John Cow dot Com » John Cow vs Garry Conn

Put Your Crappy Content Away, Ya Lazy Bum!

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:55:25 +0000

The times, they are a changin’. Although it hasn’t officially happened yet, there have been whispers in quite a few places for a while now that things are changing in the world of article marketing, specifically in the article directories and very specifically, with Ezine Articles. And in my personal opinion, it’s a change for the better.

Here’s what’s rumored to be happening: submission standards are about to get a whole lot higher. To put it in a nutshell, the minimum standard for articles to get approved (which, historically, has been pretty darn low) is going to be longer and better. No longer will you be able to throw together a crappy 250 word article full of spelling and grammatical errors and call it a day. Soon, that kind of sloppy work won’t get approved any more.

And what’s more…

The changes are reportedly retroactive!

Meaning if you’ve got crappy articles approved in the past, unless you update them and make them acceptable, they’ll disappear.

What do I have to say about this?

Well, I say it’s about damn time. I’ve said many times, on this blog and on the other sites I own, that putting quality content out there is the real key to succeeding in online business. And I use article marketing to promote my products, but when I mention that I’m an article marketer, people lump me in with those other bozos littering the article directories with crap content and giving the rest of us a bad name.

For my own article marketing, I’ve long held a stipulation that all the articles I use be at least 400 words long, always be completely original, and have really useful information for the reader. Keyword density should be between 2-5%, but is usually around 2.5-3.5%. Because I’ve been doing things this way for a long time, I know that, when the changes do come, I don’t have to worry about any of my old articles being taken down.

HOT TIP –> The MOST IMPORTANT thing i do however, is write the content first and then go back and keyword optimize it. If you write for a keyword the content will suck… create a title first, write a worthwhile piece of content and then go back and keyword optimize it. Your content will get both published and read!

So that’s my advice for anybody using article marketing right now – if you’re not already, make the change and start writing quality articles NOW, before the new rules come into play. Do this for two reasons; one, because quality is always better than crappy (in terms of your reputation and your bottom line), and you should have been doing it this way all this time anyway; and secondly, so that when these changes do come you’ll be ahead of the game and not one of the people left in the lurch when all of their articles get dumped.

NEW Update: Just saw a new update to the ezinearticles guidelines as we speak…

Expert Authors can now earn the ability to link-up 4-word and 5-word phrases* by submitting lengthier (over 400 words) high-quality articles.

BOTTOM LINE:

If your article is shorter than 400 words, each text link may only contain a maximum of 3 words*

If your article is longer than 400 words, each text link may only contain a maximum of 5 words*

* Important Note: Any common words, including to, is, in, on, it, and, at, by, a, an and others will now be excluded from the word count.

PS – If you are wondering why i am focusing on EzineArticles here… cause they are the grand daddy of all article directories and you NEED to be using them (IMHO).

So what’s your thoughts?

Link Boosting and WIN $10 000! – JOHNCOWtv Episode 2

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:12:02 +0000

Well it has been a full week since our beloved COW was stolen from us (as witnessed in JOHNCOWtv Episode 1) and sadly we have not heard a single word from the authorities or the COWnappers. We are still hopeful that COW is safe and unharmed but we also a little concerned. We are moving forward still and in fact we want to celebrate with all of our readers what it is COW represents and stands for (too many things to write about in this post, that is for sure) and as a result we are giving away…

>> $10 000 CASH! <<

That’s right… we are not going to let these COWnappers ruin us and destroy this for our readers.

The rules are simple… watch the video and we announce the winner in the video. We selected a name from the list of email subscribers and picked one random winner. The only exception is we are not publishing the name, we are not emailing the person and they have to contact us within 24 hours of this post…

NO EXCEPTIONS!

If you do not hear your name or do not contact us within 24 hours… we are keeping all of it… and believe me Audrey can always find ways to spend that money!

So don’t email us or comment below that it is unfair if you do not hear your name or contact us in time.. remember NO EXCEPTIONS!

I also share a powerful strategy in this episode called “LinkBoosting”… which I know you will find useful!

So watch the video and see if you are a lucky winner!

Click Here to Add JOHNCOWtv to Your YouTube

Want Your Website or Business Spotlighted in the Next Episode of JOHNCOWtv?

If you would like to be spotlighted on JOHNCOWtv it is easy… simply send us something with your business name or logo on it (ball caps, winter caps, t-shirts, coffee cups)… OR… something cool (we like gadgets and PS3 video games ) and tell us what you want to have mentioned. We will also add the sponsor message in the text of the post.

Mailing Address: 645 Queen Street East 2nd Floor, SSM, Ontario Canada, P6A2A6

Tragedy Strikes with the First Official JohnCowTV Broadcast

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:35:57 +0000

It is a sad day here at the JohnCow pastures. While filming our first “Official” JohnCowTV episode our faithful COW was kidnapped…. hmm I guess I mean COWnapped!

We are at a complete loss for words as to what to do right now but we have contacted the authorities and they are on the case. In the mean time we are without fresh milk and the vacuuming is not getting done

The entire incident was luckily caught on film and you can check it out for yourself!

Making Money Online with JohnCowTV – Episode 1

We are bound and determined to carry forward…. we know that is what COW would want. So in the spirit of integrity and perseverance that our COW inspires in us all, we will move forward. So stay tuned for next Fridays “Episode 2″… hopefully we will know more about the COWnappers or better yet have the cow returned to us.

Want Your Website or Business Spotlighted in the Next Episode of JohnCowTV?

If you would like to be spotlighted on JohnCowTV it is easy… simply send us something with your business name or logo on it (ball caps, winter caps, tshirts, coffee cups)… OR… something cool (we like gadgets and PS3 video games ) and tell us what you want to have mentioned. We will also add the sponsor message in the text of the post.

