John Cow dot Com » ReviewMe Reviews

Want to Know Exactly How I Got a Brand New Site From 0 to Hero in ONLY 5 Days?

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:57:10 +0000

How fast can you get a brand new domain indexed and ranking in Google?

I am talking brand new… not an expired or aged domain… one that has never been used before… and I am not talking just getting indexed, I mean ranking and getting traffic for your main term(s).

Here is what happened…

Purchased brand new domain on December 30th 2009
Built the blog and published its first post on December 31st 2009 (built this 100% myself and did not outsource anything)
Started promotion on December 31st 2009
Was indexed in Google on January 1st 2010 (less then 24 hours)
Page one rankings for target terms January 5th 2010 (5 days)

What terms?

magic bullet system
magic bullet system reviews
the magic bullet system review
the magic bullet system
magicbulletsystem
magic bullet systems
magic bullet system pricing
magic bullet system traffic review

OK now before any of you grumpy bastards speak up and say…

“Anyone can rank for those kind of terms… blah,blah,blah…”

Then build a brand new site and go make yourself money and prove it to us all that it’s easy. Must be a brand new domain too… no aged domains.

OK, hopefully I headed off the annoying people right off the bat. Now for the rest of you that actually see value in this and realize that if you can repeat exactly what I am doing here for other product launches you can rake in HUGE bucks… well, then listen up.

First of all, these words are very targeted traffic and they are bringing in VERY good traffic to the blog already. With this campaign website, if it only makes one sale of the main product its promoting it will have achieve a ROI of over 1000%….. that’s just one sale and for the amount of targeted leads it’s generating I have no worries.

I am not spending money on PPC, Media Buys or anything else… it is all based on unpaid search and social traffic.

How would you like to have 100% FREE access to…

Flow charts
Checklists
Explanations

…of exactly how I researched, built, structured and promoted this campaign. I will expose 100% everything and even explain the plugins I use and how I use them.

If this sounds cool and valuable to you… well then, CLICK HERE and listen to the Podcast with Amish Shah… where I ask him 10 very pointed questions about his upcoming product. The call got excellent reviews and you will certainly get something out of it. Near the end of the call I explain how I am going to be giving access to this material.

So go here now –> http://www.AttendThisEvent.com/?eventid=10619751

Now I am sure a few of you will be able to figure out which site it is… and think your smart… go for it… it’s not hard to find… the site is ranking well and is not hard to find

‘Tis the Season to Give Something Back

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:18:46 +0000

As you all know, it’s a very special time of year. The time where people come together with the spirit of goodwill…and join Web2Mayhem.

Wait, that’s not right…(well, it is, and you should join, but that’s not the point of this post). No, it’s the other special time of year, and whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, of Festivus, ’tis the time for gift giving.

And in that spirit of goodwill towards men (and other creatures) this post isn’t about how to make money online (although that does tend to make people happy). No, this post is about giving something back while you’re giving gifts.

Below is a list of charitable sites that allow you to make donations in someone else’s name. Now, in case your special someones would still like something under the tree, never fear – most of these sites will accept donations in any amount you want. Even a donation of $10 can help, and it’s a great idea for stocking stuffers. Instead of golf balls, or chocolate, and some useless tchotchke that they are never going to use, you can do some good.

ASPCA Who doesn’t want to help animals?

Right to Play A charity that helps underprivileged children in developing countries learn the benefits of play and team sports.

Amnesty International The charity that works to protect human rights around the world.

March of Dimes A charity that is dedicated to improving the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality.

World Vision International
A charity that helps close to 100 million people in nearly 100 countries around the world, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or gender. They have multiple giving options, from straight cash donations, to the ability to buy chickens, ducks or a goat to help a family be able to feed themselves.

These are just a very small sample of the charitable organizations that would be very thankful to get some of your holiday money this week. To help on a local level, check out your local United Way, Salvation Army, local soup kitchen, or Humane Society. If someone you are buying for has a special connection to a particular organization, then donating to them in their name is a gesture they would really appreciate. And you’ve killed two birds with one stone – you’ve given a thoughtful gift that the recipient will like, and you’ve helped these great organizations do some good.

And in the interest of total honesty (unrelated to the FTC stuff though) I should also tell you that using charitable donations as stocking stuffers are also a great way to finish off your Christmas shopping that you left until the last minute because you were too busy with a product launch to get it done earlier. Just as an example.

Boost your Online Business Offline

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:35:38 +0000

It’s easy to get caught up in the tidal wave of Internet Marketing. You can spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars promoting your little online site, only to get a relatively low return on your investment. Or, it may be that you’re in a terribly competitive market, and getting your piece of the online marketplace is like pulling teeth.

It might not occur to you naturally, but some of the best ways to promote your online business are actually through offline means. You see, once you hit the online marketing realm, you’re competing with every other online business in your niche. In the offline marketing realm, however, the competition tends to be much less severe.

Here are three ways you might try promoting your online business offline:

Take out an ad. When eHarmony entered the online matchmaking world, the market was already pretty saturated. Rather than rely on AdWords campaigns or affiliate marketing, eHarmony took their message directly to consumers. They saturated both radio and television airwaves with advertisements, and it paid off. While your small business isn’t in a position to create a national campaign on that scale, you can take an ad out in your local paper or on your local radio station.

Network. Before there was online social networking, there was offline social networking. Make sure your friends and family know about your online business. Be involved in your community, whether it’s through a local business group or civic organization. Sponsor a tee-ball team. Think about some of the businesses and groups in your area, and see if you can come up with a mutually beneficial arrangement. Perhaps you can help promote them online while they help promote you online.

