Swollen Pickles

This is it, my one chance, my one opportunity, my make or break moment. Well maybe not, but this is my big chance to review the blog of John Chow, and maybe score a little extra web traffic to Swollen Pickles as a result.

As of typing this, John Chow dot com is ranked at number 439 on Technorati. Quite an achievement, if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat. Perhaps it’s not the best line to use at a night club, but ranking that high has to be profitable!

Why am I writing this you ask? Well, Swollen Pickles could do with a healthy dose of ‘link love’, and John Chow seems happy enough to oblige. Perhaps I better leave it to John to explain the terms and conditions of the back scratching arrangement.

The concept is simple - review my blog and I’ll link to your review. The review must be at least 200 words long and you have to include a link to the blog home page and this post. You are free to link to any other posts as well. You are to be completely honest with the review - state what you like and don’t like about the site. It doesn’t matter what categories your blog covers and it doesn’t have to be in English. I will accept all reviews.

Yeah it’s a shrewd marketing ploy, but he’s made me an offer I simply can’t refuse. Ok, my palms are sweaty now, must not make disparaging remarks about godfather of money making blogging, must not…

Ok John, at this point I think it’s a good time to remind you of the terms and conditions of the whole deal. “You are to be completely honest with the review - state what you like and don’t like about the site.” John, please don’t have my blog ‘rubbed out’ for what I’m about to say…

What do I know about John Chow? Not a great deal really. I ran into his blog one day whilst randomly clicking those MyBlogLog profiles. It was the two photoshopped blue Pagani Zonda F’s in his header that stopped me in my tracks. Honestly, my initial reaction was that I had been tricked into stopping at one of those SPAM infested, ‘get rich quick – check out all my cool assets I must know what I’m talking about – hurry buy my limited edition over priced e-book’ websites.

With my suspicions already aroused, my eye hit the tagline, “The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul”. At this point the pretentious tosser alarm was ringing so loudly that my ears were bleeding. I’m a fan of humility, and for me ‘mogul’ and ‘humility’ seem to be mutually exclusive. Actually, I hate the term ‘mogul’ with a passion. Perhaps I hate the term ‘mogul’ even more than I hate the term ‘blogosphere’.

In any case, as far as first impressions go, John Chow dot com was dangerously close to striking out. The pairing of the term ‘mogul’ with images of over priced Italian super cars is a sketchy move if you’re trying to win over a cynical meat and potatoes dullard like myself. If this had been dinner, I would not have been asking for the desert menu.

Fortunately, I gave John a third swing of the bat. After reading a couple of his posts I was glad that I hadn’t closed my browser. The content was well written and useful, he pointed me in the direction of a couple of cool wordpress plugins, and I was a happy camper. You have to give the guy credit. He comes up with some interesting ideas (take this ‘review me’ thing as an example) and he’s certainly created a name for himself.

Sure, you could criticize John Chow dot com as erring on the side of pretentiousness every now and then (your honor I would like to present to you Exhibit A… I rest my case), but show me a blog that doesn’t.

If you want to pick up some money making ideas (free of charge) from a guy that seems to know what he’s talking about, check out John Chow dot com.

p.s. John, please do something about the setup of your Cold Air Intake. You need to be getting cool air into that thing, keeping the filter so high in the engine bay will only force it to take in hot air, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing.

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