Battle Of The ReviewMe Reviews
written by John Chow
Everyone knows I’m a ReviewMe publisher but I’ve also been fooling around with ReviewMe as an advertiser. Before the 50% coupon code expired, I ordered up two ReviewMe reviews. One from Stephen Fung and the other from E Moms At Home.
Both reviews took on an “Evil” theme, with Stephen saying evil begins at my blog and Wendy asking if I’m gaming the system. With the discount, the reviews cost me $105.00. Both reviews were far better than the PayPerPost reviews I ordered a few months back. I guess you do get what you pay for.
Traffic wise, Stephen Fung sent me 48 visitors and E Moms sent 15 readers, according to Google Analytics. That makes both blogs extremely expensive from a CPC standpoint. However, ReviewMe is used for more than just traffic. I’ve received permanent links on two PR4 blogs that have written very good reviews about me. I’m sure the long term payoff from the reviews will be worth it.
Anyway, please check out the two reviews and tell me which one you like. Who knows, if you’re comment is good enough, I may buy a review on your site.
E Moms At Home - Is the “Evil” John Chow Gaming the System?
Stephen Fung - John Chow DOT COM - Where Evil Begins!
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(12 votes, average: 2.33 out of 5)
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Nice to see a small example of how something that isn’t a lot (traffic from the two sites) can be turned into something big (backlinks from PR4 etc).
Yes the real strength of reveiwMe is targeted one way links, which leads to better SEO, assuming posts are left in teh archive and not deleted you get long term benefit
ReviewMe certainly has captured the attention of the blogosphere hasn’t it?
John you seem to be getting a LOT of review requests which is by no means a bad thing - but do you think your price is too low?
If a blog does too many reviews, the reviewer gets hurt as people start wishing for more genuine content and the reviewee gradually receives less value for money as readers start ignoring them.
The solution to this is to bump up the price. The blogger gets more money (win), the reviewee gets more visits as their review is not one of a million (win) and Reviewme gets more money (win).
I guess it’d be hard to work a balance.. but does ReviewMe bump up the price of reviews where the demand is high? If they don’t, it’d probably be worth it!
ReviewMe allows me to set my own price. However, most of the reviews came in on the last day of the 50% off coupn and that created a huge backlog. Reviews gives a limited time to have the reviews posts, which is why you saw a bunch all posted at once.
I have finally gone through the backlog. There is only one review left to publish. Then we’ll be back to normal.
That is great news John. I believe you can sense that some of us readers are ‘whining’ on this.. “We want the Old John Chow back!”
Yeah there have been a lot of reviews, but if I were offered them I would jump at the chance, as would most readers of this blog
I dont think the price is too low, if it were higher he may not have received so many reveiws, sure John has it pitched about right
I won’t deny that I thought Stephen’s post was absolutely fantastic! Heh… I think I’ll go and signup to ReviewMe under John’s aff link, on one condition.
You buy a review on Techzi…
MUHAHAHAHA! Evilness over. 
lol.. You would have to get him to go along with an ‘evil’ trade first.
If you want bunch more of visitors, and PR6 link, you should order review with me
I have 40,000 uniques daily and 3 million impressions monthly, but you should decide if the topic of my site is appropriate for review of johnchow though…
The illusions on your site looks interesting, but I daresay John isn’t an ‘illusion’.
Well, I have to say that although I’ve dropped in here before, it was the review at eMom that sent me over here for longer than a few seconds, and eventually led me to subscribe to your feed and dig through your archives. I think the link is valuable but also the quality of readers that you will get (i.e. people who actually stick around, subscribe to your feed, come back) is worth more than just any reader, you know??
I should sign up with ReviewMe, but I’m keeping plenty busy with orders and regular bloggy stuff. My blog is a PR5 though, so perhaps people would pay good money…. hmmmm ;).
Probably, you dont have to accept a review, if you dont like the advertiser you can turn it down. I would suggest joining and seeing what comes your way
I really enjoyed reading the E-Moms article. Your daughters blogs are an interesting read
Ok John thanks for the information!
Thanks for the mention Mama Duck. What do I owe you for that comment?
Ha ha ha, what could I charge?
Come buy my products, tell your readers to buy my products?? 
Ah, just kidding, of course.
Those are two great reviews and it is hard for me to pick one over the other. While I really liked the writing style and humor in eMoms review, there were some older links in Stephen’s review that I had never seen before and that resulted in me exploring a little bit more of your site.
In both cases I think you got a good deal with the reviews as they are both well written and should continue to bring you traffic here and there.
Wow, they’re both going on the “evil” theme… kinda makes you wonder, don’t it.
It’s a tough call, but I’m gonna have to go with our favorite eMom Wendy’s review. She sure doesn’t pull any punches, does she.
Steven Fung did a great job too - and he did link to a great post on John’s site that I hadn’t seen before:
“Trading Hours For Dollars” ( http://www.johnchow.com/trading-hours-for-dollars/ )
which reminded me of an excellent Steve Pavlina post on the same topic - “10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job”
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/07/10-reasons-you-should-never-get-a-job/
Have an awesome day!
