good.. because.. he is getting a cut.. =P

So I recommend if you do any review make sure it’s a direct link not a affiliate link…

Lolx.. of course cannot lah… where got people write without being paid first…

Ahh i see…ok understood.

Hmm….think you misunderstood me.

I meant I buy and pay first. But use it later in 1-2months.

Regards,
Alvin Huang

Although it is a painful experience, knowing you, I am sure you will turn around to make the $400 the most important investment you ever made.Like what is written in ‘think and grow rich’….in every adversity or headache, there is an equivalent seed of equal or greater benefit.
Or like one of your student who wrote about us being cement and a bucket of water….we can either build a wall or build a bridge to whatever we want.(…taken from http://www.atomicbloggingsecret.com).

Okay, signing off now to download and reading your report.

Philip ang

I read the review and i felt that he is honest but does seem to have a negative impact on your reputation some way or another.

Its brilliant that you came up with this quick report of this recent John Chow’s Review of your atomic blogging.

Its a loss of $US400 but hey, you managed to learn how to pick reviews in future to come.

Alvin, all the best in your future projects.Glenn

why so liddat? His review is like so lame sia

[...] On Sunday's I like to provide some entertaining reading, and I have just found out about a free report Alvin Phang has written about the lack of value he received as an advertiser buying a review from John Chow. [...]

[...] Alivin paid John for a review. And John gave Alvin his [...]

It’s hard to really find any sympathy in this instance.

You should have better researched John Chow’s audience as being above newbie bloggers when your product reads like it is extremely basic.

Also don’t understand what you wanted from the review. If you expected/demanded a positive review (ie: an advertorial) you should have gone down the PayPerPost road - in fact, John Chow would have lost some of his credibility if he raved about your eBook (ie: lied) only for buyers to find it totally inadequate.

And to be honest, reading John Chow’s review in your report I do get the clear sense it is a very sub-par product.

I think you’re just bitter that you couldn’t control the review and because of that no sales came from it.

It’s no good bitching after the fact, review the reviewer and the review process first. Then decide if you’re willing to take the risk.

I guess.. in everyday life we learn some thing new everyday.. but anyway it wont stop me from improving my guide book =)

Alvin - I know my comments came as sounding harsh, but that’s exactly what you should do - continually improve your eBook. There’s obviously a market need for newbie blogging information.

I guess you’re upset that you wasted $400 marketing money - I would be too, but then you have to be really selective and research any marketing initiative you undertake.

Personally, going for these type of reviews is risky because you are not in control of the message (and the reviewer almost has to put in the negative bits to show that he is totally unbiased) - Personally, I would have spent that $400 on AdWords, even if it’s only to capture an email address.

AdWords rock, imho (but only on search results not on contextual sites). Example: I worked with a client who spent $500 on an AdWords campaign over 2 weeks. He paid 20 cents for each click and had a 1.7% return (42 sales) - for a product he sold for $49.95 - not a bad ROI.

hey Martin.. thanks for your kinds comments.. =) Currently working on that.. =) It seems in marketing PPC is still the best for the best ROI!

[...] Alvin Phang has written a 16 page ebook report on his review experience and his findings.Most Painfull $400 Spent [...]

The only thing I think you made a mistake on were your expectations. You paid for a review not traffic. IMO a review is more like a critique designed to give you tips and a better understanding about how to go about promoting and marketing your book.

As a reader of John’s review I liked the review and thought it was balanced and gave insight, for example, the newbie part.

Have you thought of splitting your ebook into basic and advanced and/or selling them as a package. Plus what percent of your book contains advanced material versus the basics for newbies.

If you offered and promoted your ebook I would promote if for free just to help people I know get into blogging.

Also, what if you sold the first part as “Blogging Basics for Beginners” and then followed up and sold the advanced part as an upsell later?

From my perspective, sounds like you might have missed defining your market adequately. Remember, the needs, wants, emotions and perceptions of a beginning blogger and an advanced, established blogger are quite different.

$400 to have someone give you solid marketing advice is pretty cheap.

Hi Alvin

I read through the report and I guess in your case it was more with bad targeting than anything. Most of John Chow’s readers (me included) are already bloggers who are learning the finer art to monetization. John claims that your product is basic while you claim otherwise. As I do not have your product, I can’t say about the level of expertise that it covers. But what I can say is this.

When you are creating a product, it is best to have different products for different levels, especially on a topic such as yours. By combining levels into one such as what you have done, the higher levels might feel that they are paying for something that is not useful to them.

The other thing to note is that reviews were meant to get you traffic (and not sales) and where the review came from is just as important. But I am sure you know that.

Sometimes, no matter what we know, we still make mistakes and while $400 is a lot of money, it is not the end of the world. I wish you all the best in achieving your goal of $1 000 000 in earnings and hope that your product(s) will continue to improve.

