As you know I have recently chosen John Chow to review my site. The goal for his review was getting exposure for my blog. Just because the review was by John Chow didn’t mean I chose his site without researching. I wanted the best for my money so I researched the traffic trends of previous sites which got posts dedicated to them.

Kumiko’s review got me some great exposure. Her review got me some loyal readers just from one paid review; so, after a week I decided step up a level, well jump a lot of levels, and see how much exposure I can get from John’s blog.

It’s a fact that people who are serious about making money online will invest in marketing. If you are serious about blogging take into consideration that paid reviews give great exposure. If you wanted to pay for a review, make sure you do your research. Don’t go by word of mouth or by how many comments a blog has. Use the statistics of Technorati, PageRank, and in this case Alexa, to make your decision about a certain site.

With all my searching to get a paid review done I got down to choosing from three sites to review my blog, and John’s blog was one of them. The other two blogs are as follows:

TylerCruz.com: I looked at the traffic for Tyler’s blog and I looked through his posts and I am pleased to say he writes well. His review price of $66 was very tempting, with a $60 initial fee plus 10% or $6 added to it from PayPerPost. However, in my opinion, his base users are the same users as John’s blog, so getting his review was crossed out. Not only that, his blog’s focus was more about making money from forums and buying and selling domains, something that is way off from my blogging focus.

NetBusinessBlog.com: This is one of my favorite blogs; however, it’s not as busy as I want it to be. NBB doesn’t publish a post everyday so that was one of the things that lured me away from that blog. Not only that, the huge price tag of $150 was also a turn-off. Even though Adie Cooke and Matt Coddington of NBB make a great team, I just didn’t like their blog’s posting frequency. But getting them to review my site was a consideration since the review will be their first post on their site for several days. However, I decided to go bigger; I wanted a bigger site to review my site.

Also, I slightly considered DoshDosh.com, but that site wanted $500 from ReviewMe or $350 directly for a paid review. I looked at the site’s statistics and that site had a PageRank 4, plus that site’s traffic was half of John’s site; therefore, it was obvious which site was a smarter investment.

When I chose John to review my blog, I did my homework and looked at the figures of his past posts that exposed other blogs. I generated a chart from Alexa of the traffic trends of sites that had exposure from John’s blog.

The details for the chart are as follows:

A. Zac Johnson. His blog was reviewed on April 30th by John, and as you can see he had a big boost of traffic. Unfortunately, that traffic didn’t last long because Zac’s site is focused on affiliate marketing, which is a big turn off for most bloggers. I’m not a fan of affiliate marketing so I can understand why his blog had a decrease in traffic. Even though John’s site does do affiliate marketing, his visitors don’t; in my opinion Zac ordered a review from the wrong site.

B. BloggingTips. Kevin Muldoon had John expose his blog through a review on May 10th, and as you can see at area B, Kevin got a big boost from that review on that date. But unlike Zac’s site, Kevin’s blog has maintained a good and steady traffic trend because his site was targeting bloggers and not affiliate marketers.

C. Jane May Blogs. Jane May guest blogged for John when he was off on his trip to Taiwan. She published her first guest post on John’s blog on June 2nd, and surprise, surprise, her blog got a kick out of that one post on June 2nd. Jane continued to guest blog for multiple days and that’s why you see multiple peaks for her site’s traffic trend.

So, when you want to invest for marketing, make sure you get the statistics straight before you check out with a marketing order. The reason I wrote this post is due to one of my past mistakes in marketing long time ago for another site of mine. I paid a site $130 for one month just because I saw a lot of feedback from its visitors, unfortunately I only got ~$75 in return; therefore, I lost money in that investment. I didn’t look at the site’s traffic trend statistics; I made my decision based on my perception of the site’s traffic. You could say I made a stupid move, and I agree, but at least I learned from my mistakes.

Also, the reason I didn’t discuss much about Technorati was due to the fact that the ranks of sites from Technorati can be manipulated by the Technorati Favorites train. For those who don’t know what the Technorati Favorites train is, it’s a manipulation of raising your Technorati rank by adding your site to a pyramid. This pyramid is passed around in the blogsphere with the last site in the pyramid taken off and a new site added to the top of the pyramid. I admit, I’m guilty for testing it out in my early blogging days, but I’m glad that not many sites added my site to that pyramid. And none of those sites that are heavily involved in the pyramid goes over 50,000 in the rankings because Technorati stepped in and put a stop to it.

I hope this research helps you if you were to get any paid reviews done for your site.

How much would you pay for a review?

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