Meet My Mentor - John Chow, “A Dot Com Mogul”

My second piece on mentorship will feature self-proclaimed “dot com mogul”, John Chow. John runs an incredibly popular blog called John Chow dot Com, where he talks about how he makes money on the internet, and he also runs The TechZone (a technology site) and TTZ Media(a network for web publishers).

John lives in Vancouver, BC with his wife Sarah. His website John Chow dot Com has close to 7,000 RSS subscribers, and John reports that he receives over 300,000 page views a month, from roughly 200,000 unique visitors. The TechZone boasts even higher traffic, at over 200,000 page views per day! These are the type of results that allow John Chow to refer to himself as a mogul.

I stumbled on John Chow dot Com by accident. I was actively searching for a project before I had the idea to start my own blog… I had only a vague idea that I might work online, so I was doing Google searches to see how I could maybe “make money online“. John’s blog was among the results I found. Little did I know, I had fallen right into John’s aggressive linkback campaign, where he offers to post a link back to any site that reviews his blog.

I was impressed with John’s ability to build website traffic and how open he was about reporting the income he creates from his blog. For the month of June in 2007, John reported over $12,000 from blogging on John Chow dot Com. I felt good about picking John as a mentor because he seemed to blend his fantastic business sense with a roguish name-based type of web branding, which appealed to me immediately. I like to think that business is serious, but it’s nice to have a good time as well.

By definition, a mentor is someone where you hope to duplicate their results by duplicating their processes and tactics. I find John Chow to be a quality mentor because he readily shares the path he’s following, and talks about what’s he’s doing that works and doesn’t work. I beleive there’s a lot to learn from someone who is that open. John definitely has celebrated results that I’m comfortable duplicating (heck, I’d duplicate one tenth of his results for June!). If you haven’t heard of him, or if you’ve never visited his site, why don’t you check it out now?