Make the Million

John Chow E-Book Review Part 1

John Chow’s E-Book is broken up into 9 chapters that cover a variety of topics on how to make money online using your blog.

“Here’s a clue for all you losers out there; someday never comes.”

Starting with an inspirational post about seizing the day and starting the process of achieving your goals, the book begins with a high note. The writing is blunt and straight to the point, using examples of how people who “hope” and “wish” to achieve their goals never will and are losers until they do something about it. A bit rough, but a solid kick in the ass if you remember yourself ever uttering the words “someday”.

From there we jump right into what services John recommends to monetize your blog with. He writes about 9 different services that have brought him the most financial gain and discusses how they each work in a short paragraph, accompanied by a link to their respective site. The explanations are general but enough for you to get a grasp on the service, allowing you to investigate further if it sounds like the right one for you.
Next up we have beginner blogging tips, which confused me as to why the service recommendation came before this, it seemed like the order should have been a little different, with the service recommendation in a later chapter. The tips here are truly beginners and will no doubt help anyone who’s been thinking about starting a blog. This section starts off with the importance of registering your own domain name for your blog, updating your blog, forming the ever important connection with your readers and a 10 blogging mistakes to avoid list.

The list is interesting because it focuses on how to fuel your blog with passion toward your subject and not to blog for money. Sound advice, but again the placement of the services section ruins it a bit, since most would think if passion is the basics, wouldn’t it be placed first on the list?
The rest of the chapter is an expansion of the 10 blogging mistakes to avoid list, with more detailed descriptions and some additional info about how to react to negative comments, branding yourself apart from the other bloggers, post length and frequency and the importance of consistency in regards to how your blog will be viewed by reader. It even discusses using MyBlogLog to help with writer’s block. The chapter has a very organic feeling, but the monetizing information thrown in every so often near the beginning can overshadow it at times. There’s no doubt though that you will learn important things in this chapter and use these basics as a foundation for your blog.

Chapter 4 begins with a list of 15 essential plug-ins your blog will need. The plug-ins cover a wide range of improvements to your blog. From improving the comments area, to using Digg and Feedburner to improve traffic. Each is described in a short, detailed paragraph with a link provided, making it extremely easy to navigate and download. However, there is no tutorial on how to install the plug-ins via FTP, so that was a little disappointing. After the plug-ins these is detailed information on turning on SEO friendly URL’s, setting the preferred domain address and setting up a 301 redirect. Small improvements that are important to gaining the traffic you want.