Sunday, March 18, 2007

A Dot-com Mogul who Knows How to Engage the Readers


“Engage the readers” is a true mantra for all bloggers. All successful bloggers understand the important of this mantra and worship it during their entire life. They are experts in this field: engaging the readers. Successful bloggers ask questions, answer questions, show that they care for the readers and reward them.

John Chow is a successful blogger. He is a self-proclaimed dot-com mogul who runs a technology review website and a personal blog JohnChow.com. And yes, you don't have to guess, he is an expert in engaging readers too!

John Chow engages the readers by asking intriguing, appropriate and effective questions and rewarding them. A few months back, he posted a question on how much his readers thought he would earn form his blog for the month of February and offered a reward for a reader whose estimation is nearest to his February earning. Everybody wanted to know about how much John earned. What a good way to engage the readers! Want to guess how much he earned in February? I'll give you a tip. It is more than seven thousands US dollar.

In his recent post “China doesn't like me!”, he revealed that China too has banned his IP according to GreatFireWallOfChina.org and asked for the responses from China. Just as the previous questions, this question arosed my curiosity too. But unlike the previous ones, many questions hover my mind as dark clouds. Why did he have to ask this questions? Is it necessary to ask? Didn't he running the famous Google Analytics to track the visitors and analyses them?

He also came out with this idea of giving a free link back to anyone who post a review of JohnChow.com in their blog. He received an awesome amount of reviews. After receiving more than thirty reviews with each reviews containing ten reviews, he made a change in his review-me-for-a-link rules in a bid to increase page rank for the search term “make money online”. His idea was wildly popular among the bloggers and being copied that he even had to claim, “I’m being imitated but I’ll never be duplicated.”

Unless I can fully understand his method of engaging reading and arousing their interests, I can forget about becoming a dot-com mogul just like him.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looked for your email but did not see it so decided to ask via comment: I saw your review on John Chow's site today and wanted to know if you would be interested in a review. Please visit my site for for review exchange rules, let me know if you are interested in a review exchange.

Anonymous said...

lol. Looks like Jason's got a similar idea (mine's better though).

I recently saw your John Chow review (I have to say I'm an addicted reader too) and came up with a similar back-linking idea.

Since my site isn't as popular as John's (yet), instead of a link I'm actually offering an 80GB iPod Video in a back-linking raffle. You don't even need to write a review. If you're interested check out the rules.

- Erich (sorry for the blatant self promotion)

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