Disclosure: This is a paid review, if you wish to purchase a paid review for your website (I have a 75% turn down ratio so if I turn you down don’t take it personally) you can purchase one from ReviewMe.
Like anyone I come across tens or hundreds of new sites and blogs every day. Most of them I will not spend more than 2 seconds on because, well, they’re crappy. Either they’re plastered with ads, buttons, and widgets and I can’t find something I care about or the content is worthless. When I got the ReviewMe for Increase Your Website Traffic, I honestly pretty much expected the worst. It was a nice surprise to be dead wrong.
What you’ve got here is a nice clean blog, uncluttered by links and widgets with good content. Here’s a few examples:
“To win a [PRODUCT NAME] just tell us (in 25 words or less) why you love the new [PRODUCT NAME]“
Competitions like this use psychological triggers to influence the people that enter the competition. The theory is that because the entrant is writing something positive about your product/service/brand, he/she is more likely to believe that statement because it’s something they conceived inside their own head without any external influence.
This is a great offline marketing technique (notice the Elite Retreat contests?) that has been adopted on the web. If you haven’t used this for your site, you’re missing out.
A recent post I found pretty amusing was his analysis of digg headlines:
I started by creating a PHP script using regular expressions to fetch the headlines from the last 500 articles posted on Digg. I used simple pattern and boundary matching expressions and added each headline into an array. The output looked like this:
Its not earth-shattering, but hey you didn’t do it. Here’s 2 of his 5 closer-sentences:
“If you have any more questions please let me know. I’ll be more than happy to help in any way I can.”
“I hope I’ve answered your question for you. If not just let me know and I’ll be happy to address any outstanding concerns.”
What’s bad?
Believe it or not, I can’t find the link to go to earlier posts without reading them by category. That’s about all I can complain about.
I can tell you it doesn’t happen very often, but HarpzOn: Increase Your Website Traffic will go into my list of blogs to read.
March 24, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Holy! $2,500 for this review?
March 24, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Was that the easiest money that you have ever made?
March 24, 2007 at 3:13 pm
be clear I did not make 2500$ for the review that is what reviewme charges. I am not sure what the revshare is.
Also lets keep on topic
I will make a post about reviews soon then you can let it fly there.
March 24, 2007 at 3:18 pm
I believe they take a 50% cut, so that review was worth a whopping $1250. Guessing you wrote it in less than 10 minutes, your hourly review rate is somewhere around $7500/hour. Not too shabby!
March 24, 2007 at 3:25 pm
if I disclosed what some of the blog posts have made me (indirectly) you would be pretty stunned
March 24, 2007 at 3:25 pm
I’ve read this blog for awhile, but I think most of the articles are crap. But he seems to like marketing his blog through review me. Maybe something to take note of.
March 24, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Hey Stuart. Most of my articles are crap? Too bad you feel that way. I’m averaging 1,000 unique visitors a day and my blog’s been up for 3 weeks. You can pay for reviews all you want but it doesn’t mean anything if your visitors don’t’ come back, and mine do. They come back in droves.
March 24, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Not cheap but probably worth it
March 24, 2007 at 4:43 pm
He’s going to spend $10k on reviewme reviews. Must be nice to be rich.
March 24, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Shoemoney.com gets tons of traffic. So it doesn’t matter what the cost is but how many visitors drop by Harpzon.com and then return after reading reviewme. It would be great if Mitch could share results of the reviewme on his site after a week or so.
March 24, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Well Mitchell, you have to take it in a personal view. Some of your articles are great. I visit your blog, I’m even a subscriber to your RSS. I won’t take the visitor traffic as anything fantastic, you are spending thousands of dollars for this kind of traffic. It would be more impressive if you could do this without spending $10,000. Spending no money and getting 1,000 visitors a day would be something to boast about. Other than having a load of money and being the founder of devarticles, which you sold year ago, we don’t really know what type of experience you have. Yes I view some of your articles as not being high-key. The digg article has little value, unless you’re trying to figure out what Diggers like reading about. And that would be simple, everyone knows Diggers like Apple, Linux, and the Wii. Didn’t need to develop a PHP script for that.
March 24, 2007 at 5:45 pm
I’m not trying to force anyone to read my blog and I value everyones opinion.. the only reason I spent a few hundred bucks for a few ReviewMe reviews (no where near $2500 – I’m not crazy) was to get the ball rolling. I could’ve used free techniques to promote my blog but I just wanted some initial momentum.
