Case Study – John Chow Effect
A few weeks ago, I did a review on VirlalNetworks. The review was ordered by its creator, Colin Klinkert, and was part of a pre-launch to get buzz and sign ups for the new network.
Being the entrepreneur that Colin is, and perhaps trying to get an addition blog post as well, he did a little case study (in video no less) on the effect of the review. Is it worth paying $500 to have your site reviewed by John Chow dot Com? Find out what Colin thinks in the video below.
One thing to keep in mind when looking at the traffic graph. They only show traffic from this blog. However, most readers read this blog via RSS or Email and those don’t show up as a referrals from the blog. When RSS and Email referrals are taken into account, the actual number of visitors sent can be three to five times higher.
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- Posted in Blogging, Make Money Online, The Net
- 47 comments what's your take?
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Interesting. The John Chow Effect is apparently king.
definitely king… hope i had $500 to taste the chow effect
yeah, it would be the only thing that I would not regret after I wasted my money on it!
I love it! You shell out $500 get the Chow effect. You post about the chow effect get another post worth $500
Yeah it sure is, I still remember the old article!
You got the big name for a reason.
great post….i wish i got $500 for a review.
Even if I could afford to have my site reviewed, I would be way too embarrassed to admit it was mine…lol
I think if you make the most out of the viewers and exposure you get from a john chow review, a reviewed post would be a great way to get your name out there. But i’d have to be darn sure for $500. Nice post, if only you could get this from every reviewed site.
VirlalNetworks got a review from you and then he returned the favor. He got two reviews for the price of one because he gave back in a form of a video thankyou. Good going chow. To think about it, you did the same thing with some companies at blogworld. You gave them a chance to tell a little about themselves without any cost to them other than the time limit.
interesting
suprisingly reviewme said my site is a suspected fake…smh
Let me get this again, for a $500 post, you get 72 comments & 82 members to a free service.
You got 267 visits for a free sign up service?
That’s almost $2 just for a click!
Do you really think that is worth the money?
I’d hate to see the John Chow effect on a paid for sign up service…
No, actually, I’d love it, will we see the John Chow effect for the sleep aid pills, PPC Marketing, blog flipping reviews and so on?
Besides those figures, I just reread the original review and see that you were also hosting a $6,700 Prelaunch Contest. I’m sorry but I just don’t see the value, If you can’t get 82 members (who would provide downlines anyway, nothing to do with the John Chow effect) on a $6,700 free to enter contest without paying an extra $500 for a review, I’d say you are doing something wrong.
No but I think that getting a name and sign-ups for a new service is pretty tough, with no one trusting you, buying a John Chow Review can easily clear it all to the people, then those interested can join or visit!
As John said, the visits are only from his site, not RSS too, but also remember that this is quality traffic
I guess he got the jump-start he wanted, he seems very happy and at the end of the day, that is really all that matters.
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
Yea, although the statistics look dry, but for a new website, that is a lot, and as John said that those statistics are just for johnchow.com not his feed!
So his actual statistics could be a lot!
I think the main issue atm is that johnchow.com is mainly a paid for review site and ultimately people will get bored of reading commercials. I appreciate you’re cashing in but it’s short term cash vs longevity?
Seriously, where are people getting this? JohnChow.com is a mainly paid for review site? Do you even know what you’re talking about?
Blogs exist which talk about different stuff, this one talks about making money, and never have I seen a review which is irrelevant to the blog! Plus everyone does review and paid per post! (Except Me)
This is not as much as I would have expected to be honest but I guess the goal was to get the product out and have people talk about it. I would be curious to get some stats about paid services.
Like John said in the post, those were only visits from the blog. He didn’t count visitors from email and RSS so it would be interesting to see what those stats delivered.
Hi Jarret, If you look at the original review again, you will see that John is using his affiliate link, so it really shouldn’t be too hard to track.
Oh yeah I just noticed that, good work you pointed it out!
John estimates them to be about 3 – 5 times the total
Hey as long as he’s happy with the results I guess that is all that matters.
Personally I’d think the “John Chow effect” would have been a little greater than just 267 hits over 2 days. It doesn’t look like there was much residual effect there. The initial load of hits looked promising with a high number of page views and time spent. But that is likely due to the contest and the initial “walk through” and checking out the contest info.
Since he only shows the initial hit load its hard to gauge the actual affect the review had. It looks like it was a one hit and done type thing.
120 members is fairly impressive, but again that could be more of the contest than the “John Chow effect”. I mean they go hand in hand but I’d guess more readers from here joined just to have a chance at the contest and won’t return. In fact I think I joined, didn’t like it and never returned, but I can’t find a log in so maybe not.
What did you not like about it? Its still only in prelaunch remember and most of the features (almost all) havent even been rolled out yet
What’s bigger, the Shoemoney Effect or the John Chow Effect?
john chow effect, just like beckham effect for pepsi..haha
make sense?
“people one advice – use john chow review rather than smorty or payperpost”
Colin: “Thank you John Chow for the review.”
John: “No, thank you for the $500 dollars sucka!”
J/k,
great video though. Awesome idea to follow up and actually analyze where you get the traffic from.
Some of these comments are hilarious! In my first month of blogging I worked my ass off and ended up getting 1800 visits to my blog, 1600 of which were unique. But I worked about 8 hours a day to get this.
I think a wam bam thank you ma’am review for that 267 new visitors in 2 days would be great. And he’s not showing how many visitors come from that link in 2 weeks.
Not everyone visits John’s blog everyday. I’d be interested in seeing a follow up post on this in 2 weeks time.
Yeah you really can’t judge the full effect since you only see a couple days worth of data, and again we don’t see the number of hits from email traffic. However looking at the graph you can see that 2days later there was next to no traffic being sourced from here.
Like I said I would have thought the JC effect would have been a little more pronounced and had a little longer lingering effect.
Let me correct myself as I was mistaken, his break down shows traffic over the course of a couple weeks. So it shows he got the majority of traffic within about a seven to eight day span. Which it typical for something along these lines but still not the residual effect I’d have expected.
it is all down to the exposure, what i really like about John’s site is the members are active and thus we know that they are not just mere figures, some may exaggerate that they get thousand of views.
I think the $500 is nothing to worry about depending on how much money you receive. If you can break-even, the review is probably worth a couple thousand because you’re reaching people you’d probably never be able to reach. John also has given reviews on bad products before with appropriate feedback so it’s all good.
I admire your “effect”:) seems like one post last for a week (Judge from the Google Analytic..not very clear)!
Hey John…got any discount?
The main effect is only for the first day because it is the first post on the page and all subscribers get an email as well, whereas after that it has chances of getting traffic till about 5-10 days and then there are hardly any chances to get traffic after that!
I would also recommend writing a nice press release and submiting it e.g. to PRWeb. Some time ago we have spent $300 for a release that really nicely propagated through a web and got us ~1000 new registered users from the release alone, we got picked by local media and after that things rolled easier. Nice thing for a launching service.
Amazing case..geniously made viral marketing.
I want a Free review
, I want to check its effectiveness and then post an article on your site about its effectiveness 
120 members isn’t bad really. It’s not that easy to get people to subscribe AND to keep them.
After the slashdotting and the digg effect ,the “johnchowing” ?
nobody can question “john chow” effect. the results have proven many times already. how i wish also that i’m one of the recipients
That was awesome.. $500 for a single review.. ;D
First, $500 for a single review is impressive (I don’t even have enough traffic yet to sign up!). Second, that’s an impressive response from your review – I’d say his $500 was money very well spent.
I do believe it is worth $500 to get it reviewed here. It is a good deal.
It is not true right? Hahahaha
I wanna taste to