Use traditional sales techniques. Whether it’s direct mail or cold sales calls, the tools of the traditional salesperson can help boost your online business offline. Take a course on sales and marketing at your local community college, or immerse yourself in the writings of offline sales and marketing gurus.

Not every niche can benefit from all of these techniques, but most will.

Why Do We Sometimes Need a Slap in the Face?

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:12:32 +0000

Often times in movies you will see someone going crazy, repeating the same phrase or just talking nonsense and suddenly someone slaps them in the face. This immediately shakes the person up and seems to calm them down and you will often hear the character then say “thanks I needed that”.

Why is this?

I do not mean getting a slap in the face literally of course but I mean in general. Why is it that we often need something major to wake us up and get us back on focus?

If you listen to any of the successful people out there, it seems that there are often moments in thier lives where something major happened. It often is some financial disaster but not always. It is these “slaps in the face” arise that suddenly the person stops, sits back and takes a look at the big picture of everything they are doing.

Here is another question for you to think about…

Is major failure (a slap in the face) necessary for achieving success?

Yesterday I talked about asking the questions “what is this all for?” and I mentioned I would explain my thinking behind it but I am going to actually hold off on that for a bit and the reason is I want to discuss the above questions first.

So whats you opinion on the question…

Is major failure (a slap in the face) necessary for achieving success?

Please do not just give a yes or no but give a reason too

Tomorrow (for real this time) I am going to talk about this and also about answering the quesiton “what is this all for?”

Posts in this series…

March Sponsors Shoutout

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:13:31 +0000

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has made our blogging life a bit easier because they sponsor us. Every month we’ll do a write up like this, just to show our appreciation for their business with us. Unfortunately we won’t be able to thank all sponsors, simply because a couple of adspots were bought just to publish affiliate links. Not much point in thanking the affiliate programs.

So without further a do, here’s a shoutout to the coolest people on the face of the planet:

1 ) Top Hosting Center – Currently our biggest sponsor, who very generously donated one heck of a server for our blogging bonanza. If you’re on the lookout for a new or better hostingplan, these are the folks you’ll definitely want to go and see. Who can beat a FREE IP, FREE domain name, 1000GB space and 33,000GB(!) bandwidth for under $7 per month?! Also; check out the review on them by us before they decided to become our hosting sponsor.

2 ) CSSRockstars – If you need your designs coded into a workable website, these are the people to hit up. They have very attractive rates and do a quality job within 2 days. Oh by the way, we just had a little contest with them, $500 worth of coding, and we’re announcing the winner at the end of this post.

3 ) E-Junkie – Perhaps the coolest banner on the blog, E-Junkie is a well renowned service to sell your stuff via affiliates. Remember the cool WP Auctions plugin (review here) and the The Traffic Book (review here)? These are also sold via the E-Junkie website.

4 ) Profits Daily – Whose site seems to be down at the moment…aaah.

5 ) Motive Interactive – Excellent affiliate network to add to your portfolio of money makers. Very nice crowd and they were nice enough to sent us a free tshirt! Check out the review we did about them.

6 ) Ads4Dough – Another affiliate network. They are currently running a contest where you can win an ipod nano if you’ve signed up through this review. There still time to enter!

7 ) The Social Millionaire – Just a few weeks ago, Pat ordered a review with us for his new million dollar idea website. His earnings counter back then was set at $106, and we hate to be the ones to say ‘told you so’ but The SocialMilionaire is now nearly at $3000!

8 ) PepperJamNetwork – Yet another affiliate network that wanted to get featured by us. Again, great folks and a worthy addition to any money makers portfolio of money making affiliate networks.

9 ) Here’s the list of our text sponsors for March:

Looks like that’s the list for March. Thanks for your business and we hope that we’ve managed to sent some good traffic your way!

*Photo by: Jennifer Ciel
** $500 worth of coding won by Laarni.

Getting The Most Out Of Your Review

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:38:07 +0000

Being bloggers, something we’re all familiar with are the numerous sponsored reviews that are being posted every day in the blogosphere. Website reviews, product reviews, affiliate reviews, most likely every single one of you has either paid or got paid for one or more. Its no longer something readers frown upon since the nay sayers seem to have finally caved in. There’s money to be made with these reviews, so there’s really no stopping it. Consider it an extension of your ad campaign – a positive endorsement by a leading figure in his or her relative niche can work wonders. Take Shoemoney for example; He said a thing or two about the Million Dollar Wiki project a few months ago, and the founder of the MDW ended up generating over $40,000 in new sales instantly!

The ‘problem’ with these reviews in general? The cost of getting one! Sure, it might seem like a lot of money to dish out a couple of hundred bucks, but it you’re getting a good review, with the right audience exposure, your ROI (return on investment) might be doubled many times. Having said that, some of us simply do not have the budget to get in on the big blogs like Shoemoney and JohnChow. This is where you’re going to have to make a decision and find a balance between how much of your budget you’d like to spend and how much exposure you’re looking for.

Let’s say you have $500 to spend. There’s the possibility of blowing it all one one review on a top blog and hope for the best. Another option you have is to spread out that budget over a few smaller blogs with lower review prices. Then, there’s the option to get featured on a medium sized blog and use the rest of your budget to sponsor a contest on that same blog.

A review is a review, and once it’s gone from the front page, not many people will remember it. However, if you’ve tied in a sponsored contest, your brand recognition will receive an instant boost, the contest will lead to more free exposure on other blogs, because to win your prize, people have to write a small post about the contest and link back to you for example. Take a look at WinningtheWeb.com for example. The blogger held a contest and put up a review on JohnChowcom and us as the main prizes. How did they make sure everyone knew about the contest? By ordering a review with Chow and us and having us let the blogosphere know about it! They are now sitting on 500 RSS subscribers and have a steady flow of traffic.

