When I was a teenager, I wasn’t much different than I am today. For me it was all about making money. This is no joke! I have always been very technical and very much a hands on type of person. When I was 13 years old, I had the bright idea of starting my own lawn mowing service but quickly discovered that it was really difficult to land customers.

Near the end beginning of spring, after school I’d go walk my neighborhood and go door to door asking residents if they would like me to mow their yard during the summer. Most all would say no, largely due to the fact that had already planned on mowing their yard on their own or already had someone in line to mow it for them.

I remember this being so frustrating. Soon after recognizing that going door to door proved to be ineffective I started to market and promote my service by making fliers and distributing them out at a lot of the local stores and businesses. I had a BMX bike and I would literally ride everywhere while looking for places to hang my fliers.

Once again, this proved to be ineffective and then it dawned on me. I realized what the problem was. For one, I recognized that I had to deal in volume and two, I had to make sure that people were actually seeing my advertisements. Going back to the drawing board, I scrubbed the fliers and then made new smaller business card sized ads. Keep in mind, I didn’t have the resources to have these made professionally. I had to make these all by hand.

After making around 250 of these smaller business sized ads, I rode my bike to the mall and started inserting these smaller ads into the coin slots of pay phones, soda and candy machines and in between the rubber seal and glass of driver side windows of vehicles parked in the parking lot. The result of that massive campaign was a huge success. I landed 20 customers who needed me to mow their yard on a regular basis in the upcoming weeks during summer break.

More than half of those customers called me after pulling my ad out of the coin slots of the pay phones and candy machines. Very soon there after, I quickly learned that the promoting and marketing aspect of the lawn mowing business wasn’t the difficult part. Dragging my push mower with me while peddling my bike everywhere was a total bitch. Sometimes my mom would drive me which was so much easier.

So how does this childhood story relate to you trying to sell products and services from your blog? Well, let’s look at it this way. I don’t think the issue is that your readers aren’t interested in the products and services you offer. I think the issue is more along the lines of they don’t know what you’re offering.

Most blog I see add the buttons and banner on the right side of the screen. People don’t really look at that. A more effective way to get better visibility is to put your ads on the left. But even still, that isn’t very effective either for the fact that most all blog readers have ad blindness. Most all bloggers have grown accustom to advertisements and simply ignore them not knowing that the product or service is probably something that would truly interest them.

So what is the solution? Well, as a blogger, you have got to figure out a way to stick your advertisements in all the coin slots of the pay phones and candy machines. The minute I put my handmade business card ads in the coin slots was the minute I had 100% ad visibility. From there my conversion was just a little over 10%.

Peel Away Ads is the same thing. When people visit your blog they are going to see that they can pull the top corner of the screen down to reveal an advertisement. In many ways, this also reminds me of the famous “Fart Button” advertisement that become very popular on the Internet in the early 2000’s. The fart button was a huge success for the fact that people always clicked it. When the did so, a new page would load with an advertisement which planted a seed in the minds of the reader. Needless to say, the “Fart Button” helped increase conversions.

The same is true for Peel Away Ads. Believe me, I know this, because every time I visit a blog or a web site that is using Peel Away Ads, I always always click on it to see what is behind the screen.

If you want a system that will help you increase you ad visibility and also increase your sales conversion, I would strongly recommend purchasing the software that will allow you to create your own Peel Away Ads. Amazingly, the program is only $37 bucks! Needless to say, I placed my order without thinking twice. You should too. Many highly successful bloggers use Peel Away Ads. John Chow dot Com is one of the most popular blogs I know using the program.

If your blog has in the ball park of around 100 visits per day, there is no reason why you can’t make money with that. Granted, people like John Chow have tons more traffic, but still… having around 100 visits per day, should score you around 4 or 5 sales per week on the product or service you’re promoting. If that isn’t happening then there is a problem. Take a look at the Peel Away Ads Script. I believe that you’ll agree with me and find this program to be very effective for you in effectively marketing and promoting the products and services you advertise on your blog.

Amazingly he has learned quite a bit. He knew a lot when we first met, but talk about rolling a the snowball down the hill. Within the last two months, you wouldn’t believe what this guy has soaked in. His brain is a sponge.

Anyway, I do a little bit of web design work for Mark. In fact, his flagship site, Mason World dot Com was designed by yours truly. Recently though, he hired me to design another site of his. This site that I recently designed for Mark was the same site that he called to ask for my advice back on March 5th of 2008 which allowed for us to actually start talking more on a regular basis and eventually lead to us doing quite a bit of work together. Not only do I do design work for Mark, but he also helps me with quite a bit of things with Internet marketing. What the hell? Taking advice from a noob!! LOL!!! Needless to say, Mark is very talented and someone I would strongly recommend pairing up with.

The site that I redesigned is called History of Elvis. It is really a prime example niche site in my opinion. While his site is very much an experiment, I have always felt it has a very high potential for success. I think after redesigning this site, it will soon start to really bring in the dollars for Mark. Which it’s deserved… Mark works very hard.

Here is a screen shot of what the site looked like before:

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Here is a screen shot of what the site looks like now:

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Here is a screen shot of the header graphic I made in Adobe Photoshop Version 6.0

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Previous Design Work By Garry Conn

Here are some additional screen shots and examples of my previous work I have done for myself on some blogs that I own.