Mailing Address: 645 Queen Street East 2nd Floor, SSM, Ontario Canada, P6A2A6

PS –> This is the first official because the others were more practice

[poll id="11"]

New Look at John Cow dot Com and the Reasons for It

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:00:49 +0000

If you are a regular visitor to the JohnCow homestead, you will have noticed that we have done a little rennovating around here and we are very happy with it so far. We still have a few minor things we want to do but for the most part we are VERY HAPPY!

So Why the Redesign?

The previous JohnCow template was fantastic. The colors, images and everything was very nice looking and it was a great template, the problem however was with the templates functionality.

1. Above the Fold: When designing or selecting a template, one of the first things you want to ensure is that your main action needs to be above the fold. What this means is if you want subscribers or buyers you want the offer to be immediately viewable as soon as they land of your blog.

The previous template had a huge header graphic and as a result there was a lot of wasted real estate that did nothing but look nice. With the new template we now have our highest priority offer (opt in) in the header area, making it immediately viewable and have shrank the hieght of the header so it allowed for other action items below to move up higher.

2. Move non action items to the footer: The old template had a cool looking footer but it did not allow for much information to be added. This in turn caused us to have to jam everything into the sidebar of the template and caused some distraction from people seeing the items we wanted them to take action on.

With the new template we now have much more room to be able to ensure we have everything available on the page but it is not jammed into the side bar and distracting the reader from what we feel is first priority.

3. Internal Functionality: The internal structure of the template was also a huge improvement for us. Most templates have the same basc structure and as a result if you are trying to update the template, you need to try and find where that code is in the main templates and if you are not savvy at php and html, it can be a bit of a challenge.

With our new design it takes full advantage of WordPress’s powerful widget technology and all the main areas that are most likely to see changes now use widgets.

There are also more php pages within the template, for example the top navigation on the page is a template page all to itself. This allows for much more control when updating and editing the templates.

Whats Left to Update?: There are only a few small changes left to do and this has to do with creating custom template pages for thankyou pages (remove action items that will confuse people from thinking they might not have already opted in) and opt-in landing pages (such as the ebook page and soon to be Keyword Corral page) that we want the focus to be on the content and getting people to sign up rather then other banners and links.

So, there you have it… the reasons for the updrade!

I also want to give a HUGE THANKYOU to Hyder over at http://www.weborithm.com/ for doing such a fantastic job on this template. If you are ready to take your blog to the next level and are interested in your own custom template, I 100% recommend you check them out. Draw out what you want and http://www.weborithm.com/ will be able to do it for you.

So, what I want to know is…

[poll id="10"]

Johncow And The Mad Cow!

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:13:34 +0000

Just to let you know I will be getting back into the grove of the AudLife case study tonight… I had a family reunion this past weekend and it nearly killed me I am also in process of updating the ebook to reflect the new TrafficTravis upgrade… hope to have that ready for tomorrow.

In the meantime I want you to check out this new site called BlogGears.com

It is a cool new blog that allows you to submit a video blurb about your own blog. I have to admit I was a little embarrassed with the video I submitted… the freakin cow was in rare form and just would not behave!

Check out the video.. and PLEASE vote me up to show your love for the poor COW (and i am not talking about me). CLICK HERE now to watch the video and vote it up!

Make Money as a JohnCow Affiliate

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:05:30 +0000

Now you can profit from John Cow by promoting our FREE ebook!

Everyday over 100 people are downloading our FREE ebook “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” because it is packed full of ROCK SOLID advice that works and now…

YOU can PROFIT from this FREE eBook!

How this works is you simply sign up as an affiliate and then recommend our free ebook to others (it is an easy sell since it is free and you can vouch for its quality) and then if anyone you send upsells to one of our paid products (such as traffickahuna) you will earn 25% to 50% (depending on the product) commission for life. If they sign up for a recurring service, then you will earn recurring commissions as well

A Word of Warning –> Guaranteed Life Time Affiliate Credit

You know the saying “the early bird gets the worm”, well that is very true with our affiliate program. As you know most of the popular affiliate programs use cookies to track affiliates but these will either disappear once the person clears the cookies from their browser or the cookies gets updated by someone else’s affiliate link.

We do NOT allow that to happen!

How our system works is once someone opts in to download the FREE ebook, they are immediately put into our database with YOUR affiliate ID for life. This will never expire and if they end up purchasing with us YOU get the commission.

We have loads of new and very powerful tools coming out over the next few months and because the early bird truly does get the worm, you want to start taking advantage of this now!

——————————————–

CLICK HERE to Sign Up as an Affiliate NOW!

——————————————–

WIN Big Time with the Unveiling of John Cow

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:33:49 +0000

Well today is the day.. no more clues, no more tricks… we are fulling coming out with who is behind John Cow and in celebration of this liberating moment (for me especially), we are going to make this fun… LOTS OF FUN!

Before I get into talking about the cool prizes however, I want to introduce ourselves. Now a few people have mentioned lately that we did not do a good job disguising ourselves in the last email we sent out… well that was the point. For over three months we have had people guessing at who we were and very few figured it out (personally i do not blame them.. I am sure you all have more productive things to do) and so we tried to make it a lot more obvious.

Now one thing I want to make very clear… one of the concerns we had with uncovering John Cow is we did not want the readers to be worried this was going to become another product pimp blog. We promise that this blog will only continue to improve in quality and we have lots of amazing things planned for the coming months.

So who are we… well a few days ago we mentioned that the owner of Johncow.com was a company named Archon Media (which is based in Houston TX)… but the owners of Archon Media are….

