« Last Week To Win That iPhone | Home | Poor Kid Needs Coffee »
Blog Reviews. More Bang For Your Buck?
By admin | June 24, 2007
More and more bloggers seem to pay for reviews by other bloggers and I’ve been curious to see if they were worth the money spent. It seems to me that in fact a positive paid for review is nothing more than an artificial ego boost. Even if you get a review by some of the bigger names in blogging like JohnChow, Sunny will definitely not earn back the $400 he forked out for a 600 words review in his traffic results, ergo adsense results. Sure, some people will add your blog to their RSS feeds and you get a linkback from a PR6 blog*, but wouldn’t you rather invest those $400 into something else like a few contests which will surely get you plenty of linkbacks and exposure? Bigger doesn’t always mean better. I believe that the same blog had to pay only 10% for a 1000 words review on another popular blog.
As you can see the traffic jumps up for a couple of days before it falls back into its regular pattern.(My dip is obviously my two week holiday).
If someone can tell me what the ROI is on these reviews, I’d love to hear it. A few weeks ago I ordered 3 reviews for $10 each with reviewme.com and even those $30 could have been spend much better. In my opinion, a review done by Andy Beard was one of the most useful ones I’ve seen since it had some excellent constructive criticism. This kind of consultancy alone was worth the $130 that was asked for.
I believe that ordering a blog review is just not worth the money unless you have a product you can sell to your new readers. The two sites I used in the Alexa graph have both spend over $500 in paid reviews but are now around the same level of traffic BobmeetsWorld.com is getting. Ordering reviews is the quick and easy way to get some publicity but if your blog’s focus is on making money wouldn’t you rather keep that money in your pocket and blog a bit harder?
(*I recently came across a few blogs where it was said that the PR is temporary. As soon as your review is off the front page, your linkback is only worth whatever PR the inner page has. Unfortunately I can’t find the blogs on which this was mentioned anymore though Blogging Tips has the answer.).
Don`t want to miss a thing? Just subscribe to the full RSS feed :)!
Topics: blog |
June 24th, 2007 at 11:44 am
The authority and age of the domain linking through are factors among the 100s.
Posts do get buried and that can reduce the pagerank benefit depending on how a blog is optimized.
There are a huge number of factors involved
June 24th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Let’s do some maths! You can direct people via AdWords/Bidvertiser/Adbrite to your site for around $0.15 per click depending on what keyword you use. For $400, I’d want $400/$0.15 = 2,667 visitors from a $400 review.
I don’t think that’s going to happen.
It seems that with a some bloggers who order reviews, it’s more about the prestige of “he’s writing about me!” than intelligently promoting your site.
As for a PR6 backlink, you can go to Digital Point forums and pick them up for about $4 a piece.
June 24th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
Hey Bob,
I just wanted to say that I didn’t spend over $500 for the reviews. The chart from Alexa.com only shows my site’s traffic before I ordered a Review from John Chow. My site is different than the average blogging tips sites; I go beyond than the average blogging tips site. Remember John was reading my site before I ordered the review from him. He wrote “I’ve been reading it before he ordered this review.”
I actually do have something to sell to my visitors, it’s my $4.95 business offer. http://desinotes.com/show-me-the-money-495-offer/
And I already gotten an order. If John emphasized it more in the post, then my review would’ve paid for it self within a day from that deal.
I didn’t order the review to get a higher PR. I ordered it for exposure. The more people who know about my site the better.
I just wanted to clarify that, but it’s good you thought about it, good article.
June 30th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
[…] said: Even if you get a review by some of the bigger names in blogging like JohnChow, Sunny will […]