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!

Most of you know Digg and what it means once your article hits the front page. The traffic levels can become insane (We had 40,000+ unique hits two months ago on one article over at bobmeetsworld.com) and many a server had to succumb to the mighty power of Digg and crashed. Just imagine what this can do potentially to the amount of regular readers to your blog or your ad revenue!

So the trick is to get people digging your story (duh!) and this was the hard part until a friend of ours decided to change things around and introduce the collective power of Diggbarter.com to the world. The concept is simple; You Digg for a Digg. When you sign up you are able to submit links of posts you want to get dugg. One digg requires one credit.

So do you have to buy credits? No way, you earn a credit every time you digg a story for someone else. So if you digg 20 stories for 20 different people you will receive 20 credits which you can convert into 20 diggs for your own story!
From a technical point of view, the site lets you visit Digg through a series of anonymous proxies so you won’t get into trouble since you can’t be traced

Diggbarter.com has just gone live after and is still very much beta, but it works! and we’ve been told that some exciting new features will be introduced in the near future where you can actually sell your earned credits for real money to others that want to get dugg. An RSS feed will warn you when there are opportunities for you to digg stuff and earn credits.

Become a beta member today and you might get some extra kudos from them. Needless to say; “Spreading the word will increase the percentage of people that will digg your stories!” Oh, and someone was kind enough to Digg our 14 days later post, we’d appreciate it if you could do the same. It’d be our first time on Digg!

19 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Man, after we introduced the Make Moo Famous idea, people have managed to find our mailbox quicker than their shadows! For those of you who have missed only the greatest idea a cow can come up with, Make Moo Famous is about you and us. We want to give you some linklove and instead of the usual review, all we ask for is a tag in one of your existing posts. Think along the lines of adding:”I love mad cows” or “The cows were here [insert date]“. We’re sure you can come up with something cool! In the mean time, batch 2 is ready to go and 3 is close to cowpletion too.

Today’s superstars are:

Sam Breadstone
Zen Zoomie
Coffee Makers
Made To Be Great
PressMicro
OnlineCashFlow
JulieAnneBonner
Bear Needs Help
iWebis
HomeMom3

16 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Hello, my name is Dean Hunt and I have been asked to share my buzz marketing case study with the readers of John Cow.com

I spent the past ten minutes trying to find a cow related pun for the title. The best I could come up with was to replace the word “brief” with “brisket”. The really sad thing I even used Google to find all the different parts of a cow (I should get out more often).
Anyway, the bad puns are out of the way, so let’s get down to beefsniss.

Today I am going to be showing you the first part of my buzz marketing case study. I was asked to create this case study due to my abilities to get not only my own articles, but also friend’s and client’s articles onto the Digg.com home page.

Here is what I will be showing you throughout this mini-series:

* The tips and secrets I used to get on the main page
* The psychological tricks I abused to get more Diggs
* How many visitors I got
* How many back links I got
* How my server coped
* The golden 30% rule
* The fatal mistake webmasters make
* My $1000 winning bet
* The thrill of the chase
* How the story spread
* How you can do the same for ANY article and ANY site.
* What effect it will have in the up and coming page rank update
* My Alexa graphs.
* TONS more….

I am sure many of you will be familiar with the techniques and terminology I will use in this case-study, but for those are not, here is my description of viral marketing:

Viral marketing: Using techniques and content that encourage your message to be spread quickly and easily from one source to the next by outside sources.

That is my technical description, I also have a JohnCow description:

Here goes…

To me, viral marketing is like a great big field with two cows… these two cows are your viral content. If the content is good enough, the cows will have baby cows, and with time, they will also have babies. A successful viral campaign is when all of the field (the Internet), is filled with cows (links).

Disclaimer: I promise I was not on drugs when I wrote that

So what about buzz marketing?

Buzz marketing: For me, buzz marketing is the art of creating a “buzz” (sense of excitement) from your content/message.

So now you know what these techniques are, but…

Why Bother Using Buzz/Viral Marketing Techniques?

I can answer this in just three simple words: Links, traffic, Branding

Feel free to add “Money” to that list. But most webmasters make a fatal mistake when it comes to buzz marketing and money (I will explain this in a later chapter).

EVERY webmaster on the net wants and needs traffic. It if the life and soul of any website. There are numerous techniques for getting traffic, but most experts agree that viral/buzz/linkbaiting are by far the most powerful techniques.
Oh, and did I mention that these techniques are FREE?
If you have never tried these techniques then subscribe to Johncow.com today, and over the coming weeks I will go through every thing in a step by step manner.

Proof

Many people talk about buzz marketing, only a few really understand it in detail. So always look for proof.

