Blogging With John Chow Review-Part 5-Monetizing 101

The first thing John Chow says in the video on top of the module 6 about monetizing your blog is “don’t do it until you establish your reader base.” Then he goes on to say to go and review the module on List Building. He recommends that you go over all the 5 modules covered so far but the module on list building is especially important.

According to John Chow, most bloggers monetize their blogs with advertising too soon. They send their first time readers away, through the ads, never to see them come back to their blog again, for a few cents that they may get from Google Adsense or whatever.

A Note on Current Google Search Results

By the way, as of Febuary 03, 2013 two of my Blogging with John Chow review posts are found in Google search results placed #634 and 635. Granted it’s not bad out of around 2.5 million results but on the other hand it’s a placing well behind classical trick review posts with “Is It A Scam?” or “Don’t Buy Before You Read This” in their titles and reviews in languages other than English. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I know John Chow personally and Google doesn’t think that for that reason I’m qualified to write impartial reviews of his products. That could be a valid reason, except that there is nothing in my reviews urging people to buy anything. And how would that explain the posts which are just keyword baiting being much higher in search results? It seems that all the Google updates aren’t still doing the job Google claims they are intended for, which is giving the readers the best results.

Something exciting: Have a look at John Chow in the video below:

Now back to the review of Blogging with John Chow

Blogs = Cash

“… So, when you create a big enough blog with enough readers and update them with fresh, interesting content on a regular basis, you have a petri dish primed for monetization.” Of course this needs to be qualified. Blogs don’t automatically translate to cash. They will at first actually cost you cash.

John Chow points out that even with a lot of traffic, blog monetization is not easy. And monetization is not just for profit. Blogging and things associated with it, like hosting and autoresponder cost money (the two mentioned could cost you easily $300 per month and that’s assuming that your time devoted to blogging is free). So unless you want to be losing money blogging you need to make enough from monetizing your blog to cover your costs.

John goes on to say that: “…Thankfully, the strategies I’m about to show you will do MUCH better than just covering your basic expenses.” Then he shows a graph of how he grew his site.

Create an Editorial Plan

You need to decide what you’re willing to accept as monetization for your blog. While most readers will support your efforts to monetize your blog, you need to be careful with what kinds of ads may be pushing it too far and alienate them.

John offers 7 questions which you should ask yourself before monetizing any components of your site. Below are a few of them:

1. What types of products and services will benefit your readers?

2. What would you be annoyed at if it were on another site you use?

4. Would you personally vouch for the product you are promoting to your readers?

Affiliate Marketing

To John this is the most powerful advertising that is personalized to his audience.

He says that it’s very simple and that it makes an amazing use of the list you created in the previous chapter on list building.

He then in step 1 goes into how to integrate affiliate marketing into your blog, how to find a product you want to promote and he mentions things not to do.

In step 2 he strongly advises to read the promotional materials and to  actually use the product yourself.

In step 3 he advises to write or record a review for the product and gives instructions on how to go about that.

In step 4 John describes how to integrate that review content into your blog and in step 5 how to follow up with your readers.

The above is followed by a list of Recommended Affiliate Marketing Tools,

Recommended Affiliate Marketing Networks and

Using These Tools to Make Money.

Other Forms of Advertising on Your Blog

John explains a bit about each of the following types of ads:

Media Selling, Google Adsense, Amazon Ads, Banners from Affiliate Products.

And here is an excerpt from what he says after that:

“…Your website, as it grows, is a fertile land that increases in value.. As soon as you reach the point where you are comfortable placing ads, take advantage of that traffic and start monetizing.”

Amazon Product Ads

John Chow says that one of the fastest growing forms of affiliate marketing is physical product marketing through the Amazon marketplace and goes on to give 4 reason for this:

It’s Easy,

Those Products Convert,

The World is Your Shopping Cart,

Huge Upsell Opportunities.

 

John says that what Google became for online search (as imperfect as it is – the remark is mine), Amazon has become for online commerce.

Defining and Charging for Ad Slots

John gives some instructions and pointers on this subject. The main idea is to make sure that you don’t give your ad space too cheaply.

After this section John goes into

Adsense Strategies

Under five headings, he goes quite deeply into this subject which is kind of odd because when he’s done with it you’ll find a headline which says:

Why I Don’t Use AdSense

Under this revealing title he gives several reasons which are:

I Make More Money with My Own Ads,

Controlling What Appears,

Bad Targeting.

He explains what he means next to each reason.

Then he also mentions Google algorithm glitches and repeats what he mentioned close to the top of this module: people leave your site when they click on a Google Ad. (As if this was not enough, Google then goes on to degrade the rating for your site because people don’t stay on it long enough – remark is mine).

This concludes the part 5 of my Blogging with John Chow review. Update September 06, 2017: The course by John Chow reviewed above is no longer available. However the review contains a lot of valuable points and so I have decided to keep the post. There is an excellent course on blogging which is available and it’s by a famous blogger who’s friends with John Chow as well. You can check it out by clicking on the banner below.

You can also watch a video about the famous blogger, his students success and what he has to say about blogging and the online business. That’s at the next link below:

The Next Step

Authored by Vance Sova

 

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