The Airplane Blog

This is a personal blog of mine where I publish uniquely written content about aviation and airplanes.

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Website: www.airplaneblog.com

Beechcraft Aircraft News and Information

This is a personal blog of mine where I write uniquely written content related to Beechcraft aircraft.

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website: www.beech-aircraft.com

Celebrity Access

This is yet another personal blog of mine uniquely written content is published about celebrity news and gossip.

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website: www.celebrity-access.com

Blog The Internet

This is a personal blog of mine where I write content about all kinds of deals, sales, holiday or seasonal specials and finding the best deals online.

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website: www.blogtheinternet.com

Hire Garry Conn For Your Blog Design

I am available for hire. All my blog designs come packed with very practical and search engine friendly code, superior level of custom CSS and amazing layouts and formats. Graphics are done in Photoshop Version 6.0. Themes are optimized for WordPress 2.5 and the Cost is only $250 dollars.

Here are my observations of my readership. I have readers who are very skilled in web design but suck at writing. I have readers who are very skilled in writing but suck at marketing and promoting. I have readers who are very skilled in programming but aren’t very sociable or personable. All these great qualities in people are amazing. On the other hand, everyone has weaknesses or characteristics that aren’t up to par compared to others. All in all, no one is perfect and its rare to find an individual who is well rounded in having an expert level of experience in all the elements needed towards creating a money making machine on the Internet.

I have mentioned this many times in the past. However, since I do have quite a few new readers within the last few months, I want to remind people again of how important it is to network, make friends and discover the strengths as well as the weaknesses in other people you surround yourself in. Overall, this is what I see in my readership. I see hundreds of people who have the same goals, the same motivations and the same drive to achieve winning and finding success in the business of blogging and making money online. However, another very common element I see is that not many people are successful in this attempt to make money online.

The reason being is the fact that you’re not coming to terms with the fact that you can’t do it alone and you can’t do it all by yourself. Believe me, you are not the only one who reads my blog who has the goals and the desires to learn how to make money online and take your piece of the pie that all these other successful guys are doing daily.

My suggestion for you is to bite the bullet and recognize that bad breath is better than no breath at all and come to terms with the fact that you can’t do this by yourself. However, also come to terms knowing that most of everyone else reading this blog are also in the same boat. I believe that it is simply a matter of you investing some time into contacting other people and presenting your thoughts and ideas to them. You would be amazed with the results. You would also be amazed to discover how much the other person you contact would appreciate you for making an attempt to establish a connection with them.

People are desperate in this business and everyone wants the same freaking thing… yet, everyone wants to fly solo and not seek the help from others. If people in this niche could simply learn to take their guard down and remove the protective walls that surround their ideas and thoughts, then collaborating with others will become so much easier.

What can you bring to the table in a MMO project? Are you a graphic designer but don’t have a clue about search engines? Well, everyone knows that a killer looking blog will go far in the niche. But also, everyone knows that a blog dead in the water with no traffic isn’t good either. A graphic designer can easily pair up with an SEO and together they can make a very successful business.

Do you see where I am coming from yet? You’re not going to win in this business if you keep things to yourself. You’re not going to win if you keep spinning your wheels in the mud. You need someone to help you with a good push out of the mud, preferably someone who is also stuck in the mud works well. Finding a mutual partner in this business is very comforting. Two heads are so much better than one. Three heads are better than two. The more people that you can find in starting a make money online venture the better.

What are your thoughts? Drop me a comment and let me know more about how you feel about finding partners in the business. Do you think tag teaming in an online venture is for the birds? Or do you feel like it could help you? Speak your mind.

WhiteSmoke is an innovative software tool that improves and edits your English writing. Based on patented natural language processing (NLP) technology, WhiteSmoke performs advanced and context-based English grammar, spelling, and punctuation checking, as well as text enrichment to enhance your writing. From well-written letters and emails to friends, through to professional business documentation and presentations, WhiteSmoke is the all-in-one solution to help you write better, right now.

WhiteSmoke software is a perfect choice for a blogger and here is a huge opportunity for you to win a copy of the Executive Version (All-in-One) plus featured add-on Dictionary Multi-Language Translator sent straight to you from Zach Hamisha from WhiteSmoke.com Executive Marketing Team. Retail price: Retail cost of this software is over $250 dollars! Check out this wonderful WhiteSmoke.com video presentation.

Before I go into details about how you can win a 100% totally free copy of this amazing software, I want to take a moment and tell you more about how my life was back when my wife and I first met. It is kind of a sad story, but I feel that it will allow you to better connect with me as a person.

The Life of Garry Conn In His Early Twenties

In this modern day we live in we frequently see commercials on TV and hear ads on the radio about credit card debt. For me, having credit card debt was something my wife and I fought for years when we first got married. I am serious, when we first met we had our first child very early in our relationship. While it wasn’t a mistake, as we actually wanted to have a baby, it was a poor judgment call to do it when we did. At the time, we were both in our early 20’s, in fact I had just turned twenty years old, both were working at entry level jobs and shacked up in a two bedroom apartment.

