This article is guest posted by Carl of Make Money Online with a 13-year old.

I see loads of blogs copying John Chow dot Com (Style, design, evilness, etc.). Sadly, many of them failed. Honestly, I am one of those. I am one of the victims who copied John Chow’s marketing tactics. But why did my blog became successful? What did I do to make my blog more interesting?

I’m not self promoting here guys. I’m just here to share the things that I learned from this great blogger that helped me through my blogging difficulties and marketing.

So, I’ll just go straight to the point. Here are the 5 things I learned from John Chow that made me a successful blogger.

1. Be Unique

“What the heck Carl? You just said you copied John Chow’s marketing strategies and now you want us to be unique?”

Yea I copied, but not literally! I just get the thought on how John Chow became successful and revised some of it.

Like for example, John Chow is the evil one right? That’s why people love him, he’s unique in some kind of way. John Chow uses branding for people to love him. So if I say, who is the root of evil again? What comes up in your mind? Of course, John Chow!

2. Socialize with famous bloggers

To those loyal John Chow readers here, did you remember the time when John Chow is chatting with Darren Rowse through Adwords? The “I love Darren Rowse” ad? That was the perfect idea that caught Problogger’s eyes and noticed JohnChow.com

3. Leverage Your Knowledge

There are so many great bloggers out there with great and useful post. Some are guru’s blogging just for popularity. But how did John Chow established himself as the make money online authority to many people?

As stated in the guest post of Adii from my blog:

I doubt that he knew anything about making money online and monetizing blogs when he first started blogging. But John Chow has persisted with his goal to be regarded as an expert (see the wording, his readers thinks he is the expert, although he might not even think so himself) and he had the self confidence and arrogance to back up these goals.

4. Don’t Play with Google

If you could recall, remember when John Chow edited his robots.txt? Then after a day or two, his rank went down in Google for the keyword “Make Money Online.”

Yeah… I know if you want to be an SEO expert, you gotta experiment. But please, not on your main blog that gives you 5 figure monthly. I hope John Chow gets some Google love soon.

Oh yea. I told Google that I hate them because you’re not in the top search results for the keyword John Chow! Though I’m not switching to Yahoo

5. Never, Never Give-Up

Even though John Chow is still not showing up number one in the search results today. He still have this sportsman spirit (John Chow used to hold the 100 meter dash in his High School) that keeps his blog alive and his community active. He even reached another blogging milestone by breaking the 6,000 RSS mark!

This is also a reason on why people don’t make money online. They give up. After few months they give up because they are not earning or they’re earning not enough. Remember, Blogging is like planting a tree. It takes years to harvest the fruits.