DDN: Good luck with your blog and if you can’t find any value in my blog then that’s OK. I try to write for everyone but obviously I can’t. I sincerely wish you all the best.
Stuart: My digg post was actually tongue-in-cheek but no one picked up on it surprisingly. I just got bored one night and thought it’d be fun to play around with PHP. Not every post on my blog will be useful to everyone. Again, I also wish you the best of luck with your blog
March 24, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Most of your articles definitely aren’t crap. You probably have one of the most interesting blogs that I’ve read. I subscribed the first time I went(came from Johnchow.com), and have loved it since.
People like Stuart are negative for who knows what reason. Envious of your success maybe and your ability to vault yourself into popularity so quickly? You can spend $10,000 on advertising, but it wouldn’t be successful unless he’s creating interesting content, which he is.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
March 24, 2007 at 7:30 pm
This was one of the worst written reviews I have ever read, in my LIFE. Actually, it is one of the worst collection of English worlds and letters I have read in my life (thats all this is). The advertiser has wasted money that could have been used on PPC or reviews on better websites. The whole time I did not even understand what Shoemoney was even talking about. Please Shoemoney, take that $1250 or whatever you made from the ReviewMe cut, and take some BASIC writing skills.
I pity the advertiser.
March 24, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Goodness, you’re much better than Shandyking at this type of thing Shoe. Just check out his paid review of Jokeroo.com.
March 24, 2007 at 7:55 pm
maybe you should write a blog someone might want to read and do reviews yourself with your awesome grammar!
March 24, 2007 at 7:58 pm
sorry after thinking about that I would just rather you keep reading mine after all nobody would pay for any reviews if there were not so many readers like yourself. AMAZINGISNTIT?!?
March 24, 2007 at 8:07 pm
well atleast you got to spam your link here!
March 24, 2007 at 8:53 pm
March 24, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Good idea Zaib. Let’s see what the return on his investment turns out to be.
March 24, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Mitch has some great stuff and I think people are missing a huge amount of the good info he has presented…sure everyone doesn’t have 10k to develop their blog, but it still comes down to the quality content, which I read every day. And to add to that, I don’t believe he has the success he has because of any dollar amount. AND, as Shoemoney mentioned, he turns down most of the ReviewMe requests he gets AND will add this to his list of blogs to read. I’m guessing he isn’t about to sell his soul for a cut of $2500.
March 24, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Reviewme is a cool tool to use to get your site reviewed and of course not all reviews are as expensive as stated.
March 24, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Well if it says $2500 and he paid a couple hundred.. how does one go about this “dealing”
to get a better price ?
March 24, 2007 at 10:05 pm
He should do an analysis on the ROI of buying htis review…
March 24, 2007 at 10:06 pm
I am fairly new to blogging and I just appreciate all your input good or bad. I am here to learn and apply some techniques to my blog and where better than here to learn and visit some of the sites that post here.
Cheers!
March 24, 2007 at 10:08 pm
He has been running for only 3 weeks. Let’s see if he can keep up this kind of traffic without having to pay for it.
March 24, 2007 at 10:15 pm
at 2500 a pop it might not last long
March 24, 2007 at 11:31 pm
For some reason people that read your blog like to correct grammar. I was corrected (rudely) on a comment I made here the other day. I think they are just jealous of your success. Pretentious pricks.
March 25, 2007 at 12:00 am
I read the guy’s free eBook after reading Shoe’s review and I have to say that it was nothing more than 20 pages of how to spam everyone and get traffic. Not exactly anything interesting. I hope that he will have some quality material in the future because at the moment, he doesn’t.
Just my 2c
March 25, 2007 at 12:10 am
I am just wonderning if the Guy has “Blogging Tarffic BulePrint” they why spend $2500.
March 25, 2007 at 1:01 am
I think it is funny you talk trash about Mitch’s blog but then mention that some of his articles are great and you subscribe to his RSS. Mitch’s experience is pretty clear – he is 24 and founded a multi-million dollar company which is now one of the largest PHP development companies in the world.
March 25, 2007 at 4:56 am
hmmm interesting the part about having to search through categories to find older posts. In my opinion categories are the best way to search since you can filter by topic, but I guess a lot of people like using the archives, I got test that.
March 25, 2007 at 5:22 am
See me, I just wrote about shoemoney on my blog waited for him to find the post, which he did and then he linked me.
But honestly shoe, I would never give you or anybody $2500 for a review, that’s just insane. HarpzOn has a good blog and probably what will drive him more visitors is the fact that soon the legend will spread of a blogger spending 10K on ReviewMe reviews.
