Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

This is the third and final post in my series dissecting the success of JohnChow.com. To see how John got his start in blogging, check out his first post ever in How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts.

Last week, you saw how John Chow was able to leverage Digg.com to increase his blog traffic by 1600% in one week. Unfortunately for John, his success with Digg was relatively short-lived. He got himself banned just 3 months after Digg put him on the blogging map. Although the ban has now been lifted, JohnChow.com hasn’t made it to the Digg front page since. Take a look at his historical Alexa reach again, and you can see exactly where the ban occured:

When all was said and done, John Chow had 22 posts Dugg (more than 20 Diggs) in the three month period between September and December of 2006. Quite a few of his posts received 1,000+ Diggs. Since John openly prides himself on his "evil" marketing techniques, you can speculate about exactly how he obtained that feat. However, even during those three months, John’s traffic fell a bit from its peak, despite receiving massive Diggs during that time. From November on, John’s Digg traffic dropped off a ton as the Digg mafia started marking his posts as spam.

Digg gave John’s blog its start, but his success in late 2006 was hardly due to Digg alone. Check his article on the breakout of where he was getting traffic from in mid-November. Only 15% came from Digg. 33% was from Slashdot—another great social sharing site. In December, only 3% of his traffic came from Digg (that’s when the "Digg mafia" as John calls them, began marking his posts as spam).

That’s when John started what he calls his most successful marketing tactic ever. He announced that he would exchange a link from his blog for a review. You just link to his blog with the text make money online and to the rules for the exchange, and John will link back to your blog. Thanks to this one brilliant marketing scheme, John accumulated over 870 high quality (posts dedicated to his site) contextual links from this offer.

Note: The last batch of "Making Money Reviews" John posted was on June 27^th. That was batch 87, and he said he was accepting reviews for batch 93 at that time. Unfortunately for those of us who haven’t got our links yet, Google decided to penalize John around that time, presumably for his aggressive link-building tactics. He no longer ranks #1 for "Make Money Online"…or even "John Chow" for that matter. You actually have to look through several pages of JC results to find his blog! We’ll see if this series of posts is enough to entice a link from J.C. anyway…

What You Can Learn About Building Traffic From John Chow

1. INCREASING BLOG TRAFFIC IS LIKE EARNING MONEY. It’s a whole lot easier to generate traffic when you already have traffic. The more you have, the better you can leverage it. It’s easier to make the front page of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot or any of the other social news sharing or bookmarking sites when you already have a well-established readership. If you’re just starting out, you might want to focus on building a solid base of readers through social networking on other blogs and forums, posting comments, or getting another major blog author to feature your blog on their site before going for the big bang.
2. DON’T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE MARKETING BASKET. You have a lot of different marketing tools at your disposal. Use them all, and don’t rely too much on any single one.
   
3. USE YOUR BRAIN. My absolute favorite thing about John’s site is the creative ideas he comes up to increase traffic and revenue on his blog. Some of the ideas are downright ingenious. Others are, as John himself says, a bit ‘evil’—so use your discretion when putting any of them into practice. As John has proven twice now, if you press the system too much, it’ll push back. Digg’s ban and Google’s penalty speak for themselves. Let’s see how John recovers from the Google fiasco in the long-run…
   

P.S. I had fully intended to do a more ‘technical’ breakdown of what has made John Chow’s postings so successful, but somemakemoney.com beat me to it. Check out his analysis of John’s posting strategy by length of post, frequency of post, and linking strategy. Now that’s what I’m talking about! NICE SERIES!