Are You Addicted To Shopping?
With the Christmas holiday coming up the stores are packed with shoppers looking for that great deal or that perfect gift. This is also the best time of the year to own a shopping site. Just like the retail industry, shopping sites do a ton of volume during the last quarter of the year. More shopping sites are started in Q4 than any other quarter. One of them is Shopping Addicted and they’ve order this ReviewMe review to generate some Q4 buzz.
Shopping Addicted is a brand new blog, started on November 26 with the goal of handing out shopping tips and finding great shopping deals. The site would be a text book case in how to create a great shopping affiliate site except one big flaw, which I’ll explain in a bit.
Nice Simple Layout
The layout of Shopping Addicted is very clean but its navigation is a bit lacking. The only links are to home, advertising, contact and archives. Where are the category links? I know the blog has more than one category because the posts are filed under Gift Ideas, Shop Reviews, Product Reviews and Other.
The post themselves are extremely short and not very detailed, especially for the product reviews. I wouldn’t even call them reviews. For example this was the entire review of the Sony KDL-46xBR4.
Sony is known for great quality in all of their electronics (while usually at a higher ticket price). Despite paying a little more, the Sony KDL-4XBR4 (Bravia series) is the most popular HDTV. It’s a 46 inch LCD, TFT active matrix meaning that the picture is refreshed more than other models, allowing for a smoother image, especially when there is a lot of movement. Of course this TV supports 1080p resolution! Definitely check out this TV this holiday season to find a good deal!
Find the best deal on the Sony KDL-46XBR4 at OnSale.com
It’s pretty obvious the only purpose of the posts are to get you click on the affiliate links and while there is nothing wrong with that, I would like to see Shopping Addicted do a better pitch than just writing some fluff. Then again, it’s pretty hard to do a product review when you don’t actually have the product to review.
Did The Editors Quit?
Shopping Addicted started off on the right foot with multiple updates per day. However, in the past week, updates has slowed to less than one per day. The last updated was on December 3rd. You can’t run a shopping site like that. There are tons of deals on the net and shoppers are not going to read your site if you’re only post a deal a day. The TechZone’s Hot Deals page had 22 deals posted for December 6th and 26 deals for December 5th. We post so many deals we only show two days worth or the page will get too long. New deals are always posted at midnight and we have never gone one day without posting at least a dozen deals.
Running a shopping site requires a tremendous commitment and constant updating. It’s not like a blog where you can get away with one post (or less) per day. Your competition is posting dozens of deals every day and if you can’t match that, you’re in trouble. Shopping Addicted biggest flaw is the lack of timely updates. Maybe they went into this thinking they can run the site like a normal blog. If that is the case, they’re in for a rude awakening. If they are serious, they need to crank out at least a dozen posts per day to even stand a chance of competing against the more established sites.
The name of the site is Shopping Addicted. It stands to reason they’re going after people who are addicted to shopping. An addicted shopper wants to see dozens of new shopping deals every time they visit. If Shopping Addicted can provide that, they’ll get the shopper addicted to their site.
- Posted in Reviews, The Net
- 46 comments what's your take?
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Wow!!! …I love shopping
Reply to this comment“shopping tips and finding great shopping deals”…That would be Great
Its a great idea it just doesn’t look like a lot of follow thru
Reply to this commentYup…the internet seems to be full of great ideas without the follow through.
Reply to this commentI also love shopping. Online shopping is fun
I found many great deals.
Reply to this commentI also love to shop, but recently my time is used up thus unable to do some xmas shopping spree
Reply to this commentIt’s the biggest shopping season of the year and they’ve slowed updates? I don’t see them operating too far down the road.
Reply to this commentIt sounds like a good premise, and I’m trying something like that too… it can be hard to keep up. Especially if you’re trying to run other blogs as well…
Reply to this commentThis is the perfect niche though since you can make so much money off affiliate links.
Reply to this commentTrue, but you gotta really put your time into it and write either detailed reviews or write a whole bunch of them, at least 20-30 per day. This’d be good for not only readers but search engines. I find that the optimal number of posts for search engines is around 20 to 30 per day.
Reply to this commentI love online shopping too
saves time going to the shops when i can make more money online 
Reply to this commentLess ReviewMe’s PLEASE. We come here for content, not reviews.
Reply to this commentNooo…. Don`t say “We come …” say “I come …”
Reply to this commentDo you come for the reviewme’s?
Reply to this commentNo, I just come to read good articles. As this is a good and informative article (actually I’m finding out that this is a good niche) it doesn’t matter if it was a paid post, it is related to the “make money online topic” and that is enough for me.
Reply to this commentBesides, if you still don’t find value on this blog anymore, stop coming.
It was a joke
Anyway, it is a great niche once you get the traffic since products affiliates can be integrated naturally as you can imagine.
Reply to this commentAmen. I actually like the reviews. It’s always great to see what’s out there and to get John’s honest opinion. He doesn’t pull any punches.
