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

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

We are in the middle of finishing up the next keyword post but we wanted to ask a question, that came up based on a couple moos from the post “What Would X Do Without The Internet?“. The comments were…

If you cant read it, the moo says… “It’s really wierd how easily these famous bloggers get away with the online money for writing basically nothing useful… Are we hooked too much into the online stuff?”

A couple of moos down, another reader “Caleb” responded with…

Again, if you cant read it, the moo says… “Ajith: I don’t really see those particular types of posts -like when Chow shows pics of his dinner for example- as nothing useful because it gives the reader a sense of the blogger’s personality and lifestyle. This makes it more REAL to the reader…
…and YES we are hooked!”

So our question to you is…

What is your opinion on this topic?

• Should blogs be all business ONLY?
• Is not one of the attractions of blogging –> getting inside the mind of the blogger?
• What do you look for in a blog and what brings you back… what gets you hooked?

The way this is going to work is there will be one winner of the $100 Amazon Gift Certificate and that will be based on quality of answer. We will select the winner on Monday May 12th… and if there are more then one “high quality” answer, which based on the majority of your comments already we are sure there will be, then we will simply pick a number… but you MUST put a little thought in your answer. The winner will be notified by a blog post here and so you may want to subscribe to our rss feed to be notified

PS –> If you have not already, sign up for our RSS Feed to stay up to date on fun contests like this and to be notified when the next “Super Awesome” Keyword Research post is made.

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!

27 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

We have a question for you and we want you to really think about this.

What are the most important metrics that you use when doing keyword research?

1. Traffic

2. Competition

3. KEI

4. ___________ (Fill in the blank)

There are lots of fantastic tools online today and each one has their good points and bad points… but one thing that 99% of all these tools have in common is they simply give you a calculated guess using their own custom algorithim, that simply tells you how many competitors there are and how much traffic you can expect. Some make up a fancy term to use, such as KEI, but the bottom line is it is simply a traffic and competition ratio.

Now this seems logical doesn’t it?

Of course we want to know the amount of traffic a keyword could expect and hopefully we can find those hidden golden nuggets that have virtually no competition and lots of traffic.

But why is it then, when we find these keywords, research and create good solid content, build back links and work our asses off to dominate the search engines, are we not making any money?

The traffic is great!

The rankings are fantastic!

The content is stellar!

What could be wrong???

This is where keyword research gets tricky and was our biggest discovery in transforming our affiliate marketing business. The discovery was that there is a gigantic difference between “traffic words” and “buyer words”

You need to understand that just because certain words get lots of traffic, this does not mean at all that the people searching with those terms are even remotely interested in purchasing anything.

A good example of the is the “dirt bike” industry. There are loads of traffic to be gained from this market but the demographics of this market tend to be generally teenagers who really cant afford to be spending a lot of money. Their searches are for interest… because they are fans of the market but few are spenders.

Does this mean there is no money to be made in this market?

Not saying that at all. There may be potential profits from AdSense and other revenue streams but not (in our experience anyway) a lot in the affiliate side of things. Now there are probably some of you out there making a killing in this industry online and if so.. good on ya! We are not debating whether a profit can be made but pointing out that depending on the revenue model you are going for, traffic and revenue do not always go hand to hand.

For those of you that have experience in PPC, you see this a lot. You can have two words that are almost identical yet one converts into sales like crazy and the other does next to nothing.

Why is this?

There are lots of guesses and theories as to why but honestly we don’t know all the reasons. What we do know however is that it is a fact that there are certain words that are more often used by money spenders then just general interest surfers. The challenge however is how do you uncover these keywords?

Well there are two ways this can be done.

1. Slow and Painful

Build lots of pages focused on lots of keywords, get lots of backlinks, record and track everything and wait months to figure out what is working.

2. Fast and Furious

Find out what is working for others and use that information to get your research time reduced to only days instead of months.

Come on now… you can’t be serious cow?!

Oh but we are!

Traditional keyword research is great. There are loads of tools to use and they tell us some fantastic information but the problem is they are only using “traffic” and “competition” to tell you what to focus on.

What about “Sales”, “Revenue”… PROFITS

Would you not rather focus on a keyword that only gets 20 visitors a day but converts 2% then 100 visitors an day that converts 0.01%?

But how now John Cow?