Dan
HONEST to God, John, Pay Per Post didn’t suddenly offer a new Pay Per Comment feature!
Then again, if I were to truly allow your evilness to wear off on me, I could pay all of my regular readers to come comment here.
Dan - bill me for this one, will ya?
Have you seen the John Chow review over at myopinionsareimportant.wordpress.com?
(dec:That’s my brother’s blog)
I thought his post was hilarious
Those ideas are even more evil than I would ever thought about! He’s is about to be on par with John’s!
Hmmmm…I can’t say that I would pick one or the other. I still think that John Chow is a “Humanitarian” like it or not. Despite throwing rocks at pandas, he is a formal and informal mentor to thousands of aspiring bloggers out there (including myself).
“Evil breeding evil,” well, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I don’t find myself to be evil and I follow John’s site closely…
Throwing rocks at pandas??? I never understood what the hell was behind that whole thing..
You see, I found the site through Digg many moons ago and a visit or two later I was subscribed to the feed.
While some users complain about the number of paid posts lately I read them in awe - the simple notion that you get this much revenue from a personal blog is astonishing. I’ve found this site to be a great personal motivator - full of advice and leading by example.
True some bloggers would call this level of monetisation “selling out” but why? It’s reward for effort. I’ve been reading the site for quite some time and have no interesting in stopping.
You may be slightly evil though, John.
Its not selling out it is all on topic, If he wrote a review about a bread making machine or something then that could be considered selling out, though Im sure hed do it
how did you chose where to buy space? or which blogs rather
Stephen and I agreed to buy reviews on each other’s blog. I choose eMom while browsing through the ReviewMe blogs and figure targeting working moms would be pretty evil.
I don’t know, John… I think you were actually showing your good side, wanting to help a couple of Dot Com Mogul Wannabes.
ScamHunter might have been right - I think I totally outed you.
Y’know John, before I called you evil and told everyone about you killing baby pandas and provoking idiots to become serial killers…everyone thought you were just an arrogant ass. Now everyone can see that you’re just an evil, evil man.
I can’t decide if that also makes me evil or not…
While both reviews were an interesting read, I thought it odd that none touched on the subject of design or functionality.
At the very least I expected them to mention the error in your comments section, prompting horizontal lines to cross out your readers’ comments.
ReviewMe contacted me once in the two weeks I’ve been signed up for. If you’re at all interested to read a review from a graphic designer’s standpoint you can do so here:
How a designer reviews a website.
All the best John.
David, although I did give some serious thought to touching on this subject, when I wrote the post, I couldn’t find an elegant way to fit it in. And what I would have said, if you’re interested, is that for a “Dot Com Mogul” John has a rather simple and plain template with the exception of his header. I would almost expect all the fancy 3-D Vista-style effects from someone like John.
(And I couldn’t figure out why the lines were here in the comments in the first place - thought perhaps he had them there for a reason!
)
John wanted evil. I gave the customer what he wanted
Ditto to that, Stephen!
PR 4? Damn John I would have called you an evil man for about the same price from a PR 5 blog!
Keep up the good work!
Yeah he is doing well.
I did a review last week and today found another reviewer scraping the images I used in my review.
I put a mod re-write on and tried to send his review an add for my site but it didnt work, so I just blocked it.
Cheecky *?$%&&£
E-MOM OUTED YOU.
Read her review closely. In her opening, she played along a bit with the evil persona that you try to take on, BUT…. she said you were GOOD. You are GOOD — ha ha — take that Mr. Bad Man.
E-Mom said you are a:
Good father
Good community member
Good member of the internet community. Helpful to others. Honest and kind. Practically a Boy Scout!
Ha ha … you’re going to have to kick a dog or something horrible if anyone is going to continue to believe the whole Evil-John-Chow thing.
Even an evil person has some good in him.
why ever not? 
There can be no evil without good. That’s why John taunts us with little sprinkles of good to help us see the contrast between his evilness!
loljohn cant hide behind his
smiley any longer
Those are some pretty good reviews, but the idea of trading review me reviews during the promo period is just evil.
I know John and Stephen did that, but sadly, I’m not that evil.
It was an excellent way of taking advantage. That’s why Wendy said that he was ‘gaming the system’.
Clever, I think its one of the best ways to promote your site
You certainly look far too innocent to be doing anything evil Wendy
Yeah, every time I tried the evil thing I had the guilt thing going on — I just couldn’t take it anymore, and resigned myself to being decidedly non-evil!
But it’s fun to hang out in this neighborhood to live my buried evil self vicariously through John (Though I could NEVER hurt a panda. EVER!
)
Wow, that was very motherly of me.
How did I get back on the top commentator list?
Dunno but Im back off it, the reset button was pressed again me thinks… anyway your 20 down now
Sometimes, it just seems that the script was being just a bit way too ‘mischievious’. It keeps jumping!
Who are the masterminds behind ReviewMe anyway?
[...] income source. However, I plan to use ReviewMe as a source of promotion as well. I have ordered two reviews already and plan to do more in the future. Whether I’m an publisher or an advertiser, ReviewMe [...]