The Most Painful US$400 I Ever Spend On A Review….
On the 10th September I did something that I think seldom any blogger or marketer would do. Which was I went to John Chow’s blog and spend over US$400 on a blog review. To look at what he review you can check it out at this link here. I thought since I spend so much and I got so many of my friends wanting to know how was the results I decided to write out a 16 page report on my findings which I think will surly help you in deciding in buying reviews in the future.
The moment you are waiting for.. haha.. grab your FREE copy of my 16 page report of my findings… it was seriously very painful on my pocket =P
The book is about 1mb with lots of screen shots of my findings and report, you can also click here to download the book =)
Do put your feedback below what are your thoughts about the report =) And also if you also bought reviews before do share your experience doing them =) Oh yes.. the cover you seen above is also done by me… need some comments on the cover too.. =)
Hi Alvin, I do believe you can do it. I am using your atomic blogging and it seems really nice. However, no sales yet. I think its my problem. Im competing with All the internet marketing giants out there. I sure lose out. I”m still figure out ways to make it earn my first dollar. I WONT GIVE UP!
To Steve:
There is because if you go in to the review and read again.. there went about 4 comments saying that John had a cut in the review… so that will affect conversion on the review =)
Ha, this is brilliant. Using a negative event and turning it around positively. Brilliant stuff Alvin, you really have a knack for finding the silver lining in the cloud. Heck, you will even sell the silver lining by itself and leave the cloud stark naked!
Great stuff man,
Btw, any discount for a review for my site? haha!
Yep =)
Hi Alvin,
In response to the post by Alvin Haung, I see nothing wrong with Chow using an affiliate link in his review. You are going to pay that out anyway, that’s why you have an affiliate program. Sounds like the experience overall was good.
By the way this is a great blog!
Sorry to hear about your $400
All those PayPerPost and Review Me programs are only good if you have an insane amount of traffic to pump your $$ per post.
I had tried Review Me and PPP and got good enough traffic and still couldn’t get more than $30-$40 per post. Doesn’t sound bad eh? Well, consider the site would approve my posts after weeks of submission and pay up after at least 30 days of hosting it. Crazy marketing in my book!
I stopped using PPP or Review Me and woonly write what my readers wanna know about : HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE !! Not what new gadget is out or what cool design website is offering now..
Insane Seb
http://www.insanemoneymarket.com
http://www.insanemoneymarket.com/blog
lol, it’s gonna be an interesting read. Thanks!
Hi Alvin,
Great job coming up with a report like this.
In the long run this will give big result.
thanks
Koli
Hi Alvin,
I haven’t got the chance to read your ebook yet but I just want to say that I’ve also ordered a review from John Chow and have written my experience in my blog.
http://www.sabahan.com/2007/07/23/is-it-worth-spending-400-to-have-your-blog-reviewed-at-johnchowcom-heres-my-experience/
I think expecting to recover the $400 and make tidy profit immediately is too much to expect sometimes.
Two things, first, I agree, you’d do well to hire a part time editor to proof your writing just for some of the nuances of our exceedingly complicated language. I have a lot of respect for anyone that can learn English, though, considering the number of rules and exceptions the language has.
Also, I wasn’t able to download the book. It seems your links are broken or something.
Hey ! Never mind Alvin’s English ! Mine’s pretty good but I haven’t sold a thing … Actually, I believed all the sales copies about seeing my first cheque in 2 weeks ! Not too bright, huh?
I had to give up on the blog. There’s only so much one can write about a topic you aren’t interested in, even if it fits all the other criteria.
One of the problems I find though is when following all the make money blogs, they seem to make money from selling how to make money products to other people. What about those people who are making money selling other clickbank stuff ? I mean, some of the products are really weird but people seem to be making money from them as well.
Better keep quiet. I see my name has come up again in the comments section …
Hey Alvin, look on the bright side. Now that you are sharing your experience on your blog, people are linking to your blog & your report. Can it be considered a smart link bait?
Hey Karen, most blogs don’t make money, right from day 1, it takes awhile. If you wanna make money asap, then it’s ppc but you better know what you’re doing…..
I think you should have someone go over your English. I know it is not your first language but I can hardly understand some of the things you are saying.
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 good degree (I believe) that your product may not sell well.
I mean, come on, he is a very experience blogger, internet marketer, and have the best knowledge of his own reader’s wants and needs. The least I would expect for an ethical reviewer to do is to give some advise to the buyer and perhaps even reject the business altogether.
Well, it’s a business world out there. I’ve read about JC’s quest to make the numbers. So…
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
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
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
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.
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 !
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?
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!
Yup, Karen, time to move to WP.
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.
let me join this group thanks
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 !
$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.
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.
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.
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 =)
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!
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,
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
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…
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!!
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.
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 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
Careful when you use a blogger account to do your work.. you will get banned once in a while when you have affiliate links on your blog
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
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!!
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.
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 – 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.
I guess.. in everyday life we learn some thing new everyday.. but anyway it wont stop me from improving my guide book =)
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.
why so liddat? His review is like so lame sia
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
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
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
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…
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