A Critique of John Chow’s Musings on “The Ramp”
12 Dec 2007 Quan Quach 10 comments 8 views
In one of his recent posts, John Chow speaks of the mythical ramp wherein he went from a blogging nobody to a blogging mogul. What is “the ramp” exactly? Basically, you can think of it as explosive growth in your web traffic over a short period of time that is maintained afterwards. Thus, unlike Stumble Upon, wherein the explosive growth is temporary, the growth from “the Ramp” doesn’t dissipate. How did John accomplish this? All he did was write some posts that happened to reach the front page of digg . . . 30 times in the span of three months. Pretty good, I must admit. For most bloggers though, “The Ramp” is quite the lofty aspiration.
Every blog out there is waiting for the day when their blog hits the fabled Ramp, including this one. Yes, we all know about the usual means of commenting on other blogs, exploiting social media, text links, and so on to increase your traffic . . . but is there more to it? Apparently, its all a simple matter of “the ramp”, which will propel your blog to glory like it has never seen. And after reading about “The Ramp” on Chow’s site, I would like to point out three things that I disagreed with:
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Chow says:
The reason most blogs never hit the A list is because they never hit the Ramp. As I said before, traffic is not built on a linear scale. Traffic needs to be ramped up to critical mass as fast as possible.While it is true that traffic is not built on a linear scale, Mr Chow doesn’t seem to realize that not everyone can be as good (or lucky) as he has been. Sure, ideally you want to build up your traffic as quickly as possible, but it’s not really that simple. Realistically speaking, what are the odds of someone getting their posts dug 30 times in a three month period? Not very likely. Thus, for newer bloggers, the concept of “The Ramp” can be entirely overwhelming. It’s like winning the lottery to them.
Contrary to the idea of the Ramp, there are blogs out there that have made it to greatness on steady growth. Take for example, Problogger.net. The growth is much more steady and there are no extreme ramp ups, as shown in the figure below.
The impression Chow gives is that “The Ramp” is the ONLY way to achieve blogging greatness. And lets face it, the level of growth that Chow experienced will probably only happen to less than 0.01% of the blogging population. Most blogs strive for less lofty goals, such as doubling traffic or RSS readers month by month. After half a year of doubling your growth, thats a whopping 64 fold increase if you can maintain the growth! The Ramp is nice, but not necessary.
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Next, Chow says:
The quality of your posts has zero to do with your traffic. It’s all about promotion. And when it comes to promoting a new blog, the Ramp is the most important part.Chow could not be more wrong in this assertion. Content is everthing! Content comes before promotion. Without GOOD content, promotion is MEANINGLESS! I’m sure those 30 articles that Chow wrote that made it to the front page of digg were pretty informative and useful, or else it wouldn’t have been so popular. I’m not sure how a blogging genius like himself could overlook this. Content is king, and always will be.
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Finally, Chow says:
If you want to join the A list, you will need to do a concentrated promotional effort sometime during your blog’s life. The “I’ll just put $100 per month into promotion for a year” thing is for maintaining traffic, not ramping it. You’ll be better off by spending $1,000 in one month, then $10 a month for the rest of the year.I’m still not convinced that an all out approach is the way to go in promoting your blog. There’s nothing wrong with taking baby steps until you’re ready to make that leap. Anyhow, I’m not disagreeing with his point here, but I think it would have been helpful for him to mention WHEN to go about doing your concentrated blogging promotion. If I go all out and promote my newly minted blog that has no content on it, it’s not going to be very useful. When is the right time to strike? It’s a detail that I wish John would have mentioned in his post. I believe that after building a solid foundation of content and subscribers, your chances of hitting the “ramp” would be greatly improved
10 Responses to “A Critique of John Chow’s Musings on “The Ramp””
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Solid post. I ‘zoomed’ you on bloggingzoom.
Great Post!
John Chow is definitely an anomaly. We can’t quite figure out why he is so popular except that he feeds people what they want - the hopes of Internet riches.
Too bad that most of his posts begin to sound like a broken record after a while. Same old information with a bit of a different spin.
And the number of reviews he does gets a bit tiresome.
Enough about him!
We do agree that a blogs traffic can grow steadily. We hope ours does, and for a fairly new blog, we are doing well. We are happy and only hope that our blog continues to grow!
I often find JC’s methods not applicable to the general mass of bloggers. He knows quite a bit about black hat SEO and other “less than usual” techniques and uses them liberally. Most of us are still struggling with regular SEO.
And Lizard Wisdom is right - he feeds HOPE.
All the JC wannabes just follow whatever he says in the hopes of becoming like him without realising that in the first place, they don’t have the kind of traffic or whatever special circumstances he has that led him to this success.
Nice analysis.
mbm
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Digg effect that JC used to vault to his current position happened by playing Digg in ways it was never meant to be used. Shortly after people caught on to his methods, Diggers started penalizing others doing the same.
As they say; Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
It’s likely that no other English-speaking blogger will achieve the same results by playing social media sites, so you’re right that it’s up to the bloggers to work on their content and make sure it’s informative, insightful or just plain enjoyable. Anything less would be a waste of bandwidth.
No it wasn’t luck and it wasn’t the great content that got him there 30 times. It was some evil scheme that he never revealed. That was why he got banned from Digg. Like he got banned from Technorati and Google.
Great post. Gave you a well deserved thumbs up!
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Lizard: Thanks for your support and agreement. We normal bloggers need more realistic goals and JC makes doesn’t help in this regard.
mbm: Hope can be a good thing, but I think JC feeds unrealistic hope, which is the worst kind.
Jason: Yes, it seems that JC is a master of bending the rules to his advantage. I think we all wish we could do this as well as him!
Costa: JC is an evil blogging genius as evidenced by his other schemes to increase traffic/readership/subscribers.
It seems that Chow is both revered and loathed across the internet land. Thats what happens when you become big I guess.
[...] John Chow’s post about how you should ramp up your site’s traffic, blinkdagger wrote a detailed and interesting critique. This piece is definitely worth the read, as it gives hope to many of you beginning bloggers who [...]
That is one of the reasons why I don’t follow John Chow.
He bases his stuff off some lucky digg features and his massive readership.
The web is very much lucky timing.
He got lucky.
Most don’t.
The surefire way to get a readership is to write quality content. Without good content, no one will read your blog - no matter how much you spend on advertising in a short amount of time or how many times you get dugg or stumbled.
(btw, I personally like SU more than Digg)
So, I don’t read John Chow.
I haven’t been dugg.
And I’m getting a nice readership despite that.
Take that John Chow.
I haven’t followed John Chow at all. I never have and never really will. There are 1000000 better blogs online right now that discuss money making and give way more informative posts that I’d much rather spend my time on.
John Chow got lucky, and I think the fame has gone to his head a bit.
at least 1-2 posts a week now are pictures of some weird food hes eating. How is that helping ANYONE make money?
Not just lucky but maybe the timing is just right for him. Before Google penalized him, he was on the 1st page of google for ‘make money online’. If you noticed, some of the post he wrote are repeating the same thing. but i think, that’swhat people want to read and he always give ‘hope’ that u can just blog for money.