If you're new here, you may want to check out this cool new contest. You could win almost$3000 in Prizes!

As a lot of you know, Monday is the start of the cowpetition, where we go head to head against Garry (with two r’s) Conn. During the 30 days of the contest you are going to see first hand and in detail, exactly how we build and profit from niche blogs. Some of you, if not most of you, might not realize that the “Born Again” (hint hint) JohnCow has been doing this very thing for a while now and is making a good living at it… enough to have a good size staff working fulltime in our office for us. We are not saying this to brag but on the contrary, to make sure you do not miss this opportunity to get first hand knowledge of how to step through the process of planning, researching, building and marketing a profitable blog, the exact way we do it for ourselves.

So some of you might be able to say… We know that Cow… we know that!!!!

BIG UPDATE –> Well here is what you do not know… We are also going to be doing weekly live webinars (that we are calling “CowCasts”) with occasional guest speakers, where we are going to be talking about all that was done through out that week of the contest, review each lesson we posted and will open it up to Q&A

But there is a catch –> Do not worry, we are not putting you to work or anything but each one of these CowCasts are going to be limited seating and the details of the calls are going to be sent out via our email to our list of RSS subscribers who subscribed via email only. Also these “CowCasts” are going to be recorded and only made available to people who are subscribed to our RSS feed via email. Now we need to make clear that these recordings will not be made available right away, there will be about a 72 hour turn around time on them.

So bottom line… you better subscribe to our SPAM FREE RSS Feed via email now to get in on the action.

The webinars will be hosted on GotoWebinar and so I am sad to say you will need to call in on a phone to participate and listen but with solutions like Skype being so cheap it should not be a problem.

You see we thought about this and yes there are a lot of things we can do to help our readers, there are more prizes (oh and we do have more prizes too) and things like that but we are pretty sure most of you either already have things like computer’s or MP3 player’s and the reality is they do not really offer you what you came to this blog for in the first place.

This is a “Learn to Make Money Online” blog and as such it makes more sense for us to offer you rewards that actually help you achieve that. The value of what we are going to be delivering here is in our opinion only limited by how much money you end up making as a result of the training, which is a heck of a lot more then a free laptop of software.

BUT… and this is a BIG Cow Size “BUTT”

We also understand that contests help make it fun and we like giving free valuable resources away PLUS we have been approached by a few others to be able to offer even more prizes now

Can you moo… COOL!!!!

New Added Prizes…

• A FREE one year subscription to TrafficKahuna ($997 Value)
• A FREE copy of the Full Blogging Mastermind Audio Series from Yaro Starak with over 10 hours of up to date blog training ($397 Value)
• A FREE copy of Web 2.0 Marketing Tips from Miguel Alvarez, author of Marketing Factor ($135 Value)

This is in addition to the already awesome prizes of…

• A FREE Copy of Affiliate Elite Enterprise Edition ($550+ value)
• A FREE Copy of TrafficTravis ($97 Value)
• A FREE 1 Year Membership at PLR Pro ($1164 Value)
• A FREE Copy of Easy Member Pro Unlimited ($297 Value)
• A FREE Copy of Video Post Robot ($197 Value)

Begin of Cow Rant –>

Sorry but we have to throw this in here. We need to come clean on something here, we read a comment the other day about the cowpetition, saying that “anyone can give away ebooks”. FIrst of all these are not “ebooks”, these are software, training and tools that are of solid value and will help you to make money online (emphasis on help… you still have to do the work).

Now, we want to ask, why is it some people love to complain about things, always find the negative… even when they are free. Why are so many of us so miserable in life that we always look at the glass half empty? I think of all the time and energy we waste being angry and negative for the stupidest…. and i mean STUPIDEST reasons. If we could just take that energy and focus it on helping others instead of knocking others down… what a better place this would be.

<– End of Cow Rant

Your Specific Instructions for getting on on this stampede!

