Case Study: John Chow dot com posts dissected

Successful bloggers usually share some of their rules to follow for success. John Chow takes it to another level by sharing tips, tricks, hints, plugins, and many other things to help the person new to blogging. John really takes it to the next level by sharing his revenue and advertising expense for each month. He breaks down the money made online by each revenue stream that is active on his site. With this information I was able to produce this chart of the last nine months.

What most of his readers commented on after John published his May results was how they were happy how the Review Me post had slowed in frequency(Assumed to be caused by the raise in price) and correlated that to his drop in overall revenue. Looking at the chart that seems to be the case, unless you realize the total revenue only dropped $1143.27 compared to the drop in Review Me Revenue of $2500. He made up for $1356.73 in other areas, plus he did less Review Me post which allowed him to concentrate on other areas(or did he do less reviews?)

So how has John grown his blog into such a money making machine? Well, you will need to head on over to his blog to find out how he shows everyone how to make money online. What I will tell you is that he, along with the other top bloggers,say that it is good original content that will build a blog and sustain it. With that in mind, I though on how I might be able to come up with my own original contribution to the blogosphere. I have been reading about blogging for about the past 3 months (versus others who just jumped right in 3 months ago and are now on their way to good blog incomes) and it seems that most of what I might post would be me just repositioning other’s thoughts.
Then it hit me, you always hear that good, quality post - not to short, not to long - is what you need to publish. Well, what is to short and what is to long? There is no clear answer to be found anywhere. With that I decided to review all the post at johnchow.com over the April and May months. As I started to collect all the data: date, day of week, words, links, views, comments, categories I noticed some interesting trends emerge from just the data collecting. After I finished collecting data for each individual post in Microsoft Excel, I used Excel and Access to group and aggregate the numbers. The information I found answered some questions regarding post length, but also revealed some areas that I believe John neglected in May compared to April.

To give you a taste of the information I found:

This case study will be presented in 3 parts, I will publish a new part each day.

Part 1: Length of Post

My initial question on how long should a post be will be discussed in this part. You can do some quick math and see that John average 353 words per post over the 212 post the past few months, but that is just the average. What about the median? What word count grouping had the most post? 300-399? 400-499? Maybe 100-199?

Part 2: Frequency of Post

Again, you can do simple math and see that John posted an average of 3.47 post daily. How consistent were this post published? How often did he use images or video to enhance his post?

Part 3: Linking Strategy

This is something I found very interesting. Links found in post were assigned into these three categories: internal, external, and affiliate. Why did John not continue his streak of breaking previous month’s revenue totals in May? I offer my suggestion in this part.

Please stop by everyday this week to read and comment on my findings and analysis. I am sure that there will be differencing of opinions, but that is a good thing. Like many others I want to discover what the successful bloggers are doing to make enough money part time so they can quit their full time job.

If you enjoy your RSS reader as much as I do please subscribe to the full rss feed, we would all appreciate it if you would come back the site to participate in the discussion about each part.

Finally, if you like this post please digg it.