Our financial lives were rough… very rough. In order to survive, we had no choice but to live off credit cards. Coming into our relationship, my wife Angie already had a child and adding the the new baby (my son Garry Conn III) to the mix really impacted his very badly financially. Living off credit cards was a matter of survival as our kids had to eat. Luckily for us, living off of credit cards bought us both enough time to eventually climb in our jobs. During that time I was also working sleepless nights on my first online business.

The result of living off credit cards to survive during this time resulted in a huge never ending circle. Granted both Angie and I were now beginning to get ahead in life by earning enough money with our jobs, but unfortunately the large amount of debt we accumulated over the first few years of our relationship was haunting us. Both Angie and I made enough money to pay our bills, get food for our kids and also make the minimum payments on our debts. However, we didn’t make enough money to ever really chip away at our debts. Month after month, we were only able to make minimum payments and as you know in doing so, it takes many years to completely pay off your debts.

Recognizing that Angie and I were in a situation where we were literally throwing hundreds of dollars away each month towards minimum payments, we decided to seek out the assistance of a debt consolidation company. After a few weeks of speaking with different companies, we found a company that we felt would provide us with the best service and we were able to get a debt consolidation loan which was then used to completely pay off all our credit card debts. From there, we were left with only one bill to pay each month which yielded a much lower interest rate compared to all the credit cards accounts that we were paying on.

Having the debt consolidation loan was a true life saver for us as it enabled us to be much more organized with our money and enabled us to actually pay more each month towards chipping away at our debt. The initial loan that we had was a 10 year loan and Angie and I were able to get it completely paid off in five.

How To Win The WhiteSmoke.com Contest

In this contest everyone is actually a winner. However, one person will be more of a winner than others. After reading this history story about how my life was in my early twenties, you can quickly see how credit card debt has impacted the lives of my family and myself.

To participate in this contest, I would like for you to write a 500 to 1000 word article that will provide your advice on how a family can avoid getting into credit card debt. Secondly, in this article, I would like for you to provide advice on how a family can get out of credit card debt. You can use real life examples if you or another family member had problems with credit card debt. Additionally, you can simply provide your straight advice on the subject matter.

After you complete your article, please submit the final copy to me via email to garryconn@gmail.com. From there I will assign it a reference # as I have my trusted friend, Christine Senter standing by to judge the quality and craftsmanship of your article. As I send the article into Christine Senter I will be removing elements that identify you and replacing that information with a reference #. Christine Senter will have no idea who’s article she is judging. She will be looking only at the quality of the article rather than who wrote the article.

When I have sent in all the articles, Christine Senter will relay back to me the reference # of the article she has deemed as being the best. That reference # will be paired back up to the individual who wrote the article and be crowned as the winner of this content.

Everyone Is A Winner!

Earlier, I mentioned that everyone is a winner and it’s true! All articles that are submitted in for this contest will get published and featured on my latest niche site. Full credit of this article will be maintained and you will be provided with multiple direct links to your blog or web site. This will score you traffic and name recognition – two elements that are mandatory in successful blogging.

Yes Every Contest Has A Bonus!

As you know, most all contests have a bonus. The winner of this contest not only will score the free copy of WhiteSmoke.com software but will also win an exclusive opportunity to expand on the winning article. This article expansion will then be professionally proofed and edited by Mark Sierra ($150 dollar value) and then professional typesetting and conversion to PDF will be performed my Mark Mason ($175 dollar value) into an eBook using which will become the flagship eBook of my latest successful niche blog. Lastly, Forest Park will create a professional eBook cover graphic ($75 dollar value).

For those who don’t know, Mark Sierra is a very gifted publisher with a professional degree in journalism, Mark Mason is an extremely intelligent professional engineer with an amazing career at Texas Instruments and Forest Parks is a professional artists and graphic designer with over 10 years experience. One of my best partners who is also holding the glue together in this contest is Christine Senter. She has over 20 years experience in writing and book publishing.

The final eBook will then be made available to literally thousands of people via free download on my latest niche site. The eBook will give full credit to you as the author and provide numerous links back to your blog or web site.

As you may know, eBooks are one of the best ways to funnel traffic to your web site or blog. However, if you can’t get people to download it, then it isn’t worth anything. The individual who wins this contest has a huge opportunity to put their name and writing work in the limelight.

Contest Rules

The rules are simple.

1. Submit Your Final Article in to Garry Conn by emailing it to garryconn@gmail.com
2. All participants are winners and all articles submitted will be published on Garry Conn’s latest niche blog and full credit will be provided with multiple links pointing back to your blog or web site.
3. Participants will need to write a post on their blog announcing that they have published an article on Garry Conn’s latest niche blog encouraging readers to visit the article. (URL will be provided to you as well as date the post needs to be written and published)
4. All articles will undergo anonymous judging by professional writer and publisher Christine Senter. After judging, she will inform me of the winning article.
5. The winner of the contest will be provided with the WhiteSmoke.com software.
6. The winner of the contest will also have the exclusive opportunity to expand on the winning article which will then get converted into a flagship eBook of Garry Conn’s latest niche blog. Full author credits and multiple links will be provided in the eBook which will immensely help with branding, name recognition and traffic to the winners web site or blog.

Comments and Questions?

Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions regarding this amazing contest that is packed full of multiple winning opportunities for my blog readers. It is my personal goal to see to it that you find success in blogging. I have worked very hard on putting this contest together and I do it for you. I feel wonderful knowing that I am helping so many people find personal enjoyment, freedom and success in blogging.

