John Chow Blog – The X-Ray Review
What you see above is a screen shot of John Chow‘s Blog. Which I had done a special X-Ray shot of the blog to reveal to you how does John Chow actually make money from his blog.
Those that are highlighted in Yellow are his monetization spots and those highlighted in red are his traffic spots. As you can see from the above picture, he does one review for US$400 and most of his income actually comes from doing reviews.
According to his blog articles, he also made lots of money from banner ads placement on his blog. One shocking report I read was that John who had a Alexa Ranking of 2,499 currently only earns US$800 per month from Adsense. That’s kind of little if you ask me.
What I Learn From Looking At John Chow’s Blog
1. He is very open when he blogs about his knowledge and findings
2. He always dares to go against rules in website like Technorati or Alexa to get high ranking just to proof a point and sometimes even got him banned BUT that itself created tons of buzz for him and attracted tons of traffic.
3. He is really good at entertaining his viewers with his stories and events photos
4. John was also the creator who started the exchange review trend which many bloggers now are also trying to follow his ways. But I think there is only one person who does this very well and that’s John.
What You Can Copy From John Chow’s Blog
1. He has tons of great ideas on his blog where you can also learn from about his evil tactics he uses to grab traffic and attention.
2. Also you can learn many tactics and layout he uses to get traffic from his blog
Key Pointers I See John Chow Get His Traffic From
1. Although I think not many may noticed it but he actually spends lots of money to advertise his blog where ever he can. I can even sometimes see his advertisement on my blog in my adsense blogs =P
2. He collects a huge database of fans by using his RSS feed reader, currently he has over 6916 readers. How many of them are real I am not sure but it’s a big number =)
3. He often talks about how much he makes in his blog and is pretty open about it which really attract a number of people to his blogs. ( Do you noticed something I did in common.. haha )
That’s all I have for John Chow’s Blog if you have more you like to share that you learn from John Chow blog just post your comments below. For more details about his blog just visit www.JohnChow.com
adsense is mostly for starters but for people like john chow, adsense is simply a teaser money for him
BTW, good reviews on john chow’s blog. I accept all that you said in this post
Swamy
Hi Alvin Huang, I agree with you!. There’re lot of revenue model besides adsense. on johnchow case, he shown that adsense is not the major revenue.
I was reading his recent post, his main income actually came from affiliate marketing =)
You’re right alvin, John is very open when he blogs about his knowledge. and I think this is the big factor to get lot of traffic. and also with this he have a price tag of $400 per review.
About john’s adsense earning, that’s really little for blog like johnchow.com
In my opinion, adsense devalues a blog more than the monetary reward it can ever bring.
It distracts visitors from reading your articles by clicking away. Erodes the branding of the blog if the adsense ad leads the visitor to some spammy website, not the blog’s fault but ignorant visitors might not understand the difference.
Like you said Alvin, John Chow earns a mere $800 from adsense while his other revenue streams bring in much more. I suspect that if he removes his adsense ads, he might be able to make more money through his other revenue streams.
But don’t mind me, I was never a fan of using adsense as a revenue model. The days of the average joe setting up mass adsense websites to generate revenue seem to be numbered. Unless of course you are cutting-edge top in your field in creating such websites.
Just my 2 cents.
Regards,
Alvin Huang
I think not many people can have a price tag of $400 per review, unless a site with great traffic like John’s.
He may not be earning alot from Adsense, but he may be focusing on other factors which are more controllable like writing reviews.
For AdSense, if the visitors do not click, there is not much revenue for you. Perhaps writing reviews is a more controllable variable in generating income for your blog.