Read The Entire John Chow Interview Transcript Below:

Vince Reed 0:00 – 0:03

Network Marketing Nation, episode eight.

John Chow 0:03 – 0:12 (sound bite)

My response has always been, you know, if I had not gone to the Mastermind, I would not have saved $4,000. I would have cost myself $1.5 million.

Vince Reed 0:13 – 0:32

You’re listening to Network Marketing Nation, where six and seven figure top earners share their stories. My name is Vince Reed, Internet marketing trainer and coach. Prepare to be inspired.

Vince Reed 0:33 – 1:52

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Alright, I’m extremely excited, I’m here on the line with John Chow. John Chow is an author, speaker, product creator, and top earner in his company. John has been featured in such publications as the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, Ming Pao Magazine, and BC Business Magazine. John runs one of the most popular blogs in the network marketing industry, JohnChow.com ranking in the top 15,000 globally and in many countries ranking in the top 5,000 of all websites in the world. John was the first person to hit 7 figures in his company, while his blog consistently brings in a consistent 5 figure income per month. Now he’s here on Network marketing Nation to share his 6 and 7 figure success story with you. John, what’s going on man, are you ready to rock and roll?

John Chow 1:52 – 1:54

I sure am Vince, how are you doing?

Vince Reed 1:54 – 2:04

I’m awesome man, it’s always good to touch base. I was just joking around with John, he lives literally around the corner from me and I said it’s a shame we haven’t got together much, so now we definitely have to do a lunch date.

John Chow 2:04

Yeah.

Vince Reed 2:05 – 2:18

Awesome. So you’ve got an amazing story. I got a chance to get to know you over the years. We’ve shared the stage at several events. And you know, is there anything that I left out in that amazing story that you’d love everyone to kind of know about you?

John Chow 2:19 – 2:23

I think you did a pretty good job tooting my horn for me so thank you.

Vince Reed 2:24 – 2:54

Awesome, I mean it definitely, you know, is a journey in this industry so to accomplish some of the things that you’ve accomplished is amazing and I’m sure we’ll touch on all of those. And by the way, to have such a blog doing that well, I don’t think people quite realize how many websites or blogs are out there, you know, when we started even Network Marketing Nation we were I think like 17 million in terms of ranking when we launched, and to be in the top 5,000 in several countries is amazing. So kudos to you man.

John Chow 2:55

Thank you.

Vince Reed 2:56 – 3:16

Awesome. So you know, you’ve earned a minimum of 6 figures and obviously 7 figures in your company, which is a goal for a lot of people getting started. And you know, I always like to ask this question first because when people get started in this industry, that’s their dream, you know, they want to have that freedom.

So share with everyone listening how does that actually make you feel to accomplish that goal?

John Chow 3:17 – 3:59

Well you know, it feels pretty damn good because one of my biggest achievements is what I call the dot com lifestyle, which to me it means time freedom, money freedom, and location freedom. And my blog in the company has definitely allowed me to achieve that. Today, you know, I do have freedom of money, I do have freedom of time, but more importantly I do have freedom of location, like you and I are next door neighbors. But during the summer time it does get pretty hot down here in Southern California, so what we do, my family and I, we just jet back up to Vancouver and we spend summers there where it’s a nice 72 degrees. And when it starts raining in Vancouver, we fly back down here where it becomes 72 degrees again.

Vince Reed 3:59 – 4:23

Awesome man, and that’s what it’s all about. Having that time to spend with your family and you have a great family as well, I’ve got a chance to meet them. And normally I kind of want to go off a little bit. You know, what is your .. I know you’ve kind of joked about it, you know, when I’ve seen you speak before but how does your family feel, you know, I know your daughter at one point thought that was just how things were. Like your dad works from home, tell us a little bit about that and how cool that is.

John Chow 4:23 – 5:10

Yeah, growing up Sally had both parents in the house and to her, that was normal to her. She did not know any difference, and she did not find out that was not the norm until she started school when she realized that when she’s wondering to the other kids, “how come your parents don’t drop you off at school or pick you up from school? And how come they don’t bring your lunch?” And she didn’t realize that their parents have to work. So that was a bit of a shock to her. She asked me a question like, “I’m talking to my friend Kaylee and you know, her parents don’t pick her up or drop her off or stuff.” And I kind of say, “Well, that’s how it is, Sally, normally.” But we definitely have something different.

Vince Reed 5:10 – 5:38

That’s awesome man, and that’s really what it’s all about and those of you listening, that’s what you’re striving for. Alright, awesome man. So, you know, you’ve built amazing organizations. I mean, to reach 7 figures you obviously, you know, have sold a lot of products, you’ve built teams.

You know, tell the listeners why should a person join John Chow?