But will I do that? No! Why? …because this program is a bunch of crap and I would never allow myself to do something so terrible as to abuse the trust in my readership to promote a product that will make my readers poorer, when its my job to help make you richer.

Am I calling you stupid? No!! But I what I am saying is that I believe that there is a huge level of trust established between myself and my readers. I believe that because of this level of established trust between myself and my readers, I find a huge amount of success when I promote products that I believe in, such as Micro Niche Finder.

I believe that when trust is established, people will purchase products that I recommend. I also believe that people will also drop their defenses and allow me to pitch products to them successfully. I am not going to use that to my advantage, to score it big on things that I know are garbage. Why? Because I know that every time I do, I will lose the established trust I have worked long and hard to build up with my readership.

John Chow might not know it, but people do talk and his blog is not what it used to be. People don’t trust John Chow anymore and I don’t believe that John Chow acquires a lot of repeat business. Because he deals is such a high volume of people, he can obviously afford burn the bridge of trust and screw people over by promoting products such as Ty Coughlin’s Reverse Funnel System. He knows, that there is another 15,000 people he can hit up in his next marketing campaign on a different product.

So what would John Chow do? The complete opposite of me of course… John Chow would not only allow people to advertise this garbage in his sidebar but he would also accept to publish a sponsored post or paid review about it. And you know? He does it well…

In his review of The Reverse Funnel System, he is a smooth operator and publishes a flawless review that will fulfill its purpose in sending his mindless followers to a site owned by an individual named Damon Harris which promotes The Reverse Funnel System. The site was just registered only 4 days ago.

The review is nothing more than a bunch well pieced together words that cover up the smell of this crap garbage program that is only making people more in debt to their ventures in MMO rather than richer.

John Chow so casually explains that you have to invest $50 bucks up front just to get a general overview of the product and then if you decide that the program sounds good enough to work with, you’ll need to invest another whopping $3,000 dollars into this program before you can even begin to make attempts to use this system to make money.

But wait… the madness gets even better. Check this out! After spending over $3000.00 dollars into some miracle system that is supposed to make money for you automatically, you still have to invest even more money into promoting and marketing the products within this system, otherwise you fail.

John Chow mentions in his review that the ultimate deciding factor between being successful with The Reverse Funnel system and not, is all based around your ability to funnel traffic to promote the product within the system itself.

John Chow casually claims that the $50 dollar enrollment fee is simply a deterrent against people who are truly aren’t serious about making money online.

“Many people will be put off by this requirement right away and that’s the whole idea. By charging the $50 fee, the system ensure that only truly interested prospects see it.” said John Chow

Bullshit…. that $50 dollar enrollment fee is there because it can be. It doesn’t weed out the tire kickers, it’s called milking the ignorant bastards for all they got down to the last penny.

John Chow continued to provide his top grade insider’s tip on how to be successful with this program after spending over $3000.00 on it.

“…be prepare to spend some money advertising on various make money online blogs because that’s how the system works. You buy ads to generate traffic and that traffic makes you money. The more ads you buy, the more traffic you generate and the more money you make. That’s how it should work anyway.”

Let me guess, after buying into this program and being over $3000.00 dollars in debt, I need to buy a review or an advertisement from John for yet an additional $500 dollars!

John Chow then casually admits that you are totally screwed if you don’t have any more money to spend on advertising and promoting after having spent over $3000.00

“If you don’t have any money left after buying the product and paying the application fee, then making money from the system is going to be really hard. At least you can still enjoy the $3,000 product.”

Enjoy the $3,000 dollar product? In my opinion, if this system were to be printed on paper, it would go down in the history books as being the most expensive toilet paper in the world. If you purchase The Reverse Funnel system, you are in essence purchasing very expensive printable toilet paper.

Ty Coughlin is a scam artist and his Reverse Funnel System John Chow’s review is proof. John Chow mentions in his article how legit the program is based off the high demand for advertisers requesting ad slots on his blog.

Well no crap! Most people have nothing to loss at that point… after investing over $3000 dollars into a scam. You might was well go all in and spend another $500 dollars in a one last attempt to get your money back by scamming others.

Consider what a crack addicted whore would do to score $20 bucks on the streets. If you invest money into a product that scammed you out of $3000 dollars, I can only imagine to what lengths you’ll bring your A-Game into selling the piss out of the same product you bought in attempt to rebound your loss.

Money doesn’t come easy on the Internet. There is NO product that automatically generates it. And anyone who tells you differently is a liar and or a contributor towards the scam side of the MMO niche. It’s really sad to see people with such high levels of authority, respect and trust among peers to resort towards contributing and enabling others to continue feeding off the weak, desperate and ignorant in attempts to financially benefit themselves.

Claim Your Free Seat In My MMO Classroom

I was challenged by John Cow dot Com to participate in a competition against him to see who is the best MMO blogger. I accepted his challenge and have started a free MMO Case Study that will take place live during this competition. If you’d like to have a free seat in my classroom, please use the form below to complete your enrollment into my free MMO classroom case study! This is a separate mailing list from my main mailing list. Even if you are already subscribed to my mail mailing list, you will need to enroll into this one on to take your free seat in class.

