John Chow is one of the more successful “probloggers” around. How successful? In April 2007, he took home $12,000 from his various monetization strategies. Obviously he knows what he’s doing.

So how kind of him to share what he knows, in the form of a free eBook?

‘Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com’, is a compendium of previous articles from John’s blog, with a little updating to bring older information up-to-date. Tapping into his blog archives like this demonstrates the power of a good blog – the content for a book is already there, it just needs to be reformatted. if you’ve been reading johnchow.com for a while now, you may well know all of the contents of the book already. Even so, having John’s articles collated into one easily portable format is quite handy.

Anyway, the eBook itself; it doesn’t quite have the professional appearance of the usual internet marketeer fare, which is part of the point, I guess. The purpose of the eBook is purely to act as a traffic generator for johnchow.com, not to upsell another product. The first few pages actually deal with this, and it’s refreshing to read something which isn’t acting as a giant sales brochure. The Jerk, John is not.

Obviously the book does still have a monetization plan. The plan is affiliate sales. It’s the chapters relating to this which I found most useful. At the very start, we are given a list of recommended money makers. While there were some of the usual suspects, I’ve now learned of a few new schemes to try out on the Get Rich Project, and how best to optimize their use.

Much of the book deals with growing a blog. While it is all good advice, a lot of it has been written before (and not just on johnchow.com), so it can get a little repetitive. However there are still snippets of gold hidden away in there, so it’s worth at least skimming each section.

All in all, the eBook serves best in one of two roles:

1. a quick catch-up, if you’re new to making money online
2. a “pocket reference” style book – you already know the stuff, you just need a little reminder now and then.