John Chow dot com posts dissected - Part 3: Linking Strategy

This is the last part in this case study of John Chow dot com blog. In the first 2 parts we looked at word count in post and how often one should post. Those two topics help set some guidelines on how much content readers (particularly in the make money online niche) are willing to consume daily. Part 3 looks into how John Chow links to other sites. In order to tackle this topic I decided to break done his links into one of three categories:

• Internal - These links point to other pages inside John Chow dot com. Basically deep linking.
• External - These links point to site that is not on the John Chow dot com domain
• Affiliates - These links point to a site that is not on John Chow dot com domain and John Chow makes money when a surfer visits such sites and performs an activity (signing up to be an affiliate, buying something, etc) after being referred via John Chow dot com.

The grand total of number of links in the 212 post for April and May was 1285. An average of 6 links per post, and here is a pie chart breaking down the percentage of the link categories described above.



What sticks out is the fact that of the 1285 links on the 212 post 69% of them are External to John Chow dot com. They send you away from John’s site and he does not benefit from you leaving. I have read that this is not exactly what you want to do when you are trying to make money. You need to keep people on your site until you have convinced them through clever copy to click on an affiliate link.

So I looked a little closer at the at what kind of links where on what category of post and this is what I found.

621 of the external links on the posts were in post that John had receive benefit before he published the external links.

His Review My Blog program ask bloggers to review John Chow dot com and link back to johnchow.com with 2 links. The first link has to have the anchor text of make money online, this link in the 800+ reviews John has received has propelled his blog to the top spot at Google for the search term make money online. The second linkback link is to a page that describes this review my blog link exchange in hopes that more people will write a review about John and give him at least 2 more linkbacks. Now, in fairness the blogger who participates in this link exchange does get a linkback from JohnChow.com which currently is a PR6. So there is benefit on both sides.


The other category where John already had incentive to put in external links was the ReviewMe category. Post in this category were written after John had receive $300 (in May it was $400) to write an objective review about a site. John does a great review in being extremely objective with his review, and does his client a great service with constructive feedback and almost 10 linkbacks to the site in question.

I do not feel there is anything wrong with either of these 2 strategies and I plan on implementing the review my blog program once my blog gets a little larger.

So after we remove those 2 categories from the link total we are left with 525 total links. These links are from the heart and ,unless I heard from John any different, were not purchased or traded. This is what the breakdown looks like now:

This makes more sense. 48% of the links in these non-incentive post direct you to another post on the blog or to an affiliate link where money can be made. The other 52% of the links are for you the loyal reader, these are the link John shares without being evil. Either way John keeps you attention 1 out of 2 times and therefore gives him more opportunities to make money.

You will also find context links via Kontera in these post and John is making a flat 1k a month from these ads. I think that the flat 1k has something to do with the program he is offering his loyal readers through Kontera, it helped me - you should check it out if you are not already sporting Kontera links.

I was hoping to discover a reason for John income drop from April to May in the way he inserted links into his post. So I graphed a comparison between type of links grouped by month and something very interesting showed up:

The number of affiliate links in May was not even half of that found in April. So with half the links the assumptions is that revenue should be down for affiliates as well. Well, that theory was blown out of the water when I review John’s revenue streams and saw that Affiliate Sales was his largest revenue stream for May at $2485.74. One has to wonder though, how much more would that of been if the full 84 links would of been placed in May?

Part 3: CONCLUSIONS

When it comes to satisfying your reader, I believe that quality of links in a post is a close second to quality of input in the race for what matters most to the reader. A nice 1:1 mix of valuable links to previous post along with links to other relevant seems to be the way to go. Mix in some inline affiliate links because if you are providing high quality links, then when a reader clicks on an affiliate links they will not think ‘Hey, this person is just trying to sell me something’, but they might think ‘This link is here because the writer feels it is a valuable tool\product and I should seriously consider purchasing it’.


Tomorrow night I will publish the recap of this 3 Part dissection of John Chow dot com April and May Post.