John Chow is the master of making money online, and has continued to grow his blog over the last year, and like most, I assumed it was in part to increases in his traffic, but he recently put up a post called Getting Traffic is Half The Battle where he released a graph showing that his traffic hasn’t been growing by leaps and bounds. This seemed strange to me. My brain couldn’t wrap around the fact that John had found a way to increase his income more than ten fold while having the same traffic flowing through his site.

Sure the traffic now is probably more search engine oriented than it was near the start, but that can’t account for all of his revenue growth.

If you read my recent income report than you know this blog made $27,240.83 last month. That’s a nice big increase over the $2,139.93 the blog made in November of 2006. However, what many people find shocking is the traffic the blog got in November 2006 was actually higher than the traffic from November 2007.

The above chart [on JohnChow.com] illustrates the growth in traffic (red bars) vs. the growth in income (blue bars) from November 2006 to November 2007. In November 2006, the blog received 217,876 unique visitors and 329,853 page views. This is actually higher than the 185,386 visitors and 323,572 page views it did in November 2007. Yet, the blog income was over 12 times higher. Making money online has way more to do with optimizing income from traffic than just getting traffic.

Wisely, Mr. Chow says that it isn’t how much traffic you get, but instead what you do with the traffic. John Chow has been brilliant in shoving affiliate programs down the throats of his readers and making sure to put every version of advertising front and center, while also requesting huge fees for the promotion space.

Definitely an interesting read, and one that I have had to go over a few times over the last few days, wondering how I can work harder at optimizing my own ads, not in hopes of tricking my readers, but making sure that I can eventually get to a point where I am not so absolutely dependent on a blog network for my income. Don’t get me wrong, I love working for Splashpress Media, and Bloggy Network was also a great learning experience and opportunity.

Originally posted on December 12, 2007 @ 5:59 pm