If you are new here then you will want to CLICK HERE to enter to WIN an LCD TV, Ipod Touch, Flip Mino and More!

So as you know, things have been pretty busy around the JC pasture’s. Now that our COWpetition is over, we thought maybe your brains (actually ours too) could take a little bit of a break and we thought we’d share some interesting information for you all.

So sit back, put your feet up on the desk and grab that nice cup of coffee Milk and have some fun.

So you have heard of Twitter right? Of course you have.. it was part of our Cowpetition and we also posted about it a while back. Our Twitter page is http://twitter.com/johncow

Well have you ever heard of a student named James Karl Buck?

Google him, you’ll probably come across his Twitter page.

Well James was arrested in Egypt (that would suck), and it is an interesting story.

Here’s what happened. See James went to Egypt to work on his master’s thesis. He met a 23-year old Egyptian veterniary student in Mahalla named Maree. Maree then offered to help James out so he could photograph local anti-government protests.

Well during the protest, James said that families began to throw Molotov cocktails and also began setting tires on fire as they demanded the government’s help over low wages and the rising food prices. James and Maree fled but we’re later stopped and then detained by police officer’s along with other journalists and bloggers who were there also covering the protest.

James and Maree we’re later released, but they were obtained again before actually leaving the detention facility. James was then separated from his translator Maree.

So we know, your probably wondering where Twitter comes into play, right?

Well you see, while James was on his way to the police station, he took his cell phone and sent a quick message to his friends using Twitter that simply said “Arrested”. That was sent at 6:33PM

His next message wouldn’t be until 10:40PM, it would say “Still holding us no charges very scared for my translator.”

Then nothing again until 11:21 “Taking us to general prosecutor, changing mhmd”

Another message would come after midnight, and then another one at 9:16AM saying “Alive and ok. Still in jail.”

He would continue to send updates when he could until around 3:27 PM that would say “Free” and another one again at 3:32PM Saying “Free. No mohamed. Thanks so much.”

What was great about this was that after James had sent his first txt message that said “Arrested”, his group of friends back home and his blogging friends from Egypt were all alerted that he was being held. Not long after that it sent off a chain of events that actually led his college to hiring him a lawyer.

Obviously James has since been free’d but he has been using the power of Twitter along with other social networking websites to get the word out about his Translator Maree who is still being held.

Check out James’ Twitter page http://twitter.com/jamesbuck

Here is even more links for you about this (we thought it was interesting)

• Webpage: http://jameskarlbuck.com/
• CNN Page: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/twitter.buck/index.html
• Another CNN Page: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/05/twitter.maree/index.html

So… what you think of this whole thing?

19 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

This lesson is a continuation of the previous lesson Keyword Research - Show me the Money… Words that is

Now, that you have a large list of keywords, you will want to filter out the hopeful “Diamonds”… these are the words that are actively being used by advertisers and the tool of choice (in our opinion) is Traffic Travis. We almost passed over this tool because in our opinion the name and logo are cheesy (sorry Mark, but they are). It was a good thing however that we got to know Mark about a year ago and he walked us through this tool and we have been hooked ever since.

We need to make very clear right now, this is not a paid review or a requested review for a favor or anything else like that. As stated in the initial lesson, we will be sharing paid tools that we use and this is one of those tools we use and we personally love. After you finish reading this, you may agree or you may have a tool we do not know about that is just as good and you can use that. Just wanted to make that clear to everyone

How to Dig for Hopeful Diamonds with Traffic Travis:

Step 1 –> Once you have Traffic Travis, open it up select “Competition Ads”

Step 2 –> Select “Keyword Options” and “import from clipboard”. Now paste your keywords from the previous “Keyword Lesson” into the form and click on start. TrafficTravis will now search Google for each individual phrase and get a list of the sites that are currently advertising with AdWords for that term.

IMPORTANT –> Do NOT enter in a list of more then 1000 keywords or else Google will shut you down. It is recommended that you use a service like findnot.com to prevent Google from identifying your IP and blocking you temporarily.

The way to know if you have been blocked is you will not see the numbers increasing in TrafficTravis while its running.

Ignore the “Overture Count” this no longer works since Yahoo pulled the plug on this free service.

Step 3 –> Once Traffic Travis has finished, click on “Google Count” and sort by highest to lowest. Under “Domain Name” is the URLs that are currently advertising for some of the keywords you entered. The number is the amount of keywords that they are advertising on. You are going to want to select at least 5 of the sites that relate directly to the product you are going to be promoting and for each one right click on the word and select “View Matching keywords” and save the results to your desktop. You are going to repeat this for at least 5 of the top urls that relate to your product. If you are not sure, then visit the site to see if it relates.

IMPORTANT –> Make sure to save each file as a unique name so you do not overwrite each one. Personally we just name them 1, 2, 3 and so on because we will be combining them into one and then deleting them individual lists soon.

Step 4 –> Now take the 5 files you saved and copy and past the results into one file, so to make one list out of the 5.

Step 5 –> Now go back to TrafficTravis and go to the “Keyword Sorter”. Since there will be duplication in our current list we are going to want to clean it up a bit. Enter your keywords into the “Search Terms” box and click on “Remove Duplicates”. This will now give you a clean list to work with. Delete any extra stuff that may have been included that you do not want included. Now highlight all the keywords (hate it that there is no select all option here) copy them and paste them into a notepad file (.txt) and save this as your good keyword list.

Now we have filtered down our list from a many keywords with many “poor” terms, to a smaller more focused list that contains words you know are directly focused to your topic but also are words you know people are actually paying money to advertise with. This is the start of finding the diamonds… but we are not there yet

Start of Added BONUS Topic –> You better say you love us after this little tip we give you

If you are just starting a new site, this is a great time to find one now, using the keywords you filtered out using Traffic Travis and here is a tip that you are going to LOVE!

