Money Online

I am not going to tell you who John Chow is, because If you haven’t heard about him so far, you are probably part of a blogosphere from another planet
I will however, try to analyze his blog a little and try to see where his success came from.

A niche?… not really
Most successful blogs that I know, are focused on a specific niche. John’s however, doesn’t fit in this category. It covers general topics, such as making money online, affiliate marketing, cars, lifestyle and… food. Yes, you have read it well…. lots of food. It’s all about “The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul” as he states in the slogan of his blog.

The income that his blog brings is in continuos growth. Last month he managed to get over 3000 dollars, which I am sure everyone can agree that it is a nice chunk of cash.
Most people know that it is very difficult to become successful with a blog that is not niche-oriented but this guy is proof enough that it is still possible.
“How in the world…?” you say?

Well with one smart move after another… At first, he caught my attention when he started to advertise through google adwords on other well known blogs Darren Rose’s and Steve Pavlina’s. However, those were not ordinary adds; the text was saying something like “I love Darren Rose”.
Very smart thing to do… The idea is that he knew where the traffic was, and found an ingenious way to “redirect” it. Of course, he had a lot of great content that was interesting to that type of audience to back him up, and made visitors come again. He even got the attention of Mr Problogger himself, who not only posted links towards his blog but even replied with a set of sinilar google adds on JohnChow.com.
Now I see that some others have started to use his idea, and place similar ads on his blog. I would say that from this point of view, he is soon to become a trend setter.

Giving out prices
Now and than, John organizes contests and offers prices. In the last one he offered 1GB Kingston Lego Flash Drive to a member of his MyBlogLog community. This contest helped his community become one of the hottest and fast growing around there. I am sure it was a good “investment”.

Giving links for reviews
Another great move that he has done to increase his popularity is that he has asked people to review his blog, and in exchange he would offer a link back to their websites (here is the link to the post). This way he will increase his popularity even more and at the same type spread a little link love to help others too.
Who wouldn’t want a link from a top 1000 technorati blog and a soon to be PR 6 in google? I know I would… and this is part of the reason I made this review myself; I would have probably written about John’s blog some time, but not necessarily at this point.

I wonder what would be his next ingenious move…