Reply to this commentJC is not going to stop ReviewMe articles — do you know how much he made last month in reviewing articles? … as long as people pay him to review, he is going to … it’ll be stupid for him to stop doing something that bring in a substantial amount of $$$.
personally i’m with you, i don’t like lots of reviewme articles but the guy has to make money somehow.
Reply to this commentyup….$4,400
Reply to this commentIf you want John Chows content you’re going to have to see the reviewme reviews now and again.
Reply to this commentYup, that IS part of John’s content. He reviews stuff and puts his input whether that’s negative or positive. Without that, this blog wouldn’t make as much money.
Reply to this commentI love Shopping too…shopping is always fun when u have money
Reply to this commentJohn, you gave them very good advice with your review. To make a shopping site work, you need to keep it fresh. They’ll need to do a lot of work - one post a day just won’t cut it.
Reply to this commentSome just have money to throw. I would have rather bought content and smaller promotions for that $400 rather than order a review for a empty blog.
Reply to this commentHave you seen the John Chow effect reported on other sites?
The person reviewing is looking for alot of instant traffic and hopefully subscribtions quickly
Especially with the prices they are charging for reviews at $500 each
Reply to this commentI was not referring to the “traffic” that Johnchow.com would send to him. I was referring to “why spend money when you don’t even have a healthy review”. That blog is so clear that is just a “make quick money” through affiliates and thats it…if he is lucky and if someone will actually get convinced from his reviews to purchase a product through his affiliate links.
Reply to this commentYea, looks like they’re just throwing money away. I don’t think anyone is going to top that one guy who ordered a review asking for wedding donations.
Reply to this commentAs disgusting as that tactic was, I think it probably made him money by doing it.
Reply to this commentI agree some people do throw money away but if you are into the same “niche” market of making money online, it’s worth it. I did order a ReviewMe for http://Keetsa.com for eco-friendly mattress couple months earlier but it wasn’t effective as doing for one on http://OneBuckWiki.com
Reply to this commentYea, if you have something that can be marketed to one of John’s millions of readers, then game on.
Reply to this commentThese types of sites takes a lot of work since the deals should be quick and fresh in order for people to come back. The site looks nice though so it’s too bad the owner thought it would be another get rich quick thing
Reply to this commentYou are right, it takes a lot of time and attention to be (if not the first than at least on of the first) able to write a review for a new product or a upcoming product. Also it needs a quality and detailed review, rather than just a “read here, and write there”.
Reply to this commentSomething tells me these guys are not operating their site full time or at the very least are not properly monitoring them frequently..
Reply to this commentSites that post current deals and coupon codes can generate tons of income. John Chow is right about how difficult it is to review something without actually reviewing it.
Reply to this commentFair review - meh
Reply to this commentUh, I guess I’m not addicted to shopping because I wouldn’t spend 10 seconds on a site like this. I’d go out of my mind looking at all the completely unrelated things here. They must have money to burn if they only have 19 short posts and ordered a $400 review. But, that’s just me.
Reply to this commentA good shopping site that recently launched that got it right in my opinion is http://www.freeshipping.org.
Reply to this commentThat’s true, I’d order a review after posting at least about 30 posts per day for 30 days, which works out to be about 900 posts. Yeah, for a blog based site like that, you could create enough buzz on the blogsphere just writing the crap out of it. Or about it…
Reply to this commentI’m a big online shopper - their site needs some work. If I visit a shopping or “hot deals” site the first thing I look for are categories. If you look at TechZone’s Hot Deals page the first thing you see, front and center, are their categories.
In addition to improving their product descriptions Shopping Addicted should also grammar check their copy:
“I was looking these days to buy a digital camera. I looked and I looked because a small price will be a thing to make me decide on which product to buy. I didn’t told the best part yet.”
Their success will of course depend on how much effort they put into developing the site.
Reply to this commentThis is the prime shopping month, if he’s operating a shopping blog, he needs to post at least daily to capture this seasonal traffic
Reply to this commentIt would be a Black Friday site not updating or posting any entries during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving…not a good recipe for success!
Reply to this commentI thought about getting a review from John about my site, which is in the same nitch, but I don’t have the money
Doing a shopping site is hard but rewarding. There is no way I’d be able or anyone I know, to post 30 post a day for 30 days, but if they could, they would make a lot of money.
Reply to this commentCecil, a review on this blog seems to bring a lot of quality visitors - and if you have a quality landing page, they will turn into subscribers / customers / loyal users etc.. or at least this seems to be the case with most reviewed sites, as far as I’ve read until now :). Anyway, the thing is, if the site won’t keep up with the latest offers, not even 100 John chow reviews will keep its traffic up
Reply to this commentI’m not addicted to shopping at all, which probably sucks for my family and friends.
Reply to this commentIf it were updated more I may have subscribed too it. Every day I see to want to own something new.
Reply to this comment~ Dave
Addicted? No. Christmas forced
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