Don’t be late to school! Take your free seat and witness first hand how every move I make in this game and learn how you can easily duplicate my plan towards making money online for yourself.

in my last post I called out John Cow’s past practices in the methods of how the site made money online. In the whopping mess of cow patty comments on my last post, somewhere among the smell and mess, the new/old/whatever owner of John Cow dot com challenged me to a COWpetition. He feels that he can bring his A-Game against me in a challenge of making money online.

A few ideas have been tossed around here and there, nothing at this point has been set in stone as to what the competition will be or what the rules will be.

This is what Cow man initially suggested:

“Here is a wager Gary, I will place a bet with you. We put a poll up for a market niche on a neutral place and we both build a blog focused on that niche and see who makes more money in 30 days. We both show exactly the steps we use and the tools we use and expose everything… we have nothing to hide. This could be a lot of fun. It could be a nice little competition and at the same time both of our readers will see what we teach but to practice. The wager… Lets say $500 What you say?”

The problem with that is I think it would be very difficult for myself as well as Cow man to properly authenticate our earnings. A system of some kind would need to be put into place and I can’t speak for Cow man, but I know that I don’t have the available time to invest into creating an arena for us to play on that can properly bound us to the rules with out cheating.

This is what I initially suggested to Cow man:

“Instead of seeing who can make the most money with the blogs, lets invest 30 days into developing, marketing and building the blog and then list them for sale in SitePoint and see who can get the highest successful winning bid on selling it? The person who can sell their niche blog for the highest amount in a NO RESERVE Sitepoint auction wins the game. Both sites will end up selling and the runner up who sells for less, transfers their earnings to the winner of the game.”

So these are the two initial ideas that have been throw into the mix. What do you think? Would you like to make a suggestion on how this contest should be conducted? Drop me a comment and share your thoughts, I am all ears.

Free MMO Case Study Classroom Enrollment

For me, the purpose of this competition is to provide a true case study on how I will be winning this game. This will be a huge learning experience for you for the fact that I will be going “All In” on this game. Meaning I will be exercising every skill, every talent, every strategy and every tactic I have up my sleeve to win.

I will be documenting my every move and providing a full explanation of each decision made during game play. The people who follow me in class will learn some real top grade secrets in the business of making money online.

If you would like to take a seat in my classroom and witness first hand of me totally milking this cow man for every penny he has in this game, I have an open seat for you. I will be documenting everything I do on digital paper. However, my chronicles will not be made public on the blog as it will reveal vital information about my game play to my competitor in this COWpetition.

If you decide to take free seat in my class, during the game you will be constantly updated with my activity and tactical advances on how I am progressing in the game. Ultimately, when the game is complete and I collect my winnings you too can then copy everything I did in the game and duplicate it for yourself in your own make money online dot Com ventures. You get all this absolutely for free!

If you would like to take a seat in my classroom and witness a total domination in this COWpetition, please enroll by subscribing into my COWpetition mailing list. In this journey to take the win, I am going to need your help with a few things. I am sure that you’ll be willing to lend a helping hand as I am going to be investing double the time into this competition by not only bringing my A-Game for the win, but also by investing the time into documenting my every move so that you too can learn a winning strategy in the business of making money online.

Claim Your Free Seat In My MMO Classroom

Please use the form below to complete your enrollment into my free MMO classroom case study! This is a separate mailing list from my main mailing list. Even if you are already subscribed to my mail mailing list, you will need to enroll into this one on to take your free seat in class.

Don’t be late to school! Take your free seat and witness first hand how every move I make in this game and learn how you can easily duplicate my plan towards making money online for yourself.

Remember, I will not be publishing any of my strategies on my blog. From time to time, I will be updating my readers with how the COWpetition is going; however, if you want to be in on the loop and learn first hand what I am doing towards winning this competition, you’re going to want to take your free seat and enroll into my free MMO Classroom Case Study.

So I bet you have been wondering who is the new owner of John Cow dot Com? You may have noticed that things have started to go back in the right direction for the cow site. Quality seems to be much better with the site sporting the new Keyword Research Mini Series [Read: Part One | Part Two | Part Three]

After the release of these three posts, I discovered that the word on the street, or at least in my Google Alerts and around the blogosphere, is that people think I am the new owner of John Cow dot Com. People who don’t believe that I am the new owner at a minimum believe that I at least have been hired to write on the site. Strange vibes are in the air as people feel that I have some kind of affiliation with the site. What do you think? Do you think I am the new owner of John Cow dot Com?

If you recall, last month the owner made a press release about the listing John Cow dot com for sale in SitePoint. Naturally, this sent a shock wave through the blogosphere (well, the MMO niche corner at least) because a lot of people have come to like this blog. Back in July of 2007 the site was launched as a parody of the famous John Chow dot Com.

The above screen shot was taken July 7th 2007

Source: BloggingTips.com

It was blatantly obvious that John Cow dot Com was an entertaining copy cat of John Chow. Needless to say, thousands of people clinged on to the site and the John Mad Cow Disease started to spread like wild viral linking fire. The explosive growth of the site has even caused the famous John Chow to interact and milk the madness a few times on his own blog.