Jason Katzenback (the voice of John Cow for the past 3 months)
Jason Potash
Marc Quarles

We are also the owners of such products and memberships as TrafficKahuna, CommentKahuna, Video Post Robot, Orwell Pro, Content Rover, PortalFeeder and more. We also have a huge number of non internet marketing blogs, websites and products that are focused on everything from health issues to GPS and over the past 4 years we have been able to build an online business that generates a healthy 7 figure a year income.

I am telling you that not to brag but the ensure you that we truly know what we are talking about. You see the original owner of John Cow was barely making a living online, not that he did not do a fantastic job with getting this blog initially off the ground (and I am sure he will be very successful) but this was not truly a “Learn to Make Money Online” blog because the old owner really did not know much about the topic. Well we do and over the past few years we have had a lot of bumps and bruises… and each time we have been able to learn from our mistakes and have been able to turn them into helping our business succeed even further.

Our goal with John Cow is to give back to the internet marketing community as a way of saying thanks!

Now for our current customers, please do not worry that we are going to be sharing all those strategies and tools that you pay to have access to. While we will share lots of strategies and tips here, obviously our first priority needs to be ensuring our paying customers are taking care of and that means that you have nothing to worry about…. you are our number 1 priority! Also, you will get behind the scenes access to exactly what we are doing with Johncow.com so you can learn from this real life example

WOW… does that feel good to get off my chest… you have no idea how frustrating it has been not being able to be completely open with everyone as to who we are.

Now onto the GiveAway…

FIRST OF ALL CHECK THESE PRIZES OUT…

Grand Prize:
-26” LCD TV that can be used as monitor
-A FREE Copy of the brand new version of TrafficTravis (it is totally improved and being released next week)
-A FREE copy of Affiliate Elite
-A FREE 3 month Membership to TrafficKahuna
-A FREE copy of TrafficTravis
-A FREE copy of Video Post Robot
-A one hour One on One phone call with just you and me to review your current business and brain storm ways to improve it.
-A contest on JohnCow that will include YOUR SITE as the main registration criteria for entering (lots of traffic to you

2nd prize: iPod touch – Sponsored by Market Leverage (the best affiliate CPA network around)

3rd Prize: 3 Months of TrafficKahuna

4th prize: Flip Mino – Sponsored by Market Leverage (the best affiliate CPA network around)

5th prize: Copy of Content Composer

6th prize: Copy of Video Post Robot

7th prize: $250 ML Amex gift card – Sponsored by Market Leverage (the best affiliate CPA network around)

8th prize: 2 GB USB pen – Sponsored by Market Leverage (the best affiliate CPA network around) – and “JohnCow.com Fan Club. Charter member. ” t-shirt

9th prize: 1970s Disco Party Mac Daddy Pimp Costume

To help us celebrate this special event (for us anyway), we have put together a cool little giveaway that I hope you are going to love and registering for the giveaway is SUPER EASY!

As you know… a few months ago we had a little competition here on JohnCow called the COWPetition. This was a little contest between a fellow blogger named Garry Conn and ourselves. The point was to take a brand new domain and in 30 days build a blog and sell it on sitepoint.com for the most amount of money. Well we detailed every step and put it together into a 132 page FREE ebook that if you “Click Here” you can read some awesome testimonials. This ebook is not a cheap report to get you to buy something else… it is a full start to finish case study and we have been told over and over that we were nuts to be giving it away for free.

OK, so why am i telling you this?

Because all you need to do to register for this giveaway is simply register to download the FREE ebook (which is extremely valuable by itself) and you will automatically be entered into the draw. The only stipulation is the winners must still be registered when we draw the prizes.

If you are already on the list and have downloaded the eBook… you do not have to do anything

HOW TO REGISTER TO WIN –> Simply register to download our eBook below and thats it. (How easy is that )

Download “Building a Business NOT a Blog” and be Entered to WIN!

SECURE & CONFIDENTIAL Your email address will NEVER be rented, traded or sold. WE GUARANTEE YOUR CONFIDENTIALITY because we HATE spam as much as you do.

Winners will be selected by random draw on Thursday July 31st at 12:00pm EST

We also want the give another HUGE THANK YOU to Market Leverage for Donating the Cool Prizes!

So what are your comments… Cool Giveaway or What???

Do You Want to Know Who John Cow is?

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:49:23 +0000

Well the day is finally here… and I think about 3, maybe 4 people have been anxiously waiting for us to let the cow out of the bag. Before we get into that however, we have some winners to announce

Winner of the BRAND NEW KINDLE from amazon –> Barbara Baker (http://twitter.com/)

Winner of the FREE ACCOUNT AT WHYPARK.COM –> Silla (http://twitter.com/)

Winner of the CUSTOM BANNER from http://www.therandomforest.com and the 30 DAYS OF ADVERTISING here at JohnCow.com –> Woobie (http://twitter.com/)

Winner of a FREE COPY OF VIDEO POST ROBOT –> Dude World Order (http://twitter.com/)

Congratulations to the WINNERS! You should have received an email from us and if not, contact us via our contact form on this page and we will set you up.

Now that this contest is over we have another good one lined up for you… and this one is 100% sponsored by us the new owners and there is a good reason for this. You see we are darn proud of this here blog and the response from you our fantastic readers is amazing. We love getting emails and seeing posts on other sites mentioning how this is a true MMO blog now!

Of course we realize that there are a few of you, who probably are not reading this right now, that do not care for the change. We have not heard as of why but we accept that we can not be liked by everyone… we do not like it.. but we accept it

Now, as for us telling you who we are, we want you to know that this is a huge relief for us to be able to finally do this. We have loads of things planned for JohnCow dot Com and by having to hide our face was making a few things a little difficult.