Harpz are you sure you are not employed by ReviewMe, you kind look like Patrick Gavin.
March 25, 2007 at 5:27 am
I bet he got his money’s worth. Huge and highly targeted traffic never comes cheap.
March 25, 2007 at 5:28 am
Come on! What’s with all the secrecy? Mid xxxx, high xxxx?
March 25, 2007 at 5:29 am
To make money, you need money. It’s as simple as that.
March 25, 2007 at 5:31 am
I would say he made probably at least $10,000 from any number of posts. Especially when he had that whole deal about the MyBlogLog thing.
March 25, 2007 at 5:33 am
I somewhat agree with a previous comment: the review was poor. I’m not commenting on the grammar of the review (I hate it when people do that — yes, very pretentious). I’m commenting about the content of the review. Considering Mitch had to pay good money for the review, I think Shoemoney could have spent a little more time on the details. I read Mitch’s blog on a regular basis and enjoy it. Therefore I knew there was more than what Shoemoney was saying and in particular there were definitely more “cons” than mentioned. Was the review money well spent by Mitch? Only time will tell. In terms of the overall content of the review — I think Mitch did not get all that he paid for.
March 25, 2007 at 7:13 am
OOh. nice..a flame war about English skills. again.
Why no-one read my blog to do it? My first goal for my blog is to improve my English skills.
To stay on topic, I read his blog and I like it.
March 25, 2007 at 9:41 am
Maybe he bought it before Shoe increased it to 2500?
March 25, 2007 at 9:42 am
It’s not good if going through categories is your only option…
March 25, 2007 at 10:54 am
I would’ve waited maybe another month or so until he had more posts or gotten his friends to review it so he could catch some of the more “obvious” flaws like the category navigation only issue – if I wanted shoe to look at my site and drive traffic, I’d have more meat and have cleared up the low hanging fruit issues… at least before I dropped 2500.
March 25, 2007 at 10:56 am
I’d imagine it would be at least five or six figures, the sheer economics of scale of the internet are mindboggling at times.
March 25, 2007 at 10:57 am
When people can’t correct the content of the message and they feel like arguing, I suppose grammar’s the only thing left.
March 25, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I saw John Chow’s review of Harpzon.com not really to much new here but it does show that true to his word he is buying more reviewme’s though I honestly am starting to hate that program… Though I would love to use it
I’m just to cheap.
March 25, 2007 at 2:29 pm
I never talked trash about his blog as a whole. take more time to read before coming to your ignorant accusations.
March 25, 2007 at 2:54 pm
HAHA! I’m very sure I’m not an employee
Although I wouldn’t mind some ownership of ReviewMe – they are going great guns at the moment.
March 25, 2007 at 3:28 pm
All I can say is…WOW!
March 25, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Mitchell is one of the first new bloggers I’ve seen invest reasonable sums on reviewme to get his new blog known in a short period of time.
Just reading about the results of this interests me from a marketing point of view and I’m sure Mitchell will report back how everything goes.
I’m curious how much traffic Jeremy can push with his blog here too. This review was quite tiny compared to reviews written by other bloggers, but because Jeremy is Shoemoney he tends to have some traffic power.
March 25, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Actually you can make money even if you don’t have it. I would say you more need a WILL to make money, rather than money to make more money.
Just look at all the 20 year olds on the internet man, many are millionaires.
March 25, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Cool, good luck with your blogging ventures. If you have the time stop by mine sometime.
March 25, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Not 2500? So tell us how much you paid, please?
March 25, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Nice shit Shoemoney. You completely changed my comment above and added in errors that are commonly associated with yourself to my post, just so you could flame me.
March 25, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Not my link. It goes to Shandyking’s page.
March 25, 2007 at 4:44 pm
your post was never edited…. timestamp and last edited are from original post date. nice try though.
March 25, 2007 at 5:58 pm
The review wasn’t extensive or detailed but that’s okay because he got a positive recommendation from Jeremy. I mean the Shoemoney brand is pretty strong and I’m sure Mitchell was buying a review because of its reputation and reach.
March 25, 2007 at 6:08 pm
This biggest gainers are ReviewMe though. Earning $1,250 for administrating a review process is just sweet.
March 25, 2007 at 6:18 pm
the review wasn’t that good…but I actually like some of harpz material
March 25, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Maki’s exactly right. The review (even though small) drove a rediculous amount of traffic which results in a lot of RSS subscribers and email subscribers. The traffic is still coming in (it took my site down for about 5 minutes yesterday – luckily I rang the hosting company and they sorted it out) so I’ll post about it in a few days time once it dies down.