In this case, the blogger did have to put down quite a bit of money for the reviews and prizes he put up, but he got what he wanted – insta-fame.

Next time you’re thinking about ordering a review somewhere, don’t think you’re done once you’ve paid the reviewer. You should squeeze every last bit out of that review to make it work for you. As soon as your review is published, don’t just sit back, looking at the comments coming in and replying to anyone that happens to disagree with the product or site that was reviewed. Its time to become a social worker. Tagging the review on all your favorite social media sites is a start. Ask your friends to join in and vote you up. Link back from your own blog(s) with relevant keywords so the sponsored post will gain more organic SEO traction. Once again, a positive endorsement on a well known blog will work much better than when you keep talking about your own product on your own blog.

You’ve paid for it so you might as well make sure that everyone knows about it. A pleasant side-effect for the blogger that gets paid is obviously the effort you’re putting in to drive traffic to the sponsored post. A win-win situation if you ask us.

Win Half a Decade of Free Hosting

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:58:24 +0000

Our good friend Nick Sullivan from InternetBabel.com is at it again. This guy just keeps dishing out the good stuff and is running one contest after the other. This time he’s managed to get his hands on 5 years of free hosting, with an estimated value of $514.25! Not too shabby if you ask us, especially if the only thing you have to do to win one of the 6 prize packages (4x 1 year – 2x 6 months free webhosting) is simply subscribing to Nick’s RSS feed via email! How simple can it get?

Anyway, Nick saved us a lot of time by putting his sponsors and prize packages neatly ordered on his blog, which really is all you boys and girls want to know, right?

Sponsor 1 – ICDSoft.com

ICDSoft have offered up an incredibly generous 3 years of free hosting.

Prize(s) from ICDSoft

1 Year – Business Package + Free domain($125 total value)
Full details of this package here.

1 Year – Universal Package ($75 total value)
Full details of this package here.

Sponsor 2 – WireNine.com

WireNine have given up 1 year of free hosting!

Prize(s) from WireNine

1 Year – Personal Hosting Plan ($69.95 total value)
Full details of this package here.

Sponsor 3 – BudgetHost.ca

Last but not least. BudgetHost have offered two 6 month packages, totaling 1 year of free hosting.

Prize(s) from BugetHost

6 Months – Standard ($131.40 total value)
Full package details here.

Finally, here is what the winners will win…

1st Place: ICDSoft Buisness package for 1 year + free domain.

2nd Place: ICDSoft Universal package for 1 year.

3rd Place: ICDSoft Universal package for 1 year.

4th Place: WireNine Personal Hosting Plan for 1 year.

5th Place: BudgetHost Standard hosting for 6 months.

6th Place: BudgetHost Standard hosting for 6 months.

Remember last time we told you to subscribe to Nick’s RSS feed to keep up with all the competitions he’s doing all the time? This is where we say “Told you so” to all of you who didn’t take two seconds to subscribe. Nick’s next contest might not be mentioned by us, and you’ll miss out on probably another great prize he’s got in store for his faithful subscribers.

*Contest runs to the 29th of Feb.

Online Business In 6 Easy Steps

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:10:55 +0000

Anyone who is either subscribed to us, or finds this blog through the search engines results has a certain drive, a shared interest in making money online. We’re always trying out new things on the Net to see what’s what and how we can start earning more cash. Obviously you’ll need to have an online presence to make moolah and in this day and age, there are so many different things you can setup for yourself. Fortunately there are sites out there that make it their business to provide you with your own business.

The boys and girls over at Buytemplates.net provide us with a massive selection of website templates for extremely reasonable prices. The templates come with five predesigned pages and are editable. All designs have been done by professionals, and besides a 100% money back guarantee if not satisfied, they offer 24/7 chat, email and phone based customer support! Once you’ve picked the website template you’d like to go with, there’s always the chance that there are a few elements you’d like to have changed. If you’re not too website design savvy (like us), Buytemplates.net has a design customization service so you can have your template made unique.

Ok great, so you’ve got your cool website template, all customized and ready to go. But wait, with today’s web 2.0 attitude, you might want to add some nifty functionality to the site. A bit of AJAX works wonders, and yes, Buytemplates.net can also help you out here. They work for as little as $12 (!) per hour to develop your custom web 2.0 code. Its hard to find a developer anywhere that’ll work for such a low price, even on webmaster forums.

So if you go the whole nine yards, with a custom design, added AJAX functionality, you might as well leave your site in the capable hands of it’s creators. They offer two affordable webhosting packages, again with 24 hour support. Because they’ve designed and developed your site, they’ll probably be able to tackle any unforeseen issues with your site quickly and permanently.

You’re ready to rock and roll. The site is done and online. Its time to get you some traffic and start selling your stuff. You need to get indexed in the search engines and make sure you will start attracting precious targeted traffic. Buytemplates.net provides an in-house team of SEO and SEM experts that can help you out on a monthly base. A few of the things they do is Keyword Research, Onsite Optimization and Link Development. This is something you could figure out for yourself if you have plenty of time, but why not have the experts work at it for you? That’s what they’re there for after all.

Making sure they cover every single angle, the last service this one stop shop for all your website requirements offers is a Website Maintenance Service. This could prove extremely handy for those of you that have multiple websites online and little time to dedicate to them. The professionals at Buytemplates.net will add and update fresh content, manage your domain and email accounts, backups and much more. They seriously aim to make your business their own.

