Today, it’s my absolute pleasure to review John Chow’s new book about blogging for money, Make Money Online. In the image below, you can see my very own autographed copy of Make Money Online. (Want your own? You can order your autographed copy of John Chow’s book directly from his blog for only $23.99. Of course, you can also purchase a non-autographed copy from all the normal venues.) At the end of this review, you can see an image of me proudly displaying John’s book. In short, I’m thrilled with this book and highly recommend you purchase a copy. It’s one of the best books I’ve read about blogging and I’m looking forward to sharing a few of my personal takeaways. First, however, I’ll start with a little background.
Who is John Chow?
If you’ve been following PPC Ian for a while, you may know that I’m a huge fan of John Chow. Not only do I link to JohnChow.com in my blogroll, but I also enjoy commenting on his blog. Also of interest, PPC Ian was recently reviewed on John Chow dot com. The review was very positive and ended up driving a substantial amount of traffic to PPC Ian! More than anything, it was a milestone and honor in my career.
John Chow is one of the most celebrated Internet marketers around. In the circle of making money online, there are few bloggers that stand out as much as John, and I personally find quite a bit of inspiration in his blog. For that reason, I’m excited share with you some of my favorite takeaways from John’s new book! The following four takeaways are just a very small sample of the great knowledge I took away from John’s book.
Takeaway 1: A Non-Updated Blog Is A Dead Blog
I’m new to blogging. While I own a portfolio of domains and websites optimized toward affiliate cash generation, PPCIan.com is my very first blog! I launched PPC Ian back in October, 2009 and have been enthusiastically learning each and every day.
One of the trends I have observed with PPC Ian is a dramatic influx of traffic whenever I do a new post. As such, I always look forward to posting new, quality content. At the same time, it really hit home when John Chow pointed out (several times) that a non-updated blog is a dead blog. As someone with a very exciting and important PPC career, I find it essentially impossible to update my blog more than once a week. In terms of my blog’s growth, I know this is not ideal. As John also points out, it’s important to have a consistent schedule and to never compromise on quality – I’m definitely doing those two things right. However, I really do wish I could update at least twice per week.
In terms of solutions, I don’t see one just yet, but I must say this simple yet very powerful advice really struck home and got me thinking about how I can take my blog to the next level! After all, there will come a point when I hope to generate income from PPC Ian. I’m not at that point yet, but I do believe a faster-paced schedule will be critical in reaching my goal.
Takeaway 2: FeedBurner Is Essential
If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you may also remember when I was interviewed by super affiliate Jonathan Volk. This was quite the honor! In my interview, Jonathan pointed out that I should install FeedBurner on my blog. Similarly, John Chow devoted several pages of his book to this very topic (RSS feeds and their power).
I’m personally not a huge RSS consumer myself. Because I’m a big commenter on the blogs I frequent, I go the old school route and visit blogs directly. However, I should not assume everyone is like this. In terms of taking PPC Ian to the next level, I have officially decided to make FeedBurner a priority thanks to John and Jonathan’s advice. Please keep an eye out for this in the coming weeks. I hope to make it as easy as possible for you to read PPC Ian in the format that’s most convenient for you! John points out that number of RSS readers is an incredibly important statistic.
Takeaway 3: John Chow Will Save You Time!
As mentioned earlier, I’m newer to blogging. I have learned a tremendous amount over the past year. Most of my lessons have come the hard way for sure. I don’t mind it at all, this is how the best lessons are learned. At the same time, I sure do wish I had John’s book when I started. John Chow describes in detail solutions to many common blogging dilemmas such as duplicate content (and htaccess), WordPress SEO (where some of my hard lessons were learned), content generation, essential WordPress plug-ins, and so much more!
Regardless of where you stand in the online marketing game, John’s book is the perfect combination of high level theory and lower level tactical tips. It will save you a tremendous amount of time.
Takeaway 4: I’m On The Right Path!
As my last takeaway, I felt really good reading John’s book. While I certainly jotted down dozens of notes on how to improve PPC Ian (just a few of which I share above), I also realized that I’m doing quite a bit right and am very consistent with the strategies John describes. I started blogging in October, 2009 knowing a lot about PPC, but very little about blogging. In less than a year, I have been able to accomplish a lot with PPC Ian. I owe my success to very hard work, passion for PPC, trial and error, and much more than anything all of you – my loyal PPC Ian readers! I sincerely thank you for your support, it means the world to me! I recommend John Chow’s book and hope it helps drive success in your personal online marketing career.
