My Thoughts on John Cow, Earth and The People That Suck the Oxygen
Sorry folks for not keeping you in the loop on what has been going on recently with the Cowpetition. It’s been a very challenging time for me with personal things going on in my family life. May sound silly but this time of year is baseball season for my son and he just finished up his springball season and has been accepted for the third year in a row to the All-Stars team.
Quite a bit of my time is devoted to that. And really that is the main reason why I do what I do so that I have the freedom of being able to drop like a rock and do what I want when I want. I have zero commitments to anyone and only to my family. 
With that being said, I do apologize for not keeping you up to date. So here’s an update on events.
John Cow and I both have our sites up on SitePoint.com. They are both doing very well. John is in the lead with a current bid of $700 and I am falling behind at $255. You know, I am cool with that. During the 30 day development period, I was able to score $66 dollars off of less than 1000 visits while he claimed to have 100k visits and only scored $35 bucks. To me, I’d rather have the $66 bucks off the little amount of bandwidth versus having tons of useless traffic.
In my opinion its all about building a site that makes money online with the least amount invested. I have proved that. While I am not discarding his efforts entirely because I am actually very impressed with the amount of time and energy John Cow has invested into this game, I can’t help but toss in the fact that all that hard work and “Advanced” and “Expensive” software only scored him $35 dollars.
With me… well, it was just me and my trusty copy of Micro Niche Finder. John Cow has a staff of employees who worked very very hard on GamerzReviewz.com while I was fortunate to have friends who voluntarily helped me with writing 25 posts for a chance to win a prize. I also had four close online friends that pooled together their skills to help me finalize a sellable eBook for the site written by Annie Binns.
The total amount of time invested into this project was very little. Again, that is really what I am all about. My profession, my job, whatever you want to call it, is in developing niche sites that make a passive income. In the past, my base has been with Google AdSense. Still to this day, Google AdSense remains my #1 online money maker. While I continue to make efforts towards broadening my horizons and expanding with finding other sources of income, still to this day, Google AdSense pays my bills and gives food to my kids.
The end result of DebtConsolidationBook.com is very typical of the amount earned per site that I already maintain. My goal is to develop multiple low maintenance blogs that each earn a minimum of around $100 dollars per month. If you have 10 of them, you’re scoreing $1000/ month. If you have 100 of them, you’re scoring $10,000 per month.
For me and in my past experience, it is easier to run 100 mini or rather, “Low Maintenance” blogs compared to running one “Superman” blog such as John Chow dot Com. In order to gain the $100 dollar / month goal per site, I need around 100 visits per day. For me, it is so much easier to score the 100 visits per day per blog rather than the 10,000 visits per day per ONE blog.
What I am explaining to you today in this article is what I have been doing and growing for over a year. It all started with airplanes. I am the proud owner of very close to 100 unique airplane sites. I update them as I can… some days are better than others… other times I’ll go weeks without updates. I am the proud owner of close to 20 real estate sites and I have a handful of other odd topic sites… some sports related, some tech related and even a few celebrity related blogs.
Just recently I finally hit home with something I have been explaining to many people in the past. I was talking to Joe form IMWithJoe.com and I explained to him what I do and told him about boats. He wanted to know how I make money and I explained to him about my airplanes sites and then told him he could duplicate the same thing with boats. He jumped right on that and boat himself a boat domain. I think its real cool to see that he had an interest in it.
Granted, I went off and purchased about $250 dollars worth of boat domain names too (sorry Joe.. but don’t worry there is room for both of us. ) All in all, the key thing to remember he is that what I did with DebtConsolidationBook.com is no different than what I have been doing all year.
It’s all about the passive income. It’s all about having multiple “Low Maintenance” blogs that each earn around $100/ month. That’s my deal… that’s what I do and that is what I teach.
I am not a business guy… I don’t run a corporation. I am a 31 year old guy who wants to stay at home so that I watch my son play baseball and take my daughter to the park. I am actually a pretty lazy guy. Point being is this… John Cow whoever that guy may be, it’s obvious that he has a lot of business experience. You can tell that immediatly in the advice that he is publishing on his blog.