Best Things In Lyve Are Free

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:41:57 +0000

Looking back on your life now, what have you done that makes you proud? Are you a parent? Do you have a husband or wife? Have you ever run a marathon? Have you got the coolest blog on the block? (scrap that last question, we all know who’s got the coolest blog, right kids?) Anyway, they always tell us that the best things in life are free and in this case, Andrew from Lyved.com won a free review with us, courtesy of the boys and girls over at jollyjo.com

Lyved.com is a blog. It runs on wordpress, so it has to be a blog! On first impressions, it could be a blog about anything. An image of a large plant greets you as the page first loads. Then there’s this quote:

“The greatest good we can do for others is not just to share our riches with them, but to reveal theirs.”
Zig Ziglar

We’re indifferent to a mention of Zig Ziglar. The tagline of Lyved is, “Lyved is about life and living it.” Right, we’re getting somewhere now. Navigation in the top menu is notably sparse. You’ll find “Home”, “About” and “Contact”. To the About page and there’s a lengthy biography of 19-year-old Andrew Galasetti, the author of the blog. Right at the bottom of his life story, Andrew writes:

But I want to use my thoughts and Lyved to help others to empower themselves and live the life they want. I hope to evolve Lyved from this site into a media company so that millions can be ~~made~~ reached and taught to follow their dreams.

It’s all suitably vague — and so we move onto Andrew’s posts. Categories range from business, culture and people, to quotes, Internet and technology. The first post we see is “Life Lessons from Snowflakes”. Moving on, there are lots of inspirational quotes and then we come to “7 Tips to Harness the Power of Digg”. The tips aren’t particularly useful, but it’s refreshing to see that Andrew blogs a little bit about everything.

You may struggle to find anything you want to read on Lyved, unless, of course, you’re into motivational, personal-development websites. Andrew blogs regularly enough to make an RSS subscription worth the effort if this is your shebang.

On the blog, there are currently only three posts about the Internet, two of which are guest posts. While the likes of some bloggers write about how TV shows relate to blogging, so Andrew tells us what dogs can teach us about life. The problem with such posts is that they contain zero useful information and could be written about anything. Obviously Andrew should have gone with cows here, instead of dogs.

Andrew seems like a decent enough bloke and we’d like to see his blog take on a new lease of life and become more focused with information we can actually learn something from. The potential is there to tap into a niche that is yet to be overdeveloped. A new theme would also serve Andrew well, as would the removal of the large Adsense block to the top right of the template.

The About page doesn’t need all the personal info, either. What it does need is a definitive statement about what Andrew is aiming to achieve with Lyved.com. Then again, it’s his blog and who are we to criticize it? We’re only getting paid for it

Lyved is pretty cool if you’re into the whole positive vibes, inspiring photos and self growth, but it doesn’t really appeal to us. Lots of posts are just pictures with someone’s quotes. It just doesn’t do it for us. We could go shopping and buy a “1001 quotes book” while browsing through someone’s Flickr photo albums. It looks like Lyved isn’t quite sure yet where it’s going, but it has potential as the blogger is a positive and upbeat person. We might have another look in a few months to see if the content becomes more informative and original. Until then, we’ll stick with making money.

Being cows and all, our greatest achievement so far has been the inventing of a keyboard with keys large enough for us to type blog posts like this with our hooves. We’re also proud of learning to swim and being able to sleep standing up. Can anyone top that?

Who Needs Money?

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:00:40 +0000

Today we’ve got a review which is long overdue. You guys might remember a little while ago, a certain Mr Park took the blogosphere by storm when he offered not only a review on the Chow, but also with yours truly. Poor Sven won the review but had his review pitched (surfer slang) several times because we had a few ‘urgent’ posts we felt we had to get out first. Ofcourse, as soon as those were done, we went on a long holiday! We’re just hoping Sven has the cool and laid-back surfer dude attitude to forgive us.

Sven’s blog is a little different, unusual…we like it!

Seriously, Sven’s blog is probably unlike 99% of the blogs you’ve seen out there. Its got a real personal feeling to it, full of personal posting material, philosophical writing, arty images and a load of inspirational insights. If you’re running low on ideas what to blog about next, make sure you browse though Sven’s RSS feeds because we can guarantee there’s something in it for everyone.

This image on the left is a little timeline of what the blog looked like in the past few years. Recently updated to svensworld 2.0, the current design is fabulous. We couldn’t find any other reference as to who might have designed it but Sven himself, excellent job dude! The only thing we can whinge about a bit is perhaps at the top and bottom of the sidebar, where there’s two units that kinda ruin the blog’s feng-shui. The ad blocks just feel a little out of place. We’d like to apologize to our readers for not slagging the design a bit more – we know it’s what you’re all waiting for

You should consider to start a blog design company, or team up with one of our good friends over at weborithm.com to wipeout the competition Sven, we think your work is definitely capable of it. Then again, it seems you’ve found your big wave and you’re riding it! (anyone had enough of the surf puns yet? Hope so because we ran out.)

The more observant boys and girls amongst us might have noticed that instead of the usual .Com, Svensworld is a .DE domain (Germany). It might be another reason why we like Sven’s blog, English isn’t his native language either, like us. This again adds to the more personal touch this blogger has – .Com is just so…Commercial!

To sum up Sven’s World, we took a shortcut, copied the blog’s meta tags and figured that if its good enough for Google, its good enough for you; [meta name="keywords" content="surf waves, gone surfing, art, artists, artwork, concept art, design, basketball, streetball, breakdance, creative, creativity, breakdance, paintings, vacation, holidays, ink, pencil, sculpture, fighting, bboying, hiphop, rap, jazz, funk, ocean, sea," /]

Its great to see that not all of us bloggers have sold our souls to the almighty dollar and that there’s still some people out there that don’t play the make money online game, but instead entertain us with their artistic and benevolent personalities. Surf’s up dude!