Good Luck!!

Hi Alvin,

Great stuff coming up with a report like this. Even if you didn’t make a return on your review at John’s site, you will get traffic and exposure from this and in the long run that will result in more sales anyway.

Nice work turning a bad result into an asset.

Yaro

Hey Guys, that’s what I’ve been promoting - PPC for newbies instead of going the blogging or SEO ways (for a start at least

Ya, I’ve only started blogging actively as PPC has been my focus all these while. Can’t agree more with these last two commens & observations… hehe.

Sorry, blowing trumpet a little bit here lah hope you don’t mind. BTw, I bumped into this blog following some links from various Blogrush posts - so web 2.0 stuffs like blogging DOES work.

In fact, I’m just starting to promote my new blog (created in Kevin Hui’s workshop recently) and it’s already getting quite a number of viewship.

So keep blogging but don’t neglect paid advertising for more predictable ROI!

See you guys around sometime.

Cheers,
Hans

Hello Alvin,

I just wanted to reinforce some of the comments that Martin left and add that, although an expensive lesson, I would willing to bet that you will do significant amounts of market research before buying another review

To make a long story short, I see two major issues why you aren’t making any sales from John’s review.

1. JohnChow.com is one of the most popular “make money online” blogs on the internet. Your target market, complete internet newbs, doesn’t match John’s audience, bloggers trying to make money online and internet marketers.

2. Your main blog has an awful lot of grammatical errors. It doesn’t sound like your native tongue is English, which is absolutely ok from a conversational reading standpoint. The problem, however, is that you are trying sell copy for and, although it may be seen as nitpicking, errors that would have easily been caught in just about any word processor with readability statistics doesn’t instill confidence when trying to sell someone something. It leaves a bit of a bad impression.

Hey Alvin,

I just read your report. I have always stayed away from the “paid reviews” up to this point because I always felt that you had more control over who would come to your site via PPC.

On another note, I don’t necessarily think that you didn’t get the “John Chow” effect but that most bloggers would be more likely to want to visit a blog rather than a sales page (maybe this wasn’t the case, pardon me if it was). It would seem to me that a blogger who looked for potential backend sales would do better with getting and keeping traffic than someone who was overtly selling something. Just a thought though.

Also, I think that you using actual sales from a product might not be a fair way to gain a true assessment of what you gained from advertising with John. For example, you did mention that many signed up to check out your freebie….how many and what potential do you think that that would have in store for you for the future?

Now, like I said, I am no fan of the “review me” wave that a lot of people are buying into. I think that PPC and forum marketing are more effective ways to go around this but whatever. I just am not convinced that you got absolutely nothing out of the deal. Was it worth $400? Probably not. Chances are you could have spent far less on a better avenue for advertising.

John Chow is an extremely unethical person. When someone pays you $400 for a review, it should be honest yes. The review SHOULD be somewhat negative because we all have flaws.

The problem is this - John goes out of his way to degrade every product that is put in front of him. 99% of his readers are brand new to the Internet and he knows that arrogance sells when blogging to newbies.

These reviews also create controversy and since his readers love his arrogance, they defend him in every instance.

The affiliate links that he inserted into a paid review are a new low, but not surprising.

As of late he’s been posting a few decent posts, but most of the time he is absolutely wasting his readers time!

If they were smart they would spend that time at blogs like this one, where they may actually have a chance of getting some valuable information!!

lolx.. so far only Yaro.. understood what I was doing.. haha =) yeah.. I thought since I lost so much must well teach others what I fail at…

[...] a popular website will instantaneously cause your traffic to explode.  The report was made by an Alvin Phang who recently wrote the Atomic Blogging e-book and paid $400 for a review by the infamous John [...]

Hey Alvin,

Just read your free report, it’s really interesting how a review can turn out so bad for you, if you measure in terms of ROI.

At the same time, I guess you never know until you tried it and I do come from such a mentality too.

Just 6 months ago, I too went on to paid over US$300+ on banner advertising that promised me 1,000,000 clicks on my website. Up till date, after 6 months, I think I get less than 1,000 clicks so far from the banners itself.

So, I’m sure with each experiences, we are getting wiser and wiser.

Catch up with you soon,
Roy Phay

LOL Alvin - a typical marketer’s spin

Was that *really* what you were doing?

C’mon, you can’t deny you were pissed off at blowing away $400 and simply wanted to vent a little. It’s only natural.

Anyway, hope this has a viral effect for you, for what it’s worth.

Hey Alvin,

Good job with the report.

First of all, regarding the JC review - I actually thought that, while financially it did not net you anything, but it did expose you to -anyone- who reads JC’s blog, or even comes across it. And if they are interested enough, they will visit yours. And down the road who knows these might become sticky. I always view any publicity as -useful- publicity and there’re always ways you can turn bad publicity to your advantage.