I am not like that. I am not a business man… I am a person who enjoys making money online with blogs. I am also someone who can freely write about many different things online. I am someone who can type very very fast. I am someone who is keen on how search engines work. I am someone who knows HTML, CSS and basic PHP / MySQL programming. I am very creative. I am very persistent. I am stubborn. I don’t sleep.
These qualities make for a perfect blogger. So in regards to the CowPetition… I see my efforts as a total planned and predicted success. I did everything I normally would do in about 90 days and compressed it into 30 days. In fact, I did a lot more than I normally do on a niche site. My typical niche site is monetized with Google AdSense. On DebtConsolidationBook.com I broke away from that a little bit and developed a product…. a professionally written and published eBook. Secondly, I took a shot at doing email list marketing using Aweber.
The end result was scoring $66 dollars and having a top bid so far of $255 dollars. I’d say that not too shabby for getting paid for education. Many people pay big bucks to learn a trade or skill and in my case, I got paid to learn and enhance my current skills and abilities. In the process of doing so, I took many people with me and taught them what I know and made a ton of new friends doing it as well.
So… I always said to myself, “win, lose or draw” nothing but good can come from this competition against John Cow and today I am very happy and can’t wait to move on!!!
With all the above being said, I need to make a decision and I’d like your feedback on what I should do. In John Cow’s most recent post he wrote this:
The auction of GamerzReviewz over at sitepoint is going ok… we approved a bid of $700 and have a few pm’s asking for a buy now price. The contest is to have the site up for 30 days but to be honest we would love to just be done with it. We love the site and would rather keep it but on the other hand it is frustrating to keep it and manage it when you know you are selling it… which leads us to a thought that just came to us.
Right now our blog is at $700 and Garry’s is at $255…. would it be wrong if we pulled it out to keep it for ourselves and just donated $1000 (which is $300 more then the current bid) to World Vision?
As readers of this blog please let us know your thoughts on that… we do not want to put one more thought into it until we hear your thoughts.
What are your thoughts? You all have been with me since day one on this little adventure… so I really would like to collect your feedback and opinions on this. Keep in mind I am very open minded and this whole event has been a very friendly competition. I don’t hate John Cow or have ANY adverse feelings against him. If fact I have a lot of respect for what he has done for the MMO niche.
As you many know… I kind of already have some sour apples for the MMO niche with so many people out there who trick others and in many ways simply rob people of their money. It got to the point last month where I was really considering making Garry Conn dot Com into a freaking FlickR syndication and just have the site be nothing but pictures or something cheesy like that.
Really, before the competition I was real sour at the MMO niche. So I am very glad to have someone strong helping me in spreading the good in this business. Before the competition I was blogging about all the difference things that pissed me off in the niche. All the different scams out there and all the different people who I felt were a joke to the niche. All in all, I really had a big chip on my shoulder with the MMO niche. So, after the competition its really good to see someone else out there who carries my same ethics and beliefs and who too wants to help others in the business of making money online.
Anyway… bla bla bla… If you’re still awake after reading this, drop me a comment and give me your thoughts on how or what John Cow and I should do about this. I feel the same, I want the competition to be freaking OVER. I am tired, and I have many blogs that need tending to and I have a lot of things lined up new for GCDC as well and so much I want to share. But I really can’t do that right now with having this big thorn in my side… which is a 30 day auction hovering over my head.
So, ball is in your court GCDC readers, what do you want me to do?
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53 comments
I am not sure which numbers you are going from, but “the Cow” has only received 10,000 unique visits.
You can’t look at pageviews in AWstats with a wordpress blog, because so much junk counts as page views.
Hi Garry,
it has been a competition between YOU and JOHN COW, the readers where only spectators whith the benefit to learn all what you both were doing on your way to succed in the competition.
We (the readers) have already won: look at the amount of good information you both provided (I need still time to get thru it).
So IMHO you BOTH can decide freely what to do with it.
From my side I say a big THANK YOU to both, it’s nice to read you BOTH.
ciao
alexander
Man, I say if you two come to a collective decision, then, go for it. I know how much work you’ve put in and it’s amazing. Especially with the amount of resources you had going in.
