Want to Learn How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog.. for FREE? CLICK HERE Now to Find Out How!

Hi gang, here’s a quick update for you to chew on. If you think it has been a bit less busy over at our farm blog lately, you’re right. The off-line world is demanding more time because we’ve got a big moove ahead of us. We’re trading in the Irish paddock for new pastures down udder! A very exciting time, but also a very busy and unorganized time unfortunately.

There’s tons of paperwork to be sorted out for VISA applications, plenty of digging through what stuff we want to ship over and what we can give away to the charity shops etc. Besides that, we’re hooked to frigging twitter

So, we’ve been thinking how to improve the current situation and here’s what we came up with:

1) Hire a blog poster. Obviously someone with experience and talent. (We’re not going too much into the guest posting thing anymore because we feel the diversity of flavors that it brings with it isn’t suitable for this blog.

2) Sell. Yes we know its April’s Fools, but we’re deadly serious. If we could find a suitable candidate to take over, we would absolutely consider selling. Besides the extra time we’d get, the money would hurt either in our move to Australia.

We’d love to hear other suggestions if anyone has any. Obviously, if you’re a professional blogger who thinks he or she is bovine enough to write for us, please do contact us. If you’re filthy rich and you’d like to buy the farm…well you can contact us too!

If you’re bummed because you were expecting a prank from us today, we’re sorry. We’ve done our share of pranks in the past and nobody seemed to like them. Remember when we got sued for copyright infringement or when we got hacked?

Happy April fools day.

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

52 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Hello! If you can read this post, that means you’re on our brand new sponsored server. If you can’t…well just don’t waste your time on leaving comments because you’ll be the only one reading them As you might recall, a few days ago we did a sponsored review of TophostingCenter.com and we found out what a great bunch of boys and girls they really are. Like we said before, we found the tech support department extremely helpfull and Eric, the CEO, is a friendly and down to earth guy who knows what he’s doing.

The timing on this whole sponsor swap was excellent as we started to run into more and more trouble with our old sponsor. At one stage they completely took the server offline because someone in the sales department thought it was weird that our monthly bills were $0! Took us hours to convince them that they needed to boot the server back up. No need to say that we were pretty pissed off with that. Besides the uptime issues, we were looking for some extra options which they just didn’t have. We’d still like to thank them for 6 months of free hosting and we hope they’ll get back on the right track.

Anyway, enough with the old, lets talk about the new! Top Hosting Center has very generously given us a rack mountable pizzabox server to milk. Here’s the specs for the geeks:

• 4x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3210 @ 2.13GHz Processor #1 speed: 2128.541 MHz
• Memory: 2072252k/2096000k
• 2x SCSI device sda: 488395120 512-byte hdwr sectors (250058 MB)
• 3Ware Raid Controller (2×250GB in RAID1 config)
• 100mbps pipe

This is quite a bump in hardware specs. We used to run off a Core Duo 2 @ 1.86 Mhz, 2GB Ram, 2×160GB Raid1 and a 10mbps pipe. Besides the hardware upgrade, we decided to crank up the old PHP/MySQL and Apache versions too. Coming from MySQL4.1, PHP4 and Apache 1.3 we’re now moo-ing on MySQL5, PHP5 and Apache 2.2. Was a bit scary when we transferred the blog and the rest of our websites, but so far no significant problems have occurred. We haven’t tweaked anything yet in MySQL or Apache like we did on the old server, mainly because we think that all the upgrades should have a huge positive impact on the speed of the site. Of course, the 100mbps won’t hurt the performance either. Enough with the geek talk already! You guys might not need a dedicated server persee, but you should really check out the great budgethosting plans THC has for bloggers.If you find a bug, please drop us an email.

So that’s what we’ve been busy with most part of last night. We’d like to give a big shout-out to our new sponsors, the team at Top Hosting Center! Thanks for the server and your help! (And for the awesome prize you’re sponsoring for an upcoming contest for the JohnCow dot Com readers sometime this week )

We’re gonna have a proper Saturday now - hanging on the couch, drinking beer milk and playing xbox (Gamertag “JohnCowdotCom” if your up for a game).

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

37 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Errr…we just saw this rather disturbing video of our hero, the reason why we blog, the epiphany of the blogging underworld, Mr John Chow. We’re not exactly sure what to think of it. Its a pretty crap video and he’s basically talking a lot of shit. He’s saying this is an attempt at a viral video, but that’s just bullshit if you ask us - he’s been sniffing glue for sure. Lets face it, if he had one, we wouldn’t recommend the Big Beef to give up the dayjob to start a career in standup comedy. And who is this Gary that shit his pants he keeps talking about?

*This was a sponsored review

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

25 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

If you’ve been a good little subscriber, you must have seen our previous post about this nifty auction plugin for your wordpress blogs. We were actually going to post a follow-up since our iPod auction is ending in a few days, and to let you know how much free traffic it has already brought us. Anyway Hyder, the genius behind the plugin (and our sexy blog design), beat us to the punch and wrote the following post for us so we can take it easy for the rest of the day. He even tried his best to make it look like we wrote it ourselves, isn’t he adorable? Here goes…

Are you ready to sell stuff on your blog, keep all your profits and get some free traffic with it too? If you are then WP Auctions Gold, the premium version of the revolutionary auction plugin for WordPress, is for you.