Last month John Cow dot Com inadvertently got caught in the cross fire that was initially aimed at others. As with most controversial blog posts, the article I wrote a post titled, Flipping Blog Scams and The MMO Niche is Full of Jerks, had a huge reaction among shared readers between my blog and John Cow’s. In that post I said this to the owner of John Cow dot Com,

“I have been very disappointed with you and your blog for awhile. Your blog is no different that the rest of the bullshit MMO sites that do nothing but spin off the same stupid information found on the other 100 or so other MMO blogs. Your blog doesn’t help anyone learn how to make money online, yet your blog heavily advertises the fact that it does.”

It was predictable that I would get a direct response published on John Cow dot Com. Here is what the owner had to say,

“Garry accuses us for example that we heavily advertise ourselves as a blog that teaches others how to make money online, while we don’t. Have a look at our header Garry, we’ve been “Milking the Internet since 2007“. We’re making money online with our blog, and we make no secret of it. We do sponsored reviews, like you. We sell private advertising, like you. We endorse affiliate products, like you. We’re open and honest about what we do and why we do it, unlike you.”

So there you have it in a nutshell. The owner of John Cow openly admits that he is not in the business of teaching people how to make money online. Secondly, he admits that the site is used to trick people into buying bullshit products and that their chief level of concern is for what is in your wallet and not for what is in your heart. Lastly, he attempts to throw some flame back on GCDC by stating that I published sponsored posts, promote bogus products and rob people from their money just as he does.

To top this all off, the ultimate scam is that John Cow dot Com was being offered for sale to any ignorant individual who had $50,000 USD to shell out on their next biggest error in judgment. It’s one thing to trick people into buying a bullshit eBook for $19.95, but I tend to get pissed off when I witness higher grade behaviors that involve serious money that could seriously impact the financial well being of an individual who could potentially be tricked into buying a web site at such a high expense.

But what does the owner of John Cow dot Com care? He doesn’t. We have already witnessed his true colors and character in the above statement directed to me. With having the owner of John Cow dot Com openly admit that he is honest about screwing people over leads me to believe that he too would be honest (after the fact) about screwing over the person who made the idiotic decision to invest $50,000 USD into the site.

John Cow dot Com listed for sale in SitePoint on April 14th, 2008

In my 31 years of living I have learned a quite a few things in life. One of which is the fact that history tends to repeat itself and if you cast a line into a pond, eventually a fish will bite… the more lines you cast into the pond, the more chance you have at scoring a catch. John Cow dot Com does not have a new owner because I believe that the site was never truly up for sale. Yes, the site was listed in SitePoint. Yes, there were actual bids on the domain. But, the site was never sold and eventually the listing on SitePoint was cancelled.

John Cow dot Com listed for sale in Sitepoint on August 9th, 2007

Instead, I believe that listing John Cow dot Com was purely a marketing strategy to flood traffic and gain more readers to the site. As I had said, history has a tendency to repeat itself and casting more lines in the pond will increase the odds of catching a fish. This isn’t the first time the owner of John Cow dot Com has listed his site for sale in SitePoint. It seems that back in August of 2007, just a few months after launching the site, it was listed for sale in SitePoint for $20,000 USD. The pitch to the listing was, “Own a piece of blogging history, we’ve outdone the original.”

So you see, the owner of John Cow dot Com had nothing to lose. Back in August of 2007, if some idiot had ended up buying his site for $20,000 USD, the owner of John Cow would have pulled off the ultimate dot Com blog scam of 2007. Obviously, no one took the bait and the owner was not successful in selling John Cow dot Com for the asking $20k. However, he still won as he was successful in his marketing strategy and scored tons of readers and interest in the site.

John Cow dot Com listed for sale in Sitepoint on December 20th, 2007

Amazingly enough, the owner of John Cow dot Com decided to repeat the whole process once again in Dec. of 2007 immediately after Google had updated PageRank, granted the site with a PR5.

In April of 2008, after reflecting on how successful the August 2007 and December 2007 marketing strategy was, the owner of John Cow dot Com decided to repeat the same strategy and once again, offered John Cow dot Com up for sale in SitePoint. Why not? What’s there to lose? Either some idiot will take the bait and purchase the site, this time around for $50,000 USD or the owner of John Cow dot Com walks away after having hundreds of bloggers write posts and give him free publicity.

You see, listing your blog in SitePoint is becoming a trend. It’s a win/win marketing strategy. You list your blog for sale for some ridicules amount of money, if someone is stupid enough to buy it, you win. If no one ends up buying it, you leave after having everyone and their grandmother blogging about it.

That is my thoughts on this situation. I don’t believe that John Cow dot Com was ever truly up for sale. I believe that if some idiot happened to have purchased the site for $50,000, the site would have been sold. But I don’t believe that the owner had any expectation of someone actually considering making the purchase. In my opinion, the owner of John Cow dot Com was in it for the hype and the free publicity, which as mentioned above, will continue to be used to exploit the ignorance of people who want so badly to learn how to make money online, they’ll believe in the promotion of the products and services being listed and advertised on the site, which as we all know will make the owner money and cause the readers to continue to lose money.

The part that I personally enjoy the most from this situation is the fact that when the owner of John Cow dot Com decided to make an attempt to beef up his quality in his content, people started to suspect that I either purchased the site myself or was hired to write on it.

