Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why you blog?  Some people to do it to be heard.  Others just want a place to organize their thoughts.  And some do it to make money.  John Chow is one of a growing number of bloggers who fall into that last category.  One of the nice things about his blog is the transparency and openness of his successes and failures.  You can literally chronicle his progress from day one to the present.

Yesterday he posted his income numbers for the month of February:  $7011.05. Not bad for a month, huh?

I love that John has broken down his revenue and detailed exactly where that $7k came from.  As his numbers show, many streams of revenue can add up to a much greater whole than just one.  Look at his AdSense dollars.  Do you still think AdSense is the only way to make money on your site?

I guess it is.  If you only want to make a small percentage of what you could be making.  It'd be nice to make 7 times more income… wouldn't it?  Make sure you look at his breakdown to see what I'm talking about.

SEO is the same way.  If you only work on one thing - building links, adding content, meta tags - then you're missing out on all of the other potential.  It's true that each of those things are very important.  They all add up to more traffic.  But the sum of a whole is only as good as its parts.  And the more parts you have, the better.

Some people spend hours a day trying to get an article up on the Digg front page.  Others try all day to get referenced by another site… or added to a list/directory.  And that's all they do.  For hours and hours their focus is on one way to get some traffic to their site.  And eventually they usually succeed.

But what's better:  1000 hits from Digg for one day… or a 100 hits from the search engines every day?

Take John Chow's advice.  Read through his blog.  Do research at other sites.  If your ship still hasn't come in, find out what you're missing.  What are the successful people doing that you're not?

Thanks for the information, John.  And congrats on the spectacular growth!

-Matt