Getting Freaky With Forums

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:02:48 +0000

Webmaster forums seem to pop up from time to time. Today, we have the pleasure of reviewing one. Bzimage.org is a typical forum in the mold of Digital Point where people can go to discuss all manner of webmaster topics. Although we can’t figure out what “Bzimage” means, we signed up anyway and had a look through the different forums.

There are heaps of forums to sift through. Again, similar to Digital Point, there are forums for all the major search engines, forums about marketing, business forums, tech and gadget forums, and so on.

There is also a marketplace where you can buy and sell services, links, websites, domains, content – basically anything to do with the Internet. Unsurprisingly, the marketplace forum is the busiest of the lot, although at the time of writing it contained only 453 posts.

Bzimage is a new forum and it’s gradually filling up with posts and users. At the moment, there are 2,072 users who have made 2,361 threads between them. As with most forums, you can add signature links, although we weren’t able to do so as new users.

You can also add your Adsense code into your profile and get a cut of money made from Adsense ads that appear in discussions you take part in. Trouble is, we couldn’t find any Adsense blocks throughout the entire forum.

Bzimage uses reputation and infraction systems. It’s really just a straight-up forum. As with all new forums, it is worth checking out to promote your websites and products to new eyes and make connections with new people.

The color scheme isn’t particularly inspiring and could perhaps do with sprucing up a little. It’s all a bit dull for out liking.

This new SEO forum is worth checking out, if only because it has a Page Rank of 6, which means that if you leave your signature links in a few places you might pick up some valuable juice for the search engines.

A plus point of this forum is that it is yet to be infiltrated with people out to scam you, as you find on Digital Point. One of the problems with Digital Point is that it’s incredibly hard to assess who to trust. For that reason alone, we cows don’t trust anyone on Digital Point and we are careful abut who we do business with.

Bzimage is obviously not going to become as big as Digital Point any time soon, but with a small group of honest users, it could be a resource worth logging into on a regular basis.

God-Looking Websites

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:26:22 +0000

“Catherine Gillespie of Artists in Buffalo says god-looking website are important.”

No, we haven’t gone mad after all the New Year parties. What you’ve just read was a shameful typo that appeared on the Buffalo News website. If the people who are paid to write the news make fundamental typos that end up in final copy, imagine how many typos the rest of us make.

Our Cow Department of Made-Up Stats estimates that across the Internet, there are more than 500 cowzillion typos that nobody has spotted. Scary stuff. How, then, can we put these typos to “god” use? Well, the subject of this review might just have the answer.

This baldy is Tony. He currently ranks as our third-favorite baldy because he has created the website Auction Intelligence. From the homepage:

Who Else Wants To Know How To Find, In 4 Easy Steps, Every Misspelled or Mistyped Listing On eBay, Which Cannot Be Found By Using Any Normal Search Tool, Therefore Attracting Very Few Bids By The End Of The Auction?

Despite being trigger-happy with his shift key, Tony has come up with a great concept. You can get started right away with Auction Intelligence.

Type in what you’re looking for, decide to include or exclude the correct spelling from the search results, choose a regional eBay (US, UK, Aussie, Canadian) and then search away. We tried searching for a “cow alarm clock”. To our disappointment, you can only search for one term at a time. We should have read the tip underneath the search box.

The error message we got told us to watch a demonstration video. To do so, you have to enter your email address and have it sent to you.

We think this is unwise. The video should be on the front page. If people want to sign up for updates, that’s all well and good, but having to sign up to watch an instructional video will put people off.

Saddened that we wouldn’t be able to find an alarm clock, we searched for “Playstation”. A window popped up with our eBay search results of numerous variations of the word “Playstation”. Sure enough, there were a bunch of games and gadgets with no bids and minimal time remaining. No real bargains yet, however.

Next, we stepped up our game and searched for “IBM” and “Apple”. These terms produced error pages; likely they were too short. How about “Toshiba”? Nothing worth writing home about.

Finally, we tried “Panasonic” and “Technics”. We found lots of Lego. Searching for a single term limits the usability of Auction Intelligence, but we have no doubt that if you play around with the website, you will be able to find some bargains. You should give Auction Intelligence at least a few minutes of your time after reading this review.

What we’d like to see from Tony is the ability to search for multiple-word phrases as well as some testimonials on the front page of cool things that people have found and bought. As we said, the tutorial video should also be on the homepage.

Overall, the site needs a relick – new logo, better colors and perhaps a picture of Tony wearing a hat. We made the last one up, but a new logo and colors would make a world of difference.

Tony is definitely onto a “god” thing with Auction Intelligence.

Win 3 Free KILLER Logos!

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:11:34 +0000

Contests rule the blogosphere these days and whoever is giving away stuff for free can count on a lot of new subscribers and readers. Obviously it all depends on how cool the freebies are, but we’re pretty sure that we’ve got a nice prize for you bloggers out there, courtesy of InternetBabel dot Com, one of our previous advertisers. They wanted us to let you good folks know there’s some neat stuff to be won. Three Killer logo’s from the Logo Samurai guys, who also happen to advertise with us as you can see. We know for a fact that their work will get eyeball’s attention – their own ad on this here has a higher than average CTR.

Internet Babel has recently had a few more competitions and we’ve just missed out on winning a PS3! Ah well, we’ve signed up for the feed to make sure we won’t miss another opportunity with all the freebies they keep giving out.

Enough of that, here’s the breakdown of their contest, where there’s three cool custom logo’s to be won. Perhaps you could get something done like our header?

