Blogging Zoom vs John Chow
The apparent dislike for John Chow in the Blogging Zoom community is obviously present. I didn’t realize this and submitted a post about our entrecard on JohnChow dot Com. The response was immediate and negative. I got paragraphs for comments as well as very irrelevant discussion.
Many must not of read the article and just though I was praising John Chow like many do. I could care less really, however advertising on his widget not only brought us traffic, but also gave us more entrecard points which is good for anything. I don’t care much about him, or how much money he makes. However, he is getting all that traffic and money and I’d sure love a piece of it. Why not?
Why the Dislike for the Chow?
John Chow has not been offering much valuable content, if he ever did. He’s just enjoying being on top and earning thousands of dollars per month. In the meantime he is continuing his eating out pictures and traveling being a web celebrity.
He’s taken a lot from blogging, but how much has he really given back? No real golden tips, besides that it CAN be done. That there is life without adsense and after google slaps you.
So what? His posts consist of how much his blog is growing and how much he is earning. He often mentions his advertising and rates, as well as how great the advertising is. It’s not of much interest for me, he stays on my feed reader but I often just skim through the articles.
So what? Don’t read him. Take him off your feed reader and ban his URL from your computer.
However by blogging about him, arguing over how bad he is, you are just making him even more filthy rich. So in a weird twisted way, you are just helping him be who he has become.
Blogging Zoom Article
It was weird to see that my bloggingzoom article had less than 5 votes but over 10 comments (it’s more now!). While bashing Chow, many instead live and die by what Vic of Blogger Unleashed says which is fine with me. His blog has become very successful in a short period of time. He claims to be “controversial” but I think he’s mistaken for bashing and cursing. However, I do like Vic and it’s great what he’s been able to do.
What I don’t appreciate is to be judged and bashed by a simple post that wasn’t even read by them in the first place. I make enough money with my blogs and run this website because I enjoy it.
I guess I am asking for it, submitting this article to Blogging Zoom, but we’ll see what happens. Maybe it will be read this time? Maybe I can start getting ‘bashed’ too and rack up some links.
Social Media Could Put You on the Map
In our last Comment Friday I was asked if I thought it was worth spending time and trying to “crack” social media. The simple answer is hell yes. Many bloggers have received social media ‘stardome’ and constant diggs, stumbles and votes. They never looked back and earn thousands of dollars a month.
Social Networking
My favorite things about social media and networking is that it’s free and it’s fun. Personally I’ve mostly worked on building my stumbleupon profile and account. Now I have over 1,000 stumbles and close to 200 fans. The way I achieved this has been to mention my profile a lot and simply ask for people to add me as friends. I’ve also run promotions offering stumbles for those who have added me. This in turn makes my stumbleupon more “powerful” because these people are now subscribed to my stumbles. When I submit something, when my friends stumble they will likely see that page.
Not only does this provide my own articles more traffic but also the articles I enjoy. All it took was my time and energy, the rest is free traffic and growing my sites and others.
It’s Worth It
Before John Chow was the blogging mogul that he is, it started with being dugg a hell of a lot. He was a digg machine. That somehow put him on the map, I don’t think he would of built his ’empire’ as fast without it.
Problogger recently mentioned two bloggers that I only know by their social user and name, not by their blogs.
Shana aka TheNanny12 is popular on several social media sites, I mostly see her on stumbleupon and sphinn. She recently wrote 5 Reasons My Stumbleupon Profile Stands Out, which mentions the Problogger article as well.
Another name mentioned in Probloggers article was Muhammad Saleem who has become a Digg top user. Lots of the articles he submits goes popular, I’m often voting for them. His own personal blog is about social media strategy, which I’ve just subscribed to.
One that wasn’t mentioned is DoshDosh. Besides writing essays for articles and being one of the top blogs out there, he is also a very active and popular social media user. He went from just another .blogspot blog to a top blog in his niche. Did social media give him that boost he needed?
A 2008 Version of the Contest Roundup
Happy New Years to everyone, I hope you partied hard! I actually took my break a little later than everyone else, hence the late posting, but anyway, here’s my pick of the top contests from Contest Beat for this week!
A Genetic Genealogy Test
I picked this contest because it is so original and interesting. Basically, the Genetic Genealogist blog are giving away a free Genetic Genealogy test, which would normally cost you a couple of hundred dollars. To enter you just need to link back to them using the words genetic genealogy, and also blog about the comp.
Three Prizes of $100 Cash
Winning the Web and Tyler Cruz are having a little contest to see who can get the most votes. The blog that gets the most votes wins, the blog that doesn’t has to pay three prizes of $100 each to three of the people who voted for the winning blog. Sound confusing? It is a little, but check out the details here.
Free Unique Blog Designs Theme
Anyone who reads any of the A-Listers blogs should know about Unique Blog Designs and how cool their themes are. Well here is your chance to get one for free, saving yourself $799 $99! To enter you just need to blog about the comp, subscribe to an RSS feed, and make a comment.
A Copy of OIOPublisher
OIOPublisher is a script that basically lets you control, and sell, all the advertising elements on your site yourself. What this means is no more going through 3rd parties like Adsense, Text Link Ads, Adbrite, and whoever else to sell your ad space. You get more control and all the profits! Oh, and Ian Fernando has a few copies of the script to give away – read up on the details here.
Don’t forget to check out Contest Beat for all the latest contests, you never know, you might make some money, win a Wii, whatever!