The sad part to this story is that eventually the owner of John Cow dot Com will be successful in pulling off his lifelong dream of scamming and tricking some poor sap out of a lot of money for a blog that doesn’t make even close the the amount of money or traffic being inaccurately reported.

I can seriously relate to that. If you step back for a minute, I believe that you’ll start to see the light on this too. Google has been slowly working on many things that allow them to get a better feel for the content that people feel are personally important to them. While this data isn’t shared with others and it is kept private, the information is all stored on their servers and I believe is being used to help calculate the how certain things rank in their search engine.

Google Web History

When you’re logged into you iGoogle account, and if you have enabled Web History, Google is keeping a record of everything you do on the Internet 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and 365 days out of the year in your Google Web History account. Google follows your trends, they know what your favorite web sites are, they look for patterns in your surfing habits such as the time of day you commonly check your email and they know what your primary interests are based off the different blogs, pages and sites you visit.

In plain English Google says this, “ Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations. In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services. We will not disclose this information to other companies or individuals, except in the limited circumstances described in our main Google Privacy Policy, or with your consent.”

Source: Google Privacy FAQ for Web History

Does your surfing habits which are being logged into Google Web History have an influence on Google SERPS? I’d like to think that they do.

Google Subscribed Links

Google Subscribed Links is an amazing service. Register for the service and get all your friends to subscribe and basically you can incorporate the things that you find on the Internet which are important to you into the search results of Google. People who subscribe to your Google Subscribed Links will see instances of things that you have added into your Google Subscribed Links database when they search for something that has the same keywords as an entry you added into the system.

Google explains this service by saying, “Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services for your customers, provide news and status information updated in near-real-time, answer questions, calculate useful quantities, and more.”

While this information isn’t shared or sold to third party companies, is it far fetched to believe that Google will use this information internally to place an emphasis on how things rank in their main engine? Could it be foolish to assume that Google will consider the subscriber base of some of these custom engines and place a level of authority in these micro engine sites? I would think so. End users who have successfully gained a large number of opt in subscription to their Google Subscribed Links system are natural magnets for great quality. People don’t subscribe to garbage and if the custom engine was indeed a link pool of bad information, then there wouldn’t be a large mass of subscribers. I believe that Google is or soon will be looking at end user’s Google Subscribed Links engine when considering how to rank content in their main index.

Google Notebook

Google Notebook is something I am really going to start making use of. The service is absolutely amazing as you can highlight content on the Internet and paste it into your notebook to make a forever long and permanent archive of the information. In Google Notebook, you have the ability to make many individual notebooks, all of which can have their own individual sections. You can make a Make Money Online notebook and capture all your favorite articles related to that. Secondly you can make sections such as the John Chow section in your Make Money Online notebook and snip copies of his articles in there.

All in all Google Notebook is a very exciting feature. Your Google Notebook(s) can all be made public, they can all stream an RSS, they all can be imported into your Google Bookmarks, they all can be imported into your Google Reader and then added into your shared items folder. All of which I believe will soon if not already impact how things rank in Google’s main index.

What About Traditional SEO Strategies and Tactics?

I am going to agree with ShoeMoney on this one. I think his insight is superior to many others in this niche as he tends to downplay his level of knowledge. Are the old days of making sure you make use of the proper <title> tags; <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags; <img alt=”, <a title=”, and other related tags over? The use of traditional SEO strategies and tactics very well may be limited. The days bartering for link exchanges and asking your friends to provide search engine friendly links on their blogs that point back to yours may start to have little to no impact on your ranking in Google. To me, it would seem more logical of Google to make use of their services such we Web History, Bookmarks and Notebook to place weight on how content ranks in their search engine.

To me, it would seem less likely to be gamed successfully by people who are trying to exploit their ranking system. I am not saying that their evolving ranking system can’t be gamed, but I am saying that people will have to work much much harder to successfully do it. Long story short is if you’re going to invest the time into saving content into your Google Bookmarks and adding an entry into your Google Notebook and possibly even adding the content into your shared folder in Google Reader or adding the content into your Subscribed Links via Google COOP, the content you are adding into your iGoogle account most likely will be good content as most end users are not going to want to crap up their own personal accounts with junk and garbage. Secondly, your public reputation is also on the line.

In the realm of social bookmarking, maintaining a good standing order in the many various networks including your public activity on Google is crucial towards building and maintaining a good online reputation among peers. In many ways, I believe that Google is banking on this factorization which inadvertently prevents web spam due to end users not wanting to be classified as a spammer publicly among their peers. In my eyes, it is superior thinking on Google’s part and it is something that I think will evolve into a much more accurate and powerful ranking system compared to the traditional PageRank system. I look forward to it as it continues to evolve and shape into form as I feel that it is a system that I will do very well in. In fact, in many ways I have been making very proactive measures towards establishing myself in this shifting and evolving ranking system. You should too. Now that you have read my article and understand more about what I think, take a moment and drop me a comment and share your thoughts.

The home page of MoreNiche is pretty common just like many of the other sites I have seen in the past. You can either sign up to become an affiliate or sign up to become a merchant.

If you’re interested in making money online, you’re going to want to sign up as an affiliate. If you’re interested in having a ton of people promote your products who want to earn your commission, you should sign up to become a merchant. Follow this link to sign up for MoreNiche.com.

What is The MoreNiche Affiliate Program?