Sign up with Internet Babel via email (so they can pick a random winner from the list)
Leave a comment on their contest post

That’s all folks! Seems simple enough eh? Reading RSS feeds and leaving comments on other blogs is what all you boys and girls should be doing anyway as good little bloggers. Add one more and you could be brushing up your blog with a nifty new logo at no cost! Branding is important these days, remember what we said about that a few weeks ago. The Logo Samurai and Internet Babel can certainly give you a nudge in the right direction with that.

*Contest runs to the 18th of Jan.

Increasing Your Online Presence With Sivatar

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 22:09:01 +0000

Thank God December is nearly over and done with. You people have had us slaving over all these half price reviews this month and we’re tired of it! Come 2008 and prices will return to normal. (for all you smart-asses out there, yes you can order a review for the discounted price before the month is over and have it published at a later date.) Anyway, on with the show!

The boys and girls from Sivatar.com forked out their savings and have spend it wisely on this review of their neat-o website. It really is something neat-o, because we think they might just be onto a winner with this concept. It seems to be something like Mybloglog meets Blogcatalog meets Entrecard meets You! A highly interactive community where you can hang out with the cool kids, (*edit* removed bad Michael Jackson joke )

The Sivatar community is aiming to increase it’s members personal branding by sticking a name to the face. All avatars/sivatars link directly to one’s blog and since they’re spread throughout the sivatar site, changes are people will click through to your blog. You’ll have to have an attractive 50×50 button to stand out though. Something sexy to lure the traffic in like we did.

To have a bit of a chitchat with other bloggers and not having to use their or your blog’s comments section, there’s a chat page (ironically enough the URL calls it spam.aspx instead of chat, perhaps they’re trying to tell us something) A very cool feature here is definitely the star power system. The more you’ve been promoted, the bigger your text becomes and the more people will notice. We love this functionality, being the attention ~~whores~~ seekers that we are! Others will promote you by replying to your comments and you can upgrade yourself by leaving comments. More attention will most likely result in more clicks to your site, something which we really didn’t have to point out seeing only smart people read johncow.com, but we just did it nevertheless.

We’ve tried to see if we could speed things up a little by trying to reply to ourselves – nice try, didn’t work.

Overall Sivatar’s team did a great job so far, although in Beta phase, it has a lot of potential to grow big in 2008. The simple, straight forward interface is definitely a strong point and the concept is quite unique. A bit of feedback from us; The tag system will work wonders for SEO, but we’d try to make it look a bit more organized. Try to generate a tag cloud with different font sizes. The more a tag is used, the bigger the font becomes, kinda like the star power system. There’s a reason why big sites like Technorati use this. Another thing we’d love to see improved would be the avatar upload function. Try to create an auto-resizer in there. It’ll save new users a bit of hassle, trying to resize their own avatars for their profiles.

We’re curious how this site is going to get monetized further down the road. Signing up is free and obviously there are no ads around. There are no special features available for users to buy (yet?) and there’s no option to upgrade to anything. Guess we’re gonna have to stick around to find out!

Get Your Promo Codes Here

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:06:59 +0000

As December is expensive enough, todays paid review is one that for some of you will help lower the cost of your online adventures. Promo-Code dot Net might be the best next stop you make if you’re planning on investing in new web hosting for 2008. These guys keep tabs on most of the popular web hosting companies in the world, just to offer you some great discounts and coupons on web hosting.

Seeking out the best deals for your web hosting needs since November 2006, Promo Code has tons of lucrative offers that will fit anyones needs really. We even found an entry for the sweet ’15% off everything’ deal that our hosting provider Micfo has agreed to setup for John Cow readers.

Besides hosting discounts, we’ve found posts about cheaper domain names, free PPC vouchers worth $50 and reviews of hosting providers. It’s obvious that Promo Code seeks out useful and relevant information for it’s visitors. It’s even setup a tidy section where you can just see what the cheapest possible web hosting is, without having to compare all the options.

You can actually make some money from the Free Promo Codes website as they reward anyone that can give them details for a new deal that any webhoster has. They’ll hand over a free $10 amazon voucher to anyone that points them in the right direction. Another great thing they guarantee is to give you the best possible discount; If you happen to use a promo code on their site, but later discover that you could have gotten a greater discount with another promo code (available at the time of purchase), they will refund you the difference. That sounds like a win-win for everyone except the hosting providers!

Promo Code is a clean site with no ads and a straight to the point attitude. There’s really not much we can make a fuss about as they do exactly what you’d think they does. Its pretty pointless for us to try and sell you on the idea of free stuff and hosting discounts as that pretty much sells itself. For obviou reasons, it might be a smart thing to subscribe to their RSS feed and keep on top of any upcoming discounts and giveaways.

Young Entrepreneurs Making Money Online

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:52:12 +0000

So here’s the review for Micheal’s RetireAt21.com (part two!) Where to start, we’ve used all the funnies we could think of about retiring at 21 when we reviewed the wrong site last week (fortunately this was also one of Michael’s sites, so not all was lost) and truth be told, there’s actually nothing funny about this site. Its one of the closest things of what money making sites should look like in our opinion. We actually learned a trick the minute we hopped over to RetireAt21, because our fat hooves mistyped something which made us land on the 404 not found page. Hah, very clever of Michael to utilize this page too, trying to sell more of the affiliate products he endorses!

Let’s get down to business, what does RetireAt21 have to offer for its visitors? Besides a lot of young entrepreneur interviews, Michael really finds a lot of stuff that has to do with young people making money online, one video that made us chuckle was the wedgie-proof underwear, invented by two tiny eight year old entrepreneurs. (Ok so there was something funny over at Michael’s site!) Even though the blog has been online for a year, focus seems to be directed towards ebooks and tools to help out any aspiring online entrepreneur and not so much as updating the blog. Guess we sometimes forget that there’s more to the Internet than blogging.