There are no keyword tools that know what kind of profits people are making, they don’t know what words are making sales and what ones are not… do they?

Yes and we are going to prove it to you over the next few days. We are going to walk you through step by step, the exact process we use to uncover “Killer” keywords, that not only have good traffic and little competition, but are also already proven by others to be fantastic money makers.

Lesson 2: Keyword Research - The Cart before the Cow

Lesson 3: Keyword Research - What for may we ask?

Lesson 4: Keyword Research - Show me the Money… Words that is

If your interested in learning more, then subscribe to our RSS Feed and follow along as we lay out this step by step process with the exact tools and techniques we use.

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

*This is not a sponsored review*
Dishing out bags of money can help, but if you dig around a little deeper, there are truly some hidden gems to be found online. We’re talking about design, themes, banners and buttons. Ever tried to find a quality banner designer, who didn’t try to either rip you off for $30 per banner or a complete n00b that just fired up MS paint and tries to sell you a bahahanner (pun intended) for $10? Obviously there’s a matter of taste, banners we like might not appeal to you, but we’ve had a look at banner performance on our blog, and we’ve found that one designer in particular has always delivered top notch banners, which also happen to have the highest click through rate on the blog.

Sharing is caring, and we figured we’d let you guys in on it. Eli has done a few banners for us in the past, but has also done work for others like Blogperfume and the OIOPublisher plugin guys. You can find his banner portfolio here. We believe that a mere $12,50 for a great banner with a high CTR isn’t doing Eli’s work justice. Got a crappy 125×125 Entrecard avatar? Go see Eli!

Right, thats banners covered, on with the themes. Some of you might have already found Fresh Press Themes, which is designed and owned by the designer of our own theme, Hyder. He has recently started working on FPT, and so far he’s managed to squeeze two excellent free wordpress themes out of his creative genius.

He’s committing himself to deliver three free fresh themes per month, which is pretty awesome if you ask us. Be sure not to miss his new themes when they come out, sign up to his RSS feed and stay informed.

*PS If you’re wondering why our own banner is showing up in our sidebar every now and again, its because we’re experimenting with 125exchange.com, and it seems we’ve broken it already

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

So here’s an interesting concept: Is Twitter more effective than RSS subscribers for your branding? We believe the answer is yes. Twitter is a quick and easy ‘hack’ to get your name out there. While you still get your opinion through to people, it doesn’t require the reader to go through a ton of posts on your blog, it’ll only take them 2 seconds to read your 140 characters on a twitter notification. Twitter is instant delivery and very dynamic. All you need to do is make sure that your short twitter blurb is catchy enough for someone to go and read your post, same as it is with the headlines of your blog posts. Ever messed up a headline, published your post, only to have to go into feedburner and resync your feed, hoping nobody has pulled the feed yet so they won’t notice your crappy headline? With Twitter you can instantly retweet yourself with a better line without any hassle.

Following someone on twitter is very simple, you click follow and you’re done, while with RSS you often have to go through 2 or 3 more steps, like picking your reader of choice, confirming your subscription, verification etc. Like we said, its way more dynamic. Our twitter client of choice would be Twhirl, it works on everything, running on Adobe’s AIR platform, and it is constantly getting improved with new features.

The following doesn’t really have an relevance to the comparison of Twitter Vs RSS, but it show that Twitter is definitely something you should be using as a tool to market yourself in the blogosphere.
Using Twitter the right way will generate some great traffic to your site. Here’s an example: Jason Calacanis has a huge following on twitter (no idea why, he seems to have a 99:1 Mahalo spam:interesting stuff ratio) and whenever he links somewhere, there are 20,000 potential new visitors involved. BeBizzy posted about Calacanis and the power of Twitter, Jason then picked up on it (probably has Google Alerts on his name, hi Jason!) and sent out one twitter message, linking back to the article. We went right in and left a first comment. We instantly received 40 visitors from BeBizzy, so we’re pretty sure BeBizzy must have received at least 400 visitors in a matter of minutes.

Twitter has gone mainstream, and not having a twitter account these days is like not having an email address! You can follow us at http://www.twitter.com/johncow, and for the latest updates, check our sidebar widget. We use twitter to announce stuff like when we’re going on live video stream again and such, so you can schedule your lunch breaks around our broadcasting time

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!

11 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post