I’ve learned a lot, and if it wasn’t for this little competition, we may not have become pals, so, that to me is priceless!
And thanks for the boat tips, I had shared my strategy with a few pals online, showing how I combined your methods with some other ideas I had, so thanks for that. I knew you’d get you some of those boats domains hahahaha, you’re a business man.
I say if you guys want it to be over, then let it be over.
I’ve been thinking about the boats niche too, because analysing what you were doing with the airplanes I’ve been thinking about something else in the luxury market: airplanes are saturated by somebody from Clarksville (LOL), cars are oversaturated, boats seemed to me (not already, but $250 = at least 25 domains !!!) saturated.
Although in my language there isn’t so much adsense and affiliate ads and that was holding me back, but I want to get rid of this obstacle and I’ve started my first blogs in english.
Do you mind if in future i’ll try to step into the boats niche too ? (Off course only if you guys have left some crumbs for me
)
ciao
alexander
Well, of course, it’s up to you and John Cow. But here’s the thing: if the bids were reversed, I don’t imagine Cow would be so willing to donate money and call it a day.
Each of you put in a lot of work, but for him to say he’s tired and not in it for the long haul (all of 30 days of bidding), then I’d call that a disappointment and it’s because in his mind he’s won because he has the higher bid.
Personally, I think it’s the winning bid that should decide who won the competition.
In my opinion, I think all the money should be donated, no matter who wins. The real winners in this whole thing were those of us who watched and learned. You both proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is possible to create a niche site and make money from it.
There are a lot of organizations out there who could really use the money made from both sites. Being a member of the Boy Scouts, I know that the Boy Scout Ranch that was wiped out by a tornado could use some donations. To see the money made from both sites donated to ANY organization would be the perfect ending to this entire competition.
Hi Andy,
I should be more careful when I represent my competition and overshoot their traffic by say, 90k.
Actually I was more or less looking at his reported page views, but I should have stated that rather than confuse the terms like hits, views, visits, etc… For me I was looking at the page views. Having 100k, or really in his case 159681 page views, I can’t seem to understand why he didn’t make more money.
And yes… I totally agree with you on AWstats. I think many people use Awstats so that they can make people think that their blog or site is much bigger than what it really is.
Thanks for stopping by man.
I just wrote a post about benefits. How odd.
Hey man… we are both glad to help, I am not too sure how Cow is feeling, but I feel like taking a vacation or sticking an electric cord in my ear and the other end into a socket for recharging. I am kind of drained.
We are going to be able to do some wicked cross promoting and float a lot of boats each other’s way.
I get really special discounts now at Godaddy.
That’s odd though, because if I were winning with the bids, I wouldn’t want to stop the auction. He is winning and does? To me, stopping the auction would kinda leave a mystery of who really won. I could have quite a few people sitting on my auction and waiting until the last minute to place their bid. So you never really know what happens until it’s over. But, I am open to whatever… also I am losing in the auction right now, so ending early and leaving it a mystery sounds kind of appealing.
That is very thoughtful. John Cow is donating to a charity. He wants to end the auction early and buy his own domain for $1000.00. He will do that by donating the thousand to World Vision.
I already stated a month ago that I was not going to be donating my earning to charity. With Angie and I having our 4th kid… we kinda are charity. I think it’s great what Cow is doing, and we for sure would do the same thing, but we have some serious financial issues potentially upcoming in just two months.
Well, that is understandable. And I don’t blame you at all. I’m one of those people who would end up starving to death in order to feed everyone else. Please don’t take offense to my comment. I know how much it takes to feed a family.
I am so offended… let me tell ya!
LOL!!!!
Garry,
Shut up. LOL
Oh what is this crap??? You offend me and then tell me to shut up?? Sheesh… I can’t take the abuse anymore…
Don’t make me call your wife.
PS, how is she feeling?
She is feeling pregnant and hits me a lot. I tried to seek help and support for that abuse but its seems that there is no symphony or support for guys who are subjected to abuse from the wife whom they have knocked up.
Oh well… I have electricity and a small apartment sized fridge in my dog house.
that means they’re even more than 25 domains
I need a lot of domain names to send links to Joe’s sites.
Garry,
Congratulations on your son making the All-Stars team!
