John Cow dot Com » outsourcing

Happy New Years – And Some Free Super Cool Prizes For You!

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:49:12 +0000

First of all congratulations to…

Phillipe of http://prizk.com/ and Jan of http://www.janmiddleton.com/ for winning the $50 via paypal. Simply email me using the contact form and send me your paypal and I will send you $50 USD

The winners were picked using the cool free http://www.random.org/

Now if you did not win… worry not… cause i have another cool contest for you… and this one is focused on new years!

I am giving away…

2 months FREE access to the Web2Mayhem ($254 value) and if you are already a member i will simply refund you the charges you already paid

PLUS

One hour skype call with you and I to look at your business model and to come up with a custom plan for using Web2Mayhem based on your needs ($ not sure of value… depends on how much money you make from my advice)

PLUS

5 Custom and 100% unique “Spin Ready” articles for you to use

This is a short contest and i am picking the winner on Monday January 4th 2010 (will announce it in a blog post here)

How can you win?

Step 1: Retweet this message on Twitter by either copying and pasting it or you can just Click Here
“Get 2 Months Free of Web2Mayhem from @johncow Go to http://bit.ly/51BlWl to check it out and Happy New Years!”
Step 2: Sign up to check out the free video for the Magic Bullet System (Click Here)
Step 3: Comment below with a link to your twitter post, a quick post of what you thought of the free video Amish is giving away (make sure the email you use in the comment form below is the same you resgister for the video with so i can cross reference.. and if you already signed up you are good to go) and also in the comment simply say “Happy New Years”

That is it… but WARNING… your comment might not be approved right away cause 25% or more go into moderation. I will be checking every few hours and so please only submit your comment once.

Have a FANTASTIC New Years, Be Safe and Remember… Have Fun With Your Life!

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:58:03 +0000

Merry Christmas… happy holidays and I hope you create many wonderful memories!

Brand New Contest with Wicked Prizes!

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:43:30 +0000

On January 6th we opened the doors to a very small number of “Beta” testers to test out our new “PPCKahuna Elite” system. Our initial plan was to only allow 100 people in, this was so we could ensure everything was in place and working correct… well in ONLY 11 minutes, we filled the 100 spots and as a result we left the doors open for 20 extra minutes and we sold out another 100 (200 in total).

PPCKahuna Elite is an amazing set of tools that will help anyone involved in PPC to skyrocket their efforts. We provide powerful tools and training that is focused with one thing in mind… getting quick results.

We just are kicking off a brand new contest and there are some wicked prizes.

Click here to check it out now!

Using oDesk for Outsourcing Continued

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:47:12 +0000

This post is a continuation of Outsourcing Using oDesk

So far my experiance with oDesk has been met with some frustration but it is not the oDesk system that I blame but the people I am hiring. You see, the oDesk system it self has been great (I do have some recommendations to make it better but overall it is great) but the problem is that the people that I have interviewed and even hired have been less than exceptional… not all of them… but the majority.

So far I have tested a few different people and I have just now found someone that I am hopeful with. The biggest problems have been…

1. Not able to dedicate time needed: Even though I put in the job request that I need someone 30+ hours a week, every single one of them (expect for the latest) seems to think that means something entirely different… like maybe 10 hours a week.
2. Do Not Understand How to Communicate: I had to actually chase down two people to see if they were actually going to do the “test” assignment. One of them decided no and the other finally got back to me with something that could have taken 20 minutes (it was a joke).
3. Are Not As Experianced as They Say: This one was a big lesson for me and it made me revamp my test assignments I have been given them. People will lie about what they can do in their resumes and as a result I assumed certain things and did not bother to test on them… BIG MISTAKE!

OK, so this kind of sounds like a slamming of oDesk, but it really is not. In fact I love oDesk and it has been the features available on oDesk that have really helped… especially the time tracker with screen capture. This has allowed me to see if people are even started on the task and the real amount of time it took them. With elance and rent a coder, I was always left to just hope… but oDesk shows me.

What I am not crazy about is…

1. There should be “contact info” front and center on the work team page for each worker. This is not in an obvious spot and is a pain to find.
2. Should have a communication area (a message board) for communicating with outsourcers in the team room. Using email and having to track the communcations is a pain in my opinion. I would rather everything be there like how elance does it.
3. Even though you put criteria for the job, people can still apply that do not meet it. For example, I would want the ability for applicants to have to confirm that they can be available he 30+ hours a week before being able to even apply for a position. If the say they can but can’t then they get a negative point on their profile.
4. When you “interview” some one, it needs to show you clearly on the application board (where all those applying for the job, have their profiles show up) who you have requested an interview for.
5. If you have more then one job open and click on a person to interview, you then have to select a drop down box for which one of the jobs you are interviewing them for. That may sound easy but it is first of all in a terrible spot and easily missed. Plus if I am on the page for a certain job that people are applying for, why in the world when I click “Interview” would it not just automatically know that is what I want to interview them for!

Overall, I like oDesk… but with the above changes I would LOVE it!

I am going to work with this system for another week and then put a checklist together for all of you as to how I am going to use oDesk. This will include…

1. How to post a job
2. How to interview
3. How to create test assignments
4. What to watch for in test assignments
5. How to manage outsourcers after hiring them

So what are your thoughts and what else would you like me to include that I may have overlooked?

Keyword Corral – A Step by Step Walk Through

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:17:24 +0000

A couple of days ago I posted the brand new keyword tool called “Keyword Corral” and the response has been pretty good except for the fact that there is no written documentation available. I did create a video but I knew that some written documentation would be needed, I just wanted to wait and see how the initial beta test has gone. I am pleased to see it going so well and so here is some training to help those who might have hit a snag or two.