If you don’t know about WP Auctions then here is a quick intro. Basically the plugin lets you host auctions on your own blog without having to use a third party like eBay or any other auction site out there, plus the plugin can get you some free traffic too!

Some of the Gold features include -

• Upload up to 4 images per auction
• Show your auctions in a list format, rather than graphical format
• Sell products only on Buy it Now option
• Sell products with a Buy it Now option
• Show eBay feedback, if you have any, to increase bids
• Improved RSS functionality
• and many more backend improvements

Right now the Gold version comes packaged with 5 free color styles, valued at $250 if designed individually, so you can use the plugin on a variety of blogs you may possess and chances are one of the styles will fit snugly into it. Also, this version comes without a link on the sidebar, unlike the free version.

The Gold version comes at a small cost of $24.99, with free upgrades for life {Hyder tells us there’s many more developments going on}.

Let’s not forget the free traffic bit now, We’ve been getting around 20 - 30 visits a day from the Live Auctions page. Hyder, the guy behind the plugin, has said that there’s a lot more to come. So early adopters can except to see a steady stream of traffic to their blogs, all you need to do is get the plugin, activate it, register on our Live page and post up an auction. It couldn’t be simpler!

Bonus offer for John Cow readers: If you are buying the plugin from us you can get a customized style for a special price! Rather than plunking down $50 you can get one for only $24.99. A customized style will fit into your blogs design, just like ours does and this swanky one made for Shoemoney, and look much more appealing than the default color styles. Here’s what you need to do to get the special style price -

• Buy the plugin for only $24.99
• Email designed [at] weborithm [dot] com with your purchase ID which you’ll get from PayPal
• Once verified you’ll be able to get one custom style for the special price of $24.99, instead of $49.99
• That’s it!

Buy WP Auctions Now! Happy Selling!

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

14 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Hello boys and girls. In today’s webisode we’ll be showcasing the top six wordpress plugins we’re currenty using on our money making blog. Obviously we all make money with our blogs, primarily from selling ads. WordPress being the most popular blog CMS out there, a lot of people have developed some excellent plugins to help us bloggers out. We can’t all be coders, but uploading and activating a plugin is something we can all do (we hope). Here’s a top six list of our favorite and recommended plugins for making money with selling advertising space on your blogs.

1) The Ad Zone Plugin - With this plugin, you no longer have to go through your WordPress theme’s code to manually set up all the places where you’d like the ads to appear. You just tell the plugin where you want them to show up, and the plugin takes care of the rest! Sure saved us a lot of time and frustration.

2) The Ad Randomizer Plugin - This plugin will make sure that your advertisers will get an evenly divided exposure above the fold if you’re using 125×125 banners like us on your blog’s sidebar. Besides the exposure, this will also help to prevent ad-blindness because with every refresh, there’s another banner in the old banner’s spot.

3) The Ad Performance Tracking Plugin - Your advertisers will be very happy to see what exactly they are paying for. This plugin provides detailed statistics about how their ad is performing on your blog. The plugin will email them weekly stats, and you can see for yourself what ad spot performs better than others. Obviously this is a win-win situation for both Publisher and advertiser. You can calculate exactly how much your ad space is worth.

4) The Ad Auto Renewal Plugin - Here’s a real moneymaker! Once an ad has run on your blog for whatever time you’ve been paid for, it won’t go to waste. If the advertiser was happy with the results, they just pay you via paypal and you can reactivate the ad in a second. No extra hassle by submitting new details.

5) The Custom Sales Plugin - If you have sold all your adspace and you still want to make some extra money online, perhaps you could offer your services as a writer, a coder, sell your wordpress themes, ebooks…whatever. This plugin makes is SO easy for you to setup a custom sales page that will let your readers/customers pay via PayPal and download your themes or ebooks for example after that. This plugin makes sure you’re not paying any commision to anyone either. (except for PayPal )

6) The Affiliate Engine Plugin - If you’ve used the Custom Sales Plugin, chances are you’d like to make some more money with whatever you’re selling. How about you start attracting affiliates to do your selling for you? With this plugin you can setup your very own affiliate system which keeps track of who sold how much of your stuff for you. Easy to setup the percentage you’re willing to pay out, extensive reports on sales etc. A must have if you’re serious about making money online.

Hah! Lets see who’s the first one to comment, saying we’ve screwed up the links since they are all pointing to the same plugin. We didn’t mess up, we just think that this plugin has so many useful features that you could consider it a mashup of all the advertising plugins you’ll ever need as a blogger. We could have extended this list to the top 25 plugins, but we think you guys got the point. This plugin rocks!

PS We’ve got a few spots open if you’re interested in getting some great exposure for your blog via us.

Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!

38 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post