PLEASE READ THESE CAREFULLY

1. You must opt in as a subscriber via email to our RSS Feed. You can do that in the side bar…
   
2. By registering, everyone automatically gets one ticket to be put into the draw for the prizes. You also get access to the live “CowCasts” and the recordings.
3. To get more tickets for the Cowpetition… All you have to do is the following…

• 4 Tickets: Twitter a post about us and link to http://www.johncow.com/cowpetition, then post a comment with a link to your twitter post on the Cowpetiton page.
  
• 10 Tickets: Twitter a post (following above step criteria) and become a follower of my Twitter at http://twitter.com/johncow, then post a comment with a link to your twitter post on the Cowpetiton page. (If you are already a follower then you just need to make a twitter post to qualify)
• 25 Tickets: Make a blog post about the cowpetition and the prizes and link to http://www.johncow.com/cowpetition
• 50 Tickets: Create a short video and submit it to Youtube about the contest

So if you register for our RSS via email, Twitter and follow, create a post and video, you can be awarded 90 tickets. That means that if there are 10 000 tickets registered all together then your odds of winning a prize would be 90x’s greater then someone who just registers

To learn more about this contest, go to http://www.johncow.com/cowpetition

The contest starts Monday and each day, we will post a lesson based on what we are doing. We will reveal pretty much everything to you. Then the start of the next week we will a have a CowCast, for email subscribers only, to provide an opportunity for further learning and understanding.

This is pretty much going to be the last update about the contest, since Monday the training is going to preoccupy most of our posting time.

One last reminder… if we (John Cow) win this contest, we are donating all the proceeds to World Vision… we are not keeping one red cent!

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

14 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

You go to the gym and get on the treadmill, you have no real goal in mind and so you hit the “Quick Start” button and just go. You know of people that are in really good physical shape and they absolutely love the treadmill and you want so much to look like them so you are going to try it.

At first it is a breeze and actually is a little fun. You have your headphones on, rocking on to your favorite music and you play around with the buttons and settings on the treadmill thinking to yourself how this is actually not too bad. You look at the treadmill beside you and see that person is on level 9 and so you crank yours up to level 10 just to show them that you are better.

Then it starts, your legs get a little tired, and start to burn. The fun is starting to disappear and you watch for a chance that the person on the treadmill next to you is not looking so you can turn the level down a little.

Suddenly the thoughts start…

“I need to get off this thing, I hate this stupid thing!”

60 seconds later all inhibitions are gone, you don’t care who is looking, you crank down the level to the lowest it can go… your just to darn worn out.

30 seconds later… you hit the big red STOP button and justify to yourself…

“Hey, its been 7 minutes, thats long enough, I will go longer next time!”

What Failed Here and What the Heck Does This Have to do with Business Planning?

Hopefully you can see where we are going here but if not, we are sure you will get it in a moment.

For anyone starting a business, if you do not set yourself a goal right up front, chances are you are going to be just like the person on the treadmill and jump ship the moment things start to get rough. Things are always fun and exciting at first but what about when tough times hit?

You NEED to set for yourself realistic goals.

You see, with exercise the big goal is usually to lose weight but if you do not have a specific amount you want to lose… well then as soon as you lose a little and times get tough you are going to be like the guy on the treadmill and simply quit.

With your business, we can pretty much guarantee you that times are going to get rough. There are going to come moments that you look at your results and or finances and feel so over whelmed and paranoid, that you suddenly fall into analysis paralysis. You start to feel like you are failing, that it is too hard, that you can’t do it and then the inevitable happens… You Quit!

You chalk this up to the system not working (it is never our own fault), the tools are no good, the person who you learned this from scammed you… this whole business thing is a scam and does not work

I have heard this more then once. Someone fails to plan and because of that, jumps ship the moment the waters get rough and then blames the ship for them drowning when it was them that jumped off the boat into the water.

Whether you are starting a blog, creating a PPC campaign, or even starting an offline business, you need to make sure you set yourself goals that get you through to the end. You need to stay focused on the end prize.

Here are two scenarios…

1. Lets say for example you want to start building niche blogs. So your initial plan is to build a few of them (you are not sure how many) and make loads of cash. A few months into it you start getting discouraged because you are barely making any money and these sites are taking lots of time and effort. You cant see the reason “why” for what you are doing, so you abandon them and move on to something else.