First of all this software is meant to work directly with the Google “Traffic Estimator” data and is not meant to have just single keywords added. In my ebook “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” I wlk you through the steps of using Google’s tools and for those of you that went through the ebook, you will recognize the drastic time savings this tool can provide.

If you have not gone through the ebook, I highly recommend you do that first.

Over the next few days I will also be providing a smaller “Keyword Research” pdf that will accompany this tool but that is a few days away. This pdf will take you step by step thorugh the process of taking full advantage of this tool.

For now however, here is a quick overview of how to get started with KeywordCorral…

Step 1: Click on “Open the source file”

Step 2: Select the type of file you want to import (.txt or .csv)

Step 3: Once select “KeywordCorral” will import the data from the file. You can sort the data by clicking on the column headers. As in the below image, clicking on the column “Estimated Clicks/Day Lower” sorts the data from highest to lowest.

Step 4: Click on “Filter”.

Step 5: Now set the filter criteria. In the below image example, I have set it to filter out only the words that have at least 10 “Estimated Clicks / Day Lower”, 50 “Estimated Clicks / Day Upper” and the phrases must have at least 3 words in them.

Step 6: Once you have filtered the data, you can now select the keywords you are interested in and get the “allintitle” competition. To select more then one keyword, simply hold down the CTRL key and select all the keyword youare interested in. Then select “Get Competition”

Step 7: When you hit the “Get Competition” button, you will see the green progress bar across the top.

Step 8: Keyword Corral will now display the competition results under the competition column. This number uses the allintitle filter, so you know the competitors that are directly targeting that phrase.

Step 9: You can now select “Save All” and Keyword Corral will save all the data into a csv file.

Step 10: If you just want to save the keywords, then select “Save Keywords” and it will not save any data except for the keywords. This saves it to a .txt file.

Step 11: The “Reset” button will remove any filter settings you have applied. It does delete the filter settings, but it does un apply it. This way you can see all the keywords again and if you want to re apply the filter you will need to go back into the filter and click apply.

Hope you find this useful and would love to hear your feedback on this tool.

Boycotter Busted!

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 21:00:22 +0000

Shortly after the mysterious disappearance of the Boycott John Chow page, we received an email which explains it all. It all seems a bit fishy to us but we’ll let you decide what’s really going on since you people seem to be clever according to the following statement!

murphyz wrote:

Dear John Cow,

I’m writing to clarify my situation in relation to the boycottjohnchow blogspot
site.

I am a subscriber to your blog (and not to JohnChow.com) and checked my feed reader yesterday evening at which time you had posted about the boycott site.

After following the link to the blogspot page, I found that it went nowhere, indicating that any page which was there had been deleted by the author, or by some evil administrators.

I then secured the blog for myself, pointing it to my personal blog and also to that of a relatively new business established by a friend of mine selling some animal free products and such like.

I did not create a boycott site, and have no intention to do so. Further, I did not submit anything to Digg, and can’t really understand why the original author would have deleted the blog after digging it.

As far as link baiting, it wasn’t incredibly successful. Your readers are obviously too clever to follow links if they see something other than expected, and my blog is surely of no interest to them as it doesn’t indicate how they may get rich online quickly. In fact they may have just been confused for arriving at a blog that doesn’t have advertisements plastered all over the front page.

Best of luck with this venture, and have a nice weekend.

murphyz

Website: http://www.murphyzville.com/blog

We hope you’ll have a nice weekend too Mr Murphyz!

Boycotting For Dummies

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:45:19 +0000

“Enough is enough! John Chow is becoming too rich and we need to put a halt to his evil blog before he grabs all the money in the world! All us other bloggers can’t make any more money because the bad Chow has it all! A boycott is what we need, stick it to the man who calls himself an Internet Mogul! Stop reading Chow’s Reviewme reviews and especially stop clicking his ads, they are the source of his income which is actually supposed to be mine. It’s not fair! Boohoo mommy!”

So it seems our favorite money making blogger has ticked off another “I’m so poor I have to use blogspot.com” blogger. John, you’re so naughty! One thing though Mr Boycotter, if you’re really upset about the Big Beef’s success and all the money he’s earning and you really want to get your point across about Mr. Chow being greedy, we suggest you ditch the 120×240 AdWords banner which is nearly bigger than the rest of your blog. Good luck rounding up the villagers with pitchforks and torches!

We’re Sold Out!

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 11:15:24 +0000

Hi kids, just a quick update on this weeks guest blogger experiment. Due to the massive amount of posts we have in draft now, we’re not only going to publish just the most interesting ones for the rest of this week, we’ve also closed the new user registration. If we’d keep this open, we’d never get around to post ourselves anymore! For any user that has registered but not written a post yet; we will accept any post written within the next 24 hours. After that, all accounts will be deleted except for the blogger who received the most votes at the end of the week.

It’s great to see what kind of stuff our readers write about and we’d like to thank all of you for participating. Hopefully you’re getting some new visitors out of it!

One of our loveliest commentators, Miss Kumiko, showed a slight concern that we are drifting away from the ‘make money online’ theme which is true. We have left it up to you guys to pick a topic to write about so we can’t blame anyone for being way off topic. Perhaps a lesson is to be learnt here for all of us. If the opportunity arises to step in the spotlights, you should do your best to show your new audience what you’re capable of. First impressions count!

According to Kumiko: “It’s not just first impressions but making the most of the readership too. Here on John Cow, I’d guess that due to the marketing of the site that the audience is pretty much a money/blogger crowd.
If you want to make the most of a guest post, it should really serve to bring the readers here over to your own site on the same theme”.

Oh, and today is the last day you can win a PS3, Wii, Xbox360, iPhone or whatever is worth $500 with us!