All Posts Tagged With: "Blogging"

There’s a question I’ve wondered about for some time now, whether or not all those people that pony up hundreds of dollars to experience the John Chow Effect really get something worthwhile out of it. Let’s face it, you can save yourself a bundle of cash by landing yourself on the frontpage of Digg or having something that people love to Stumble but more often than not all of that is worthless outside of driving up your traffic stats. However, just like beauty, worth is in the eye of the beholder, so the question is, is it worth spending $400 to have your site or product reviewed by John Chow?

If 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 cast John in a dim light because overall it states Alvin got $0.00 return on his $400 investment it’s not necessarily intended to convey that message (but it makes for a great headline).

I’m not an ebook kind of person, especially ones that are grammatically challenging to read, but I’m really interested in seeing some results from someone who’s bought one of the many reviews John has done. While Alvin’s approach is from an advertisers point of view and the ebook is full of screen shots there are still a number of lessons we can take from it. For example, Alvin requested a review of his Atomic Blogging product, in his ebook he states “The review was written very well but as an advertiser’s point of view the review did not deliver what as I was expecting from John”.

That’s a great point because whether you buy a $10 review or a $400 review there is some expectation on the part of the person buying the review. However, the first question that comes to mind is, what (if any) conditions/requirements were given when the review was submitted? It would be important to convey your expectations to the reviewer, even if your sending them a product to review, don’t assume they know what your looking for.

Something else Alvin points out that I think is important, especially if you pushing a product, is that the product and even a site needs to be of interest to the reviewer. Alvin argued that John didn’t really recommend his product throughout the review, but he also admitted that he felt it wasn’t something that really grabbed John’s attention. This is so important, the whole purpose of spending this money is to get loyal readers or sale conversions. If the reviewer doesn’t find the lvel of interest your require then your probably not going to get what your looking for, whereas, knowing your expectations up front could influence their review just enough spawn you some sales. If you just want a million hits in your stats meter to say you got lots of traffic then send me $200 and I’ll hook you up, just don’t complain when they don’t provide you any benefit.

Bottom line. Whether it’s John Chow or anyone else, if your looking to get a review done you need to seriously consider what your asking of the reviewer. If you simply toss them some cash and ask that they “just review my whatever” then don’t have very high expectations that your investment will gain you readers or sales. However, if you have a goal in mind, then explain that to the reviewer, tell them what your intent is: whether it’s to generate sales of an ebook or critique it’s content. It doesn’t take a whole lot of time and will most likely make your investment much more beneficial.

Thanks to Andy Beard for turning me on to Alvin’s ebook. I’d really like to see more of this kind of stuff reported from people that have bought reviews, not necessarily from John. I’ve said before I’m actually surprised John doesn’t solicit this feedback to bolster his already bulging ReviewMe wallet.

If you’ve bought a review and have results to show how it did, drop a link in the comments to let us know.

Every wondered what it must take to build a small empire the size of John Chow’s or to become so well known for something that you become the defacto source for information on a subject like Darren Rowse? Sure you have, along with thousands of other people. Just visit any forum catering to the subject and you’ll find numerous posts asking what the secrets are, where to find that silver bullet to make a site the next big thing. There’s also plenty of us bloggers that are willing to share our opinions with you, some of us have had some success while others just talk about the subject because they believe it will make them more knowledgeable or something.

What I’ve found having spent several months now keeping up with a lot of the big players and finding some new and interesting smaller players is that everyone usually has good advice. Advice that’s based on experience so it may not necessarily be the same as similar advice from someone else. That’s good, because I might relate more to one bloggers experience than I do another even though they both have similar posts. Many talk a good game about how to do this or that, but I can’t recall seeing many talking bout the most important thing you need to have a successful blog. I’m going to share that with you because it’s so simple that almost everyone forgets about it. What is it?

ATTITUDE or BELIEF

Before you can ever be successful at anything, you have to first believe you can be. If you don’t or you doubt yourself, you’ll never, ever make it no matter how hard you try. It’s that simple. If you believe you can do it, then you can, and if you don’t believe it then you won’t.

