What Is John Chow Doing Wrong?
John Chow’s blog became very popular in a very short period of time. Several of his posts made it to the front page of digg in succession, but now it appears that several of his readers are jumping ship…including me.
Well, in all honesty I stopped subscribing to John’s blog about a month ago when it seemed there were more posts describing his dinners than anything else. It’s his blog and he can write about whatever he wants, but I don’t have the time or inclination to read about what someone else is eating.
Now it seems that more people are starting to notice the lack of quality posts. Take a look at the comments on this completely unrelated post at Net Business Blog. Somehow John Chow’s name gets brought up and everyone starts talking about how the quality of his blog is heading downhill.
You can find the same type of conversations in the comments on John’s blog as well.
All you have to do to see why this sentiment exists is to look at the blog itself. Visitors to the homepage are barraged with the following advertisements:
- 468×60 banner ad
- Large Rectangle Google Adsense ad
- Text Link Ads block
- Review Me Advertisement
And this is all above the fold!
Scrolling down you’ll see:
- 10 TTZ banner ads
- Another 2 Large Rectangle Google Adsense ads
- 3 Sponsored Posts on the front page (I think)
If that’s not enough clutter to get through, you also have to put up with the Fine Dining posts and the posts where he brags about how much money all these advertisements make him every month.
In the end, there was too much for me to muck through and little reward.
Hopefully, John takes a cue from his readers that the quality of posts need to improve if he wants to continue making $7K+ per month from his blog. Otherwise, he might find himself with a significantly smaller readership.
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[…] know that I’ve been picking on John Chow lately, but he’s the best example I can use because he publishes his […]
Do I smell some linkbait here?
I’ve only started reading John’s blog very recently and am still finding some informative posts on there.
I just skip the dinner stuff. And the car stuff.
John does seem to have some very good ideas about how to market products and generate buzz around his blog and the other things he’s involved in.
Sure, the dinner posts are a little annoying, especially when I read the posts on my Treo - takes forever to load. But they don’t really bother me. After all, it’s his personal blog, and the title itself says ‘ misc. ramblings of a dot com mogul’. So it’s kinda implied that he’ll be off topic quite often.
John Chow isn’t worth reading or following. Just another “guru”
otherwise, a lot of money he made from the Blog, how cames?