Wasting Data on a Review

I read many ReviewMe reviews on other sites that I visit and I often wonder if the website ordering the review is really just wasting money.

As with any business expense, you really need to decide on its purpose.  Forking over $400 for a review can be a huge waste of money if you don’t know why you are doing it.

Do you really want a review from the site?  Or are you really paying $400 for the PR5 backlink and the traffic generated by the review?  Will you take the reviewer’s suggestions to heart?  What if you get a negative review?

Before you order a review, I suggest that you decide why you are doing it and formulate a game plan.  Here are some suggestions:

You are ordering the review because you really want to know what the reviewer thinks about your website.  Generated traffic from the review is a secondary benefit.

Read past reviews from the reviewer and determine if the reviewer produces a genuine thorough review.  Does the reviewer make suggestions on how to improve your site?  Is the reviewer qualified to make these suggestions?  You don’t want someone telling you to change the colors on your website if their own site looks horrible.

Does the reviewer’s readers provide a lot of comments to the review?  Many times, the reviewer’s commentors provide great additional feedback giving you many additional mini reviews.

Does the reviewer make both positive and negative reviews?  You don’t want to order from someone who is positive on everything.  You probably won’t get the feedback that you’re really looking for.

You are ordering the review mainly to generate traffic and capture new readers.  The content of the review is secondary.

You’d obviously still want to order a review from a high ranking high traffic site.  You should still choose a high quality reviewer.  However your reviewer’s audience type is much more important here.

You should determine if your reviewer’s audience would benefit from visiting your site.  Remember, you may have only one chance to get their eyes onto your site.  You have to plan for that.

For example, if your site is about fast food review and you order a review from  ILoveHotdogsBlog.com, you should schedule a post about hotdogs on the same day that the review is posted on the reviewer’s site.  Additionally, you should have some previous posts about hotdogs on your site for the reviewer to review.  If your site does not have any hotdog posts before ordering the review, what is the reviewer going to be reviewing?  You may have many posts about burgers and pizza, but your reviewer is probably an expert on hotdogs, not burgers. Kinda sounds like spending money on data recovery when you don't know what a computer is.

What’s the reviewer’s blog traffic and how much do you expect to convert? 

Let’s say you order a $400 review with the hopes of getting 1000 new visitors.  If you know from your site statistics that you have approximately 40% return visitors daily then you can assume that you will get 400 new loyal readers from the review.  Therefore, you are paying $1 per new reader.  You should have some idea of this number before you go and blindly order reviews.

If your reviewer’s site has daily traffic of 2,000 visitors, it would be nice to know how many of its visitors will check out your site due to the review.  I would suggest contacting the webmasters of the site’s past reviews to see if they are willing to share that information.  After all, if only a quarter of its readers come to your site, your review probably will not reach your goals.

One ReviewMe for $400 or Two $200 reviews or four $100 reviews?

Is it better to order one review from a big site or multiple reviews from smaller sites?  This really depends on your site’s niche.  If you decide to order reviews from multiple site you would need to determine if these sites have a different set of readers.

In going back to the example about a fast food review, it would make sense to order multiple reviews from a hotdog site, a pizza site and a burger site.  You wouldn’t want to order two reviews from competing hotdog sites because there’s a good chance that they have many readers in common. 

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Advertisements of the Summer

From time to time, I like to actually think about the commercials I'm watching, judge their effectiveness, and then evaluate what I know about advertising. I'm not going to make this post super boring, but I'd like to talk about the way advertising for movies has changed.

With the rise of social media, sharing content attached with a product or service becomes incredibly important for business looking to bring in new customers.  When comparing TV ads from the 90s to now, one thing is quite obvious. We don't care about plots of movies anymore. All we are looking for is key characteristics of a movie. Is it action? Comedy? horror? We get confused too easily if comedy gets mixed in with explaining a plot. We also are looking for if our age or personalities fit well with the movie. Is it inappropriate for my age? Will my friends like it?

I think it's quite remarkable that we go into a movie essentially not knowing what the movie is about. Take the new Spiderman movie for example. What do we really know about the movie? That there's action, yes. Some Lizard villian, yes. A girl, sorta. Besides that, we don't know, and don't really care to know.

Data recovery is a nightmare

I never thought it could happen to me, but I was completely and 100% wrong. I was working late into the night on a power point presentation that I would give the following morning at 8 AM. Don't ask why I didn't have it ready before. I went to save it to my USB drive, and instantly my screen went black and I couldn't turn on or get a response out of my computer at all. After cursing and stomping around for a while, I realized that was nothing I could do besides go to bed and give my presentation without any visual assistance for me or my audience.

After all that grief, I realized that I needed some way of instantaneously recovering my data. I originally had a plan, whose name I won't mention, that stopped allowing data recovery for a 30 day window, which happened to be when my computer crashed. There are some data recovery service options such as Data Recovery Group that are perfect for recovering vast amounts of information in a short period of time. What I need though is something that I can personally manage and can get from a variety of sources. This is part 1 of the data recovery series, part 2 will update you on what I end up doing! Let the suspense build! ;)

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Marketing Mix, What's Yours?

4 P's Marketingmix, Language: nl (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Having a diverse and appropriate marketing mix can determine the type of future customers you reel in, and whether or not you keep you existing ones. When evaluating the marketing mix you use, it's important to know the five P's of your business, product/service, price, place promotion and understand if your methods are appropriate. Sorry if you disagree with my choice of P's, that's how I was raised. If you think print advertising is dead, think again. Services like the postal service and other advertising agencies offer services delivering print media to thousands of potential and existing customers. It just might be what your business needs to kick itself into a higher gear!

Don’t Forget About Traditional Print Advertising

It is no secret that printing advertising has become less common as online advertising has increased. Online advertising is easy to use, more accessible and cost effective for marketers and advertisers. Although online advertising has become more popular, you shouldn’t forget about traditional print advertising. Consumers see tons of online advertisements a day due to the increased popularity of them. Online advertisements can be very powerful, but print advertisements are still important even if they aren’t as common. Having a presence online and offline can be very beneficial for your company. Print advertisements can make your company stand out from companies only using online advertisements. There are a variety of different print advertisements available to companies too! Stigler Printing is one example of a printing company that offers different printing services for your advertisements. They can print brochures, posters, banners, magnets, booklets and more! With an endless number of printing services, there is sure to be a print advertisement for your company. Stigler Printing also has graphic design services available if you are struggling to create an advertisement!  Direct mailing is offered if your company would like to send advertising products directly to consumers. Stigler Printing can make traditional print advertising easy for your company! Help make your company stand out by using traditional print advertising and online advertising!