Like what makes your team, you know, what gives you an advantage over other people out there in terms of people looking for someone to get started with?

John Chow 5:38 – 6:23

Well my main advantage is that my team has access to additional training and additional tools that’s not available within the company, so I made all these tools just for my team members only. I make a complete sales funnel, I’ve designed entire ad campaigns that they can utilize. And also they have access to my brand and my name because the name John Chow outside network marketing is synonymous with blogging, it’s synonymous with making money online. I speak at major conferences, so they get to leverage my name and we do webinars together. So just a whole bunch of additional value added stuff that they cannot get with another team. So that’s one of the reasons I have one of the most successful teams in the company.

Vince Reed 6:23 – 6:39

Awesome man, and what would you tell someone listening, getting started to be able to position themselves in such a way? Like when you got started, was that your initial plan, to say, “Hey, I’m going to build a platform, an awesome blog, provide them with tools”? Or did it just kind of happen and you just figured it out along the way?

John Chow 6:40 – 7:01

Little bit of both, a little bit of both. Like I said, I was already a successful blogger before I got involved in network marketing. So it’s just a matter of leveraging what I already had and just using that to position myself and then using my blog, using my name to just create a position of expert status so that other people can leverage off that as well.

Vince Reed 7:01 – 7:18

That’s awesome man. Cool, cool. Now here’s another question for you, you know, this is always for me a fun one to ask because you’ve got a wealth of experience.

And I’m curious, when did you actually get started on the Internet? Like when did you first get started?

John Chow 7:18 – 8:30

I guess I would be called grandfathered into it. I’ve been a full time Internet marketer since 1998. Yeah, so my blog was started in December of 2005. And that blog was started with the sole purpose of updating friends and family. Because I have friends and I have family that’s living in Toronto and family living still in mainland China. So instead of, you know, calling each other up, they could just log into JohnChow.com and find out what’s happening with the family in Vancouver. So like I said, the blog’s purpose was just to update friends and family, it was never meant to make any money, but it also allowed me to talk about my other money making sites. Like I said, I’ve been a full time Internet marketer since 1998, so the blog allowed me to talk about my Internet projects and how I’m monetizing those projects, so I blog about, you know, by just changing the color I can increase conversion. That kind of stuff. And it was those I guess money making topics that got people interested in my blog and after a while, I started getting questions about, you know, how will you monetize a blog? How will you monetize this and stuff? And it’s from there the blog just expanded and grew into one of the biggest Internet marketing blogs out there.

Vince Reed 8:31 – 9:08

That’s awesome man, so you’ve definitely been doing this a long time. And for those of you listening, you definitely should be blogging. And I know some people say, “Well what should I be blogging about?” Just talk about your experiences and what you learned. So obviously you’ve been doing this since ’95, your blog started in 2005. For me that’s amazing because I consider myself a senior citizen because I got started in 2008, so you’ve got me beat.

So what piece of advice – because you’ve got a wealth of experience – would you give yourself when you got started?

If you could go back and talk to yourself back in ’98 or, you know, when you launched your blog, is there anything special that you would tell yourself?

John Chow 9:08 – 9:47

By far the biggest mistake I made when I started the blog was I didn’t start my customer or email list from the get-go because JohnChow.com was a personal blog, I didn’t apply my usual Internet marketing methods to it. So I waited almost a year down the road before I started the list, and had I started the list on day 1, you know, the list today would be twice the size and conversely my income would be twice as big. So my advice for anyone starting out is basically to start the list from the get-go, probably not during it, waiting as long as I did cost me over $1 million. So it’s a mistake I hope you never make.

Vince Reed 9:47 – 10:04

So talk a little bit about a list, because there may be people that aren’t familiar with a list, you know, they’re new to network marketing.

A blog to them sounds probably very difficult and complicated, but how can we simplify a blog and a list, just explaining it in simple terms to someone just listening?

