Continuous Learning

Do you know who the Dot Com Mogul is?

The first time I came across John Chow Dot Com was through his Google ads on Steve Pavlina’s amazing self-development site. I had been surfing the web for a long time, and could ignore ads very readily, but I could not ignore this one. The ad read

I wondered, “who takes out an ad just to tell people how much they love someone else’s work?” My curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to check it out. What I found was a world that I did not know existed before - the wonderful internet marketing world. I was like Alice following the white rabbit, and found a whole other existence that I could not have fathomed out of my mind.

Now, I am no stranger to a different part of the internet - the technology side, having spent a decade learning and perfecting various technical and management disciplines, delivering sophisticated systems for companies like Microsoft. Naturally but erroneously I think I know a lot about internet. Marketing has always been a second thought for me, even though I realize the principles behind marketing is important, I believe I can integrate marketing into my product and that will be the end of the story. Boy was I wrong. Marketing is HARD.

Back in July I started my Leaderware List wanting to promote a different way to think about software development, and I was betting that the quality of the content will speak for itself and the word of mouth will automatically spread. Of course that did not happen, even though people were telling me the content is good. That left me scratches my head - if you build it, why won’t they come? That was a wake up call for me that there is a lot more to learn about marketing and promotion, and simply having a good content is not enough. People must know about your product.

The light bulb went off in my head when I discovered in John Chow Dot Com - I was able to see the missing magic, for the first time.

adapted from Who is John Chow

As a self-proclaimed Dot Com Mogul, John has made it in the sense of achieving financial prosperity solely through the power of internet. Different from other well-known internet titans such as Jerry Yang or Larry Page, John makes his fortune solely based on content creation and promotion (of course Yahoo & Google also sell content, but they are more technology company than content company), and we are not talking about the kind of content that is believed to be the most popular search keywords

Instead, you will find John’s blog filled with many nuggets of wisdoms describing about his “secrets” and journey to success. Unlike the internet scams that has all hooks and no content, John’s site gives the content away for free. The first one that got my attention is the article So You Want to be a Google Whore. In the article he directly addressed my naiveté on If you build it they will come and instead of focusing on getting traffic is key. The great thing about “If you build it” part is that the key to get traffic is to have others link to you, and people are more apt to link to you if your content is unique and valuable. From that perspective I have half of the puzzle, and it is time to tackle the other half!

Since quite a bit marketing is about promotion, John is also a gifted promoter, whether natural or learned. His writing style can be self-aggrandizing, and he certainly isn’t shy on the web. On his about page he jokingly claim that he’s

a damn fine person, Google’s #1 Dot Com Mogul, and consider yourself blessed to be reading his blog.

At first I thought, “wow, interesting personality”, but honestly, it’s fun reading someone that obviously can poke fun at himself

Marketing uses hooks to get people interested to explore more. Good marketers’ hooks are subtle and natural. Great marketer’s hooks are such that even if you know it’s a hook you will still take it. For example, currently John is doing an experiment of “Review My Blog“. He started as an advertiser to buy paid review; in return he will link back for these reviewers. Getting a link from John’s site helps driving traffic, which is a strong incentive for all of us new bloggers. However, having just setup my site for about two weeks, I do not qualify to do a paid review, but I was going to write a review anyways. His marketing sense told him this is a good idea, because he quickly follows the experiment up with running a contest for getting more reviews. For him it is win-win, because as others generate content about him, it will increase more awareness for him as well. That’s the Zen of marketing. There is a lot to learn

A review is not complete without speaking about the negatives. Besides the natural self promotion spoken earlier that could turn some people off, I’ve noticed that some other reviewers did not like him having pictures of his dinner on the blog. From my perspective that makes the site more personable, and as good content finders we should also be good at content filtering, so I won’t hold that against John. My main challenge with his articles is that while his information are good, there appears to be still a gap between his 101 marketing and where I am with my blog. Hopefully this review can reverse that trend

Once you pop, you can’t stop. If you are into entrepreneurship and marketing, you will find John’s site to be worthwhile to explore and learn.

So John, this is my review for you site. I believe in the quality of my writings And if I win the contest, you can give the MiniTVUSB to the second place. Instead, I would greatly appreciate it if you can review my site in return. Even if I do not win, I would like to request your time for an interview so we can all learn more about you! How about it?

Below are some of my favorite John Chow articles in no particular order (with some of my thoughts):

1. So You Want To Be A Google Whore? - of course
2. News Sites That Send The Most Traffic - I got myself onto Google (never thought this is going to be hard) through the power of Digg
3. How Often Should You Update - this one cause me a bit of angst because in the beginning each of my article takes 15+ hours to write, but I am getting faster
4. Content Over eCommerce - it makes me rethink about my understanding on internet business models
5. My Top 10 Best Wordpress Plugins - I already wrote about this one before; this one gives me a starting point to explore what to do with WP
6. The Art Of Link Baiting - very interesting techniques on getting links… certainly it takes time to build though