~Debby
Garry, BTW what happened to the announced Admax theme release ?
ciao
alexander
That’s exactly my point, stopping it now would leave it a mystery but give him bragging rights to say his bid was higher. That one winning bidder could still be out there who hasn’t yet gotten to your site.
I haven’t released it yet.
Not to worry, coming soon.
I still got bragging rights that I made double during the 30 day period.
But I do see what you’re saying. To be honest… it doesn’t matter much to me. We can let it rock for the 30 days or not. I got to get moving on… LOL!!!
Hopefully I have a few sitters on the auction and will be bidding in soon.
In my opinion its all about building a site that makes money online with the least amount invested. I have proved that
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t spend a penny on my site other than in hosting and aweber.
There comes a time when it’s not bad to invest money into a site… but it’s really not needed if you are just aiming for a passive income.
Gary, I have a question you said you need 100 visitors to earn 100 dollars a month<My question is why am I not making that with around 800 visits per day and over 1200 pageviews?
as far as the competition goes, as others have said, many people do wait until the end of an auction to be sneaky (snipe) to help keep contenders away. Although I don’t have the cash to bid, if I were to bid, that is what I would be doing. So people thinking cow “already won” are probably off a bit. In reality, he probably got more bids because he has a little more reach so more people have seen his auction most likely. Maybe you can post about the sale on the DP forums and then just link to the sitepoint auction to get some more viewers lol
.
But as far as value, I personally would rather have yours, Garry. It has obviously made more but, in my eyes, it has much more potential value because of the setup, the niche, the products and the planning. His may make a decent blog for readers but not nearly as much potential.
And to be honest, I think you would have smacked the original john cow around without a problem…the new guy does seem to have some actual experience, talent and motivation.
As far as ending the auction early or buying out the sites with donations, as others have said, it’s kind of up to you guys. I’m sure there will be some that would be upset as they may have promoted the contest because of the charity potential but if there were still donations made then it should still count. And even if you both decide not to go with a “buyout” thing, couldn’t you just shorten the auctions to a week instead?
Regardless, like everyone else mentioned, the readers were the real winners. It was nice to finally read some good content on the cow lol and it was great seeing both methods and thoughts on the best strategies. Hopefully it will happen again some day
Although I won’t hold it against either of you if you end it, I think the contest should run as described. Fortunately, since it’s low maintenance for you, you should be able to let it run on its own (or close to it). If would be interesting to see the final bid prices too. Keeping true to your word in the IM world seems pretty pertinent to me.
I’m curious–John wants to keep his site–do you feel the same way about your site?
Thanks for the great info. I have enjoyed watching you both and have learned a lot.
Together, we are stronger.
Vicki Flaugher, the original SmartWoman
Hi Vicki,
Thanks for dropping a comment. John Cow wants to keep his site and I favor more on selling mine rather than keeping it. I’d like to see what someone else could do with it. I’d keep an eye on it and probably even help out from time to time with advice and such if it were sold to someone with lesser experience.
Garry:
Interesting that you mentioned the chip on your shoulder re: MMO niche. Not sure if you remember, but it was your rant against some poor bastard who thought you were running a scam that actually made me enter your contest in the first place. I figured anyone that took the time to defend himself in this market must be the real deal. I couldn’t have been more right – you work your ass off and I think anyone who followed the CowPetition has enormous respect for you. That is something you can’t buy on SitePoint.
I say let the contest run until finished if for no other reason than to say you did.
To digress – you’re one lucky guy. My husband doesn’t even have running water in his doghouse.
Annie!!!
I am so happy to hear from you. My one only true regret in this project was dropping the ball with spending more personal time with you. My jaw absolutely DROPPED when you just took the ball and rolled with it.
For those that don’t know this story, I so much have to share this with you. Annie Binns is the author of the most wonderful eBook that is on DebtConsolidationBook.com. She won a contest on my blog that gave her some pretty cool software plus an opening to work with me and some really cool online friends of mine, Mark Mason, Christine Senter, Mark Sierra, and Ian (Forest) Parks.
