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Hey, you have to follow the trends right?

When you admire someone, or just appreciate who they are and what they do, you often make semi homo-erotic opening statements on your blog posts about them. Whoops. Anyways, using a time machine I’ve managed to compile a brief history of John Chow dot Com.

August 17th 2000 John Chow dot Com goes live!

Not alot to look at, kind of like a generalized outline of what his site will be, just note, the awesome flash intro. That is SOOOO y2k.

The site remains largely unchanged until Dec 1st. 2005 .
Now I’m no John Chow dot Com historian, but this is seemingly what I would identify as John Chows first blog post. As you can see, it didn’t take him long to write about what he was eating, lol.

A few interesting posts appear during this period….

Gadgetry, networking, more food. Starting to look like more modern John Chow dot Com.

You can really start to tell that Mr. Chow’s mindset is changing right about the he posts this…..

Make money with your blog? Where have I heard that before?

Here is a John Chow dot Com some of us may remember circa October 1st 2006.

The look is pleasing, its more like a professional blog. Now we’re getting somewhere Mr. Chow.

Dec 2006 ads, ads and more ads. More food, blog growing, check it out.

Theres the shill we all know and love, in full effect! Gotta respect a guy that isn’t afraid to ask for what he wants.

Alright, April 2007 brings us an earnings report! . Very interesting indeed. Old school for sure.

I’d be happy with 11k, if I werent an Alpha Dog kinda guy, I need to make money like CURRENT John Chow, not 2007 John Chow.

Pretty much from that point, its the new design. If you’re interesting in going WAYYYBACK you can view the entire history of John Chow dot Com Right here!

This was a lot of fun to put together, I hope everyone enjoys it!

I totally laughed out loud when I saw this. I don’t support gay marriage, but I hadn’t visited Wil’s blog in a while. I forgot how funny he was. Certainly worth a quick little post for you guys.

If you haven’t been to Wil Wheaton’s blog (yes he played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek : TNG), you need to head there asap. Plenty of good things to read, it won’t help you make any money, but it will give you a good chuckle, or some decent insight. Check Wil Wheaton’s Blog out right here..

I thought it was dinner and a movie….. pfft, what do I know. As you may or may not know, John Chow likes to post many of the meals he eats on his blog. Inspired by this I decided to give you guys an all access pass to my dinner plate tonight.

As you can see, there are two all beef reduced fat Hebrew National hot dogs, with Heinz Ketchup and Duke’s Low Fat Mayonnaise. In addition to my delicious dogs, I have some very tasty Funyuns. Delicious indeed!

In other news, I have a new header/logo thanks to the contest I ran over at DP forums! Thanks to everyone who submitted entries. Please let me know what you guys think of this new logo. I’m pretty excited about it. Otherwise, its time to relax and go watch some television with the family!

-Jason

My uncle is a successful businessman. He has had three very successful companies, and has recently “semi” retired. He is younger than many retirees. I’ve recently had the opportunity to pick his brain quite a bit. And tonight, he said something that really stuck out in my head.

You’ve got to be the alpha dog at all times, in every situation….

To many of us, that seems obvious. Even to me it seemed obvious as he said it. But when he elaborated on the expression, it became profoundly more genius.

I often tell my uncle about the affiliate marketing phenomenon. He doesn’t really think that its a real business opportunity, and is extremely skeptical about it. I’ll give him that one, anyone should be apprehensive about earning on the internet, most times you can get duped pretty easily, but to my average reader, you know there is money to be made, and riches to be had.

In particular, I’m always telling him about guys like Shoemoney, Zac Johnson , and John Chow. When I mentioned the succes of Jeremy Shoemaker tonight, he almost IMMEDIATELY bursted out saying “You should immediately stop admiring this guy, and begin trying to dominate him. Tell yourself every day that he (Shoemoney) will ultimately work for you one day, establish yourself as the alpha dog always.”

Powerful words. Obviously Jeremy Shoemaker isn’t going to be working for me, but I found the value in what he was saying. I was able to read between the lines, and get what he was trying to convey. If you have a pack leader instinct, and you can basically BS your way through something that you really have no idea about, people will follow you.

Now theres something you don’t read everyday. I actually just said that, right here on my blog. Let me repeat it, if you can BS your way through something you really have no idea about, people will follow you.

If you act successful, and you look successful to others, you will probably be successful. Makes, perfect sense to me.  What do you think?

