John Chow - The Lord of the Digg

Many of you will already be familiar with John Chow, the man behind one of the leading tech review sites, TheTechZone.

His regular blogging over at JohnChow.com is primarily focused on making money online via blogging, various financial tips and tricks, and closeup photos of his dinner!

Over the past year he's built up quite a following of daily readers, largely aided by traffic from Digg and other social news sites, which has transformed the blog from a minor sideline of his to an ever increasing profit machine!

It was clear that while the numerous Diggs were helping the tremendous traffic growth, they were also raising a few hackles amongst the Digg faithful - who will often write off many bloggers as shameless self promoters, and subsequently were no doubt involved in flagging his blog.

While I'm sure being banned by Digg was a bit of setback for him, the readership is now at a level that should continue to increase, particularly given the number of bloggers who follow his writing, and who naturally themselves blog about what they're interested in.

I think one of the reasons I have been reading his blog so often over the last few months is that his writing style is very down to earth, lightened with a sense of humor, but most importantly, covers a wide variety of real world situations regarding boosting traffic, and monetizing those visitors through a variety of means.

That to me is very interesting reading, as I am doing similar sorts of things with some of my own websites, as I am now working on my own emerging online empire fulltime.

After John had posted a few paid post requests, he decided to offer out some links to his readers blogs, if they blogged about him and mentioned his latest evil viral blogging scheme. (He is, after all, the self-proclaimed Root of all Evil!)