2. Now a different person wants to build some niche specific blogs. This person plans that they want 6 blogs built and promoted by 6 months. They figure out the time and effort to do it and they plan that at the end of the 6 months they would take the two that are doing the best, sell the other four at sitepoint and then focus only on those two that were looking promising. Now after a couple months, this person has 4 done and none are doing that well however, this person does not quit… why?

The reason is this person knows the “why” of what they are doing. They see a goal and focus on it… they know they need 6 blogs done and then it is time to make a decision on a new goal. At the end of the 6 months they have achieved their goal and find the two sites that are the best of the batch and now focus all efforts on them.

When the doubts and distractions pop up, as long as they are not deal breakers (life altering kind of events) they are able to stay focused on the end goal and push their way through to the end.

~ I sure hope this makes sense to you!

Now for some serious questions to you…

• Do you have any idea what your goals are with your business right now?
• Are you just winging it and hoping for the best?
• If you had an employee that gave the same excuse you have for not having a goal… and you were paying them by the hour and they were just “winging it”… would you feel that was a good investment?

Have you signed up for my latest Cowpetition yet? You can win some pretty awesome prizes!

Check it out at http://www.johncow.com/cowpetition

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

12 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Got some questions for you…

• Want to learn first hand how to “truly” make money online?
• Want to see from start to finish how we plan, research, build and market a blog to dominate and grow viral buzz?
• Want to see a real life case study from start to finish?
• Want a chance to WIN over $2300 almost $3000 in prizes?
• Want it all for FREE?

>>>Click Here Now<<< to visit our “Official” Cowpetition page and learn exactly how you can enter to Win!!!

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

9 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

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<<<

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

19 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

SHOW ME THE MONEY!”

In the movie Jerry Maguire, the character Rod Tidwell (played by Cuba Gooding Jr) gets Jerry (played by Tom Cruise) to repeat the phrase “Show Me the Money”. The scene that this took place in was very energetic and fun. The basis of what was happening in the movie was the character played by Cuba Gooding Jr, was making it very clear to Jerry McGuire that he did not care about any of the (uhn hmm… pardon the french here) Bullshit, that Jerry was throwing at him… what mattered to him was the money. Dont fancy talk me, dont tell me how great it will or could be… SHOW ME THE MOONEY!

When we are doing market research, this principal should be front and center. All the fancy numbers and calculations that most of the keyword tools out there tell us, are completely meaningless… We want to see the money!

What we mean by that is, before we invest any time or effort into creating a blog, we want to see that people are spending money and more important of all… people are making money in the market that we are targeting. We are not talking about the actual affiliate product here… we already know people are making some money selling that, what we are referring to here are the keywords.

How to Find the “Show Me the Mooney” Keywords

There are three tools that we absolutely love, when it comes to keyword research and we are going to explain about each one and why we like them. We really wish we could tell you that the only tools you need are free ones but that is just not true, we want to show you exactly how we do this to earn some kick ass affiliate revenue and this is how we do it… with these tools.

As we go through the remaining lessons, we hope you will fully understand why we not only recommend these tools but we use them.

1. Google Adwords Toolbox –> In our opinion this is the most powerful tool of them all. If we had to choose only one tool out of them all, we would honestly stick with the free Google tools. The data that Google provides is absolutely incredible and once you understand it, you can uncover beautiful words… and we are going to show you exactly how we do it.

We do recommend that you do not use the publicly accessible tools, but instead create an Adwords account to access the tools from the Adwords control panel. To register for Adwords, you will have to set up a mock adwords campaign but you can pause it right away and then access all the tools.

2. Traffic Travis –> We love this tool and we bet that a lot of you (if not most of you) have never heard of this one. A good friend of ours named Mark Ling, who is a very successful internet marketing in the non IM field, created this. Personally we think the name is terrible and the interface is kind of cheesy looking but once you understand what is under the hood of this bad boy, you will absolutely love it and as we get further into the training you will see why.

