Johnchow.com is just my miscellaneous ramblings about whatever is on my mind. However, I would hope that my ramblings are worth reading. My stats show that over 100 people read this blog everyday. If reading my blog does something good for you, no matter how small, then updating this blog is worth my time.

That was John Chow in December of 2005. John Chow may not have been a zero in the bank account at the time, but his blog was as viewed as my white behind on a Sunday morning.

What I will explain to you in this article is how and why John Chow’s blog exploded and is now making $17,000/mo and climbing as we near the end of 2007.

First, let me run you through the numbers and the details in case you don’t know much about John Chow.

John Chow dot Com Milestones

December 31, 2005 - John begins to feel his blog is being read. John expresses that he is a good-guy.
January 15th, 2006 - John launches LaptopGamers.com
January 20th, 2006 - John decides to make LaptopGamers.com an online money-making experiment
January 28th, 2006 - John’s interest is piqued by a blogger, Steve Pavlina, whose income increased exponentially in a matter of months.
Feb 2, 2006 - John’s blog receives it’s first spam comment
April 18, 2006 - John asks the big question: Can Bloggers Make Money?
April 27, 2006 - John issues his first swear word, calling the Wii a dumb ass name.
September 1-30, 2006 - John gets dugg 5 times (see list of articles below)
September 16, 2006 - John updates the design of his blog
August 31, 2007 - John Chow dot Com earns $17,828.61 in revenue.

The Tipping Point: September, September, the month to remember

Wow, “what the hell happened in September”, you might ask. The answer: Digg.

John’s blog got dugg a whopping five (5) times in September. That explains the massive spike almost forming a right angle in September. Because of those diggs, many people were exposed to the nature of John’s blog and they liked it. They bookmarked it. They subscribed to the feed. Whichever way you cut it, he was guaranteed traffic for a long time as long as his content stayed fresh and captivating, which it has.

Posts that were dugg in September

• The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores
• Using Life Insurance To Shelter Income
• Great Parking Job! Did you do it?
• Trading Hours For Dollars
• Why Alexa Is Worthless

I think I will leave Digg alone for a while. It’s nice to get all these visitors to my blog but I don’t wish to turn it into some commercial operation like TTZ. And if I keep getting my posts Dugg, I’m going to look at all that traffic and I’m going to see all the potential money that is going out the window and may be tempted to redo the blog to take advantage of it.

Oh, how he did. Oh how he did.

From that day on, $91.2k

Courtesy of Steven Truong

Feast your eyes and learn. Notice how once John had the traffic rolling in he knew exactly how to start monetizing it. He expanded his partnerships and tweaked his ads and ad placements. To this day he still massages his ad configuration to obtain optimal revenue. This is why we read John Chow — he knows what to look for.

What is it that makes John Chow a mogul?

Good question. Here are the four main ingredients to this wicked cocktail recipe of an internet mogul.

1. John Chow is a maven

John Chow has a lot of visitors, he also has a lot of loyal fans. Visitors and fans alike want to read John’s blog for one reason: He makes more money than them. Ok, I’m sure people actually like John too, we’ll get into that later. If you follow John’s blog, you are probably trying to learn from him and use the information you gain from him to increase your own income. This is a wise choice, because John is a maven. A maven is A person who has special knowledge or experience; an expert. Not only is he an expert in the field of making money online — he wants to help you, yes you, make money online too.

Being a maven, John collects information. It’s one of his main functions in life. Not only does he collect the information, but he loves doing so. It comes naturally to him. Now, we wouldn’t want John keeping all that information to himself, would we? Good thing for us, John is a good-guy.

2. John Chow is a good-guy

John, since the beginning of his blog, before he even had enough visitors to scrape pennies out of any advertiser, wanted to help people.

If reading my blog does something good for you, no matter how small, then updating this blog is worth my time.

People endearingly tell John that he is evil. Evil in a clever way, though. When you visit John Chow’s blog and you see a new ad or text link somewhere, you think to yourself, “Oh that John Chow”. That is money. He is money. Just as his new blog title reads: I make money online by telling people how much money I make online. That is an amazing recursion to be in. Allow me to throw in another throwback quote:

Many people have asked me how much I make from Google. While there are Google Whores who will reveal how much they make from AdSense, I am not one of them.

