The John Chow Effect
March 13, 2007 | Comments (8) | Filed under: Ranking
Recently we submitted a review as participation in a link exchange that’s been setup by Dot Com Mogul, John Chow. What’s the idea behind it? Well, it’s basically a mafia style “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” scenario. You review his site, and in exchange he posts a link back to yours in a semi-daily compilation of reviews. By all indicators, the plan has been a huge success for John. As of this writing, he has already received reviews on over 300 different blogs, and continues to publish a new list of 10 every 2-3 days like clockwork.
Going into it, we were actually less concerned with getting individual visits from John’s blog and more excited about the possibilities of a link from his PR 4 blog. BookmarkBliss.com was featured in installment 30 of the series which was posted on his site in the afternoon this past Saturday (March 10th, 2007). As of today, that post has just been pushed off the main index of his blog, so we thought we would look at just how much traffic our blog has received specifically from this link. Surprisingly, it was not that many!
According to Google analytics we had over 3,006 unique visitors to Bookmark Bliss between Saturday afternoon and Monday evening. Of those unique visits only 15 came from johnchow.com. So, other than a nice Linkback from his page rank 4 site, you probably won’t see that much of an increase in traffic directly resulting from this link exchange. In our experience, very few of John Chow’s readership actually takes the time to visit the reviews listed in his posts. Maybe it’s that he simply lists the 10 sites without any description of them? Perhaps users are cautious about visiting untrusted sources? One other factor that might have lowered our numbers is that batch 30 was released late afternoon on a Saturday. I would love to hear from the people in Batch 31 to find out what kind of traffic a Monday morning posting gets you 
Bottom line for us, it was a positive experience thanks to the nice blog link that helps both our page rank and Technorati rating. If you go in expecting a huge influx of traffic from this deal, you may ultimately be disappointed. If you’ve had a similar experience or completely the opposite of us, we would really like to hear about it. Drop us a line and let us know how the John Chow Effect worked for your site.
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8 people have left comments
It’s funny, I thought I found you guys through his site, but now I’m not sure. I do know that I virtually always mark those posts as read without reading them, though, which would seem to be what others are doing, too, from the effects you saw.
Either way, you’re in my subscribe list now
Thanks Shane
Well, 15 people did visit us from John’s blog so maybe you were one of them 
Thanks for subscribing!
Well, you can be sure I did come from his link too, though.
That might make me one of those 15 too!
This sorta confirms that I’ve always expected. I personally think the PR value from John’s review my blog scheme is very minimal. A whole bunch of unrelated links together on one list can’t beat a contextual link with a description.
I would suggest focusing on the list linkbaits you guys have been very successful with. Smashing Magazine is a great example of a site built totally on linkbait. You really don’t need to go out of your way to get a poorly trafficked linkback from anyone.
BTW, I’m in Toronto as well. Cheers!
I think the reason people didn’t follow through John’s link is because it really looks like a non-related marketing gimmick which, as most of us will agree, is hated by many people.
However, getting a nice backlink from John’s blog post, I think will reward your blog in the future.
What’s interesting is John changed up his requirements for this idea, so that when you submit the stories you get to choose your own linkback text. I just modified this article to match his new rules, and resubmitted it for another round. Will be interesting to see if the traffic is more this time.
The text I chose was Online Business for the Fuzzy Future. Should go up in a day or two at the rate he is going…
I came from John Chow too. And I have added your feed, because I like the way you write!
You will see me around