Take a look at the Make Money Online section for example, plenty of information and short descriptions of over 25 ways to earn some extra cash online. We’ll certainly be looking into this part since we’ve just started our affiliate adventures! Why Michael doesn’t link to all the programs with his affiliate links though remains a mystery to us. Obviously he’s been getting some good traffic and we’d certainly try to convert any visitors into cold hard cash if we were a money making site. (Oh wait, we are! )

It’s a good thing you’re reading this post now. It’s Michael’s birthday in two days and instead of whining for gifts like we would do, he’s generously handing out ten prizes on his money maker blog. Obviously its all things that are related to making money online, to stick with the theme, but it looks like there’s some very useful gifts coming from RetireAt21 dot Com; Free advertising opportunities, some signed copies of money making guru books and a bunch of Amazon gift vouchers. (speaking of Amazon gift vouchers, today’s the last day to enter our $250 Amazon gift voucher contest so you’d better hurry if you’ve forgotten to enter!) To us, giving away stuff on your birthday is a pretty solid indicator that you’re doing well for yourself online.

We couldn’t find any examples of RetireAt21′s earnings, but we’re sure that Michael is well on his way to achieve financial freedom at an admirable young age if he keeps it up. Seems we can all learn something from his drive and passion for online business. To keep up with this young entrepreneur, you can find his RSS feed right here, or you could choose to sign up for his newsletter.

Happy early Birthday Mike! We hope you’ll have a blast!

21 and Retired

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:31:30 +0000

Retiring at 21 sure has a nice ring to it, but unfortunately for us we’ve passed that opportunity quite a few years ago now. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurts to keep working towards an early retirement, and in these golden days of online opportunities, really anything is possible! The boys over at retiredat21.com are quite aware of this and they have bundled their strength as a team to share not only talk about their experience of online marketing – they also just do it, making it an interesting read for anyone that’s interested in following and learning of other successful entrepreneurs online.
Perhaps the name ‘Dean Hunt’ rings a bell, he’s managed to have several guest posts written right here on JohnCow and those buzz marketing articles were well received by the majority of our bovine blog readers. Big names such as Darren Rowse have mentioned his articles and Dean has a knack for getting just about anything that he touches viral and popular on sites like Digg. What a guy to have on your team!

One thing that pissed us off a little – about two weeks ago we had a great idea. We figured we’d go around and email all the top users of stumble upon and see if they were interested in getting featured in an interview for JohnCow dot Com. So halfway through the time consuming process of finding the right person’s profile, sending them a personalized note and awaiting replies, we found a link to retiredat21.com in one of their profile. Guess who had beaten us to the punch! The clever buggers managed to secure a whole lot of interviews with the top stumble users and this basically means there’s not really a need for us to do it anymore

The blog is filled with all sort of tips and tricks. With buzz marketing in mind, its actually packed with 90% stuff that has some viral potential. An excellent hang-out spot if you’re looking for some linkbait inspiration or clever tricks to gain better rankings in Google.

One thing that strikes us as odd is the fact that the entire blog has not a single ad unit on it. The design isn’t very appealing either, not a piece of blog eye candy in sight, which we’d expect for a site that holds a plethora of potential link bait material. Perhaps the Retired at 21 team isn’t looking to monetize on this specific site and they might have other projects in the background that do make them the big bucks. If a different approach of SEO would be used, those articles on there will get more organic traffic and without a doubt you’d get more Stumblers on there too, boosting the site’s exposure. It could become a great leverage tool if handled with care, to successfully promote any other online money making activities. We might be wrong, but with Dean actively posting on retiredat21.com, we’re pretty sure that more exposure is what you guys are looking for. Pay some more attention to SEO and keep posting what you’re posting, we see tons of potential! And perhaps find a hot wordpress theme to dress up a little

1st Prize Cow, 2nd Prize Chow

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:19:14 +0000

You literate boys and girls must have seen the ads by now – you’ve got a shot at winning a free review right here on JohnCow dot Com, courtesy of Winning the Web dot Com. Gyutae Park, the guy responsible for you having to read this review, is really feeling the Christmas spirits (perhaps he had a few too) because not only is he giving away a free review from us, he’s also giving one away on John ‘with the H’ Chow dot com! How generous is that? Well considering that he cleverly took advantage of our December discounts where all reviews that get ordered are for half price only! ($100).

Enough of that, besides you guys obviously desperately wanting to win that free review, we’ll let you know a little bit more about the man with the plan, Gyutae – an Internet entrepreneur as well as a professional SEO working for a top agency in New York City. It seems Mr. Park’s blog hasn’t been around too long, with the archives dating back to the 16th of October, but from what we can see, he knows what he’s talking about. The last three months on Winning the Web are packed with great interviews, SEO tips and contests. Seems we missed out on the SEO book again But we’ll certainly try to win one of his weekly free blog audits, not that we could improve, but hey, he IS an expert so let the man have his say

“Who cares bloody cows! Tell us how we can win those free reviews already!”

Sigh, why is everyone in such a hurry these days…fine, we’ll let you in on the details.

What you need to do to enter Winning the Web’s grand competition with two free reviews on the world’s most popular blogs isn’t hard. Just subscribe to his RSS feed and read it every day, at least until the 21st of December. You’ll need to keep an eye out for a special letter each post because you’ll need these to figure out the magic word/phrase Gyutae has included in the RSS posts! Pretty clever if you ask us. By the time the contest is over, you’ll be hooked on his blog and have automagically transformed into a loyal reader. What a great idea! Here’s a blatant copy from the Big Beef’s blog post:

Letters will be added to the scrambled message in random upcoming posts on Winning the Web. You must subscribe to the RSS feed to view it.
To take a guess at the unscrambled word/phrase, you must make a comment to the contest post.
You can guess what the word/phrase is at any time in the process, but only 1 entry per person (by website and IP address).
You must enter the web site you want reviewed.
Winner will be announced Friday, December 21.

