The John Chow Effect, Part Deux
March 27, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Ranking
Recently John Chow made a few changes to his “Make Money Online” (formerly known as “Review My Blog”) link exchange program. Now with the new rules anybody that wants to participate in this program must include the anchor text “make money online” somewhere in the review. This is a brilliant move by John Chow, in my opinion, because he is now getting hundreds of targeting backlinks that will go a long way in helping him rank highly in search engines. If you do a Google search for the phrase “make money online” you’ll see he is already ranked number two. Anyone running Wordtracker or similar software will appreciate the fact that tens of thousands of people on a daily basis search for this phrase.
So, in a John Chow evil sort of way, we decided to modify our original review of John Chow’s website to adhere to the new rules and resubmit it for another round getting double the link backs for the same amount of effort. We went with “Online Business for the Bookmark Bliss” as our anchor text. The link was featured in installment 36 of the series which was posted on his site Monday March 19th, 2007.
A week or so has gone by now, so we thought we would once again take a look at the results! If you remember in our last John Chow Effect article, our biggest suggestion was to allow a description or unique anchor text that would encourage readers to visit the links. Now that John’s modified the rules to allow for this, has adding the anchor text helped improve our success over our previous submission?
Of the 4,000+ unique visitors we had from Monday to Friday last week only 14 came to us through johnchow.com. In the month of March we have had in total 33 visitors from johnchow.com and over 13,700 from stumbleupon.com. While it really was no effort on our part to get these links from JohnChow, especially the second one, it looks pretty evident that John’s readers are not really all that interested in the reviewers in his review compilations. Basically, the linkback from his blog is the best thing that comes from these posts from our perspective. The real beneficiary from this whole deal is John, and the rest of us are just helping him get to the top one post at a time.
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3 people have left comments
After a while, the thing just fizzles out and not many people are really interested in reading more reviews in the DOT com mogul.
I guess it just becomes a continuing posting habit.
I’m a regular reader of John Chow and enjoy most of his posts; however, I have to wonder (sort of picking up on lydonmaxewell’s comment), “Will John’s link exchange program ultimately back fire?” At what point will there be so many people taking up John’s offer that readers will start to say, “Oh, that’s just another John Chow link exchange review…never mind.” I’m not criticizing. I’m just wondering.
I think a lot of users are doing that already. It is pretty clear that the reviews are far better for John then they are for the people who do them. All you have to do is look at the success he’s had ranking for Make Money Online, and you can see that.
If he is smart, he’ll keep doing these reviews forever. For every 1 reader he loses because of it, he will gain 10 organically through his search placement.