This really should be a separate post but we are too lazy right now to do that

–> Get a Domain Name

A very easy and extremely effective way to find a good domain is to use the free “Bulk Register” tool provided by GoDaddy. If you do not have a free Godaddy account, you need to get one now at http://www.godaddy.com

Step 1 –> Log into your Godaddy account and select “Domains” –> “Bulk Register”

Step 2 –> Enter the keywords in the text box provided, select “.com”, enter the “Access Code” and select “GO”. You can select the other extension options if you want.

Step 3 –> Godaddy will now go through your list of keywords and list for you the domains that are available that match your keywords. The results will initially show errors, but scroll down to see which domains are available. You should be able find extremely good domain names to use that will be keyword rich and very targeted to your market.

<– End of Added BONUS Topic (Hope you liked it)

Initial Content Keywords

Now that we have our domain, and our initial filtered list of words, we still have some work to do. To truly find the real “Diamonds” from the hopefuls is we are going to have to use “Affiliate Elite” and run it on a schedule for 2 weeks, we go into detail on this in the next keyword lesson (sorry).

Before we do that however, we want to get keywords for initial site content. We do not want to waste time while waiting for Affiliate Elite, so this is a perfect time to grab 20 or so terms from your list to create your blogs initial content.

Personally our results have proven over and over again that the best results is to not go live with a blog until you have 25 articles or more. We usually target 50 to start with but that is not always possible due to time constraints.

The good thing is we know that with the keyword we currently have that some people are advertising with them, the problem is that Traffic Travis only gives us a snap shot of one day. That means that the words are being advertised with right now but they might NOT be tomorrow because they are no good… which is why we will use “Affiliate Elite” to see if words are used consistently for 14 days.

That said, using some of these words now is better then nothing, at least we can see they are being used by some and the odds are that a lot of the words you select will be good words.

Step 1–> Log back into your AdWords account and go to “Tools” –> “Traffic Estimator” and copy all the keywords into section #1. Then enter 100 in section 2, leave section 3 blank, do not change section 4A and select “All Countries and Territories” in section 4B and select “Continue”

Step 2 –> Google will now display all the keywords and their suggestion of the amount of traffic you can expect for each word. You need to understand that this number represents what Google says you would get with the number one AdWords ad… NOT the number one organic listing, which gets much more traffic then AdWords. Click on the “Estimated Click/Day” so to sort the information from highest traffic to lowest.

Step 3 –> Looking at the list, you are now going to want to select 20 or more keyword phrases. A good rule of thumb is to initially look at the words that are three words in length and have bids between $0.50 and $2.00. The reason is this shows that these words are being advertised on but are not packed full of competitors, which keeps the costs lower. Always start from top to bottom so you can be sure you are getting keywords with some traffic.

IMPORTANT –> Your list might not have any words under $2.00, if that s the case then ignore the cost rule… if there are however, look at those.

Step 4 –> Now you are going to take each keyword phrase and go to google to check out the terms competition. Enter the term in google with the allintitle filter. To do that simply enter the following…

allintitle:”your keyword phrase”

What you are looking for here is the amount of competition this term has and a good indicator of that is the amount of sites in Google that have that keyword phrase in their title. This is not an exact science and there are some who argue that this is not a true picture but from our experience it works and we like to use what we know works (which we recommend you get in the mindset of doing, do not just listen to others but find out what works for yourself). By using the allintitle, we see if a word is overwhelmed with competitors or is easily dominated.

Good guidelines for the “allintitle” results are…

• Less than 15 000 results = Needs to have lots of traffic potential to be worth it. Not recommended for the majority of this content since you will have to focus a lot of link building on this. If you have 2 or 3 that fall in here that is fine but try to have the majority 7000 or less.
• Less than 7000 results = Good - Can be dominated with good optimization and focused link building
• Less than 1000 results = Great - Easily dominated

NOTE –> These are just our guidelines, they are what work for us. Do NOT argue with us if you agree with them or not, they work for us and so there

Step 5 –> Repeat this process until you have a list of at least 20 keyword phrases with OK or better for competition. These are the keywords that we are going to build our blog on initially.

IMPORTANT –> Make sure to only use phrases that make sense grammatically as you will need to be able to create content around these phrases.

Next Keyword Lesson –> Start Up the Diamond Digger

Remember, the problem we have now is that we have words for our content but we do not really know if they are “Profitable”. We have a good guess because we know that as of right now, people are advertising on them but we only know that as of right now they are being used. Yesterday they might not have been and tomorrow they might now be and what we want to know is what keywords are being consistently used for at least 10 to 14 days by the same advertisers. These are the words that we can be sure somebody is making money with and are fantastic words to build content around, especially affiliate based content.

Talk To Us –> Did you Like this Post? If so please let me know, it i good motivation for us to keep this up

Keyword Lesson 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?
4. Lesson 4 - Keyword Research: Show me the Money… Words that is…
5. Lesson 5 - Keyword Research: Diamonds in the Rough
6. Lesson 6 - Keyword Research: Start Up the Diamond Digger
7. Lesson 7 - Keyword Research: Shiny Diamonds Everywhere

49 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<<<

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.

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.

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.

Keyword Lesson 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?
4. Lesson 4 - Keyword Research: Show me the Money… Words that is…
5. Lesson 5 - Keyword Research: Diamonds in the Rough
6. Lesson 6 - Keyword Research: Start Up the Diamond Digger
7. Lesson 7 - Keyword Research: Shiny Diamonds Everywhere

18 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post