PF Blogging and John Chow

What does PF blogging have to do with "John Chow". At first glance – nothing at all. So when I read a review about his blog on the Broke-ass Student’s blog, I was intrigued. I decided to check it out. It turns out, the reason for the review of his site was a link bait. That is, he has offered to link back to blogs that review his blog. Now this guy is ranked 1466 on technorati and apparently has an alexa ranking of 3823. That’s an offer new bloggers like me (and apparently, broke-ass student) can’t afford to turn down. So the dilemma starts – should I stay true to my topic i.e, personal finance or should I bite and do the review?

Well, maybe if I look hard enough, I can see a PF angle. Just *maybe*? Take a look at www.johnchow.com and you will see it isn’t easy. After much pacing, I finally decided that I will look to see if there are any posts that may be of interest to the readers of this blog and review them. If I cant find any nice posts to review, I give up. Fair Enough.

I started out by searching the keywords "personal finance". Not bad – two hits! The first one was titled How Much Is A Domain Name Worth?. An interesting-looking post which summarizes the results of a domain name auction. But I was a little disappointed. The post consisted a long list of domain names and the prices at which they sold and that’s it. I scrolled all the way to the bottom looking for more (the comments were quite interesting, though :), but the post ended at that. For me, a good blog post is one which presents a new idea, or sheds some new light on an old idea, or at the very least is humorous. Something. Anything. Not a long list of domain names! I can get that from the original article. If someone has nothing original to say, I would rather they just post the original link and direct me there. Not pretend to make a full post out of it!

The next hit was titled Learning To Manage Cashflow. Now that’s interesting. I am at present reading the book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and this post should be nice. So, I make myself a little more comfortable on the couch and I click on the link. Well, what can I say? Let me just suffice by saying, when we were kids my grandma used to tell us "If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything".

Maybe I just ended up reading the two posts that aren’t his best. Maybe, he just doesn’t like blogging about PF and his posts on this topic aren’t the best reflection of his blog. I look around some more, but can’t find anything that captures my interest. I give up.

So, then, why am I still posting this? Because there is a lesson for us to learn here. Just when I was ready to give up, it dawned on me. It's something along the lines of what Kiyosaki talks about in "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". John Chow, makes his blog work for him, instead of working for his blog. John used his smarts and the power of his blog’s popularity to generate more and more incoming links. He enjoys multiplicatively increasing number of incoming links through the reviews written by newbie bloggers like me who WANT that incoming link from his blog. Each of us who does a review will spend a lot of time on his blog and have more page views that any random passer by would. And some of us will bring more bloggers to him. And the cycle repeats. John not only commercializes his blog, but commercializes its popularity. The scheme is just brilliant. You just can’t help notice the parallel with building wealth. Like us newbie bloggers, people with little or no money need to work hard to get some. And slowly, if you use your smarts, you can use this money to work for you to generate more and more good stuff :)

So like I said at the very beginning at this post, at first glance PF blogging and John Chow have nothing to do with each other. Dig a little deeper, and John Chow might just teach you one of the best lessons on Personal Finance ever.

Ciao.

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