Do you blog for profit? Are you comfortable with having other people’s paid ads on your website? If so, you may want to check out the new book by self-proclaimed dot-com mogul John Chow. Even if you don’t want to monetize your blog, the Vancouver-based blogging pro offers useful advice on how to increase traffic to your website in his 144-page book Make Money Online: Roadmap of a dot com mogul. 

As a blogging newbie, I tagged many great tips relevant to my business, Zen Editorial, inside this book. (My husband was horrified to see me fold down the corners of pages I wanted to revisit later, but I am very hands-on with books I haven’t borrowed.) The most dog-eared part was the chapter on promotion and search engine optimization.

This chapter contains pointers on such topics as fighting spam in the comments section of your blog, promoting your blog in the real (as opposed to offline) world, and writing blog post titles that the search engines will love. One recommendation I was able to implement right away was about “deep links”. Chow suggests you add links to the end of every new post or article you publish to direct your readers to other related posts on your site. These deep links help both Google and your visitors to find information they may not have known existed.

This book will be of particular use to people who have WordPress-based websites, and who have at least some knowledge of HTML, because Make Money Online refers to many WordPress plug-ins and widgets. For example, Chow talks about the WordPress timestamp feature, which allows a blogger to create posts that go live at a specified time, such as when he or she will be away on vacation. However, I couldn’t find that widget on my WordPress-based site where Chow said it would be. Since I don’t have the appropriate WordPress or HTML skills I suspect I will be churning out emails to my harried web developer asking whether he’s done this, or installed that, and saying John Chow suggests I do such and such. (We’ll see how well that goes over with him.)

Naturally, since this book is entitled Make Money Online, it goes into great detail about putting others’ paid ads on your website. An entire chapter is devoted to Google AdSense. Chow follows that with information on his favourite moneymaking advertising networks, and on how to make direct ad sales. I found this interesting, but I doubt it will ever apply to a small business such as mine.

Overall, I found this book to be well written, easy to read and, from an editor’s standpoint, fairly well edited. (What editor can’t find a mistake in someone else’s writing? On the other hand, what editor doesn’t make mistakes herself on occasion?) The back cover lists the price as $15.95 and the publisher is Morgan James. You can find it on Amazon.com. I give this book 4 stars out of 5.