Yes, at one point, John was not evil, but modest.

In the early stages of his blog, most of John’s post were personal. At that time, of course, it was not super interesting to most of the population. It’s when John began sharing his information and experience with us that things became interesting.

Being a maven and a good-guy is a great combination because it makes him a powerful resource. Being that his information comes from years of experience and success, it gives his information an extreme value.

3. John Chow’s information has an extreme value

Since John is a maven and he likes to share almost everything he knows with just about anyone, the combination of those two attributes make his information very valuable. Throughout Q1 2006, John began sharing with us what he was learning from his sites Digital Grabber and Laptop Gamers. This information is very valuable because it comes straight from the source. Very much like my post sharing my 10 years of experience on web development, his posts on increasing traffic and revenue are irrefutably resourceful.

If you refer to the Alexa graph that I have included above in this article, you will see that in very early 2006 John’s blog received a spike in traffic that generally stayed the same for the following months. The reason for the increased traffic in early 2006 is people started reading about John making money. He started to include valuable information among his personal posts — this piqued the interest of wanna-be millionaires.

4. John Chow Knows How to Make the Bank Roll

Not only does he have three characteristics that are the ingredients of a Mogul, John also has the experience. He is the founder of The Techzone, one of the leading hardware review sites on the web. He’s been through the throws of creating partnerships and gaining affiliates. He knows where to look and how to talk to potential advertisers. This gives John a big one-up on all of us.

The most important thing about John is that he is on the front-lines of the battlefield. His blog posts are scouts that he sends back to the rest of us to inform of his reconnaissance. We’re all thirsty for blood so a lot of people are hungry on his coat tail trying to follow in the footsteps of John Chow. Which brings me to my next point…

Why you are not John Chow

Ever since I started following John’s blog, I noticed an unnecessary amount of John Chow clones. You tell me, “but isn’t that what good John is trying to help us do?”. I reply, “Yes, but that is not the way to be John Chow”.

Now you may be confused, let me help you out. What we’ve learned so far is that:

1. John is a maven
2. John is a good-guy
3. John’s information has a unique value
4. John Chow knows how to make the bank roll

Given these four properties, you cannot be John Chow by cloning his site. You are not rich (yet), and therefore your information does not have the value that John’s does in the make-money-online genre. I’ve seen people slap together a site that looks like they took John Chow’s site and copied & pasted it, ads and everything. Why are they failing?

• Ads before traffic
  
  Putting ads on a website that has no traffic reduces the chance of your site gaining value significantly. For instance, my blog has had between 2k and 5k unique visitors ever since I launched it. I put an adsense ad on the single blog page as an experiment on what kind of CPM I would get. Now that I’ve run that test for about a week I am going to remove the ads, because frankly, making $5 a day from adsense is not worth the space that I am losing on my blog posts.

  Verdict: Don’t put ads up until you’re getting at least 10,000 page views a day.

• Re-posting what John has posted
  
  John is the first source for make-money-online tools, so why are you trying to tell people what they already know?

  Verdict: Your content needs to be original. Be the source for something. Don’t be the mirror.

• Ruining their value before they’ve had a chance
  
  The two previous points are doing just that. While you’re up and coming, don’t commit to anything that will stunt your growth. I’ve been tempting to do many things as I saw my traffic sky rocket from 280 visits to 5,200 in three days. The reason I resisted is because I recognize that the surge was because of one successful article I had written, and I have not attained a terminal value yet.

  Verdict: Build yourself a nice loyal user base and see if your site is worth any money before you put a price tag on it. Wait until your blog has reached what I call a terminal value. A value that will take a great effort to lose.

The End

Many people read John’s blog trying to find out why he is successful. Now you know why. Being successful is a matter of wanting it bad enough and having the proper resources. If you keep at it, you can make it. Every lesson you learn and every person you read about should always been interpreted in the context of your own situation. Copying someone else’s success will rarely work. But, taking that success and molding together with other successes to form new ideas and information is the way to go.

I hope this article was helpful, and look for more in the series of Powerbloggers: How They Made It From Zero To Heroes

Buy me a beer if you liked this post or found it helpful