Ok… so are you sick of me talking yet.. well too bad

With us coming out there will be a few obvious changes right away, like the fact that I am done using “we” and “us”… this was fun at first but is now a pain in the cow pie hole. So if that is something you are going to miss.. sorry.

Another thing is we are getting a lot more stirct on our paid reviews and please stop requesting us to review your site and not mention it is a review (sorry that is a pet peave).

We also have planned to come out with some cool new toys for the John Cow readers exclusively. We are almost finished a really cool one that will help your keyword research, if you follow along the strategies I taught.

OK OK OK.. sheesh… i can hear you yelling already.

This is too fun… but I have just a couple little bits of info still to share.

1. We did not spend $50 000 on this blog… so those rumors can stop right now. A good rule of thumb is to pay 10x’s the monthly rev a site creates and Bob was not earning 5 grand a month.

2. We are not Garry Conn, John Chow, Shawn Casey, Bob Jones or someone Bob hired (that one was actually insulting)

3. We are actually 3 people that own JohnCow but it is only one of the owners that is the voice of JohnCow

OK, so who is it…….

ARCHON MEDIA from Houston TX

There it is, that is who it is behind JohnCow!

But wait… am I not going to reveal who the actual name is of the owners and who the one owner that is the writer is?

YUP.. but not today…. (oh how i wish you could hear my laugh right now)

But before you get all pissy on me and say that is not fair, we are going to make it very much worth your while.

First of all, for any of you who are our current customers of one of our products or memberships, you just need to look at your email and you could figure this out pretty quick. This was how Andy Beard did it and I was a little surprised more of you did not pick up on this. Of course maybe you did but since there are only 3 or 4 of you that even care about this, you probably just did not get around to saying anything

Here is what is going to happen though.

On Thursday July 24th we are going to mention the names (no tricks this time either) of who the three owners of Archon Media are and who the voice of John Cow is and we are also going to be kicking off our new contest that is focused on our new ebook “How to build a Business not Just a Blog” and the winner will win a free copy of every product we reference in this ebook that we use, which includes…

1. A FREE Copy of the brand new version of TrafficTravis (it is totally improved and being released next week)

2. A FREE copy of Affiliate Elite

3. A FREE 3 month Membership to TrafficKahuna

PLUS –> To show we really do want you to succeed, we are also including…

4. A one hour One on One phone call with just you and me to review your current business and brain storm ways to improve it.

5. A contest on JohnCow that will include YOUR SITE as the main registration criteria for entering (lots of traffic to you)

We will be announcing the new ownership to our business mailing list (which is pretty darn big) and plan to see lots of traffic pounding on these pastures and so this should be fun.

How this is going to work is Thursday we will be making the announcement and then on the following Thursday (one week from then) we are going to be making the draw. The ONLY criteria to be entered into the draw is that you have downloaded the ebook and have an active subscription… there are no other criteria needed.

If you can figure out who we are from the hints I gave, go ahead and comment on it, we will not respond to them though and any of you that know because I have talked to you… would be cool if you could just comment a hint instead of saying who it is.

So there you go.. now lets hear your comments

WIN a New Kindle or $350 Cash by Roasting JohnCow

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:18:46 +0000

As you are most likely aware, John Cow is not a real person (hope we are not shocking anyone here) but their always has been a real person behind it. The person used to be a guy named Bob Jones… who just recently openly mentioned he was no longer behind Johncow.com

There have also been numerous rumors as to who the new John Cow is and a couple have guessed it right such as “Andy Beard” who has one of the better blogs out there in our opinion (next to Johncow.com of course).

So why have we not shared with our readers who we are?

Well there are a few good reasons (in our minds anyway)

Our number one concern was the fans of Bob Jones. We did not want people jumping ship right away with out giving us at least a chance to speak. It can be hard to accept change and often the first reaction with change is to jump ship… so we wanted to avoid that.
The second reason was this switch of ownership happened pretty fast and we wanted to be able to think things out a bit and test the waters… which seems to be going pretty darn good in our opinions… minus a couple mistakes we have made such as allowing a paid review of a fake Rolex watch to be posted (which we removed two days after it was posted and we are sooo sorry about that).
The third and final reason was because it has been fun. We have gotten some serious “burst out load” laughs from some of the suggestions, especially the emails that are from people telling us “matter of fact”, who we are… like a college student hired by Bob Jones (bwa hahaha)

So does this mean we are going to spill the beans and tell everyone who the new JohnCow is?

NO not yet!

Sorry but we are not going to make it that easy… but we are going to make it fun.

Starting today is the brand new contest called the…

And the purpose of this contest is to both teach something but also have some FUN and the reward is we are going to be giving away a brand spanking new…

Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

$350 Cash via PayPal!
(For those who either do not want a Kindle or Live ourtside North America)

**Added Prizes

A free animated 125×125 banner from http://www.therandomforest.com and it will be displayed on Johncow for 30 days – Value $130
A Free WhyPark account ( host up to 100 of your domain names at WhyPark.com. That includes: Free Hosting of your WhyPark.com web sites. Use your domain names to generate traffic and revenue. Instant keyword rich web sites with no technical knowledge required. Free professional support and helpful tips. We’ll help you build traffic to your domain names and you keep all of your revenue from your web sites or you can use our ad network.) – Value $100

Want to Add a Prize and be a Sponsor Too? We are also opening this up to any of you who wants to donate a prize. We will make strong mention of anyone participating a worthwhile prize If interested click here to contact us

The rules of the contest are as follows…

Create a twitter account (if you do not already have one) and then log into your account
Go to www.twitter.com/johncow and select “follow” (if you are already following then you are good to go)
Create a humorous “roast” of either “John Cow” or just a “Cow” and link to the contest page using this exact link http://www.johncow.com/cowroast/

IMPORTANT –> The post must NOT be crude or rude (no swearing, crude comments or anything like that), keep it clean and fun and the full exact link link http://www.johncow.com/cowroast/ must be used

Opt in to our RSS List and download the free eBook, you can do that by Clicking Here if you have not already done so.
Post a comment below with a link to your twitter post & the name of who you think the new owners of Johncow.com are.

