John Chow’s rise to fame - A case study
Little about the blogging scene is quite as intriguing as John Chow. This guy writes about restaurants he dine at and yet he manages to make over $20,000 per month from his blog. Of course, he also writes a lot about ways to make money online, but it’s certainly safe to say that he doesn’t follow the traditional “how to write about making money online” formula that we’ve gotten used to over the years.
One of the reasons John Chow is interesting is because he has managed to build himself an extremely loyal base of followers. And when I say loyal, I don’t mean loyal in the sense that they tend to frequently comment on his blog posts. Oh no, John has been one of the first bloggers to become a cult-symbol with a status comparable to what paparazzi-hunted celebrities experience. Just like Cult of Mac members don’t really care about what Apple does as long as it’s Apple doing it, many of those who read John Chow’s blog doesn’t seem to care about what John Chow writes as long as it is written by John Chow.
Just to illustrate, a quick Technorati search reveals no less than 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 (I think I’ll just stop there) within the past 24 hours. I’m willing to bet that’s more than what most restaurant bloggers out there are hoping for in the span of an entire month!
Obviously this is a very desirable position to be in, but is it possible to identify what has enabled John Chow to attain the status he currently enjoys? A number of factors obviously comes into play here, but we can simplify it and narrow it down to six important points:
Timing - Whether it was by chance or skill, only John knows, but he was just on the spot with his timing. He started blogging back in 2005 when blogs weren’t much more than public diaries, and it started as one for him as well. But eventually the blogging scene grew out of these constraints, and John seized the opportunities that arose.
Surprising - Most of those who try to educate you on how to make money online will tell you how important the rules are. John Chow on the other hand, presents himself in a way that makes the readers believe that if he finds a way to make money, he’ll share it with you, even thought it might not be morally defendable.
Success - Even before he started his blog, John Chow had been making good money online for years. This contributed to his success as a blogger because it gave his visitors social proof that he knows how to make money online, and such he is in a position where he can teach you. This point is also probably the most important when it comes to all the free, viral marketing John has managed to create for his blog, because it acts as Social Proof as well, which makes it easy for other people to reference to him.
Transparency - John Chow recognizes just how important these forms of social proof are, and that is the reason why he shares his earnings with the public. Combined with the other forms of proof he boasts (high RSS readership for one), it gives him an advantage over other, similar bloggers.
Controversy - Whether he is Banned by Google, or denied his rightful (at least in his own opinion) place in the Technorati Top 100 Blogs List or something else, John Chow never fails to make a fuzz about the controversy he is involved in. And whether people agree or disagree with your opinion, they are likely to voice their own opinions and give you great publicity.
Arrogance - John Chow is a self-proclaimed dot com mogul, and he rarely forgets to mention it. And while arrogance in many cases can turn people off, John has managed to make it a part of his public personality in such a way that it seems only natural to those who hear him say it. This also results in that he can get away with much more radical and controversial behaviour than other bloggers who haven’t branded themselves in a way that allows for it.
While these six points have helped John Chow’s blog become a success, it isn’t necessarily recommendable that you try and replicate them. More than anything it has to do with the prerequisites you have to work out from. If you haven’t made a lot of money online to the degree that it can be accepted that you try to present yourself as better and more successful than your readers (ie. arrogant), you will never get away with it.
Even though the points mentioned above have helped propell John Chow into a blogging superstar, they merely helped him expand an already strong foundation (in terms of traffic). I also want to point out the two factors that got him into that position where that brought him that luxury, or pushed him over the tipping point if you will.
If we start by looking at his traffic details as reported by Alexa (yes, I know they are inaccurate John, but for trends they aren’t completely worthless), we’ll immediately spot when his blog took off in terms of popularity:
Screenshot missing
It was in the fall of 2006, only after John had been blogging for about a year, that his traffic spiked to the leve where it has hovered around since then. If we backtrack his blog posts to that period, we can even find that John himself wrote about this spike. The secret? Social Media Marketing, or in particular Digg.
Now, it didn’t take long before JohnChow.com was banned from Digg, but by that time, the “damage” was already done. He had gotten the initial surge of traffic he needed, and he wasn’t about to let a mere ban from a social bookmarking site stop him.
Of course, once you have all these visitors in place, you need to find a way to capitalize on the traffic in the best way possible in order to ensure that the traffic doesn’t just plummet and return to its normal level again. And John Chow came up with possibly the most ingenious scheme the blogging scene has seen to date of doing just that: Review his blog on your own blog, and get a link back from him.
Sure it seems simple, but the amount of publicity he got from that setup has undeniably been invaluable in sustaining his traffic levels. His latest batch of reviews was number 87, meaning that at least 870 blogs has reviewed his blog. Add in some very specific anchor text, and that’s a whole lot of valuable inbound links. As soon as John had the traffic, he came up with a brilliant way to capitalize on it.
What can we learn from this little case study, and the success John Chow has experienced with his blog? Well, I’ve obviously pointed out some of the things that has, according to my own humble observations, been crucial in John’s success. If I am to summarize it with a single sentence however, I would say that John Chow is a textbook example of how you don’t have to follow the textbook examples in order to be successful. Persistance and a bit of creativity goes a long way, just ask John Chow.