John Chow 10:05 – 12:23

Well in the simplest terms, your list is basically your customer base. Let’s just say you consider yourself like a regular retail store, and you know, your restaurant. You have repeat customers. So the list is the same thing. Your list is customers or visitors who came to your site or came to your landing page and they were nice enough to input their email address onto it. This is actually very valuable and over time, when you have a customer list, you can do a lot with it in terms of leverage. Like right now if I were to launch a new site in whatever I want to choose, my list is over 100,000 names. So I can instantly expose my new site to a list of 100,000 people immediately, and that’s a lot of power right there. So if I start a new site, I can instantly send traffic and this has been over time, so there’s no cost involved other than the cost of hosting the list. There’s actually no cost of mailing those people, it’s always free. So it’s definitely something you need to work on, definitely something you need to build, something you need to nurture. As your list is your customer base, and without a customer base you really can’t do this business. It’s kind of like … I guess the best example would be this: the typical affiliate marketer, you know, they look at an offer. Like just say they click bank, they find an offer to promote so they put it up and promote it and then they buy some traffic. And they send it to the page and they hope that they buy it and the money they make is greater than what they spend, right? But the problem with that kind of model is when they buy it, the customer doesn’t belong to them. Unlike the model we use, the customer belongs to the advertiser or the customer belongs to whoever sends our products. So what you’re doing is just spending the money, you’re not building a list, you’re spending money to build a customer for somebody else. Now if we imagine this as a restaurant or any regular business, that’s like you spending money to get a customer one time that you never see again. Now, a restaurant cannot survive on repeat customers. Most retail businesses or more, any business cannot survive on repeat customers. And if you’re not building your list to build a customer base, if all you’re doing is spending money to send customers to somebody else, you basically have a house of cards.

Vince Reed 12:24 – 13:06

Absolutely, and you know, for Internet marketers out there, they probably heard this term a lot and they say the money and the power is in your list, and I always say the fortune is in the follow-up. So you definitely want to be building that list and building those relationships. Awesome man. So, you know, for those of you out there listening, you want to be blogging and you want to be making sure you have a place on that website where you can capture the name and email and build your list. So I have another question for you, you know, and this is always fun and you know, I’m sure, you know, whoever was this person if they played their cards right would have been positioned quite well.

But how did the first person sponsor or recruit you onto their team when you first got started in network marketing?

John Chow 13:06 – 14:40

Well, I was actually sponsored by the founder of the company. We met at a Mastermind – and that’s another piece of advice too; attend Mastermind, attend events because I attend lots of big events every year and I’ve never actually lost money on it. But anyway, I met the founder of the company at a $4,000 Mastermind in Del Mar in San Diego and he introduced me, he told me what we did, I told him about blogging and we kind of hit it off. And a week later he just sends me an email and the company was holding a $10,000 contest and he asked me if – there was only 72 hours left in this contest, it was a month-long contest, 72 hours left and he was trying to sell a $10,000 eBook. So he basically told me, you know, “If you can sell 100 copies, you have a good chance of winning this thing.” So I did some calculations and I decided to enter with 72 hours left and as luck would have it, I won the contest and so I took $10,000 cash from him down in San Diego. And since then I’ve been involved with the company, I filled in a full lead position in the company and it’s been an amazing journey. So I’ve made over … I’m a 7 figure earner in the company now and all because I attended a major event, I attended Mastermind. I talk to some people and they say, “Why would you spend $4,000 to go to Mastermind?” My response has always been, you know, if I had not gone to the Mastermind, I would not have saved $4,000. I would have cost myself $1.5 million.

Vince Reed 14:41 – 15:23

That’s a great perspective. And I think a lot of people, if you heard that should rewind that and listen to it again because you never go wrong when you invest in yourself and when you put yourself around smart people. You’ll definitely be rewarded. So tell me this, because when it comes to network marketing and with any business, okay, you’re always going to face more rejection than success.

So was there anything that stands out in your mind in terms of a horrible rejection story where someone just rejected you and you wanted to go hide in the sand or hide your face, it was just painful?

Is there anything that stands out? Maybe not necessarily just in network marketing; any business that you’ve been in that you just were trying to talk to someone and they just pretty much shut you down?

John Chow 15:25 – 16:24

Not one particularly, at least not with this company because this is an Internet marketing company so I have everything set up so that the auto-responder is all set up. So basically I don’t have to actually talk to the person and this company has its own phone team, they handle the phone sales and stuff. I just provide the lead. But you know, I do get the typical email that basically says, you know, “This is dumb”, whatever, that kind of stuff. And I basically, you know, to me this is a numbers game. I know that’s going to happen and I look at it this way: if you try to please everybody, you’re doing something wrong. You can’t, it’s impossible. And same thing for my blog, too. I still get people emailing about my blog saying, “You can’t make money by blogging” and “You’re just trying to make money off people.” That’s the kind of stuff. And I look at it this way: if I bought some kind of joy or some kind of relief for somebody able to vent to me, then you know, that’s fine, they can vent away.

Vince Reed 16:24 – 17:01

That’s an awesome perspective on it, awesome. And you’re always going to have people, no one’s ever going to agree with everything you do and I’ve actually, you know, lived by this rule: if everyone is agreeing with you, no one is probably listening. Not enough people are listening because you’re not making enough noise. That’s awesome. So tell me your best success story, either for yourself or maybe someone on your team. Is there anything, like, what was it that happened where you just kind of stepped back and you just felt extremely proud?

Is there any one particular success story personally and maybe something from maybe a team member that’s done something well that made you extremely proud?