IMPORTANT: If you already know, you can not mention in the comment at all that it is “so and so” because “so and so” told you. Also, anyone who already knows through communications with us directly is not qualified for this contest… sorry but we will delete your comment (there are only a few of you that know anyway)

The winner will be selected based upon completing ALL the criteria and submitting the funniest and most original twitter post. You do NOT have to guess the right answer for who John Cow is but you have to take a guess

Currently we only have one prize and if more prizes are offered up then we will have more winners

Pay Attention and Learn Something Here –> This is not all fun and games here… we actually have an important lesson for you in all this. One of the greatest skills of converting sales, getting subscribers and traffic is the ability to get your point across in as few words as possible. This is very valuable for creating titles, descriptions, headlines, email subject lines, ads and so on. Since twitter only allows 140 characters to be used, you are going to be very challenged to cut out as much extra characters as possible and still get your point across and remember you MUST use this exact link http://www.johncow.com/cowroast/ and you can not remove the back slash or www… it must be the exact link we have given to make it fair to everyone.

The post can be a joke, a funny statement or just something random that makes us giggle. An example of one is…

Once the contest is over and we announce the winner we will also announce who the new owners are… you will finally know who is the voice of the new improved JohnCow!

The contest ends Tuesday July 22nd at 12 noon eastern time and the winner will be announced that afternoon along with who JohnCow is!

Oh and come back tomorrow as we are starting a series on Web 2.0 Strategies

Results of Poll for Making Money Online Training on JohnCow

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:09:51 +0000

The results are in, the readers have spoken and a plan is being created!

Over the next couple days we are going to put our plan together for covering these items in order of “voters” priority… thanks for helping make this easier.

We need to finish up the ebook first in the next day or two and then get started on this plan.

Wanted to also remind you all that the “WIN an iPhone 3G” contest ends this coming Thursday July 3rd so Click Here to register if you already have not done so… ohhh and we have another cool contest already lined up after that one

A few other topics that were brought up were…

Get top rankings
Using tnx.net
Thoughts about where IM trends are going and long term planning would be interesting

If there is any other topics you would love to see here on the Cow pastures… tell us below.

Say Good-bye to XP?

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:14:31 +0000

So yesterday we said goodbye to Bill Gates and it looks like starting on today Microsoft is going to stop selling XP to retailers and computer manufacturers. (We mentioned before in a previous post back in May about users making a petition so that Microsoft won’t take XP off of the shelves.)

Microsoft realizes that many users aren’t going to be happy with their decision, but again users weren’t happy when they took Windows 98, 95 and Me taken off of the shelves. Wait, Ha, did we say ME? Yeah right, huge cow pattie of an OS right there in our opinion.

Anyway, now just because XP is going off of the shelves for some thing, like retailers and manufacturers, doesn’t mean we have seen the last of it yet. (WHOOT! )

Now the plan, until June 2010, is to have manufacturers of limited, low-cost computers still have the chance to put XP HOME on their machine. That’s right, just home. Plus, if you are a small business and you build your own computer, well you’ll be able to install XP on it…only until Jaunary 31^st 2009.

Oh and If you have bought a new PC that has either Vista Business or Vista Ultimate on it, well then you still do have the option to downgrade your OS to XP Pro, again, only until January 31^st 2009.

What we like about this is that it looks like Microsoft has been taking a look into what their users want and even though their are restrictions, we can still obtain XP, even for a little while.

And for all of you faithful XP Users, well Microsoft is still going to allow for mainstream support on the operating system until next April.

Oh and remember in our previous post about XP and the petition… Have you all been keeping your eyes on that petition?

Maybe not and that’s okay.

The ‘Save Windows XP’ petition garnered over 209,000 signatures. Not too shabby right? No wonder Microsoft acknowledged the petition and their efforts.

Nicely done

PS – We will be going through the poll from Friday and post about that a little later today to map out our post plan for the next month.

Want to WIN a Free 125 x 125 Sponsor Ad on JohnCow?

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:15:17 +0000

We have a small favor to ask of you… in yesterdays post (Do Not be Afraid to go to the People) we had a request for advice posted in a comment and instead of us answering it, we want to give you all an opportunity to voice your opinion about this and we will give the best answer a free 125 x 125 banner ad placement on our blog for 30 days. This sells for $100 and will be going up in price soon

Here is the comment that was left…

Start of Comment –>

I would like to follow along and create a site of my own using the techniques here and on court’s site and grizz’s site, but I am having a little trouble getting started.

I have a project that I’m going to do. A member of my family sings traditional country. He has 4 albums released, has received many awards, been played on the radio, etc, but is still pretty much unknown. I’m going to build him a website, and I’d like to use the knowledge I’ve been gathering from you guys, but I’m not really sure how to get started on getting traffic to a site like this in what seems to be a pretty competitive market.

Do you have any ideas that could help me or push me in the right direction?

<– End of Comment

So our request to you is, what ideas for Mike, do you have that might be able to help push him in the right direction?

