Posted 6/11/08 - Kellex

I need to apologize. I feel dirty. I'm ashamed. Hose me down with holy water. Peel away my blistery skin. Take me out back and punish me.

Why? Because this is a post simply to give me an entry into a contest on another blog. What makes it so filthy though, is that it's a John Chow contest.

Companies love him and you can understand why with the amount of targeted traffic he reaches on a daily basis. Well, the latest company to rub his Chowzer, is Market Leverage. They've sent him a solid Nike gym bag full of crap that he is giving away to anyone that comments on the post and then follows up by writing about it on their own blog. (Yes I have officially sold out today. Give me a break, it is hump day right?)

Prizes include: A Flip, iPod Nano, $200 AMEX card, and a flash pen.

I figured I could be ashamed for one day and hopefully you all won't run away! Plus I'll be making it up to you in a couple of weeks when I run a sick little giveaway. :)


Did you know you can sell links on your site with Text-Link-Ads?

Posted 6/5/08

Mitchell Blatt of Juiced Sports Blog. Friend me on Stumble Upon at AirRaid81.

A Comprehensive Strategy for Pissing Off Loyal Visitors – In Other Words, This is Why You Shouldn’t Use Many Videos.

Arrogant bastard and super blogger John Chow recently did a post on Why Video is the Future of Blogging (it’s no-followed for ya, John) thus exposing himself as an idiot.

Now, you may think, John makes $30,000 a month, he knows blogging, so he must be right, but I think, John makes $30,000 a month, he’s got an ego bigger than China, so of course he thinks people want to see him talk about his daughter Sally.

Lately John has been posting a lot of videos of himself talking about something completely un-related to blogging, like traveling, China, or his daughter Sally, but even if he was talking about blogging, I still wouldn’t watch the videos.

Let me tell you why videos in blogs suck.

You guys are reading this right now and skipping sentences and paragraphs (or maybe even the entire article) that you don’t like. You know what to skip because you see the words on the page and you can see what paragraphs look interesting or if the article looks interesting as a whole.

With video, you can’t skip to the good parts, and you can’t even decide if the video looks good. You just see a screenshot and make a jump of faith. A few minutes in to the self-absorbed jackass prattling on about whatever, you decide, the first minute sucked, so the next five will probably suck, too. Does it take five minutes to read a blog post?

This is not to say all videos are bad. Here’s when to use videos.

Use a video of something related to make a point or entertain the reader. DON’T USE A VIDEO OF YOURSELF TALKING. That is what blog posts are for. You get a keyboard type out the same s%$t you speak, but a lot faster.

Use a video of the athlete you are writing about doing something funny or making a good play. Use a video of Will Leitch getting bitch slapped by Buzz Bissinger. Use a video to add to the post. That’s my point.

Now here are some more reasons John Chow’s post was retarded if you wish to read more Chow bashing.

He lists a bunch of reasons why people should use videos that make no sense like:

As a money making blogger, you have to keep an eye on the market to see where it’s headed. The next Internet isn’t on the desktop. If you stay there, you’ll be left behind.

What kind of a loser sits looking through websites on their phone at dinner or wherever the hell else they are? People have desktops and laptops because a phone can’t show a whole webpage on it, and because people don’t go out on a Friday night to search the internet. Also, IF the internet is headed that way, than the possibilities of making money are dramatically decreased, because no one can click ads on a small screen.

Low Cost of Entry
… If you have a digital camera (and who doesn’t?), chances are you can add videos right now.

If you want to waste time remembering to carry your camera with you everywhere, film yourself, edit the film, then upload it, I suppose it’s easy.

Having said that, keep in mind that the future of video on the Net is Hi-Def. If you’re in the market for a new digital camcorder and have some money to spend, you should consider getting the HD model.

No one cares about HD on YouTube… even less on an iPhone with a much smaller screen like you mentioned earlier.

Videos have their purpose: they should be used to enhance posts, but never use a video of yourself unless you want the publicity of being bashed on the Sports Dollar.


Time to join ClickBooth to help monetize your site, don't you think?

Posted 5/16/08 - Kellex


I'm guessing that many of us can attest to dropping a jaw here or there to the numbers posted by "Pro" bloggers. We've seen their earnings, their guest appearances and the tons of free schwag they receive, but answer me this: Is it really better to be a "Pro" blogger than a "Sports" blogger?

Here are the 5 reasons as to why I'm going with the sports side.

1. Press Pass Baby!

How many "Pro" bloggers out there can put in for a press pass to a major sporting event and actually get one? When was the last time Shoemoney chummed it up with professional athletes in a locker room after a game? (MMA is not really a sport, so that won't count Shoezie.)