Tonight I was scouring Facebook looking for a group to submit Digg articles and cross promote. I eventually gave up because I couldn’t find any group that did anything close to that. Oddly enough I was skimming through Shoemoney comments tonight, and clicked on over to AverageGal and found this post. Talk about a coincidence…..

I’ve joined up, and so should you. It all ties back into my post Why Social Bookmarking Matters to a Blogger .

Just wanted to post this before I went to bed. Thanks in advance for joining!

 Alright, in order to achieve one of my goals, I have decided to try out a small contest. Contests usually yield decent results when starting a blog. I’ve decided to do the simplest contest of all. An RSS Readership contest. 

All you have to do to be eligible is to sign up for my RSS feed VIA EMAIL. The entries only count via email because I can track those, and can basically see if anyone is cheating. 
The prize? Nothing too lavish, a $25 Microsoft AdCenter credit, and a free review (honest one) here on my blog. Bonus points for relevant comments on my articles as well. Every two comments counts for an extra entry into the contest. 

I will run this contest from today until the end of the month. The winner will be announced on Dec. 1st. A runner up will also be chosen to receive a free (honest) review here on my blog.

I hope this gives a little push for me, and thanks to everyone who has read so far, and also for all the kind emails!

Just a thought that I had. I often have silly thoughts at night while I’m watching nick at nite laying in my bed blogging. I was doing some research on Digg and came across this article. Now first and foremost, I would never use this method on my blog. This is more of a hypothetical suggestion than an actual guide on how to do this. 

What I did realize is the blogger who wrote this is a genius. He garnered some pretty good attention for his website simply by telling someone more influential than he is to basically pi** off. Its just like if you were to be sentenced to a prison term, I would walk in and pick the biggest guy and punch him directly in the face just to establish myself. I would probably get murdered, but I would make an impact. 

Posts like the one mentioned above have impact. Whether it be negative or positive, impact is what a post needs to grab peoples attention. Imagine the potential traffic you could get yourself if you started a blog war with someone like Shoemoney or Problogger.

Now, keep in mind, guys like Jeremy and Darren are stand up guys, and probably would not even dignify you with a response (although I have seen “shoemoney” comment on a blog trying to discredit his success), but you can surely see the value in this type of “pick a fight” marketing that I have. You can see another example and see “shoemoney”’s comment right here.

If you wanted to pursue this method you can’t just make a blog and put “screw you <INSTERT HIGH PROFILE BLOGGER>”. You would have to build up to it. You also can’t come with a weak argument. If you do happen to antagonize these guys to fight back, remember they are far more successful than you, have way more influence, and will ultimately destroy you in the blog war that you started. 

I would definitely recommend that your blog be a little bit established and have some credibility before you deploy these methods. Again, I’d never try this, but there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

When I first started blogging over a year ago, everyone I talked to tried to stress to me the importance of social bookmarking with sites like Digg and Reddit. In the beginning I was ready to try anything. So I signed up for those sites and began participating.

No one ever really told me how to use the sites. I figured I was a smart guy so I would just figure it out on my own. I would write posts catered to Digg on my shameful “Splog” (Spam Blog) and have my huge amount of digg friends digg it for me. Now, I met with some success intially. I even made the front page of digg about 3 times. But being new to blogging and monetizing a blog I failed to realize the value of what I had done. 

Its not easy to get a blog on the front page of digg. But the formula usually works like this. Top reasons why BLANK always BLANK. Top 10 funny BLANK pictures. New Apple BLANK. You see where I’m going with this. Digg was a predictable site, and I gamed it pretty well for a rookie. Before my blog was a month old I had already been frontpage on digg twice. 

What did it do for me? To be honest, it didn’t do much. I got the huge traffic spike. And the run off for the next few days after each FP, but no one was subscribing. No one was clicking ads. I basically was getting worthless traffic (Although, digg users love to comment your blog posts, usually in a negative manner). 

One thing that it did do, however was make me hungry for more. This would ultimately be my downfall in the digg community. I was submitting every crap article I wrote and eventually it got me banned from digg. Now I know to get the “initial push” that every blog needs, I will definitely have to use some Social Bookmarking, but I think this time I will try Twitter and Facebook. They seem to be the new big boys in social bookmarking. 

Sites like digg are past their prime. The community has diminished in my opinion over the last 10 months. Even though I wouldn’t mind a FP on digg for this site, I’m not going to try to game the system over there to my advantage. I’m making an honest effort this time not to have a spam blog. 