PS –> We have scheduled our next COWCast and if you want to get in on the call, you need to subscribe to our mailing list via email. I have also just arranged to have professional blogger and good friend of ours, Yaro Starak from the Entrepreneur’s Journey to be on next weeks COWcast.

Last of all we apologize for getting behind a couple days in the COWpetition posts, today we were suppose to talk about finding joint venture partners but we were just too backed up on too many things and so we have had to delay it a day.

Get Your Blog Up & Talk a Little About SEO vs VEO – Day 8 COWpetition

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:16:40 +0000

We always hear about how we need to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in order to dominate the search engines but for the last couple years the term VEO has surfaced which says to focus on the visitor and not the search engines.

Which one is right?

In our opinion, they both are and we made reference to this is an early post in this cowpetition.

You see with the new evolving dynamics of the web, things have changed. No longer are you just focused on trying to get traffic from Google but now you have hundreds and sites to also take advantage of that can send you equal and often times more traffic then Google. Because of this if you end up on focusing on just one aspect of your site optimization then you are missing out on the entire potential.

Our recommendation is you first set up your site for the human visitor and then once that is done, optimize it for the search engines. This is no different then focusing on your content, you want the reader to be satisfied and then you can tweak it to make the search engine bots happy too. In our experience trying to first optimize for the search engines and then for the human visitor is a more difficult task.

The process that we go through for this and the one that we followed for the GamerzReviewz blog is…

Install your blog, theme, and plugins
Create a “Link Bait” page and Opt In with site navigation emphasis on the “Opt In” and “Link Bait” for both the search engines and the visitors and update the graphics and color of blog to match theme
Manually test all links and ensure all navigation is pointing exactly where we want it to, install a robots.txt file and then submit your sitemap to Google webmaser tools to verify the blog is clear of errors
Start contacting JV partners and start your initial promotions

The great thing is while the keywords from the previous lesson are running in Affiliate Elite, we can get all this other important work done and when they are ready we can already be getting loads of traffic thanks to our Link bait page and viral incentives.

In todays post we are going to focus on point 1 and then in the next post it will focus on 2 & 3 and then after that 4 (or so that is the plan right now).

The following may seem basic to you but we are sharing it anyway and so pay attention

Part 1 –> Installing WordPress:

There are two “main” ways to install a WordPress blog. The first is to manually download the files from…

http://wordpress.org/download/

The second is to use a free installation script, called Fantastico,that is standard with many hosting accounts. If your hosting account does not come with “Fantastico” or something similar, then the manual install is relatively easy to perform and WordPress provides a detailed guide at…

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

…to help you through the installation.

Yes we realize there are more ways to do this and there are new tools for this popping up all the time, but for the sake of simplicity these are the two we are referring to.

For this post we are going to walk you through the steps to install WordPress using the “Fantastico” service, which is what we did.

Step 1: Log into your hosting account control panel and locate the “fantastic”icon.

Step 2: Once inside the “fantastico” control panel, you will see on the left hand side, a list of different php scripts that you can install on your server. Click on the “WordPress” link.

Step 3: On the right side of the screen you will now see a summary of current WordPress installations on your server. If you have not installed WordPress already, under “Current Installations:” it will simply say “None”. Click on the link that says “New Installation”

Step 4: Now you will have the WordPress set up form on the right hand side of the screen. If you have installed your domain as a subdomain or addon domain, then make sure you select the correct domain location in the drop down box. If you are installing the blog in the root directory of your domain, you will leave the “Install in Directory” blank. Enter an administrator user name and password and your email account password.

The email account password can be anything you want as you will not use it anyway and the rest of the fields will all be updated later on. Now click on “Install WordPress” and then on the next screen click the “Finish Installation” button. On the final installation page, you can also enter your email address to have all the installation information (user name, password, and more) sent to your email address.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed WordPress!

Part 2 –> Getting themes and what to look for and what to customize

When you first install WordPress on your domain, it will have the default template. Personally I recommend you do not use the default template, as it is in my opinion, very boring, and there are loads of nicer free templates available.

We used out own custom theme that you can learn more about at http://www.johncow.us/milkit/

If however you want to use one of the free templates available from WordPress then…

Step 1: Log into your WordPress admin panel at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Step 2: Click on the “Design Tab

Step 3: This is your “Template” management area and WordPress makes it extremely easy to update your templates with just a few clicks of the mouse. To find some great templates, you are going to want to scroll down on the “Design” page and click on the link called “WordPress Theme Directory”. Make sure to right click and open in a new window so you do not leave your admin area.

Step 4: You will now find a directory of thousands of free WordPress”Themes” (templates) that you can use on your blog. We recommend that your first choice in the sorting options, on the left side of the page, the “Widget Ready” option, as this will make modifying your blog a lot easier later on. Now select a theme that you like and do not worry if you are not sure, you can easily change the theme later if you wish.

The sorting options are not guaranteed and so a word of warning is to install the theme and check that tit is widget compatible before you do any image changes or anything like that.

Note: Widgets are a feature in WordPress that allows you to easily drag and drop different features into your blogs sidebar.

Step 5: Once you have the theme that you like, click on the “Download” link and save it to your desktop. You will want to unzip the file and save the folder to your computer.

Step 6: Now open your favorite FTP software to upload your theme to the correct folder. If you do not own a FTP software, download the free open source solution called FileZill, which can be downloaded from http://filezilla-project.org/

Step 7: Locate the folder on your server called “themes”. To find it, go to your root folder where your index page would be and click on “wp-content” –> “themes”

Now upload the entire contents (folder and all) to the themes folder.

Step 8: Go back to your WordPress admin area now and if you are still in the “Design” area, refresh your page. You will now see the downloaded template included. To install the template, simply click on the template picture and it will automatically get installed.

