John Chow, who’s an expert Blogger, SEO, Monetizer and a role model for every blogger, before, going into his online ventures, lets first talk about John Chow a person.

John Chow, a damn fine person, friend of the community, Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant, member of the Save the Whales Foundation, the man who controls the black market on baby seal pelts and member of the “probably yo’ daddy” foundation. About John Chow.

Online ventures:

John Chow started with TheTechZone, in 1999 —”a major resource for hardware news and reviews.” Later on, he created TTZ Media Network, which provides a shopping and price comparison engine for technology-focused web publishers, with over 250,000 page views per month. It’s his main source of income.

Make Money Online: At, John Chow dot Com, he writes articles on how to make money online, along with variety of content on food, travel, and cars. His website is full of articles of “how you can monetize your website, increase traffic, and build an online business.”

John Chow dot Com is currently PR6 with Google, and receives 300,000 page views/month. Back in December, 2006 —John Chow started a very aggressive link back campaign, in which he would give a link back for every review of his blog when the text anchor 'make money online' was used. Which proved to be a huge success, John now has over 870 links from various sites as a direct result of this campaign.

This has proved to be very successful for John not only his getting huge link, but also, since the inception of link campaign his blog income has grown from $2790.05 in December, 2006 to $12,569.61 in June, 2007, an increase in revenue of $9,779.56.

Link campaigns haven't attributed completely to the growth in links, and revenue, but in advertising also. In the below image, you can see the difference.

Source of income: While many bloggers generate most of the income from Google AdSense. John Chow dot Com, get only about 6% (about $800) of the total income of Johnchow.com from AdSense. The largest increase came from ReviewMe ($3,800 for June), because the cost for a review from John has gone up from $100 to $400.

John Chow dot Com has has about 10 income sources. Some of these sources are Text-Link-Ads, Kontera, ReviewMe!, AdSense, and affiliate sales. So, you see, diversification is an important concept on his blog.

The aggressive tactics which have resulted in such high links, and revenue growth have come to him at a high price. It seems that Google is punishing John down and has dropped him to the 51st result for the term "John Chow". Technorati has listed John as number 55 of the top 100 blogs indexed, if you look at the top 100 page there is no mention of him at all.

More importantly, John Chow is very generous with his readers. For e.g., he set up a deal with Kontera to allow small-time publishers into their advertising program, which normally has a high traffic requirements. He frequently gives away stuff he gets for free, like video cards, Zunes etc. in exchange for links to him.

John Chow dot Com is a must-read for anyone interested in monetizing a blog or other website, or just generally interested in how SEO techniques work. While many SEO e-books require you to pay, his is totally free. You can download it here.