I'm guessing some blogger will say that one of those blogging events or conferences is better than a sporting event and I'll just shoot that notion down now. You may not be a sports fan, but anytime you have a group of goofballs running around with laptops and cheesy Corsair t-shirts tucked into their pleated khakis, you are not topping the list of happenin' events.


2. The Real Fans!

"Pro" bloggers have risen to a sort of celebrity level depending on their niche, but does anyone really care about anything they write? They preach methods and spam affiliates without ever actually teaching anyone anything, but continue to keep you hooked by posting their $30,000 per month earnings.

"Sports" bloggers keep their readers hooked by writing about real life events. They come up with interesting insight, interview star athletes and insiders, and flat out keep it real. A "Sports" blogger's initial goal is never to announce their earnings to the world. (In fact, has this ever happened?) Instead they'd rather be the first to tell you about LeBron laying into some mother or whether or not Will Leitch has officially been bitched slapped by Buzz Bissinger.

Their fans continue to comeback because they love the content and the opinions; they aren't coming back just to leave a comment in hopes of a couple more pageviews or linkbacks.


3. Respectable Mentors

How many MMO bloggers can say that they actually respect John Chow or any of his dot Com Pho posse? (By the way it's pronounced "fuh" not "fer" or whatever the hell he keeps saying.) At some point, you'd think a "Pro" blogger would feel a need to give back to their specific niche. Even some original thought would be nice from time to time. The absence of real mentors in this MMO niche will most likely be the downfall.

On the other hand, the sports blog world is filled with so many that I'll just cover the niche I know best, which is basketball. Guys like Henry Abbott, J.E. Skeets, and Matt Moore do what they do because they absolutely love it. They all produce fresh thoughts, solid research and still manage to have a great time. It's easy to look up to a blogger that shares their ideas and actually loves to see another fellow blogger succeed.


4. Who's Shady?

As nice of a guy as Darren Rowse may be, I still find it hard to trust a guy in the MMO industry. I think we've all seen enough Magic Bullet infomercials to realize what every big player in the MMO niche is trying to do. "Pro" bloggers have sign up codes, offer discounts, and give away nice little prizes, but isn't there always a catch?

Tell me a time when a "Sports" blogger ran you through a maze of contest sign-ups and RSS subscriptions to get you to the meat of their content? "Sports" bloggers lay everything they've got on the line because that is all they know.


5. What's Better than Sports?

The bottom line is that sports are just freakin' amazing! I may be a biased sports fan and I also understand that not everyone in the world enjoys sports like I do, but who cares? The basic principle is that we write about something fun, entertaining and meaningful. "Pro" bloggers write about "How to get a great Twitter following!" or which cool shirt some marketing company gave them this Friday. Is that s$&t really fun?

Go watch a live NFL game Mr. Corsair T-Shirt guy.


Have you signed up for the PepperJAM Network and Review ME yet?

Posted 5/14/08

Written by Mitchell Blatt, owner of Juiced Sports Blog and the Sports Blogger Forums.


When Branding Overshadows Reality

When you think of making money online by blogging, who do you think of? I’m sure a lot of you are thinking about John Chow. Though I don’t know how much his brand extends into sports blogging territory, he does dominate make-money blogging.

A look at the front page of his blog on May 14 shows just three out of his five most recent posts are related to blogging at all, and two of them are generic posts offering no important insight?

Why do I read him?

It’s the branding, baby. John Chow the man might not give any insight into making money online, but John Chow the myth does. He has owned his site for about 8 years, and he has also been a successful blogger on sites such as The Tech Zone, but he didn’t start to blog about making money online until like 2006. He said he was embarking on an experiment to see if he could make money blogging. That built good buzz at the time. (Now so many people do it, it won’t build buzz.)

He gave away good info at the time, and it was relatively early on for the make money niche, so he established a reputation. Go to his blog and you see a picture of an expensive car with the tagline “The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul.” Again good branding. He also writes a pretty good ebook which he offers for download on his site, and after a beginning blogger reads it, said blogger will have a connection to Chow’s site and keep reading for more knowledge. Again, good branding.

But the clincher is his monthly revenue reports. At the end of each month, he reports how much he made, and it has now gotten up to $30,000 most months. If he makes that much from his blog, he must know how to make money right? Sure, but he doesn’t share his secrets.

Along the way, he got a lot of buzz through various controversies that have branded him as “evil,” which is great for all the evil capitalist pigs who want to make money just like him. First he got his site banned from Digg because anything that talks about making money is spam to Diggers. Next, he got his site punished by Google when he embarked on a linkbuilding campaign that called for other bloggers to review his site using “make money online” as the anchor text. He doesn’t even rank on page one for his own name.