MoreNiche is an affiliate network, which allows you to earn large commisions for promoting highly desirable products and services online. For every conversion (sale, lead, phone call) you make, they will pay you up to $300.

MoreNiche provides you with everything you need including marketing tools, free websites and one on one support. Amazingly, this program rewards you with $45 just for getting started and also will pay you $20 dollars per person you successfully refer your friends into their program. How cool is that?

Aside from signing up all your friends at a price of $20 bucks per pop, you can actually make money with programs that are being offered for you to promote and or sell on your blog. MoreNiche.com seems to be fairly new, so if you’re looking to get on a program just as it first started, MoreNiche is that program.

The above is a screen shot of a product in the MoreNiche affiliate program that is paying out up to $300 dollars for the sale of their Annual Pro software package! Imagine just scoring one of these sales per day… how about just three per week?

All in all, I like MoreNiche.com and it is a program I am definitely going to investigate further. I just signed up this morning and I would like to extend the invitation for you to join as well. Right out of the gate, you’re going to make a lot of money just by telling your friends about it.

Sign Up Today!

Don’t wait, you need to sign up today so that you can invite your friends to score the $20 referral. You know how blogging works, news gets around pretty fast. However, this is so new, that if you sign up and write a post about it on your blog, chances are your friends haven’t heard about it just yet. So be sure to join, you could make $200 bucks today just for telling 10 friends.

- Join MoreNiche.com Today

Edit…. The information available on MoreNiche.com is somewhat misleading. When you refer your friends who end up signing up as affiliates, you will get 5% off their sales. MoreNiche.com lead me to believe that individuals would gain $20 dollars per person they referred. While this is true, this will only happen, I believe, if the person referred signs up as an advertisers. I have successfully referred around 25 people or so and haven’t seen any money for that, so this is what lead me to make this edit.

However, the old saying, “A day late and a dollar short” is very true for many new MMO bloggers who have engaged into this blogosphere circus I call the “Make Money Online Niche.” The reason being is very simple. Many of the leading bloggers of within the last few years ago, no longer focus and publish content related to their original topic, that of course covering the topic of teaching people how to make money online.

Time has an interesting effect on things. As the days, weeks, months and years go by and more and more people become interested in blogging and making money online with a blog, the number of people who perceive of older generation MMO bloggers as MMO leaders have declined. A once been “learn how to make money online with John Chow” is now slowly rebranding and remolding with a new image as being just a simple and nice guy blogger, and an all around average joe.

Commonly today, you’ll find a heavier concentration of articles on John Chow dot Com that spin off more information about the personal life of John Chow, rather than finding content related to him teaching people how to make money online, which was commonly found almost on a daily basis just only two years ago. Paying regular visits to John Chow dot Com today, you’ll find yourself learning more about his daughter Sally or the gossip and tech talk surrounding his friends at lunch in his new video blog series, Dot Com Pho.

Dot Com Pho is a recent movement away from John Chow’s famous make money online bit. This is a weekly video blog series that features John Chow and friends who gossip about a variety of topics and review some of the latest releases on tech gadgets.

While the series has sparked a moderate level of interest - averaging around 1000 view each week - it goes to prove that John Chow indeed is migrating away from his grass roots of blogging about making money online. Many believe that is dot Com Make Money Online reign came to an abrupt end when Google, Inc. decided to pull the plug on his superior rankings in their organic search engine late June of 2007.

So how does a blogger who has been newly introduced to the world of making money online with a blog find the hidden treasures found on John Chow dot Com? What many bloggers of all levels of experience commonly fail to realize is that content found of blogs typically hold a moderately long shelf live despite being buried off the home page.

In the world of blogging, once content drops off the home page it’s old news and commonly new bloggers don’t venture too deeply into the archives of many of the more successful blogs such as John Chow dot Com.

One of the best ways a blogger who has an interest in learning how to make money online with a blog can learn about the business is by actually reading John Chow dot Com backwards.

There was once a day when John Chow was all about helping bloggers learn the business of making money online. Fortunately, the archives of John Chow dot Com are are still available for new bloggers just starting out and even older and more seasoned bloggers who need a refresher course in the business.

While John Chow doesn’t actively provide much support for the MMO niche, the content he has written in the past is priceless and available for your to read anytime you want. Many believe that once blog content reaches the archives that it becomes stale and outdated.

While this can be true to some extent, you’ll find that a lot of the articles found in the archives of John Chow dot Com will prove to be very helpful. Ultimately, I recommend reading John Chow dot Com starting from the beginning and working your way to the end, rather than read his most recent articles first.

This of course, is opposite of how blogs are normally read, but then again, you’re aiming to learn the business of making money online with a blog and it’s not your goal to follow John Chow as if he were a common celebrity icon.

Another excellent way to extract the information related to the topics that interest you would be to use Google to filter out all the junk and return only the articles that are relevant to your interests.

You can do this simply by visiting www.google.com and typing in, site:johnchow.com “keywords” and pressing the search button.

Even though individuals such as John Chow are steering away from their founding topic of teaching people how to make money online, the previously written information is still there. Perhaps, John Chow is moving away from the topic of writing about teaching others about making money online because he has covered all the bases already?

Another theory would be that John Chow has never rebound from losing his rankings in Google and things haven’t been the same since early spring of 2007.