Annie Binns | Life in the Fun Lane

I've been reading John Chow's blog for several years now.  The site is a classic example of someone taking their passion and monetizing the crap out of it.  His blog alone makes upwards of $40,000 a month, mostly in advertising revenue.  When he published his book Make Money Online: Roadmap of a dog com mogul [not an affiliate link - I live in Colorado so my Amazon account was unceremoniously canceled] co-written with Michael Kwan, a frequent guest blogger, there was no question I'd buy it.  I have a small stack of books written by my favorite bloggers and I hope they'll buy mine someday.

The book starts and ends with the most important message:  Don't wait for ANYTHING to happen before you start.  Start now. Today.  In fact, the message in Chapter One contains my single favorite phrase from the entire book:

Responsible people don't need to have all their ducks in a row because they are able to work through a series of disorganized fowl.

I don't know if Michael or John came up with "disorganized fowl" but that's the funniest damn line I've read in a long time and yes, I will plagiarize it, probably in the next week or so.

The second chapter covers John's personal story.  Unfortunately, it starts from his early days on the internet, rather than showing new readers his true meager beginnings.  Some of my favorite posts on JCDC were the videos he made when he visited his childhood home.  This guy really started with nothing.  I think the book readers would have appreciated having that perspective.

In chapter three, Blogging 101, John hits my own key message on this blog:

But don't forget to have fun too.  Life without fun it just not worth it.

Amen, brother!

By chapter five, WordPress Basics, it hit me what the book was missing, probably because this is something I do for a living.  Editing.  The writing is great, and having two authors maintain a consistent voice is tricky and these two pull it off seamlessly.  However, there are references to things like Feedburner without any explanation as to what Feedburner is or does.  It just pops up out of nowhere on page 39.  When this happens, it is usually because an earlier version had the explanation but then it was (poorly) edited into a different section (viola, page 49).  The same thing happens with "dofollow" and "nofollow" references.  If this book is meant to provide a roadmap, the noobs are going to trip up and the experienced bloggers will feel like they hit a speed bump but they probably won't know why.  A good editor can remove these hiccups without changing the message or the voice of the book.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I have to mention the multiple references to Google penalties for duplicate content.  There are two schools of thought on this one, and I subscribe to the school that believes Google does not have an algorithm for finding and penalizing duplicate content.  The "penalty" comes from creating your own competition, which is usually a bad strategy and John does mention that in the book.  I'm not fond of perpetrating the fear that Google will hurt you if you repeat yourself.  Obviously you should always create fabulous original content 24 hours a day but in the event you rinse and repeat on occasion, Google doesn't care.

Okay back to the book.  The chapter on branding is crucial.  Once you've settled on your brand, you have to promote the crap out of it any way you can.  And for God's sake do not use your name as the brand (I know, but my name doesn't appear on any of my OTHER sites, just this one that doesn't have any traffic).  John makes it clear that having himself as the brand doesn't lend itself to eventual cash-out, which is why he is milking his brand for every penny while he can.

The last four chapters of the book address what to do once you actually have traffic; and how John utilizes private ad sales to crush anything he could do with AdSense.  For your average blogger, this is going to be out of reach but it's still solid advice if you can hit that level of traffic.

Would I recommend this book?  Of course!  I think it would have been better if it were twice as long.  The book touches on basics for beginners and has some advanced techniques for folks like myself who are already blogging but wanted some more insight into exactly what it is John does.  The real reason I bought this book is because I like John's online persona.  He's built himself up to be a regular good guy with an evil twist.  If he's anything like that in real life, I'm a huge fan!