John Chow is probably the best at monetizing a blog. I can’t verify his income claims, but I believe them. There’s some downsides to keep in mind, but he knows how to make money blogging and you can get quite a lot of information from him.
He offers a free book on making money online, it’s worth the read, but he recommends a lot of things that aren’t within reach of someone just starting out. You have to keep in mind he’s someone who made it big, and did it during the dot com boom, which is a time that will never be repeated. His free book is good, solid information. He’s also very down to earth in his videos, telling things like the reason most people don’t make money at blogging is they never go through with it and put in the effort.
I like his down to earth approach and honesty, but there’s a lot of dead links in his book, and advice for bloggers who get so much traffic that they don’t need advice. It’s a mixed bag, but he really does know how to monetize a blog. For the person starting from ground zero, it’s more difficult.
I think John Chow is a good guy, but he’s not as in touch with the person who’s starting with nothing and wants to make a living blogging. I speak to people all the time who don’t even know what a blog is, or how it can help them. Maybe it’s because that’s the kind of people I speak with every day that’s the issue here. There’s more than twenty million people in the U.S. who want to start a home or online business, and today with the economy the way it is, there’s a lot more than that.
You can learn a lot from John Chow, but temper it that it’s not a lot of information you can use right from the start. His free book is worth subscribing for, I’d recommend it for any serious blogger who wants to market their product that way.
As a side note, he does paid reviews for $500 a pop, and the paid reviews and they aren’t marked as advertisements. Few paid reviews are unbiased and it’s really hard to know when it’s a good product or he’s getting a payday for it.
He did one for viperlinking, which was a place that did backlinks with thousands of sites. It sounds good, except Google found out they were a link farm and banned all their domains. The guy who owns Viperlinking was trying to sell it using PayPal payments as an example, but didn’t reveal all his domains had been banned for being a link farm. John Chow has good advice on some things, but don’t automatically trust every review you see there. Not all of them work out or are good advice.
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