You can now right click on the “View Site” button and open in a new window, to see how the new template looks on your blog.

Part 3 –> Plugins… what they are and which ones to use

Plugins are basically scripts that can be easily added on to your WordPress installation to add extra functionality and since WordPress is an open source project (all the source code is open for anyone and everyone to use with a few restrictions) there are literally thousands of programmers constantly creating improvements and new plugins for WordPress.

The problem with plugins however, is WordPress is always evolving and with new improvements, often some plugins stop working with the latest version of WordPress. Thankfully however, there are always new plugins being created and 95% of them are all free.

The majority of plugins are more for fun functionality, meaning they are more just “cool to have” type of features. There are a few plugins however that in our opinion are very important to use and help from both an end user and an optimization point of view. These plugins are not the only plugins to use and if there are others you like then feel free to use them. We also make no guarantees that the next time WordPress updates, that any of these will continue to work.

To find plugins, click on the “Plugins” tab…

…and then scroll down to the bottom the page and right click on “WordPress Plugin Directory” and open in a new window. This site has thousands of plugins to choose from and provides some important information. The most important thing to look at when looking at plugins, is the compatibility, you want to ensure that the plugins work with the version of WordPress you are using. To check this, simply click on the plugin title in the directory, then on the Plugin Details page, check the “Requires WordPress Version:”

To find out the version of WordPress you are using, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page in the your WordPress admin area and it will mention it.

If the plugin is compatible, then click the download button and save the file to your computer. You will then want to unzip the contents of the zip file. Now open your FTP software and navigate to “wp-content” –> “plugins”

Simply upload the the unzipped plugins file to the plugins folder. Now go the plugins page in your admin area and you will see the list of uploaded plugins. Plugins that are NOT activated will be white and once activated will turn green. To activate a plugin, simply click the “Activate” link.

Akismet–>
(http://akismet.com/) This comes standard with WordPress and is in my opinion the most stable of all “Spam Filter” plugins. The only draw back to this plugin is you need to have a WordPress API but these are very easy to get. Simply register at http://www.wordpress.com and then you will receive an email with your API key in it. Then you activate the plugin and click on “Akismet Configuration” and then enter the API key in the provided field.

All In One SEO Pack –>
(http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/) WordPress out of the box is not optimized well from a search engine perspective. This plugin helps with improving how each post and page is optimized and also helps to prevent your blog from showing duplicate content.

Google XML Sitemaps –>
(http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/) Google site maps are fantastic ways to help improve the complete indexing of your blog. This ensures that all posts and pages are properly linked to for Google (and the other search engines) to find. You can also block certain pages from being found, ping the search engines when your sitemap is updated and best of all the sitemap will automatically update every time the blog updates.

Related Posts –>
(http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries) This plugin helps to provide better related internal linking on your blog. Once activated, this plugin will find which posts are similar to each other and interlink them. This is good for both the search engines and human visitors.

Sociable –>
(http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/sociable/) This plugin will automatically add links to your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so that your posts can be easily added to them.

Brian’s Threaded Comments –>
(http://meidell.dk/archives/2004/09/04/nested-comments/) This plugin will automatically organize your page commentsin a more structured pattern so replies can be made directly to specific comments.

Enforce www. Preference –>
(http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/enforce-www-preference/) This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.

Homepage Excerpts –>
(http://www.dailyblogtips.com/homepage-excerpts-wordpress-plugin/) This plugin gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Subscribe Remind –>
(http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscribe-remind/) This plugin will automatically place text and a link at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

WWSGD –>
(http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do) Treat new visitors different then new visitors

Feed Footer –>
(http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/feed-footer-plugin/) This plugin allows you to add footers under all your blog posts in your RSS feed.

OIO Publisher Plugin –>
(http://www.johncow.com/oiopublisher) This plugin is very affordable at just $37 and is by far the best we have come across for easily managing displaying paid advertising on your blog.

Do not be concerned with modifying the settings for these plugins yet. You will do this later on once we add content.

Part 4 –> Shut off Notifications

Once you have installed your plugins, you are now going to turn off the default notification function. This is a powerful feature with WordPress that notifies different blog directories when a new update has occurred at your blog. The problem is you do not want to be notifying anyone about your blog until you have some content.

To shut this feature off, click on…

“Settings” –> “Writing”

…and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section called “Update Services”. Delete the url that is in the form field and click “save changes”

Now go to…

“Settings” –> “XML Sitemap”

…and un-check all the “Update notifications”

Notify Google about updates of your Blog
Notify MSN Live Search about updates of your Blog
Notify Ask.com about updates of your Blog
Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog

Part 5 –> Set your Permalinks

One of the other draw backs of WordPress is that it comes default with very non user friendly file names. On the good side however, they make it very easy to customize this and make it very user friendly. So instead of having a url that looks like this…

http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123

…you can have something like…

http://www.yourblog.com/categoryname/keyword-phrase-here

To set this click on…

“Settings” –> “Permalinks”

…and click on the “Custom Structure” radio button. Now in the field provided you can set how you want the file system to display. There are dozens of combinations that you can create and the available tokens can be found by clicking the link called “number of tags are available”

Once you have the permalinks set, click the “Save Changes”. WordPress should update this automatically but it may require you to modify your .htaccess file. WordPress will provide you with the exact steps you need to do this.

Congratulations, your blog is set up!

In the next post we focus on getting our “Link Bait” set up and optimizing the blog around it from a visitor and search engine perspective.

We hope this was helpful and we will talk to you all tomorrow

Please provide your feedback!