All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com (An IJL Productions LLC Website)
Posted in: Web Publishing | Tags: john chow, john chow book, make money online | Comments: 9 comments so far, join the discussion!
My Blog Commenting Strategy
Posted by: Ian Comments: 20 comments so far
In my opinion, it’s all about PPC. At the same time, you can be even better at PPC if you learn other marketing opportunities and channels as well. Just last week I wrote all about offline marketing and specifically the WebEx Caltrain Station Takeover. Today, I’m excited to share one of my new blog marketing strategies: blog commenting.
Growing PPC Ian’s Traffic Base
I launched PPC Ian, my first blog ever, back in October, 2009 and it has been an amazing learning experience for sure. My marketing strategy originally revolved around my extensive network of friends on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. As the months passed, my strategy shifted to an SEO and PR one with a little PPC mixed in. My traffic stats are now at an all time high thanks to loyal readers like you! However, I’m an ambitious guy and definitely want to grow my traffic quite a bit more. Moreover, realizing that blog marketing requires a whole different skill set than my portfolio of static websites, I’m now experimenting with some new marketing strategies including blog commenting.
Why Am I Commenting On Blogs?
There are many reasons I decided to start commenting on other blogs with the following topping the list. First, I noticed my friend Jeremy from Profit Addiction commenting everywhere! In tandem, I noticed Jeremy’s traffic and comments on his blog spiking. Blog commenting seems to be a strategy working quite well for Profit Addiction so this definitely piqued my interest in running my blog commenting test.
Second, I realized that blogging is a very social phenomenon. It’s all about conversation. If you don’t participate in the conversation, you’re not going to get as much attention. I realized how important it is for me to join the conversation. This is a very different philosophy that the one I’ve historically leveraged with my portfolio of SEO websites and one of the key differences between a blog and static website, in my opinion.
Third, I realized that blog commenting is a great way to get quality inbound links to my blog. Many of the great blogs out there have a top commentors list in their sidebar or footer (meaning the list shows up on every single page of these blogs). Moreover, many of these top commentors lists are real links. Unlike links in the actual comments you make, the top commentors links do not contain nofollow tags so search engines respect these as legit links!
Fourth, and most importantly, it’s just plain fun! I’m commenting on other blogs because I very much enjoy it. There are a number of amazing blogs out there about online marketing and it’s fun to join the conversation.
Where Am I Commenting?
There are two images in this article. The first shows me as the number one top commentor on Jonathan Volk’s Blog. I’m a long time fan of JV and enjoy his blog quite a bit. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may know that JV interviewed me a while back. I can always count on JV for quality posts and enjoy interacting with others on his blog. Moreover, his top commentors list gives me that great inbound link I was just discussing. I’m currently reading JV’s new eBook about Facebook advertising and hope to review it here in the coming week or so.
The image below shows one of my comments and also shows that I’m a top commentor on JohnChow.com. In the world of online marketing, JohnChow.com is a man who needs no introduction. I actually just reviewed John Chow’s Book and was also reviewed on John’s blog a while back. Like JV’s top commentor’s list, John’s also provides a quality inbound link.
Want to learn about more of the blogs which I frequently comment on? Make sure to check out my blogroll and also my post from a while back about PPC Ian’s favorite online marketing blogs.
Some Closing Thoughts
While my experiment is still in progress, I wanted to leave you with a few interesting closing thoughts. First, I must say that commenting requires time! Not too much for me at this point, but the commitment is definitely there. Longer term, I may decide to outsource some of the work if I further build out this strategy.
Second, I am already seeing some results. I’m getting direct traffic by participating in the discussions out there about online marketing. At the end of the day, that was my goal so I’m thrilled.
Third and most importantly, I wanted to call out the great fact that I’m learning. If you’re in the corporate PPC world like me, you’re probably laser focused on PPC all day long. That focus is a good thing because it creates a guru level mastery of PPC. At the same time, it leaves little room to learn other stuff. Most of my personal knowledge of SEO, email marketing, and now blogging has been self-taught. If you’re in the corporate world of online marketing, I highly recommend dabbling in a few side projects such as blogging. Your knowledge will skyrocket and will start paying dividends in your corporate career.
Images In This Post © JonathanVolk.com and JohnChow.com
Posted in: Blogging, Web Publishing | Tags: blog commenting, top commentors | Comments: 20 comments so far, join the discussion!