The best thing about online marketing is the amount of freely available statistics and reporting about a campaign if you know where to look. It’s always good to study what others are doing in a constructive way, looking at data from a number of different sources before you adopt a strategy.

I think that bloggers can add value to this information , while avoiding the practice of just reciting the facts in another form. By analysis of the data and looking for common trends, we can start to develop some real intelligence about these campaigns, and develop more effective sales tools and monetization strategies in the future.

Getting paid reviews for your e-product can be a great way to get traffic to your sales page. If you feel like you have a product that is revolutionary and makes a big difference to the way that people will conduct business online, then getting the message out fast,hard and with as much reach as possible will work to your advantage. I think that Alvin Phang had a bit of a different experience in getting his Atomic Blogging program reviewed recently on John Chow.com. He paid the standard $400 for a John Chow review, for which he hoped to get traffic to the sales page for atomic blogging (which shows all of the standard sales page hype, coloured font and testimonials by the truckload) and convert them in sales.

The PDF report of the Atomic Blogging program on John Chow is here http://www.gathersuccess.com/downloads/GatherSuccesscom-JohnChowReview.pdf

And here is my analysis of the data.

What did his $400 get him :

Qualitatively : A not very favorable review which points out the weaknesses of the system.
Total number of clicks : 349
Total number of sales : zero! = (
Return of Investment: -$400
Cost per click: US$1.14

Lesson to be learned : If your product is mostly for newbies, and does not offers something new, why give it to an expert to publicly pick holes in it, at your expense! Don’t have an inflated view of what their product is worth, and truthfully measure the value it provides to the consumer.

Recommendation : I would think that it would be wiser to spend $400 to buy up some banner space on forums where people are looking to get into blogging. The whole tone of John Chow is wrong for this type of product I would think. He is a No BS type of guy, so demonstrate some real value and you might do OK.