Promoting and Earning Money with Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs, when used properly, can be a huge money earner. However, promoting an affiliate can be difficult as well as uneffective. Don’t get frustrated. It can be difficult for a blogger to find the right affiliate and earn money with them. You don’t earn money for impressions or clicks, you usually have to get your visitors to do something, whether it’s to join a website, or purchase a product.
Selecting your Affiliates
The key to promoting an affiliate is to make it look like you aren’t. Writing about cats and dogs then promoting a diet pill is an obvious advertisement. That’s why the Text-Link-Ads affiliate program has been so successful with bloggers in the past. Since it is on the topic of blogging and earning money with your blog, it’s easy to promote and fit into content.
Affiliates that may be good for a blog like this one (blogs about blogging etc) would include ways to earn money with blogs, hosting services as well as website designs and themes.
Our latest affiliate we’ve been promoting is Domaining Manifesto, which is an ebook that teaches you everything you need to know about buying and selling domains. As well as other helpful tips for domains.
Promoting Your Affiliate
If your affiliate is on topic of your blog and website you can write an entire post about them. By having a great title and keywords in that post when people are interested in joining them they will go through you to join etc.
You can also use the PPC method to drive traffic to that post, which ZacJohnson has seemingly perfected. He has earned over 50,000$ just by using NeverblueAds. I have yet to grasp the PPC strategy, but you can definitely learn a few tips from him.
Creating Niche Blogs
By creating niche blogs for your affiliates that you want to promote should make it easier to convert. On Its All Free Online, my freebie site, I promote loads of free offers that I find all over the internet. Can you tell which are freebies and which are affiliates?
We run banner ads on the sidebar that convert with by visitors entering their email or zip codes on the landing page. Each convert is worth about 1-2$.
I am also in the market to set up a few recipes sites where I could promote healthy affiliates as well as other recipe sites and recipe books. There is life without Adsense.
If All Else Fails…
Refer yourself. By referring myself to Hostmonster we got about 90$ back I believe (it was a long time ago). There are tons of free trial offers out there that you can participate in, then even blog of experience if you want. NeverblueAds is full of free trial offers that you can refer yourself to and earn money. Some as high as 20$+. Just remember to cancel before the free trial expires.
Other websites like TreasureTrooper and CashCrate pay you to do the same thing, but they take a cut.
I think this years blogging resolution for many is to cut out the middleman. It has been ours.
BAYB Goes Direct with Advertising
Update: I had written this post, then gave members of our email network first shot at advertising. At first I intended for 4 advertisers, through the network I ended up getting responses from 5 people. The first banner is already being displayed by Andrew. Our advertising is already full and sold out. If you’d like to reserve space for next month please let me know. With such a success on the direct advertising we will be opening up another ad spot soon.
Looking at our adsense totals I noticed that we should be making a lot more money with advertising. One of our spots on single posts received over 11,000 impressions but only made about 5$.
Last night I searched and found a great adrotator plugin called WPAds that is exactly what I want. It rotates banners evenly in whichever spot you want.
To start I am looking for up to 4 advertisers to place their banners on our single posts under our comments section. Everyone who leaves a comment will see your banner. This should be especially useful for Comment Fridays. Our blog has 6x more comments than we do posts (639 posts and 4,231 comments).
Have I sold you on the advertising yet?
The banner dimensions can be anywhere from 125×125 to 250×250, basically any banner you have available. The price is only going to be 8$ to start and we’ll see how it goes. We also may look into selling our adsense space directly under the post.
Please leave us a comment if you are interested or contact me directly.
MyBlogLog Pro Subscription Winner
The MyBlogLog contest was good for them sparking interest back into the old community site. MyBloglog has lost some ground with other new sites coming up like BlogCatalog as well as Entrecard really being a force in the blogosphere.
The contest was even better for those who won, and were close to winning. Feedest edged out my friend over at SEOLogs, for the win. Leo from Feedest won loads of prizes and has also decided to give some of them away.
The first prize that has come up for grabs is a One Year Pro Mybloglog Subscription. The value is worth about 25$ and it basically just offers real time stats for your blog. On Thursday I received a message notifying it that we won!
Since winning I had to reinstall the code for MyBlogLog, I had removed everything completely. Might as well give MBL another chance!
Thanks to Leo for giving us the prize, we haven’t won anything in a while.
Who’s the Feedest?
Feedest is actually an interesting website, so I thought why not tell you a little bit about the site. Feedest is a website where you basically can share your blog feed. You can check out that Blog about your Blog page on feedest. It displays our feed as well as how many saves and views we have.
After you register to feedest make sure to save our blog and I will do the same for you. As you can see we haven’t had many views on Feedest however I believe the more saves and tags you have, the better it is ranked.
$70 Design Contest In Association With UK Webmaster World
Hi everybody, I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Years.
I’ve been a bit busy over the festive period preparing to launch a new blog: Retro Garden, the only problem is I need a logo, so I launched a competition, in association with UK based Webmaster forum Webmaster World!
The prize is $70, with $50 put up by myself, and $20 put up by Temi.
For more details: click here!
(This contest is not affiliated with Blog About Your Blog)
Comment Friday for January 4th
Things are settling down around here, but we have another funeral to attend. My girlfriend Emma’s grandma just passed away. It’s been rough on Emma and her sisters, but everything is okay. With our hectic schedule I hope to get back on track this week.
Even with everything being busy that hasn’t stopped us from getting dugg and putting our entrecard on John Chow.
If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 50 entrecard points.
Leave us any comment you want, tell us about New Years or anything else going on. I have some upcoming posts about making money with affiliate programs, what else do you want to read?
Sponsor next week’s comment friday for only 2$