People talk about the A-Listers and the things they do and how they want to be like them. People like Shoemoney, Daren Rowse and John Chow. They aren’t successful because the things they endeavor to do work, those things work because they believe they will work. It’s an attitude, and if you don’t have it from the very start, your doomed to wasting your time. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s the truth. Back in the day my parents were involved in AMWAY and as silly as that has come to sound there is still something to take away from it. People in the organization were always talking about “speaking something into action”. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now. If you believe your are successful and you act like you’re successful and you present yourself as being successful then people will gravitate to you. Any motivational speaker will tell you to surround yourself with people who are successful and this is no joke, the biggest way to bring yourself down and kill your new found blog is to hang around with your best buddy from high school who is always laughing at you saying it’ll never work. Yeah, it’s time to get new friends.

Being a successful ProBlogger, being a successful anything, first requires an attitude of success. After that, everything else is secondary and while still important, none of it is as critical. If you want to succeed and make money online, then you have to believe you can do it. It’s not enough to look at someone who has done it and believe it can be done again, deep down you have to believe that you can do what they did. If you can do that, if you can get past that hurdle, then you will be a successful problogger. A great example of this can be found in the writings of Liz Strauss at Successful Blog, many of her posts are about attitude, where the majority of others are about “How to this or that”.

So here’s a question for you, if I met you on the street and asked what you do, what would you say? Can you honestly look someone else in the eye and say “I’m a successful problogger”? Can you?

The Amazon.com owned web traffic monitor Alexa recently released an updated Alexa plugin for FireFox. After you install the Alexa toolbar you’ll be able to view traffic stats & trends, reach and rank for any site you visit. Alexa works by gathering stats from browsers that visit different sites, the catch is you must have the Alexa toolbar installed and until now it’s only been available for IE users.

Some question the value of an Alexa ranking, much like they question the value of a Technorati ranking but there is some value to this. Services like ReviewMe! & Text Link Ads use the Alexa rank as part of their algorithms to determine costs of services. Others, like DailyBlogTips use it to calculate blog popularity. Given that Firefox is in heavy use these days the release of the new plugin could cause a sudden surge in Alexa rankings for any number of sites.

If you haven’t already download the Alexa Firefox Toolbar now. There’s been a lot of chatter about it since the release, having just installed it I can say it’s pretty unobtrusive. I don’t even notice it in the taskbar of the browser, if it helps bring traffic in, even a little then what can it hurt? Try it out and tells us what you think.

In an effort to grab a little bit of traffic a guy over at IMakeMoneyOnline.tv created this video, titled “What Would John Chow Do?“. Interesting link baiting concept but the video is pretty corny if you ask me, which is probably a good thing, if it wasn’t so original I wouldn’t be saying anything about it. So what would John Chow do after someone created a video like this? Why he’d blog about it of course. It must be nice being the object of everyones affection. Anyway, check out the video, what do you think? Great link bait or waste of time?

[youtube]A9X_iWQcUN4[/youtube]

Google launched a new tool recently that everyone should check out. It’s called Google Hot Trends and it’s a new feature that gives a point in time list of the top 100 hot searches. This is something you’ll definitely want to keep an eye on as it will give you insight into what might be hot topics in your niche you need to be targeting right now, or even things that may be emerging. You can even go back in time and see what was hot on a particular day.

How does this differ from the typical searches or top keyword lists that are compiled? Hot Trends analyzes keywords and phrases and compares that against historical data looking for significant deviations from what would be considered normal for that keyword or phrase. Looking at the list as of this writing these are some of the things we find.

On the list at #21 is the iGasm. Sounds like the next big thing from Apple right? Wrong. A quick glance tells us the iGasm is a new sex toy being offered by sex shop Ann Summers. It’s a vibrator that hooks to an iPod an allows one to “massage to the beat” if you will. We also find out Apple is threatening to sue Summers over the posters of the iGasm gadget.

The hottest search right now is WCCO, followed closely by WCCO Weather. WCCO is the station identifiers for Minneapolis TV and radio stations. The Minneapolis area was under Tornado Warnings earlier today.

You’ll also notice that “National Geographic Bee” is on the upswing. Did you know the National Geographic Bee concluded yesterday? Did you also know that fourteen year old Catlin Snaring won the contest by correctly identifying the imperial capital of Vietnam (Hue) and the administrator of the island of Lampedusa (Italy)? Beyond the fact she knew the answer to both of those is the fact she won without missing a single question.

Google Hot Trends is a tool you’ll want to make sure you bookmark. It it can warn you when topics are beginning to take off and may give you an advantage over the competition by being one of the first to cover the topic. The list changes frequently so you’ll need to keep an eye on it. For you developers out there, a plugin, or FireFox plugin that monitors this list would come in very handy I would think.