Ok, here are a few screenshot clippings that I got from past and recent viral successes. The goal here is to show you what can be achieved with a successful campaign:

The above image shows how I was on the main page for multiple mega-sites at the same time.

* Digg.com
* Slashdot.org
* Reddit.com
* Popurls.com

What difference would it make to your website or business if you were featured on the main pages of all of those sites today?

I am guessing it would completely transform your business overnight.

Let’s have a look at another image:

This was taken shortly after the story went viral, and it appeared on the popular sections of Del.icio.us – what is interesting here is the comment from one of the users “This hilarious story has the web buzzing.” I think that quote sums up buzz marketing in a nutshell.

This is one of the most powerful images. On the 8th December my blog was just a small personal blog with a trickle of web traffic, on the 9th December my site was a national sensation. Within 30 days of my first buzz marketing success, I was making 6 figures online.
Back to the image… you can see the first traffic spike on the 9th December 14,000+ visits. Then it calms down a bit and goes crazy on the 13th .
Here is the most amazing part… my server actually crashed on the 9th, the 13th and the 14th… at one point it was down for hours during peak traffic times. This meant that a large % of my traffic was lost, and the rest was leaked to mirror sites. Had my server coped, these traffic stats would be a LOT higher.

Your Questions

This is part one of my viral/buzz marketing mini series. In future chapters I will show you more successes that I have had, more screenshot images, and I will be sharing the exact tips and techniques I have used not only on my own sites, but for friends and clients as well.
I would love to hear your questions… so please post any questions, and I will try to answer them as best as I can.

Note: Dean posts at his personal blog www.deanhunt.com and guest blogs at www.streetlessons.com and www.retiredat21.com

55 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

In order to counter a certain make money online review thingie by a certain Mr. Chow, we’ve decided we’re going to give you guys a shot becoming famous too! Like the make money online review batches, we are gonna put up links requested by you. The only thing we are doing different is that we don’t require you to write a whole new post and do a review about us. You can if you like, up to you.

What we want is just a small link in any of your existing posts on your blog. Try to add a line like:”The blogging Cows made me do it!” or perhaps:”JohnCow was here [insert current date]!” As you can see we ask for little and offer a lot. Most of you know the drill, you sneak those links we want into whatever post you want and we will give you a direct link and an anchor text along with it. To grab the bull by the horns, we’ll start the first batch of many to come, with the top ten commentators at this moment! If you need convincing why this is good for you, here’s this weeks Alexa traffic stats, compared with two fairly popular blogs.

CoolioJones - MyNewHustle
Mahdi Yusuf - TheKingKongBlog
Joshua - DisregardMe
RusselWagner - RusselWagner
Ali - everybodygoto
Susan - LifeisRisky
Personal Blog - Browie
Digital Nomad - DigitalNomad
FatGadget - GadgetTastic
Brian Vaughan - Brian Vaughan

Welcome to history in the making kids! Who’s next?

64 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

We get a lot of emool’s from people asking what kind of plugins we use. (not really actually, but we feel it makes us sound important!) After replying to them one at a time, We came up with the genius idea to write a post about the top seven we use and publicly publish them. Sure saves us a lot of time which we can use thinking up more crap to write about. We will list these in order of importance:

1. Google SiteMaps - Get noticed by Google because in your near blogging future, your statistics will probably acknowledge these guys as your biggest traffic driver.

2. Google Analytics - Have a look what Google recorded about your site and use the information to tweak things like your landing pages to perfection.

3. FeedSmith - You’d like to know at a certain point how many people are interested in what you have to say by signing up to your RSS feed. Not only does Feedburner keep track of them, it will also allow you to make some personal modifications to your RSS page, like adding your site’s header for branding purposes.

4. Akismet - Only the greatest blog spamblocker know to cowkind. If you like your spam because noone else emails you, we suggest you do not install this.

5. Smart Update Pinger - You wrote a great post and are now constantly hitting refresh in your browser to see how many visitors have read it yet. Install this plugin and people will be notified through the authorities that you’ve posted something new for them to chew on.

6. Wp-Contactform III - We know it sounds crazy, but readers appreciate this anonymous way of declaring their love for you. After all it is a bit embarrassing having to do it in the comments.

7. Enforce WWW Preference - Those guys from Google aren’t the sharpest tool in the shed and can easily mistake your blog for two blogs because one address has www and the other one doesn’t. So two blogs for the price of one is great isn’t it? Sure, if you’re willing to cut in half your amount of inbound links ergo pagerank between the two.

There, those are the seven plugins we use and find the most important of all. The rest are all cosmetic, for monetizing or fun. If you would ask us what the coolest plugin is we are using, why not have a look at it yourself? It’s on display right below this sentence, click away and have a bull ball!

16 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post