John Chow Effect
Recently the web directory IDK got a review from blogger John Chow. We have interviewed the founder of IDK.in in a previous interview - Syed Balkhi. Later IDK also known as genuine paid directory was sold to a new owner. Am not too sure about the final price but was around the $20k mark. Ohh and yes, if you want know what Syed is doing these days, well he is blogging! Yep, here he is - Balkhis and he also giving some free stuffs too.
So, coming back to sponsored or paid blog review - is the blog reviews worth it? Am sure not many Internet marketers worry about the PR alone when they go for the reviews! The most important thing is the conversion, or in other words the ROI [return on investment]. Say, some online picture frames related website asks me to review their website, will the review help them to get some sales, I highly doubt that. But if the review was made on some blogs that are related to that niche, then the conversion can be expected. Thinking from another point of view, a general web directory which has all the categories of the internet can have any traffic, as they have all kinds of website to direct the traffic to.
So far I have read a few reviews of john chow, one was that of zorg links. I have also interviewed Mike the owner of Zorg links. Here is what he has to say about his john chow review,
“Its good but not as good. My alexa ranking went to 9000 the day of the review, which was pretty good, although I don’t fuss over alexa too much. Many other webmaster/seo blogs picked up the story so I gained many other back links as a result of the initial review.”
Another review was of a blog directory, a part of the popular web directory - Alive directory. Chris is the owner of this directory. Chow’s review about web directories are not all that impressive, and in that review he got confused about the directory category numbers and number of sites listed there. But anyways chow’s blog is popular among webmasters and with 16k+ feed subscriber, I guess a review from that blog is not all that a bad idea after all.