Cow vs Conn and WIN Affiliate Elite Enterprise

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:31:01 +0000

COOL SURPRISE –> Got a surprise email this morning from Brad Callen who was pretty happy to see us mention that we like his product Affiliate Elite, and here is what he had to say…

If you cant read it… here is what he said…

“Thanks for mentioning AffiliateElite on your blog, I am anxious to see how you recommend using it. I see that you sponsor the odd contest every now and again too and if you would like to give away one free copy of the Enterprise Edition I can set you up. Let me know and if there is anything else I can do for you.”

First of all.. what a gentleman… thanks Brad, this puts you even higher in our books as one of the top IM gurus out there… we would most certainly LOVE to take you up on this offer and we are sure our readers would be more then happy too win a copy as well

Affiliate Elite is a kick ass piece of software and as you read in our last training post, we use this ourselves.. and will be showing you how in the next lesson. It is not a cheap one though and has a monthly use fee with it so, for one year alone this is a $570 + value… and that is only if you paid for 1 year. So you can see, this is not a cheap prize!

So, here is what we are going to do… On May 31st we are going to have a draw to see who wins… but too be entered to win, this is what you are going to have to do…

>>>MAJOR CONTEST UPDATE…. PLEASE VISIT http://www.johncow.com/cowpetition/ for all the details<<<

This is a 100% WIN/WIN for you all… you can get a chance to win this kick butt program and you will also receive all the details of how we built our blog so you can implement the exact same strategies. Can you moo the word… COOL!!!

Oh and we almost forgot… We had a good talk with Garry (no chance whatsoever of winning) Conn yesterday and it was kind of funny… we thought he was joking that he thought he stood a chance, but the little guy really believes it. He is so cute, it really warms our hearts to see the little guy all excited. Too bad we are going to have to stampede all over him… especially since we have started to grow fond of the little guy.

We also found out that SitePoint has decided to jump on board with this and is going to help out with sponsoring this contest… which we thought was pretty cool.

Here are the official Rules of the Game…

Starts Monday May 19th
Sites will be listed on SitePoint on Wednesday June 18th
Winner of contest will be decided by which site generates the highest sale
Blogs must be on a brand new domain
Blogs must be 100% original work
Blogs must not be a premade or bought and put on a new domain
Blogs will be listed on SitePoint with full disclosure of who bought them and for how much
Listing will be 100% handled by sitepoint (for fair third party listing)

We already stated that after we win 100% of the proceeds are going to go to World Vision and we will record the transaction so you can all see for yourselves that we are following through on that promise. Garry is not doing that… he is keeping it all for himself (can you say boo).

We are going to be fully disclosing all the details of this contest… how we decided on a market, how we planned out the blog, researched, built and promoted it. You will see first hand exactly how to do this for yourself. We are actually crazy for doing this as people pay 1000′s of dollars for this type of info… but our readers deserve the best

Disclosure –> We are making it clear right now that there are paid tools that we use that you will need to get if you want to do what we are going to share, so please don’t complain about that. We are not going to use this to pimp tools we do not use… but we are going to show you the tools we do use and most important the why and how we use them

Also, we are not making any guarantees to anyone about the success you will achieve following what we are going to show you… we are just showing you what we are doing. The good thing to know is we DESPISE theory in our teachings and stick to only proven facts… so you are going to learn what we “KNOW” is proven to work.. not what we think “should” work.

>>>MAJOR CONTEST UPDATE…. PLEASE VISIT http://www.johncow.com/cowpetition/ for all the details<<<

John Cow dot Com called out Garry Conn dot Com

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:33:16 +0000

OK.. some words were thrown (ok, maybe more tossed), some assumptions were made (we all know what assuming does) and finally enough was enough… one cow could only take so much. We dropped the hammer and called Garry (yes there are two r’s… I kept forgetting that) out for a fight. Well actually, not really a fight, just a competition.

Announcing….

Garry Conn vs John Cow

We are going to go head to head and build a blog completely from scratch in a non IM niche and after one month, whoever gets the highest price for there blog from sitepoint… will be the winner. (tentative plan)

We still need to work out all the details but we will let you know as soon as Garry (remember the two r’s) and us figure it all out.

The cool thing is we are going to share everything we do, so you can all see first hand what we are doing, how we do it and you can maybe (hopefully anyway) learn a thing or two.

Oh… and we are going to donate our winnings (because we are going to win.. yes Garry, that means you are going to lose) to World Vision (a pretty darn good cause in our opinion).

Cows And Politics Explained

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:08:06 +0000

A CHRISTIAN DEMOCRAT: You have two cows. You keep one and give one to your neighbor.

A SOCIALIST: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.

AN AMERICAN REPUBLICAN: You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So what?

AN AMERICAN DEMOCRAT: You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. You feel guilty for being successful. You vote people into office who tax your cows, forcing you to sell one to raise money to pay the tax. The people you voted for then take the tax money and buy a cow and give it to your neighbor. You feel righteous.

A COMMUNIST: You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk.

A FASCIST: You have two cows. The government seizes both and sells you the milk. You join the underground and start a campaign of sabotage.

DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE: You have two cows. The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE: You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE: You have two cows. The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, then pours the milk down the drain.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them World-Wide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. They are mad. They die. Pass the shepherd’s pie, please.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are. You break for lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.

A BRAZILIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You enter into a partnership with an American corporation. Soon you have 1000 cows and the American corporation declares bankruptcy.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship both of them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported on them.

AN ISRAELI CORPORATION: There are these two Jewish cows, right? They open a milk factory, an ice cream store, and then sell the movie rights. They send their calves to Harvard to become doctors. So, who needs people?

AN ARKANSAS CORPORATION: You have two cows. That one on the left is kinda cute.

This entire post was stolen from About.com