One New Blog I’m Reading
You may not know the name Mitchell Harper, but if Mitchell has his way, you will soon. “Harpz”, as he calls himself, is a 24-year-old living in Sydney, Australia, who created (and later sold) DevArticles.com and co-founded PHP software firm Interspire in 2003. He very proudly blogs at HarpzOn.com, calling it “The Only Blog Smart Entrepreneurs Read Every Day.” Okay. He also posts photos of himself wearing dark sunglasses … but, hey, I’m a U2 fan, so I can appreciate that.
Mitchell clearly believes he has something to say, and is putting his money where his mouth is. He recently bought a paid review on JohnChow.com for $250. The results? 7,000 people read that review, and Mitchell had more than 50 inquiries for a $239 Interspire product. Fresh off that success, Mitchell says he’s spending $10,000 on paid reviews through ReviewMe to promote his blog over the next three months. This is one of the first four paid reviews he purchased.
It’s a unique marketing method. He’s banking on ReviewMe as a better source of traffic than more common tools like AdWords and even basic SEO. Says Mitchell about his plan:
If all of the reviews are accepted by the owners of the 4 blogs (I think they will be) I’d expect somewhere around 10,000 – 20,000 unique visitors as a result of the paid reviews to this blog. That’s 5 cents per visitor, as well as dozens of link backs, hundreds of new feed subscribers, a massive boost in my Alexa and Technorati ratings and a whole heap of others benefits.
His success will ultimately depend on the answer to one question: Is what he writes worth reading?
As I said earlier, I like what he’s trying to do with ReviewMe and will be interested to watch him try to reach 10,000 unique visitors a day by his 25th birthday (July 13th). If you’re also trying to market a blog, you should appreciate How I Got 656 Visitors Today (I’ve Only Been Blogging For 5 Days). He’s written a 3-part Killer Google AdWords Blueprint which the PPC novice in me enjoyed. On the other hand, some of Mitchell’s posts are a bit redundant (6 Tips for Better Blog Headlines) for me — we must have several of the same blogs in our feed reader.
My answer to the question above: For now, yes. Dark shades and dramatic tagline aside, Mitchell writes well and has enough good information to count me as a new subscriber.
Come to think of it… I subscribed to a different blog last month under similar circumstances, and have already unsubscribed because the quality wasn’t there consistently. I don’t think that’ll happen with HarpzOn.com.