For all the people on here calling me stupid for paying the the review, once you read my post you’ll understand EXACTLY why I purchased the review. I’m no stranger to marketing online and we (Eddie, my business partner and I) spend hundreds of thousands every year marketing Interspire and other projects, so I know what I’m doing
March 25, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Cool, well I’ll have to subscribe to your feed at least long enough to find out about the metrics on your investment… If the content is good enough, I’ll stick around as well. It definitely seems like a good way to get eyes – the trick is turning them into readers.
March 25, 2007 at 11:14 pm
When I first heard of it, I thought ReviewMe sounded like something that wouldn’t interest me at all (like Pay-Per-Post…), but interestingly, I decided to try it as of yesterday. I was visiting a blog, and was pretty impressed with the tone of it. My first thought was that I should contact the blogger about swapping links…but then I noticed that he had a ReviewMe banner up, and I thought…”aww, what the hey?”…and I decided that 40 bucks was a nice way to show my support for his efforts. Of course, he might hate my blog…and then, it just might be time to rethink my struh-TEE-juh-ree.
March 26, 2007 at 6:44 am
Looks like he spent $750 for the review and then Shoe set his how reviewme price after the review was bought.
Mitchell makes reference to a “most popular, highest trafficed one man blog” in his post titled “Spreading The Link Love: Batch #2″ where he states he paid $750.
March 26, 2007 at 7:55 am
Yep, if you paid $750 for it, you got a steal !!
March 26, 2007 at 9:31 am
Okay, so saying most of his articles are crap isn’t talking trash?
March 26, 2007 at 10:17 am
That’s awesome Mitchell. Really looking forward to your report on your ReviewMe experience.. think it’ll be good feedback for other potential advertisers.
March 26, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Oh well. I tried
March 26, 2007 at 2:54 pm
someone’s defensive…
March 26, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Harpz has been spending some money, but his articles are far from crap. Keep it up Mitch!
March 26, 2007 at 9:37 pm
hah look at your website. it’s a piece of shit. all you bitch ass bloggers can put out comments but when you compare his blog to yours, yours is a piece of shit.
March 26, 2007 at 11:50 pm
HarpzOn is a pretty nice site I think I might read it more often ..
March 27, 2007 at 11:24 am
I can tell you it doesn’t happen very often, but HarpzOn: Increase Your Website Traffic will go into my list of blogs to read.
Wow, an endorsement like this is worth 10x the amount the blog owner paid. HarpzOn could have even got this review for 1/2 by bypassing Reviewme and going direct!
March 27, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Great review, i was interested in the site
March 28, 2007 at 11:18 am
He paid big money for a 209 word celebrity endorsement with obligatory grammatical errors. Nice…
* 209 words of actual Shoemoney review comments not including the large quotations.
March 28, 2007 at 12:31 pm
way to go
. jajajaajaj. sory bout no deep coment, just made me laugh and say way to go.
March 28, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Incredible amount of money for a review thats really good congrats on being able to charge and turn down people at that rate.
March 30, 2007 at 12:50 am
Money makes peoples’ mind’s wander. Try having a conversation in a crowded place and mention a million dollars and you would be shocked how many people turn their heads to listen. Maybe not.
March 30, 2007 at 12:51 am
I think you just need a good idea. Then someone else will give you the money
April 1, 2007 at 9:37 am
hey, ReviewMe is a highly paid middleman.
April 1, 2007 at 9:41 am
Regardless of the price of the review, I think he will get his money’s worth. Don’t forget Shoemoney has a good reputation for reviews. They usually won’t review bullshit, event at that price. So even if HarpzOn paid for the review, it’s still an honor to be featured on this blogs frontpage. And I think it will pay for itself. Good Marketing.
April 9, 2007 at 3:06 pm
if only I had that kind of money!
April 12, 2007 at 11:29 am
Robert Cialdini talks about those 25-words-or-less contests in his book “Influence: the Power of Persuasion”.
He says it was used by the Communist Chinese and North Koreans in the Korean War as part of a brainwashing tactic.
Go figure.
April 13, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Good luck Mitch, 1 more subscriber to your blog here.
February 17, 2008 at 10:26 am
My blogs got no rating price etc. after submitting at reviewMe.
November 18, 2008 at 9:11 am
And one more subscriber to your blog too! Thanks
December 9, 2008 at 10:55 am
Wow, he paid this much for a review, and the site is 404 now. HAH! At least put a re-direct up! Come on man.