Last month I participated in an affiliate review deal. The rules were simple: review John Chow dot Com in at least 200 words and get a free link back. The benefits of such a deal were seen from both sides. John Chow gets several contextual links to his blog from a PR4 website, which raises his Google PR and Technorati rating. I got a backlink from a blog that ranks in the Technorati top 500.

From such a high profile site, I expected to see a huge jump in traffic. This was not the case. I think since people know it is a sponsored link, and no information about the site is given, readers of John Chow’s blog are not inclined to click on links to the reviews. Hence I only received a few visitors from John Chow’s blog.

My initial response was a bit of dissapointment. I expected to see an array of backlinks to Ontora pop up on other sites that syndicate John Chow’s traffic. However, my dissapointed was short lived when I discovered my new Technorati ranking. After they discovered the link from John Chow dot Com, my Technorati ranking went through the roof. According to Technorati, Ontora is now the 645,914 most popular blog on the web. That figure seems a lot more impressive when you consider that my ranking was well over 1,000,000 before John linked to me.

All things aside, my review of John Chow dot Com has become the most popular post on Ontora - shortly behind what AdSense format is most profitable. What’s more interesting; most of the hits on my review on John’s blog are from Google browsers. People stumble upon my blog, see the review in the Popular Posts list, and wala.

In the end, I think John Chow is getting the better deal out of the situation. However, this was only my first experiment with a sponsored review. Even though I haven’t gotten much traffic from the deal, a link from a quality site is a quality link. I may even have John Chow to thank for the jump in Ontora’s Text-Link-Ad price.