Staska.Net

According to Whois, today is seven years since johnchow.com domain was registered. For those who don’t know him, John Chow is a dot com mogul and is probably the newest entrant into Pro Blogging A list. I have been a happy reader of John’s blog for a few month’s now and I think his blogs birthday is a good time to do a review.

John has been actively blogging since December 2005, but until last September his blog was not much different from thousands of personal blogs out there. He liked to write about fast cars, cool gadgets and good meals, give some financial tips and even tried to do some case studies of how to start a new tech site and make money from it.

John started 2006 with 100 visitors a day and a stated goal for his personal blog to:

Make This Blog Into Something Worth Reading

But it was clear that these projects were just a side show for him. While averaging 1-2 posts a day on his personal blog, he got bored with the blog money making case studies pretty quickly. As he himself admits:

…not because I didn’t have the time to update them, but because I was just was too lazy to do it….

Here’s posts I liked the most from that time:

• A motivational posts - The big rocks and Write e-mail to your future self
• Posts explaining why one big site is better then lots of small ones - Big Sites Rules, Small Sites Drool
• Some more tips on making money online: So you want to be a Google whore
• Discussion of the results from his early case studies - March 2006 and April 2006
• A post on Financial Freedom

So during the nine months of 2006 John managed to accumulate 1000 backlinks, was on his way from PR2 to PR4 site, did 12K page views in August and was on target to hit 30K in September.

And then he got dugg, then dugg again and again and again.

At first John wasn’t sure what to do with all this digg thing. This is what he wrote after the second digg:

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.

But he already started experimenting with AdSense ads a day before getting dugg and was thinking about case study of how much a personal blog can earn from AdSense.

So John quickly changed his mind, published some great diggbaits, optimized ad placement to the point of getting a warning from Google about TOS violation and started a case study running from October 01, 2006.

The rest is history, as they say. 30 front page stories, tens of thousands of backlinks, 400K and almost 700K pageviews later John was banned from digg. But it was too late to stop him.

John has been posting daily to his blog for almost a year by then. And with all the link love coming in, search engines started ranking many of John’s posts pretty well. From November earnings recap you can see that traffic brought in by Google almost doubled that month. Visitors had been also flowing in from all those linking sites. JohnChow.com received 91K (41.82%) unique visits from these backlinks in November.

Not too bad for a blog that barely had 1000 page views a day just two months ago. However, if digg bating was all that JohnChow.com was about, we would have quickly forgotten it.

John has been running profitable content based Internet sites since 1998. He knows how to make money online and he has lots of things to share. He is an expert in the art of creating content as well.

Spending just 8 to 10 hours a week on his main business sites, he also has lots of time to spare for the things he loves to do. Even after becoming a young dad.

And it looks like John really got a hang of personal blog money making case study. Running it should be a much more interesting and rewarding experience then running one more tech site, as a money making case study. Just compare Laptop Gamers and JohnChow.com to see the difference.

And this passion helps John to churn out new and great content everyday. It gives ideas how to generate new traffic streams (e.g. his AdSense ad chat with Problogger) and finds new creative link bait ideas like Review My Blog.

It also helps him to creatively exploit new money making opportunities like paid reviews, which in turn generates more money making gigs.

The newly found direction and passion for the blog helped propel JohnChow.com to the blogosphere stardom in just six months.

This week, as the birthday was approaching, the gifts started rolling in for JohnChow.com First came the entry ticket to Technorati 100, then ReviewMe doubled review price to $500. The week’s not over yet and may it bring even more good things.

Happy birthday JohnChow.com!

P.S. Shamelsess selfplug: While working on this post, I have skimmed all the posts on JohnChow.com. And I think I’ve read all of the most interesting ones (except dining and financial tips).

In the process I have learned much more then could fit into one blog post about how John made it to Technorati 100 and got to $7000+ in monthly income from his blog in under 6 months.

So I decided to turn this into a series of posts-case study of how John Chow did it.

Sure, John has a list of what he thinks is his best posts and what is the best illustration of how he got there.

But he have missed some. And he have left some questions unanswered. I’ll try to fill the gaps I found.

I hope this will be interesting for JohnChow.com readers and to John himself.

Be sure to check back next week or subscribe for the updates.