Honestly, comparable results can be gotten from organic stumbleupons+a nice sphinn frontpage. Proppeller also helps. And then I don't have to pay john chow. Which I would love to not do, if at all possible. I'm still waiting for actual content to appear on his site.
A digg frontpage possibly, but Sphinn generally does not bring 1000+ uniques and 150 blogs linking back, sending another 5000+ uniques from the snowball effect. At any rate, $400 is not a lot of money, so it was a good investment.
Sphinn does tend to snowball nicely, but yeah, not quite to that extent. I frontpaged yesterday during non-peak hours, and got about 2900 stumblers in under 24 hours. I've noticed 8 new referer domains today, got 1 interview request, and gotten 5 articles submitted by others to digg/propeller. Yeah, it's not quite the same. But first, my blog has blackhat content, which means many don't like to give links. Second, I didn't have to pay John Chow. Worth it to me, although I can understand others taking the shortcut. Oh yeah, and for me, it isn't about the $400. It's about not wanting John Chow to have my $400.
Yah, Johnchow has a huge follower, if i am in his niche and have a decent product, I will not hesitate to pay for a review from him .. lol, so long he doesnt give me a negative review ! Anyway, gosh !! your orange color background is way too distracting .... can't stay on the site for long. Whitespace mabbe ?
I had a read of that, nice case study. I did something similar might be worth comparing results. http://blog.adtoll.com/2007/11/13/the-john-chow-effect-on-adtoll/
The first review he did of my site was negative, which actually helped it even more the second review.