He used those controversies to his advantage, getting other people talking about him, and exuding in his evil nature. He has written in the past about “evil marketing tactics,” “evil RSS subscription tactics,” etc.

In doing all of this, he has become a personality, not a blogger, and people read him just for that. That should be the goal for many blogs.

However, has he gone too far? On May 11, he wrote a review of the Reverse Funnel System, a system that I have very little knowledge about based on the nature of Chow’s review. It’s an affiliate program where you promote a system that “the conditions of [Chow’s] review prevent [him] from stating what the product is.” You have to pay $3,050 just to find out what the product is and start selling.

Chow has been making a lot of ad sales from people promoting this program. He was very light on the info and heavy on the puff in his piece. Does the system work? “It’s clearly making money for these advertisers. Otherwise, why would they continue to pay $500 every month to maintain their banner ads on this blog?”

What the f*$k is it? “While the product is a real product that’s been around for 20 years, there will be some people who won’t have a use for it.”

Naturally, this pissed off his readers, many of whom commented about their disappointment. Some said they knew this product was really a mutli-level marketing scam for timeshares. It seems as if this program just tries to scam people into signing up and buying the $3,000 product just so they can sell the $3,000 product to more people who want to sell a real product.

Worst of all, Chow prefaced his shill by saying, “What is The Reverse Funnel System and how does it work? With this review, I hope to shed some light on that question.”

Now you can piss off as many visitors as you like, but most of them will still come back if you’re John Chow. At some point, you cross the line. Has Chow reached that point? He has continued to build his RSS feed to over 20,000 subscribers, and most months he makes record profits (Lets tax him! … Wait he’s a Canadian, so Nancy Pelosi has no jurisdiction.) He didn’t record, record profits last month, though. His profit growth has slowed down some, so he might have reached a peak at $30,000 a month. Furthermore, it would be hard to imagine that any of his new posts help build new visitors. If I hadn’t started reading him a year ago when he was still pretty good, I wouldn’t be reading him now. He’s reached the point of saturation. Now it’s just easy for him to keep old visitors. The point is, you can do anything you want once you establish yourself as a personality.


Have you signed up for the PepperJAM Network and Review ME yet?

Posted 5/13/08 - Kellex


Seriously though, what the hell happened to Digg? Remember the days when 70 diggs got you on the front page? And remember when it wasn't complete spam, duplicate stories, and betting site morons?

Digg used to be one of the greatest traffic or link builders on the planet for bloggers, but has turned into a country club of egos and spam lately. We were a victim of its nastiness only weeks ago when we ran our "A Blogger is like..." post. That post hit 104 diggs but never got close to the main page because a couple of big dog Digg users buried it as "spam."

This big time "blog tool" has become a complete joke as of late because of Digg super-users and admins.

I read the "Breaking the Digg Code" ebook today and it just depressed the hell out of me. (It's free by the way.) It was filled with useful information but it was also a warning label to anyone attempting to use Digg as a "tool" for their blog. What used to be strategy to gain traffic and links has now turned into a black market liver deal. If you aren't careful, you could be banned or buried for life for pratically nothing. As much as Digg has fallen from its glory days of only months ago, you still need to have it as a resource because its benefits still reign supreme in the social networking world.

Maybe there will come a time when Digg becomes relevant in my link building efforts, but for now I'll just sizzle it on the back burner.

Any thoughts or stories of success lately?

Have you signed up for the PepperJAM Network and Review ME yet?

Posted 5/12/08 - Kellex

There has been a well-known feud going on between John Cow and Garry Conn over the past few months. Garry seems to think the practices at John Cow dot Com are shady and calls them out on it, while John Cow turns right back around and calls Garry out on something shady he is doing. It is definitely a little child’s play, but has been interesting enough to pay attention to.

Well their feud hit a new tipping point over the weekend and they’ve challenged each other to a blog contest. In 30 days we will see their results and a winner will be decided, but the main point here is that they plan to share the entire process with us from the ground up.

If you could care less about some moronic blogger feud, that is fine, but the information they will hopefully pass along could benefit a ton of people, especially new bloggers looking to make it big.

Check out their contest at John Cow’s site rather than Garry’s...OK fine, here is Garry's take also.

This post brought to you by the PepperJAM Network and Review ME!

Posted 4/26/08 - Kellex

Darren of ProBlogger ran a "Speed Post Day" yesterday where he answered reader questions in just a short couple of paragraphs. I actually enjoyed the hell out of it because it wasn't some drawn out blogger self-promotion, deep though piece. He actually got right down into the details and took on questions that most of us are always looking for a simple answer on.

Here are the highlights from the day that I thought would be useful to you! Make sure to check out the full bits as these excerpts are just little teasers.

