5 lessons I have learned from John Chow

Who is John Chow?

Well, as far I know he’s a pretty successful entrepreneur and dot com mogul from Vancouver, Canada.

Apparently he rose to fame with The TechZone. But I’ve never visited that website, so…

I am however a fan of his blog JohnChow.com.

In fact it’s the only semi-personal blogs that I read regularly. Mostly, I just read different niche-blogs on personal growth and blogging.

John’s blog is basically about the internet and blogging – often with thoughts on the business side of things – mixed up with odd ramblings about, and pictures of, things he eats.

While reading John’s blog for a couple of months I’ve learned a thing or two. Here are five of those lessons. Some are new, some are good reminders. Most are principles that apply not just to blogging but to many areas of life.

1. Be consistent – I’m, more and more, becoming a firm believer that one of the biggest keys to success is being consistent. John posts very regularly and with great frequency. The blog features a couple of semi-short posts almost every day of the week.

Being that consistent is probably one of the largest factors to his blog growing so fast. Every time you visit there is always something new and – 7 times out of 10 something – interesting to read.

2. Be proactive – John’s networking skills seems to be a lot more energetic and creative than that of your average blogger. He quickly expanded his MyBlogLog community by holding a competition for everyone that joined. Today that community has 714 members.

He has also expanded his part of the pay-for-browsing network Agloco to an impressive 6000 members by networking and blogging about it. And he created the clever Adsense-ads that said stuff like “I love Steve Pavlina ” or “I love Darren Rowse” and placed those ads on their blogs.

Almost every week John reminds an amateur blogger like myself about the importance of being proactive to be successful.

3. Keep optimizing – John often writes about new plugins for blogger-software WordPress or about other new opportunities for bloggers. But he doesn’t just blog about it but actually tests things out and, after a while, reports back. He seems to constantly be experimenting to optimize his blog and business.

Every little bit counts in every part of your life. And those little bits soon add up to vast improvements.

4. Mix it up, lighten up and have some fun – One of the big factors that always keeps me coming back to John’s blog is that he writes well and, pehaps even more importantly, keeps a light mood in all his posts. I like how he manages to share a bit about his dining out-experiences and other personal stuff once in a while and not make it dull or that incongruent with the rest of the posts.

For some reason it seems like his mouth-watering pictures and restaurant-reviews fit right in with rest of the site. And that mix plus the consistency in tone and mood makes the reading a whole lot more fun.

5. Give. Sooner or later you shall receive – In a few short months John has gone from making zero bucks on his blog to making a couple of thousand dollars a month. Not bad. And even though he’s the “self-proclaimed root of all evil” John seems to be a pretty good guy. He does nice write-ups about interesting sites once in a while, like this post about 12 year old blogger Paris Spence-Lang.

John also donates all his blog-earnings to his church and other charities. I think John’s sharing and giving attitude certainly is a big factor in his quick blogging success (and probably earlier successes too).

What goes around always seems to come around. Sooner or later.

This was a part of John Chow’s Review my Blog project.

This is also the second article in the on-going series – and category in the right navigation column – “Lessons I have learned from…”. If you like, you can read the first article called 9 lessons I have learned from George Costanza. It’s actually 9 lessons plus 1 bonus lesson because I fumbled with the title. :)