I used to hate John Chow

I used to really hate John Chow. Not because he makes 400K a year with his blog and I don’t, but just because of the way he makes that 400K. You know, his blog is filled with hundred of ads, it’s hard to find the content and more than half of the posts are damn sponsored reviews. ShoeMoney makes the same amount of money out of his blog, but it looks so much cleaner and he actually writes very good content. I then analyzed Chow as the web marketer, not as the person and I have to admit he’s a damn good web marketer. He’s good at driving controversy and he knows how to make things turn viral. There is a lot we can learn from John Chow and I finally ended up respecting him because I think he knows his stuff.

The Web Prostitute

Let’s get to the core of this article: Are you a web prostitute? Would you do anything for a couple of bucks and some traffic to your blog? Personally, I wouldn’t, so we can say I’m not a web prostitute. Unfortunately, this isn’t about me, so the question is not cleared. I occasionally read johnchow.com and the day I ended up reading him in the week, he was writing a sponsored review. It wasn’t a review about some cool WP plugin, some good website to drive traffic or whatever, it was about a natural sleep aid and fat burner. What? I was so pissed off when I read that post.

I receive tons of spam comments everyday with anchor text like ‘Burn fat’ and ‘one rule for fat stomach’ and then what? These bloody products get into my Google Reader inbox because one of the biggest blogger out there is a Web prostitute.

This is really bad. I don’t subscribe to a web marketing blog to be spammed by these fat burner products. It’s OK to do sponsored reviews, but IT HAS to be related to your niche.

Did Chow really needed that 500$ he charges for a review? No, but it’s an easy 500$ I guess and he wanted to check what the reaction would be. I can tell you, the readers weren’t very happy.

Being a web prostitute will hurt your business

Being a web prostitute will hurt your business in many different ways. First of all, accepting money from everybody is a great way to make money in the short term, but it’s a sure loss in the long term. Your readers will lose faith in you and will go away. Also, your readers won’t see you as a respected authority in your niche, but more as a greedy blogger. It is also disrespectful to your readers to think you can just write any crap and they’ll enjoy. As examples, let’s have a look at some of the comments on the fat burner pills article:

This has to be the oddest post I’ve seen so far on your blog. I know it’s a review, but it was definitely surprising to see a post about a sleep aid. I thought I had clicked a wrong link.

See? People not recognizing your website anymore.

Unfortunately the quality of the site starts decreasing once products like this one start getting reviewed. But for $500.. If would do it too.

You are a frickin’ web prostitute too.

Just before I doze off… I read this, and while the review is reasonably honest, I really think that accepting these kind of sites for reviews here is stretching things a bit.

This is really bad and I think it degrades the quality if this normally excellent blog. The whole thing reads like an infomercial and the author then adds that final paragraph to try and add a bit of balance, which is too late. I hope John will remove this article from his site. Sad day for this blog

Ok, this go on and on and on. Probably this won’t affect Chow too much because he’s one of the big guy, but he certainly can’t do it on a regular basis or people will start to go away. It’s the same for you, your readers will go away if you do stupid things like that.

Paid reviews are OK

As I said earlier, paid reviews are OK and are a good way for bloggers to make money. Always remember it’s YOUR blog, you can always refuse offers if you think this will hurt your business.

So, are YOU a web prostitute?