Apr

9 Blogging Lessons I Learned From John Chow

Written by Neil Galloway

John Chow was the first big site that I got into when I started blogging in late November. He was posting some pretty desirable earnings then which were only a tenth of what he is pulling in now. Anyhow, I have learned a lot of blogging tips from his site that I have put into my own.

My blog started from scratch and I have grown it to around 200 uniques a day and $2 to $3 a day in revenue. Not as sensational as Chow, but I do credit him with some of my success. It was me who put in all the work, but he teaches efficiency in blog money making. It comes from his own research and learning from his mistakes.

This is a recap of what I have found important from his site. I'm sure this list will grow over time. At the end of each point I will put at least one link to an article on his site you will find interesting. This is from the king of make money online.

Write Content Consistently

It is not so much how frequently you post, but how consistently. It lets people know that the blog is active and just not another attempt at a quick buck without any effort. Chow consistently posts 2 or 3 articles a day. You don't have to do this though. I post 1 a day during the work week. Some bloggers are only 2 or 3 a week.

John Chow Articles

Monetize with Multiple Revenue Sources

It is so easy to just sign up with Google Adsense and slap them on your page. You will be missing out on a lot of revenue however. The Adsense on John Chow's site is less than an eighth (1/8) of his monthly income. Why limit yourself to one eighth when you have 8 times as much? I have 5 revenue sources right now and this month Adsense is shaping up to be about 1/3 of my income. I tripled my earnings by just getting involved in other sources like:

John Chow Articles

Ad Placement is Critical

You can't just place an ad anywhere. It has to be eye catching and seem like part of the content. One of the first articles I read was on using the 300x250 ad. Chow put it in-line with his article and wrapped his text around it. These receive more clicks than anything else on my site as well.

John Chow Articles

Not All Ads are Created Equal

The second most ad clicks on this site go to the text link banner at the top of each article. It doesn't even make 5% of what the 300X250 ads do however. Why, the ad rate for these links must be extremely low I'm assuming. I'm almost tempted to pull them because they earn so little and I'm wondering if they prevent surfers from clicking the 300X250 ad.

John Chow Articles

Publish a Full Feed RSS

My original RSS feed consisted of only the first few lines of text. I thought this would encourage the feed readers to come to my site and then I could make money on the ads. I have finally decided that these people seem like the least likely to click an ad. They know what this site is about and they are subscribing to it for my content.

Most of my traffic is search engine traffic. They are the ones clicking the ads. RSS is a nice feature for those looking for content. It helps you to increase your popularity. I love it when a blogge has the whole posting in his RSS. I can skim and then head over if I feel like posting a comment or seeing the full size images.

Just yesterday I released my full feed RSS. I wrote my own blog site in PHP so I had to make the code changes myself.

My opinion here is that other bloggers are your marketers. Keep them happy and give them what they want. In turn they will link to you and help you gain in popularity, resulting in more search engine traffic. What you want.

John Chow Articles

Full Feed RSS Enable - Subscribe Now

SEO Your Posts

You want traffic right? The search engines provide it, so make them happy or confident in the value of your postings. John Chow's definition of a dot com mogul has many criteria. One of them is to have your site at the top of a search for your name (without quotes). I never had this. My Ezine articles author page was the top, some other guy by the name of Neil Galloway, and then my site. I realized I had only one page on my entire site with my name. I fixed it by just adding my author name on every posting with a one line code change. I was #1 on Google within the week.

Now this is just a simple demonstration for something that doesn't matter, but it proved to me the importance of keywords on a page. I now make sure I use groups of words multiple times in a posting. I have the keywords in the keywords and description meta tags in the header of the page, I use them in the title tags, and they are used in sub-headings on the page as well.

I have a number of articles that I come up on page 1 for in Google now. My Aeroplan and Air Miles articles, my Nintendo DS articles, and some of my tech tutorials.

John Chow Articles

Get Involved in the Blog Community

I don't have a specific posting from his site on this, but he alludes to it in many postings. I emailed him for some advice awhile ago and this was one of the two points he had for me. That's right. I had some free personal advice from John Chow!

I did not do this until recently. I read blogs, but never got actively involved. I started to post comments. Not all the time on every article, but on articles I felt I had something to say on. I have had people follow my link back to my site and other bloggers comment on my site and add me to their RSS feed.

Be sincere though. It feels like everyone is on the hunt for links nowadays, but not good content. One of my favorite sites is NetBusinessBlog. He has a "Review Me and Get a Linkback" posting so I took part. I wrote a decent review and meant it. He upheld his part of the deal and gave me a link back, but he also said that I was the only one that did any kind of quality review on him, so he gave me even more than he promised and wrote a review on me.

Trust me, bloggers appreciate sincerity. Get involved and don't just be fishing for link backs.

Advance Posting is Your Friend

Okay, John didn't teach me this, but he just posted an article on it the other day so I'll add it in. I actually thought this up on my own because I frequently travel or I am out of town.

Basically, you can date your posts in the future. Your blog code is set to not show articles with posting dates in the future, so it will appear later and look like a fresh posting you just did. This lines up with my first lesson - Post Consistently. Write up a few posts when you are in the mood. Then when you don't feel like writing, you aren't publishing forced postings that lack in quality and you won't have to be around a computer to publish the article at just the right time.

I am actually building up a pool of travel articles with a few other topics mixed in when I am gone on my Trans-Siberian Railway trip this summer.

John Chow Articles

You Got To Love That Wordpress Timestamp

Market Yourself and Generate Traffic

This is the one lesson I have not followed up on the most. Getting traffic to check out your site is key to gaining readership and traffic from the search engines. The only traffic generating things I have done are:

Post articles to Ezine Articles.
Get involved in the blog community and post comments.
Do reviews for "Link Back Posts".

Chow has been the king at generating traffic. This has been done through writing a lot of good articles and then getting posts on the front page of Digg, links from other sites, high search engine rankings, Google AdWords, and just getting his name out in other circles.

John Chow Articles

The Art of Link Development
Two Tweaks To Generate More Blog Traffic (I linked to this post above already)

Now Get Inspired and Start Blogging

This is the other thing that he does well. You go away from his site with a good feeling and an "I can do it too!" attitude. I think this has been a lot of his success so far. You want to keep coming back and you want to see him double up his earnings again and again.

For a few inspirational articles, check out my favorites.

I have learned other things from watching Chow in action, but these are the ones that have made the biggest impact to my site. I will try and feature some other lessons learned from other sites in future postings after I have implemented them for myself.

Check out John Chow's site and if you read anything, go through his Top Posts page.

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe for email updates. Only one email a day and only if there was a new post.

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Category: Blogging

2 Comments

Jason Neuman Says:
2007-04-29 11:30:03
I saw your review on John Chow's site today and wanted to know if you would be interested in a review exchange. Please visit my site for for review exchange rules, let me know if you are interested in a review exchange.

Houses for Rent in Corvallis Says:
2007-05-07 15:40:46
You probably have one of the best JohnChow reviews I've seen and have alot of qualitly good information too. I love the name and title of your blog too, that u don't know everything and ur a humble being!