If I were in your shoes, honestly, I’d have done the review, even on hindsight. Now, you can actually put in your salescopy or something saying that (your product which targets newbies) actually has a stamp of approval from JC!

seriously I was not pissed off.. =) but just upset.. then I lost $400.. =) But as a on going business man I will always looks for other ways to leverage on this current situation =) So far the report is creating some sort of buzz which is good =)

Hi Alvin,

No worries…lost $400 but you are getting more traffic with this report. Who knows this traffic will create more sales to offset your $400 lost. In business, it is normal we gain some and we lose some. But when we lose, we could be wiser next time.

Cheer up my friend.

Hi Alvin,

Thank you for this great report. Despite such a painful ROI, you still like to share your learning experience with your readers. It shows that you are a generous person that likes to help people.

Thanks for the great article.

[...] a review from me weeks ago and the one who also bought a $400 review of his product from John Chow, launched his free report regarding the things he learned from buying a review from John Chow dot [...]

$400… wow.
I just did my first review on my blog, and got $5 (really $3.6)

But I guess as long as you learnt from the situation it was not a waste of money.

You didn’t lose $400 lah. Call it tuition fees. I haven’t got back my money from getting to the last page of your atomic blogging book either !!!! ( My 3 months with Article Marketer isn’t even up yet).

But I love this post so much I’ll write off what I spent creating my blog just because it introduced me to your blog ! Ha ha !

[...] P.S Alvin Phang has also ordered JohnChow review and he made a report on the results. Here is the post. [...]

let me join this group thanks

Karen you are still linking to a blog on Blogspot, so that might mean you didn’t take action on something in Alvin’s book.

Maybe Alvin could add a section on moving from Blogspot to Wordpress - it isn’t very hard but can be a little daunting for a newer blogger.

Yup, Karen, time to move to WP.

Hey Alvin, thanks for being so honest in your sharing.

Wait a minute…..
- who can trust a paid review in the first place?
- who can trust John Chow? (invisible cookie stuffer)

If you pay someone & allow him to put an affiliate link, he is sure to write something good.

Then again John Chow wrote a horrid review & still had the cheek to add his affiliate link.

If you read John’s blog, you will know that he attempts to make money from his readers as much as he can. A whole lot of ads + probably lots of invisible cookies that we cannnot see!

I think if we were to buy paid reviews, we MUST edit them before it goes live. It is fine if it is biased because you paid for it!

Also you, your readers & I might be better off buying ads compared to reviews. Ads show up on every page but reviews show up only on a single post!

I’ve been using review me for a while now to do paid reviews and have only managed to get $80 from a handful of reviews.

I wonder how long it’ll take to be in the position of receiving $400 per review?

Sigh. I did move to wordpress - the atomic blogging one. I went all the way with a whole blog trying to sell acne free in 3 days and spent a painful month trying to drum up enthusiasm to fill a blog with posts about acne !!! My articles are still scattered all over the web somewhere. Gave up cos bored myself to tears, plus no sales. No use linking you guys there if you aren’t out to buy something to cure your pimples !! May need to tweak AB a bit to mention at the keyword research section to try to get something you can sustain a blog on !

Great write up Alvin, thanks for taking the time. Glad to see someone actually reported on their results of one of these reviews. Sucks you had to blow the $400 but maybe it’ll inspire others to report their results as well.

Hi Karen.. it sad that you gave up on that blog.. because.. in order for you to see success on your blog and do see some income you have to be consistent and do not give up =) Just to let you know it took me at least 3 to 4 months before I made my 1st dollar on this blog =) Imagine how I felt back then =P

[...] your Alvin Phang the answer is a resounding NO. Alvin has put together a free 16 page report on his experience with the “John Chow Effect“. While the report itself does tend to [...]

Interesting read Alvin. I have been monitoring johh chow, and have wondered how well his reviews did for traffic. It appears that the post about how poorly his reviews did actually ended up getting you more traffic. I’ve just downloaded your books and I’m reading through them, they are full of good information. I like to make this kind of info available on my site for the few measley readers that I get. When i get done giving them a good read, i’ll put up a review of them and hopefully send more people your way.

So i guess in a way, the 400 bucks did do a little bit of good for you

wow - great report!

I too experience the chow affect but it steadily got back to normal traffic - the only thing is I got on there for free, and little traffic became new readers or bought anything

John Chow blog is only great for information gatherers and not for newbies - who might of bought the product

I don’t know much about ReviewMe or how someone get to be a paid reviewer, etc. I guess there must the reviewer must have some credibility and such.

What irks me in your case is that the reviewer (JC) still accepts your business knowing to a