Art Of Money

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Here’s the top 5 SEO & traffic building tips that you can learn from John Chow, my online surrogate big brother…

#5 Know Your Crowd - Create a Mystique

John’s crowd feels like a gang of little brothers. Visiting his site makes me feel like a 14 year old hanging out with my best friend’s older brother. You get a glimpse into the world of cool cars, hear stories of big money, and see girls that you thought only existing in your fantasies.

None of it is ever going to be for you though. John allows you to remain a younger brother forever.

Build traffic by teasing your audience’s fantasies.

#4 Domain Names Registration

Register you domain names for a long time. The last time JohnChow.com was due for renewal, John renewed it until 23-Mar-2011.

Apparently Google considers that a positive trust factor, since spammers will rarely register a domain name longer than one year.

It also doesn’t hurt at all that JohnChow.com was first registered on 23-Mar-2000. Domain age is also a trust factor.

#3 Think Outside the Box

Every AdSense user knows that number one commandment:

“Thou shalt not click on your own ads or encourage your visitors to click on the ads”

John brilliantly took this sin and turned it into a huge marketing campaign for his site. He ran a series of site targeted ads on Darren Rowse’s site that went something like…

Make Darren Rowse Money
Click on the Ads
Darren gets paid
JohnChow.com

Since Darren’s crowd are normally ad-blind, but so loyal, the ads worked great. He ran a couple other variations, “I Love Darren Rowse” being the other memorable one.

These were the most creative use of AdWords that I have ever seen.

• Site targeted (he knew that a large percentage of the ProBlogger crowd would like his site.
• Cheap keywords
• Clever social engineering

#2 Be a Shameless Self Promoter

Living large with a tag line like “The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul” can only help when it comes to drawing in traffic and link baiting.

Being outrageous is a very viable marketing strategy. Paris Hilton is famous for being famous and John Chow is getting richer from being a mogul. Although a real mogul would never work at hard as he does on a blog that pulls in about $10k a month.

#1 Reciprocal Links Are Not Worthless

John also was the first person I’ve seen that leveraged his traffic to created a targeted search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

One of the problems with having a domain name link JohnChow.com is that people will link to you with something like this John Chow. But that doesn’t pass much information to Google about what the site is about.

So John offered a link back to any site (with the traffic and the quality backlink as the major benefits) in exchange for a review of his blog that included a back link to his site with the anchor text of “make money online.”

Since John holds down the #1 or #2 position in Google for make money online, and all of the 690 links he has received from his review scheme are reciprocal, it seems to dispel the common SEO myth that reciprocal links are discounted by Google.

Evidence That His Tactics Work

Think John’s methods are light-weight, or more for show than for dough? The proof is in the pudding as Grandma would say:

It was probably just before the big spike up that John started his AdWords campaigns, but you can see that he was able to convert most of those visitors to regular readers and now his traffic has stabilized and continues to grow in a more organic pattern.