Where to advertise your blog? - Part 1
Where to advertise your blog? - Part 2 (Advertising on medium sized blogs)
When it comes to promote your blog, one of the proven and successful ways of bringing traffic to your blog is to buy Paid Reviews from other blogs. Paid Reviews are widely available in most of the blogs in blogosphere these days. There are two important questions to consider before you set out to your blog promotion.
- How much is your budget?
- How can you maximize your campaign with your given budget?
When your budget is very small, then you do not have much choice. But when your budget is medium size ($300-$800) then you have another two questions to consider.
- Should I advertise on one big shot blog? (i.e JohnChow dot com)
- Or should I go for several medium sized blogs with decent number of readership?
Decision: One big shot blog or several medium blogs?
Looking at big shots at ReviewMe Marketplace, you will notice that most of the 5-Star blogs are charging crazy prices (eg. ShoeMoney: $2500/review). And even 4-Star blog prices are quite steep.
So considering all these, you will notice that actually JohnChow’s offer is a pretty good deal. It’s a 5-Star blog and the price is just $400. It has more than 7000 RSS subscribers, Technorati Rank is 47 and has a PageRank of 6.
But does it worth the price?
Even though JohnChow’s offer is quite affordable and he has a pretty good traffic, does the review worth the price? Gaman has ordered a review from John, and he has written an extensive report on the review performance and the traffic he received from it. He writes:
The review was published on Tuesday July 10, 2007. It stayed on the top post for about 12 hours and it was off the front page on the third day. Over the course of a week, JohnChow dot com has sent me 535 visits as shown in the graph below. From this, 422 are new visitors while 113 are returning. At $400 a pop, I’ve paid a pretty expensive $400 / 535 = $0.75 for each visitor!
Given the traffic that Gaman received for his review, he actually paid too much when it came to price-per-visitor (0.75 cents/visitor). He got only 535 visitors from the review, which is not much. For the same price you can easily get other forms of advertisement (i.e banner, text) from other blogs/websites, for a longer period (1-6 months) of time which would bring a lot more traffic.
Why do people buy Paid Reviews? Because they want traffic. If you want to pay $400 just for fun or for something other than getting traffic to your blog, then you must be a strange person. So, for someone paying $400 and getting back 500+ visitors is quite a disappointment.
Gaman has also done another experiment with AdWords on JohnChow dot com. He writes:
At an average $0.21 per click, clearly spending on AdWords at John Chow Dot Com offers a much better value for money compare to paying for a ReviewMe review if all you are looking for is to attract traffic.
So, AdWords campaign actually performed better than his Paid Review on JohnChow dot com.
Even though Gaman was kind enough to say it was worth the price at the end of his first article. I think the review was not worth the price, at all. It’s just my personal opinion and you might disagree with it. And that’s okay.
RSS Readers
John has told Gaman that actually the traffic to Gaman’s blog were more than 535, because half of his readers are reading his blog through RSS Reader. Gaman writes:
Update: As John Chow points out in the comment, the analysis doesn’t take into account the readers from his RSS feed. Since half of the readership comes from RSS, I would have received more traffic than the 535 visits. I agree.
What??? Unless those users’ RSS Readers are like newspaper, surely all RSS Readers show the hyperlinks in the posts! I am sure thousands of people have read the review, but only few of them clicked on the link. Objective of the Paid Review is to get as many people visit your blog, not read about your blog. So if they didn’t click on your link in the post, then surely you didn’t get extra traffic Gaman.
Summary
I have concentrated on John Chow dot com as the case study for the Paid Review blog selection. Surely there are thousands of other big shot blogs to advertise on, however as has been discussed in the beginning of the post. John Chow dot com seems very attractive option for many. Because of the affordable price and the high traffic the blog gets.
P.S Alvin Phang has also ordered JohnChow review and he made a report on the results. Here is the post.
Related Posts
- Utilizing your empty slots effectively
- About
- Testing Entrecard, my views on it
- Some LinkWorth Tips…
- Where to advertise your blog? - Part 2
9 Responses
to “Where to advertise your blog? - Part 1”
1 Trackback(s)
- Dec 14, 2007: AdesBlog.com » Where to advertise your blog? - Part 2
By gaman on Aug 6, 2007
Thanks for the mention.
I agree that 500+ is not worth $400
However, my review of the John Chow ReviewMe has been mentioned on several blogs like here :). I think the buzz generated as a result has given me more value for money in addition to John Chow review.
The 535 was just from JohnChow.com alone, someone from RSS would appear to come from Google but I didn’t analyse those. They read and they clicked but I didn’t include that in the analysis. This was evident from the increase of overall traffic even though the visit from JohnChow.com itself was dissapointing.
Without the extra buzz, I think ReviewMe at JohnChow.com is not worth it.
By Tony on Aug 6, 2007
If you point a few links to the review on john site with key words you are chasing it can help you get more traffic. John site probably isn’t the best example but if it was an authority site. By pointing links with your keywords to the page people would then find that page under those keywords as well as read the review on your site and possibly visit your site. It’s a simple way to achieve multiple pages in search engines for the same keywords with all the pages pointing to your site.
By gaman on Aug 6, 2007
I’ve written a related post in my blog here.
By John on Aug 6, 2007
I think you need to be more strategic - if you’re going to get a review on John Chow for instance get a review that mentions you are running a contest and the entry requirement is a comment on your blog - that way you’ll get more than just a visitor.
By Rostislav Siryk on Aug 6, 2007
I think on good way of promotion is writing noteworthy comments for the other’s entries.
By Becky @ PreBlogging on Aug 7, 2007
This is a nice summary, about those Pay Reviews. I think that these things probably helped a little more last year, but now there are so many services , some with disclosure and some without, I think it has devalued the whole market. If I had $400 to spend on advertising I would have a competition, like the ones asking for a review to be listed.
BeckS
By Robert on Aug 8, 2007
The one thing that you don’t seem to mention is the extra search traffic that could result from a high ranking site such as John’s. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t use nofollow links when he does his reviews so that could, in theory, give the resulting site some extra credibility with Google.
Of course it would be pretty hard to track such extra traffic, but it something to consider.
By Tony on Aug 8, 2007
I think some people miss the seo aspect of having a link on a pr6 or ades pr7 blog. If I was to pay for a review from either site, my first job would be to make sure the keywords I am chasing are mentioned in the review. Then I would point some link love to the review with the keywords I am chasing. I would also in comments on the site “where it is appropriate” mention the url for the review this helps the site give the page more authority. Building up a page on a pr6 or pr7 site to rank well in the search engines is a little bit easier than a pr0 or new site. So if you can’t take the position yourself because you are new or too small its a great way to take a position with your site being the center of that position. On some keywords if its done well you can have 6 or 7 slots in the top 10 all pointing towards your site. On a keyword like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flatpac+kitchens&btnG=Search depending on what DC you are on you will see 7 or 8 of the top 10 all point to the same site. Great way to get authority and access to all the users. Doing something like that gives you a huge chance the user is going to end up on your site.