Let me tell you… 30 days to launch a blog, pump it full of wonderful content and produce a product (in this case an eBook) is freaking hard work. Under different circumstances I think my volunteer team and myself would probably be more apt to agree that 90 days would be more of a relaxed time frame.
At any rate, I dropped the ball and failed to work with Annie on the mentoring aspect of writing the book. About a week later, I get a surprise email… actually we all did, Mark, Mark, Christine and Ian with the freaking eBook completely written and professionally themed in Microsoft Word…
I can’t begin to tell you how much respect I have for Annie. She totally impressed me and she is an amazing person.
With all that being said, thanks for the encouraging words Annie. Mark Mason and I were just talking the other night about wondering if we all should work together again on a larger scale project but again in a little more relaxing setting.
The six of us really worked so very well together and I think we could do some serious damage together on future projects.
Thank you so much for taking the ball and rolling with it. You’re a very amazing individual and I would love to work with you again in the near future.
Golly! That’s so nice of you to say! I think you’re right, as a team we all could kick ass. That’s the second time I’ve said “ass” on this comment thread. I’m usually much less PC than this, better go before the f-word jumps out.
That was fun, wasn’t it? Ready for the next mission.
I just registered ShutUpAndFeedGarryConn.com LOL
Mark
Based on Annie’s comment, I also registered
ShutUpAndFeedGarryConnsAss.com
Mark
LMAO!!!!!! Dang it, Mark, I was gonna get that one. Oh well, guess I’ll just have to do some guest blogging for you.
Wow, can’t wait to see the posts that will be written for THAT site. LOL
Annie, you’re are so right. Garry does work his ass off, every day. And just so you know, I was totally impressed with your work on the book. And I can’t wait to see what comes your way because of it.
Come on kids, let’s do it again.
Me too, Captain. What’s our next mission.
You’re mission, should you choose to accept…….
This comment will self-destruct as soon as someone reads it.
Altough writing in english isn’t one of my strengths, I would really like it to partecipate in one of your next projects.
Let me now if you’re interested.
ciao
alexander
Hehe…yeah, I was looking for that hefty brown envelope behind the trash can earlier today. Guess it hasn’t arrived yet.
[...] Mason. As it seems, Mark being so very gifted and talented in the business of buying high quality domain names (times x 2) he offered an idea of doing a nice MMO twist to the whole WordPress theme [...]
Feed my ass….
Feed me Seymour!!!
Thank you so much… he is a natural…
Oh and I am sure that you would have an ENDLESS amount of content on that writing job!!!! LOL!!!!
what is your blog URL with these stats?
Nevermind… you’re the FeedBurner Faker guy who is now into stealing graphics from popular bloggers.
That might be your answer right there.
Sounds like this could really work.
Mark Mason has a perfect domain: ShutUpAndFeedGarryConnsAss.com
Forest can doctor up this graphic:
Mark Sierra can pitch affiliate links to PlayBoy… New AFF via PepperJam.
and Annie can cover about 10,000 words in an eBook titled, “How To Keep Your Man In The Dog House”
I might be able to then add a part two titled, “How To Blog For Beer In Your Dog House”
Inspector Gadget rocks… if he were a blogger he would kick TechCrunch’s ass.
hmmm we have to say something here… first of all this contest was originally asked to be a “who made the most money after 30 days”… you said no and wanted it to be who sells for the most at sitepoint. So we agreed (in fact we let you make the rules to whatever you wanted) and this made the plan of how to build a site a heck of a lot different.
You say “useless traffic” and “wasted resources” frankly that is bull crap and a lame attempt to make your ass whopping seem less intense in our opinion… our focus was on getting rssfeed subscribers and a mailing list… not pushing them to other sites for affiliate income. You said to use whatever resources we each had and to do what it takes to win… well we did and we wanted to build an asset for the buyer and give them assets not just stats of two sales made 30 days ago. RSS feed subscribers mean repeat traffic and something you can market too.
Also the saying wasted money… Garry our goal was to build a blog that sold for the most… you are looking at it from a money standpoint and your excuse is a $30 different when money was not a goal whatsoever. I think the $800 gap in current bid prices make up for the $30.
Any chance you’ll put your competition lessons into an ebook?
Your tutorials were great Garry ….
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