As everyone knows; we’re easy. So instead of having to guess a scrambled word, the John Cow review will go to a random commentator on all Winning the Web posts in December. However, the winner will be announced via RSS feed so it’s still important to subscribe. The winner then has 24 hours to claim the prize. Otherwise, a new winner will be chosen.

There you have it folks, you know you don’t want to miss out on these two groundshaking prizes, so you’d better hurry up and subscribe to Winning the Web’s RSS feeds!

Time Saving and Money Making

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:52:40 +0000

Unfortunately someone read the post where we advertised our December 50% discounts for any review and they made us write this post for just $100! Besides that, we even had to reboot our beautiful iMac to get into Windows XP with boot camp. We’re reviewing a handy Windows Registry cleaner tool today. Registry Easy 4.0 is an excellent little application to speed up those sluggish and clogged up XP and Vista(ahaha) PC’s. One of the main reasons we switched to Apple a few years ago.

The 2 Mb utility has a sleek web 2.0 look and feel to it and scans your whole Windows PC’s registry in a flash – for free. Obviously the tool itself isn’t completely free and some of its features are not available on the trial version, but if you want to unlock its full potential, you’ll only have to pay a measly $34,95. Money well spend if you think of all the frustration and time it can save you if you work on your PC a lot. Besides, for you affiliate ~~whores~~ marketers the application is as good as free because if you manage to sell just 1 to someone else, you’ll nearly make $30 back Just think of how many friends, family and neighbors that come to you with their PC problems because you’re the computer whiz? They’ll have no more excuse from today when you send the your affiliate link so they can download this little gem and fix their own crap! You make money and they’ll be happy.

But with all mooney making monkey business aside, the tool really has something to offer to those of you that are fed up with re-installing Windows once a month. Just to name a few of the features, Registry Easy will automatically speed up , clean & repair your PC registry of the following:

Windows Installer Errors
ActiveX Control problems
DLL Errors
Slow PC Performance
Blue Screen
Driver Errors
Regain disk space
Load windows faster
Memory Tweak

You seriously don’t need to be a computer expert to use Registry Easy, the interface is extremely user friendly and even we managed to backup our registry and optimize our memory performance with the click of a button.

As you can see, Registry Easy is easy! We all know time is money, and if you want to save yourself a lot of it, order this handy application to speed up your PC today!

Link Love

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:09:16 +0000

After a successful launch, TNX.net has amassed more than 35,000 users sharing a gargantuan 30,570,876 links – and counting. We’ve been paying close attention to TNX and while we initially had out reservations about the service, we think it’s something that everybody should look into, which is why we’re going to have a little peak at it today to find out exactly what TNX can offer you. It’s all about links, baby, and lots of them.

The mission of TNX is outlined as follows:

Assist website owners in attracting targeted visitors and clients from search engines and relevant websites.
Reduce the dependence on search engines.
Improve quality of the search results for those websites that join TNX system.
Increase the income of every webmaster who joins TNX system.

Although at first the whole TNX system can be a little overwhelming, once you get into it, any confusion is outweighed by the enormous benefits your blog or website will receive. To get started, you need to sign up for TNX and then add a bit of code into your blog. Most bloggers add the code into their footers. For an example of what the code looks like on a blog, head over to World of Angel and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Once the code is installed, you add your blog to the system and wait for approval. TNX sells links on each individual page of your blog, up to four links a page. The value of links is based on the Page Rank of the page and you are paid in TNX points. The value is also determined by your chosen niche.

I’ve had TNX running on World of Angel for a while now, and I am earning about 11 points for PR0 links up to 5,625 points for PR4 links. I left my account unattended for a few weeks with a campaign running (I forgot about it, to be honest) and when I returned, I found that I had 69 active links on other websites and about 65,000 points as my balance. While it sounds like a lot, those points are worth only $0.68 per 1,000, which would mean I could cash out for about $40.

TNX isn’t going to make you rich because the links are so cheap, so you are better off using your points to buy links. As an example, on the TNX website it is pointed out that 20,000 points could get you for a month:

20,000 PR0 links
400 PR1 links
200 PR2 links
100 PR3 links
40 PR4 links
20 PR5 links

Those links could be very valuable. To get links on other blogs, you need to set up a campaign, which can be a little daunting at first. You choose your niche(s) and select how many Yahoo! backlinks the sites you are advertising on should have, as well as their Page Rank. You then choose which language sites you want to target. You then need to set up your creatives, including your anchor texts and which of your pages they will point to.

It’s recommended that you make at least 10 creatives. Once you’re done, you choose how many links you want to appear on different websites determined by Yahoo! backlinks, Page Rank and niche category. You then send your campaign for approval and wait for it to kick in.

Points can, of course, be bought, for an average of $1.3 per 1,000, although the price can be as low as $0.65 if you buy in bulk. I haven’t bought any points for my campaign because they seem to be racking up by themselves with the code on my blog.

TNX also offers an affiliate program that pays 13.3% of points generated by your referrals. You receive 5% of payments made by referred advertisers. We used out affiliate links in this post to try and test the system out.

TNX is a great way to get free text link ads and the system has improved greatly since we first took a look at it. Creating campaigns has been made a lot easier and our initial confusion was short lived. Sign up now and get linking.