Millionaire Blogger: John Chow

“My World! My Rules!”

About John Chow

A little somethinig about me. My name is John Chow (as you no doubt notice from the domain name). I also go by the nick name “Moto”, named after the old video game Moto Racer. I live in Vancouver, Canada pretty much all my life. Before discovering the internet, I was a partner in a local Richmond printing company. After over a decade of running a print shop, I decided it was time for a change, and the internet was where I was going to stake my claim.

On April 1999, I started a little technology site call The TechZone. That site has risen to become one of the largest hardware tech sites on the net. Currently the site has over 10,000 pages and gets over 200,000 page views per day.

Besides taking care of the day to day business at The Tech Zone, I can be seen riding my bike around Vancouver, working out at Fitness World or climbing Grouse Mountain. I am best known for his famous quote “My World! My Rules!” and “Oh well.”

Online ventures:

John Chow started with TheTechZone, in 1999 —”a major resource for hardware news and reviews.” Later on, he created TTZ Media Network, which provides a shopping and price comparison engine for technology-focused web publishers, with over 250,000 page views per month. It’s his main source of income.

Make Money Online: At, John Chow dot Com, he writes articles on how to make money online, along with variety of content on food, travel, and cars. His website is full of articles of “how you can monetize your website, increase traffic, and build an online business.”

John Chow dot Com is currently PR6 with Google, and receives 300,000 page views/month. Back in December, 2006 —John Chow started a very aggressive link back campaign, in which he would give a link back for every review of his blog when the text anchor ‘make money online‘ was used. Which proved to be a huge success, John now has over 870 links from various sites as a direct result of this campaign.

This has proved to be very successful for John not only his getting huge link, but also, since the inception of link campaign his blog income has grown from $2790.05 in December, 2006 to $12,569.61 in June, 2007, an increase in revenue of $9,779.56.

Link campaigns haven’t attributed completely to the growth in links, and revenue, but in advertising also. In the below image, you can see the difference.

Source of income: While many bloggers generate most of the income from Google AdSense. John Chow dot Com, get only about 6% (about $800) of the total income of Johnchow.com from AdSense. The largest increase came from ReviewMe ($3,800 for June), because the cost for a review from John has gone up from $100 to $400.

John Chow dot Com has has about 10 income sources. Some of these sources are Text-Link-Ads, Kontera, ReviewMe!, AdSense, and affiliate sales. So, you see, diversification is an important concept on his blog.

The aggressive tactics which have resulted in such high links, and revenue growth have come to him at a high price. It seems that Google is punishing John down and has dropped him to the 51st result for the term “John Chow”. Technorati has listed John as number 55 of the top 100 blogs indexed, if you look at the top 100 page there is no mention of him at all.

More importantly, John Chow is very generous with his readers. For e.g., he set up a deal with Kontera to allow small-time publishers into their advertising program, which normally has a high traffic requirements. He frequently gives away stuff he gets for free, like video cards, Zunes etc. in exchange for links to him.

John Chow dot Com is a must-read for anyone interested in monetizing a blog or other website, or just generally interested in how SEO techniques work. While many SEO e-books require you to pay, his is totally free.

John Chow is Now a Multi-Millionaire

So, John Chow is on his permanent vacation. I just hope that it’s not an RIP vacation (just kidding).

This vacation is actually the result when John Chow finally sold his “TTZ” company. He didn’t disclosed the amount of sale but I think it’s multi-million, if not billions based on his statement:

Sarah and I plan to spend the next year traveling the world. This is the final realization of a dream. Truth of the matter is, I never expected this day would come so soon. I remember the first time I received a multi-million dollar offer for TTZ. It was during the Dot Com boom days and I said no. Six months later, the Internet crashed. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat them. I do not intend to repeat the same mistake by saying no this time around. (emphasis mine)

That multi-million offer was actually happened before which according to him he’s carrying his regret after rejecting the offer. So since he bit the offer for his TTZ now, it obviously means it’s again another multi-million offer if not billions.

Additional: (As of May 2008 Data)
John Chow dot Com now makes over $30k / month on the blog alone!

Sources: johnchow.com, ditii.com, selaplana.com