There was a time when blogging wasn’t solely motivated by money, but instead valuable information for particular web communities. I’d like to think people are still blogging for pleasure, but John Chow seems to have forgotten his roots and believes otherwise. Overdone and just another cookie-cutter monetized site with more emphasis on income than content, he’s lost his readers in exchange for the big bucks.

I started my blog with the impression that AdSense was the only viable option for monetizing it. The n00b that I was, I subscribed to John Chow’s site so that I could learn more. However, this awful post lead me to doubt. It simply attempts to promote a eBook for generating traffic. When you have so many free options available — valuable content you can easily dig up, why pay for it?

If you take a look at the articles, no matter how bad the article or how obviously shitty the paid review is, his readers consistently find a way to compliment him. Some border on entering the comment olympics; watching the feed and leaping to his latest post to submit their obviously transparent praise.

Why should I be forced to read an article, paid for by some mediocre company and help others fatten their checking accounts, while not benefiting whatsoever? Take a moment, try to remove all the ads from the blog, and take a look at the articles. You can’t get anything useful out of them unless you are desperately trying to sell something. Furthermore, posts about the parties he’s been to and the people he’s met, get you no further in your ambitions of making money online. Where are the make money tips everyone is talking about? The meat?

The $500 review is what really cracks me up. Unless you’re selling an ad platform or trying to promote some blogging tools (that still doesn’t account for the expenses), a review on his blog is not only useless, but usually a gramatic nightmare.

photo credit: rookie blogger

All in all, it’s a question of valuable content. When you get sick of restaurant or product reviews, over 50% of the page being sprinkled with ads or worthless reports of monthly earnings, you’ll turn to useful articles. For me, Darren Rowse’s blog, Problogger, has been significantly more influential than any other money making blogs I’ve encountered.

When you try to leave the money making scheme behind, and focus on quality, the rewards will initiate themselves.

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