3. Affiliate Elite –> This is a fantastic tool that should be part of every affiliate marketers arsenal… in our opinion of course. We absolutely love the spy tool and to be honest with you, is the only part of this software we really use. Not to downplay the rest of the functionality but this is what helps us identify the winners from the losers.

Other Tools…. there are lots of other fantastic tools available, such as WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, SpyFu and more. We have used them all and still use some but the above three are our favorites and in our opinion are all that are needed for very effective keyword research and are what we will be sharing with you in the following lessons.

Now before you go out and buy these tools, you may want to follow along and judge for yourself… you may even already own some tools that you can use in place of them.

Lets Get To It - Enough talk, lets get our Hoofs Dirty!

The remainder of this lesson is going to focus on the initial step of digging out the words with Google. In the next lesson we will show you how to take those words… expand of them and then use TrafficTravis and Affiliate Elite to filter out the crap and focus in on the money makers.

Step 1: Log into your account at https://adwords.google.com/select/Login and then select “Tools” and “Keyword Tool”

Step 2: Check the “Website content” box and enter the true URL of the site you are going to promote and select “Get Keyword Ideas”

Click To Enlarge Image

Step 3: Google will now list all the keywords that they feel are directly related to that site. They also organize the info into “Groups”. Click on the “Avg Search Volume” to sort in order of highest to lowest.

Step 4: Open a notepad file and copy down the top keyword from each group.

Click to Enlarge

Step 5: Now we are going to look where the discussions are happening. Go to Google.com and now search for…

“Keyword Phrase” Forum

…for each of the keywords that you listed from step 4, such as…

This is a very powerful step, because this is where the people in the market actual go and talk. This is where the problems are discussed, the resources are discussed and more.

Step 6: Click on the top forum that shows up and you want to browse through the forum and look for keywords that are not in your list and are not phrase matches to your list words. For example, since the example list has “day trading”, we would not use a word such as “forex day trading” since my keyword already covers that… instead I want to look for words that are completely different. You want to look for words used by experienced members in the forum as well and in discussions that have a lot of responses… that shows interest in the subject.

For example, we found the word “EuroBund Daily Notes”, there is a good discussion on this and it is not something we have on our list… so we added it.

Make sure you do not waste too much time here though… you can get into analysis paralysis here. Just browse around, find popular discussions and look for hot topics and the words being used.

Not every keyword will have a quality forum associated with them, but a lot of them do.

Step 7: Now go to google.com (the search engine part) and enter each keyword from your entire list, one at a time and copy down the urls of all the adsense ads on page one of the results only. Repeat this for every keyword that you copied down from the previous steps.

Note –> The reason we are doing this is to focus on keywords from sites that “PAY” for traffic… they are the ones that know which keywords to focus on (did a light come on yet?)

Step 8: Once you have a list of all the URL’s, go back to your AdWords tool and now enter each URL, one at a time into the “Keyword Tool” –> “Website Content”. Click on the “Add all…” under each group to add all the words to the right side of the screen.

Step 7: Repeat this with every URL that you found from step 7. You will find that there are a few of words that are shared but there are lots more that are new.

By the time you have finished this you will have found a lot of great keywords… but the important thing here is to realize these are not keywords related to just anything… they are keywords related to sites paying to use those words. That is powerful because that shows the words are worth something.

Once you have compeleted this step, export the keywords in text format and save them to your computer.

Thats is it for today!

In the next lessons, we will show you how to take these words and filter them to find the hidden diamonds.

Check out the other lessons in this series…

1. Lesson 1 - Keyword Research: What are you Basing it On?
2. Lesson 2 - Keyword Research: the Cart before the Cow
3. Lesson 3 - Keyword research: What for may we ask?

PS –> We truly hope you are enjoying these lessons and would love to get feedback from you on them… so leave a moo below about the lesson.

>> Remember to subscribe for our RSS Feed to stay up to date on the next lesson we post!<<

Did You Register for the "COWpetition"? If You Want To Learn How to Kill Your Competition and be Entered to Win Over $3000 in Great Prizes All for FREE? Then DO Yourself a Favor and Click Here to Learn How NOW!

10 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post