1. How do I get more relevant readers to my blog?

"The key is to identify where these ‘relevant’ readers are already gathering. On almost every topic you can think of there are people already gathering online - so it’s a matter of identifying these ‘hot spots’..."

2. How to build your blog's readership.

"Outside of hard work (and a bit of luck) there are many techniques you can use to grow readership to a blog. I’ve summarised some of the many articles I’ve written on the topic here on my How to Find Readers for your Blog page..."

3. Blog Design - Does it matter?

"Lastly - in terms of how hard a decision is it to change design. I personally find it a difficult process. While I appreciate good design I’m not a designer at heart so finding someone that I connect with to do it for me takes time..."

4. When self promotion tips into spam.

"The problem with this approach of self promotion is that you can do more harm for yourself than good. If you comments are allowed on your blog the reaction from others who see it can actually hurt your brand..."

It actually looks like he is still doing it, so make sure to jump over to ProBlogger and check it out. (This actually could be a "Speed Weekend".) Enjoy!

Posted 4/24/08 - Kellex

Sir Obnoxious...err John Chow decided to join the rest of the blog world by running an Entrecard Credit giveaway/contest. Basically just by posting about his contest your are entered. (Wow original huh?)

An excerpt from his post:

For the past few months, I’ve been letting my Entrecard credits build up. Currently, I have 18,817 EC credits sitting in my account. I’ve decided to give away 10,000 credits to a lucky blogger so he or she can try out the service.

Entering the contest is extremely simple. Just send a trackback by making a blog post about this contest on your blog. If the trackback doesn’t work, then leave the URL to your blog post in the comment. At the end of this month, I’ll draw a name from all the entries received and transfer 10,000 Entrecard credits into that person’s account.

OK, so I've done my part which has entered me into the contest. I'm not exactly sure what I would do with 10,000 credits seeing as I have about 5,000 in my account right now. Maybe we should run another contest to give some away?

I went through 2 Entrecard advertising campaigns and saw varied results. I tried the "purchase on the big dogs" approach and also the "ad-whore buy everything" approach and neither saw much success. I'm not really into purchasing anymore but more into building my popularity to see where that can take me. (Yes, I'm sure I'll give up on Entrecard someday, but there has got to be some good use to it right?)

Well, if we win, we'll most likely figure out a way to give them back away to one of you! Could be a prize worth 15,000 credits?

Posted 4/9/08 - Kellex

Sounds a little crazy? Well the blog world has decided that May 1st will become the official RSS Awareness Day! (Info courtesy of Daily Blog Tips)

The goal is to give enough attention to the internet world that more people start to use it. It seems that a very low percentage of internet users even know what RSS is or what an RSS reader is. This is somewhat sad especially since they are so freakin’ handy!

The objective is to get as many bloggers and websites talking about RSS Awareness Day that the general public and media will figure out how useful it is and take advantage of it.

Here is a list of resources to give to your viewers:

•Wikipedia entry for RSS
•What is RSS?
•RSS In Simple English (Video)

If you visit Daily Blog Tips they have some options for prizes if you are involved, plus some nifty little banners to use like the one I have up at the top.

Posted 3/29/08 - Kellex

Here is another amazing pro blogger (Shoemoney.com), but someone tell me what the hell this guy is thinking. No belt and his website's t-shirt tucked in? Look at the guys he is with and tell me what he is not understanding about this type of appearance?

And no one cares that you lost your bag as you should still never go out in public, especially in New York, looking like this.

Posted 3/29/08 - Kellex

I understand that John Chow has done some ridiculous things in the past and has also made a ton of money blogging online, but this attempt at a viral video he threw up yesterday is completely worthless crap (no pun intended).

I guess he's doing it to make buzz and be "viral," but this is just pathetic. Have a look and shake your head like I just did.

Sorry, I should have apologized in advance for this.

Posted 3/26/08 - Kellex

The "Making Money Online" world is a crazy one, that's for sure. It is obvious that thousands of people create a blog every day that is simply dedicated to making money online. The market is completely saturated and it surprises me that anyone can actually pull any cash these days.

There are however, the original big dogs that seem to be growing stronger while the rest of us just try to keep up. Here is a list of blogs you should already know about:

• John Cow dot com: 1572 subscribers and my personal fav.
  

• John Chow dot com: 22291 subscribers and counting. Hate him or love him he's good.
  

• ShoeMoney: 15537 subscribers. Free t-shirt Friday is fantastic.
  

• Pro Blogger: 44626 subscribers and probably consider THE Pro Blogger.
  

• Mom's Cash Blog: OK not a big dog, but soooo nice to look at isn't she?
  

Please check these out if you have not already. As a blogger looking to make money, you should be all over these. Learn from the best people!