Last Blogger

To follow up on my previous post about John Chow’s website, it seems the whole thing is causing a bit of a stir over at John’s website. If you check out the comments on his post about reviews coming in, you’ll find that the one prevailing thought is that the reviews weren’t worth $5.

I find it interesting because I do see the issue from both sides. As someone who posted about his website and is now drawing flak for writing a poor quality review, I really have no ground to stand on to argue against that. It’s not a great review. But from my perspective it’s definitely an adequate one. The backlink is valuable and quite frankly a frikin steal at $5 a pop. Is my backlink alone amazingly valuable? Not really… but an accumulation of backlinks from all over is of value and likely well worth the money he’s invested.

Do I think that he should dump piles of money into this and harvest backlinks like there’s no tomorrow? Heck no. This, like many other things that offer monetary fixes to search engine rankings is going to have a limited lifespan. But I think John knows that. Even if he did pursue this further he’d probably go about it the way I would. Start by putting no more than a handful of opportunities up at once so as not to show a huge spike in backlinks. Make sure those ops offer a variety of places to link to within the blog, and rotate them for each campaign. Then rinse and repeat until Google gets a rock solid method of detecting and de-valueing these things and then ditch this flavour of the month/quarter/year and move on. Played within a broader advertising strategy, PPP will work and offers good bang for your buck.

Another great benefit is the juicy, meaty content he’s getting from spending a few bucks on the latest advertising method. He’s able to blog on a relevant issue that will draw in interest from readers, backlinks from other bloggers who are following the issue, etc… Given the size of his audience base and the growth he’s experiencing he’s got to keep on top of what people want to talk about. The discussion he’s got going is drumming up great buzz and comes at a fantastic time given PPP’s recent buzz-worthy announcement.

From my seat, I can handle the flack, but don’t worry, John didn’t get ripped off and I think he knows that. In either case, it was very kind of him to provide backlinks to all the posts, I know I’m certainly appreciating the gesture. Much like he got great bang for his buck with the PPP posts and backlinks, the $5 is a paltry sum compared to his backlink to this blog.