In closing, let me say this. Social bookmarking matters to a blogger for one reason. Blogging is supposed to be a social activity. I know many people like to make it a business, but ultimately its a social interaction between you and your readers. Focus on producing something worth telling others about and you will have much success with social bookmarking. Or at least, I hope thats how it works.

All of my life I’ve reached for the stars. I always set lofty goals for myself. I think thats why the majority of my endeavors have been failures. Come to think of it, I’ve never really enjoyed any real success. Success to me isn’t doing well at some corporate job. I’ve been there and done that. Success to me is independence from anyone who can shut off my income with the snap of a finger.

I’ve felt the pain of the layoff. I’ve felt the sting of being fired. Its not a good feeling. Part of the reason I admire the superbloggers is that they live a lifestyle that I could only dream of. Completely free of the fear of their income being eliminated. I learned from Steve Pavlina that if one income stream dries up, you can just open up a new one. He has lots of great things to say on his blog, you should definitely go there.

One thing I want to make clear right away is that I am in no way shape or form blogging for the sole purpose of making money. I am using this blog to bring you on the journey with me. I hope that I can share some information with you that will be helpful and useful. Maybe I can teach you something you don’t know when I learn. And hopefully you can teach me something too.

I believe I will be successful simply because I am passionate about the topic. I am fascinated with affiliate marketing and the notion that you can earn a living from promoting products and furthermore blogging about it. I am overjoyed with the idea of building an RSS readership. I get a warm gooey feeling inside when I imagine the moment I make my first affiliate sale.

Before I set my specific goals for this blog, I want to tell you a backstory. A little bit about what I call my first “attempt” at earning money from the internet.

Last September I was working for a major telephone company. I had a LOT of free time at my desk. For whatever reason I had happened across Shoemoney’s blog. And I became fascinated with the notion of earning money from adsense. I figured anyone could just slap together a site and throw some adsense on it and just watch the dollars roll in.

I read up a bit on how to start a blog. I decided WordPress would be the best platform to start me off. And within a few days I had registered a domain, set up a WP blog and had been approved for adsense. I am actually quite ashamed of the site, as it really is nothing more than a spam site. So much that I won’t even post a link. I employed keyword stuffing, I exploited digg a few times to reach the frontpage and got some traffic, but just like anything, if you do it halfway, you’ll get almost nothing in return.

After about two months of the site sitting there earning pennies a day, I basically forgot about it. But while it was just simmering in its penny earning misery something amazing happened. When I was first starting out, I heavily promoted ZangoCash. ZangoCash is a PPI program that had a pretty good referral system. For whatever reason my site ranked well and a few people signed up under my referral link and began earning some serious money.

I was generating about $700 a month just from Zango referral earnings. My site was all but dead, but I was earning decent money. Now, I don’t attribute this to the effort I put forth. I realize that it was nothing more than a fluke. And it was really nothing that I could repeat. And when it dried up (which it did after 4 months) it would be gone forever.

But therein lies the problem. I got a taste of residual income generated by the internet. And it was very alluring to me. Once the Zango ended, and I realized that there was nothing I could do to bring it back, I decided then and there that I would put forth an honest effort to build a blog that had true value to my readers. You my friend have arrived at that very blog I was dreaming of.

Sorry if I am rambling, let me get to the point of this post. I want to outline some goals for the next three months. I want to write them publicly so everyone who reads this can help me stick with the program. With each goal I will provide a brief summary of what actions I will take to move me closer to the goal. So here I go:

Goals to achieve before Valentines Day:

• Achieve an RSS readership of 100

I will do this by creating quality content for my users and interacting with them daily.

• Get mentioned by a “Super Blogger”

My definition of “Super Blogger” is anyone with an RSS readership of 10,000 or more. I’m not really sure how I will achieve this one yet. I’ll get back to you on this one.

• Reaching a revenue level of $500 per month

I will achieve this by attaining my previous two goals. I will use proper ad placement with adsense and I will implement private ad sales and affiliate links.

I don’t want to get myself in too deep so I’m starting small and sticking with the program. I will rely on many of you to keep me strong throughout my journey. We can all feed off of one another to achieve our goals.

If for any reason I achieve these goals before 2-14-2009 I will set some new goals, and reach higher and higher. Thanks in advance to anyone who may read this, and please feel free to comment. The main reason I wanted to blog was to interact with like minded people.

Much Success and God Bless

-Jason