These three reviews are part of a link-back programme kicked off by John Chow . If you know of any other blogs doing this leave a comment.
Here’s a comparative review of the three.
Introductions
John Chow - Make Money Online has been going for less than a year but is massively popular in the blogosphere. While his content is great, his unique strength is to come up with entertaining and creative ideas which drive a lot of traffic to his blog. A Chinese-Canadian, he often drifts off to posts about restaurants or fast cars.
Matt Coddington - Net Business Blog was launched on January 7 of this year and had an explosion during February because he blogs about blogging and he’s damn good at it. His content is tightly focussed, of high quality and he isn’t affraid to share an opinion.
Tyler Cruz - An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey is slightly different from the other two in that it isn’t focused in on blogging but more on sharing his experiences of online business. His main source of income is PokerForums.org but he dabbles in other areas, generating an estimated income of over $300 a day. By sharing his mistakes and trials he has no doubt saved many of his readers a lot of time and money.
Design (although David Airey may disagree).
#1. Matt Coddington leads the way here with a thoughtful design. I like the fact that your eyes naturally fall on links to two of his top recent posts. The drawback is that there’s a little too much happening, I don’t think there’s as much value for his advertisers as there could be.
#2. John Chow’s design is functional although there’s a big question mark hanging over it with the picture of the cars facing each other. He has a consistent colour scheme and has coordinated his Adsense with that unlike Matt Coddington (somewhat surprisingly.)
#3. Tyler Cruz has a very basic design as it currently stands but it doesn’t hurt his credibility as he has posted his daily earnings for everyone to see. The blog has recently undergone a slight shift with a big ad banner sitting front and centre… I wonder how that will work for him.
Popularity
Last time I checked.
#1. John Chow. 3667 feed readers.
#2. Matt Coddington. 1024 feed readers.
#3. Tyler Cruz. 420 readers.
Style Points
If they keep reading this blog within 6 months they’ll be the most stylish dudes in the blogosphere.
#1. Tyler Cruz, for wearing a suit while sitting around in his condo.
#2. John Chow comes in second for having a hairstyle that is organised.
#3. Matt Coddington. Not too many photos around so hard to evaluate but he’s wearing an interesting helmet on his ‘about’ page.
Credibility
#1. John Chow is making a lot of money right now - over $8000 a month. Nice. ![]()
#2. Tyler Cruz owns a Poker Forum which is baking some nice dough. He also does a few little things on the side and estimates his income at over $300 a day.
#3. Matt Coddington has somehow built a huge following ridiculously fast but he has to show he can stay the distance.
Content
#1. Matt Coddington and John Chow. Content is king, as they say, and between Matt and John I couldn’t split the two. Matt has more relevant content while on the other hand John’s is more interesting but he’s an absolute scattergun! Whoever said that you should keep your blog tightly focussed was right : taking Chow’s example will probably not work for most people.
#3. Tyler Cruz is more of a hobbyist blogger given that his main online income sources are elsewhere. He could do with a proofreader.
Community
#1. John Chow has demonstrated how much difference a big personality can make. He has spawned a massive amount of groupies who blog about him seemingly all the time. His creativity is a lightning rod that attracts others, yielding a massive amount of comments.
#2. Matt C ran a competition to find the ‘133test’ commenter by awarding a prize to the poster of the 1337th. The incentive of a World of Warcraft cd and account was no doubt a shiny chalice for many of his readers (this is the internet community, after all.)
#3. Tyler has only in the past week decided to chase a community by removing the registration requirement to comment (which is generally used by those ridiculously high trafficked blogs such as Freakonomics). If he chooses to, he could generate a large community almost at will. He’s been at this game for a fairly long time and no doubt has a lot of good advice to dispense.
Just as a small exercise I visited ProBlogger.net and evaluated it against all these points and Darren would have gone #1 in every single category hands down. He will be the leader of this field for a while to come, even if Chow has knocked him from #2 for the search term Make Money Online.
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