Entries from March 2008 ↓

I was watching the forbes top 50 earners in television the other night and heard about Katie Couric for the first time. What struck me was not that she earned $15 million dollars a year and owned an impressive real estate portfolio, but the fact that she actually turned down a $20 mil job offer to stay as co-host of the today show for the lower paid $15 mil sole anchor spot of the CBS Evening News.

Not only she is a good looking presenter, she’s also a smart career mover. It’s a great example to everyone that sometimes it really isn’t all about the money. Sometimes, when you stay somewhere too long, you become stale, you loose motivation, and everyday blends into the next. One of my motos is that you always have to be learning. The moment you stop, it’s probably time to either move on to a new role in the same company, or often a new role in a new company…

Popularity: 6%

NASA has some of the most amazing photos and this one is of no exception. It’s 8 years old but still amazing. It’s a stitch of the earth at night.

source: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html

You can see where all the developed places are. I bet if they took it again now, China would be all lit up. Back in 2000, India was definitely a step ahead but China has definitely lit up since.

Popularity: 5%

The Dot Asia domains have finally opened to the public this week. Have you grabs yours yet? This is by far the best chance you’ve got to secure the top level domain that you want. I really like the dot .asia extension. It is a proper word (unlike .eu, .ws, etc.,) and covers the WHOLE Asian region including Australia and India!

Amongst the hundreds I’ve spent, I secured myself some rippers include iReview.asia and StudentFinance.asia. I picked my domain names by choosing ones which I have a business idea that I can build around. Maybe they won’t eventuate this year… but when I have the time, motivation, and money, they will eventually eventuate :)

I registered these at godaddy as I have the majority of my domains there anyway so it’s easier to manage. The coupon codes that work for dot asia are

cjcdollar - $1 off Coupon
cjccoupon - 10% off Coupon
cjcdeal35 - $5 off on orders of $30 or more
cjctenoff - $10 off on orders of $50 or more
cjcdeal - 15% off on orders of $75 or more
cjcdeal37 - $20 off on order of $100 or more

Popularity: 7%

Are you still reading JohnChow and Shoemoney? I do every now and then but no where near as much as I did during the height of their popularity a few months ago.

According to Alexa, I’m not alone.

JohnChow’s traffic is down 32% and Shoemoney is down 26% from 3 months ago.

John’s drop can be attributed to the fact that his blog is no longer a test case for what the average blog can earn - he doesn’t run adsense anymore and his earnings are from sources that are normally out of reach of the average blogger (ie. direct advertising and reviews). He’s grown too big and people can’t relate to him no more.

With shoemoney… I never followed his blog much and was never sure why people read his blog so I can’t really comment. Maybe he was giving some good affiliate marketing tips but now there are much better blogs that give better affiliate advice.

Popularity: 6%

One of the money making strategies I was experimenting with was blogging about random topics from highly searched for topics.

The three sources that I picked this up were

1. Lycos 50
2. 
3. 

If I were to follow this today, I’d be posting about

• Lindsay Lohan’s possible sex tape
• Britney Spears guess appearance on How I met your mother
• Ashley Alexandra Dupre - whoever she is
• baba booey (??wtf??)
• dagmar midcap - dagmar what??
• Djimon Honsou - again no idea who he/she is
• Pregnant Man - really?

You get the picture, there’s some interesting random stories in there like the girl who became a man but is now 5 months pregnant - fark! However, after a bit of posting, I noticed that the click through rate on the ads were super low and the blog had no theme and no direction. I wasn’t blogging about stuff that interested me and it felt like that I was just posting for the sake of posting.

As a business model, even though I was getting some immediate hits from search engines, this wasn’t sustainable as it was based off trends that did not last long. As soon as the trend dropped off, the search traffic would also drop and rely on the next trend. I was chasing trend after trend and because of the sporadic topics, repeat visitors were few and far between. There was some small money to be made but it was too labour intensive and not enough immediate return. Perhaps if I kept it up for a year and kept churning out 10 articles a day, I might have seen some good results… but that’s too much hard work for my lazy ass.

Popularity: 5%

Recently I was researching on different landing pages for my web hosting reviews site which I’ve neglected for a long time and came across this ripper of a dodge. The site is hostdir .org and they definitely do not deserve a link in from me.

What’s wrong with this site? It looks like a normal, cleanly presented, review site, but have a look more closely…

Every host is suitable for your country (they must be using a geoip tracker)

Every host is the host of the month

Every host has 271 members who signed up, 21 reviews, and rated 4.91 out of 5!

and lets throw in some random awards and guarantees

Finally… the dodgiest of them all is that they claim to have 2154 subsribed rss readers!

But hold on… it links to the netbusinessblog!!

another unethical affiliate exposed!

These dodgy strategies used on the site, if applied in the offline world, would certainly land the guy with a huge fine from the office of fair trading (or equivalent body in the US). In the big bad world of online affiliate marketing though, we’re still in the wild wild west days where anything goes!

Popularity: 6%

In a move akin to the Radiohead’s free album download, South Park Studios has decided to release ALL their episodes for FREE to watch online. How cool is that! They’re testing out the advertising model that is working so well for just about every free internet service. At the moment, it seems the ads are from KFC and weightwatchers so go support south park and eat more KFC before going to weightwatches to lose those calories :)

Unfortunately, it looks like its only available to US ppl at the moment so Aussies will need to try to get through via a US proxy of sorts.

My favourite south park episode has got to be the “Make Love, Not Warcraft” parody. It used to be on youtube before it got pulled down for obvious copyright issues. Now it’s back online! Thanks you south park!

Popularity: 6%

If AuctionAds wasn’t already dead as it is, eBay’s latest offering, AdContext will certainly dig it’s grave even deeper.

eBay AdContext is a simple, automated way to add relevant, real-time eBay listings to help maximise your ad profits. It will dynamically generate relevant listings, even when the content on your website has changed.

Basically, that means it’s exactly what auctionads offers but it’s made by eBay itself so there’ll be better tracking and no more mysterious missing revenue!

Popularity: 5%

The youtube awards for 2007 are out.

• The most adorable is the laughing baby
• The funniest is the mysterious ticking noise
• The best commentary is the what the buck show
• The most creative is the human tetris
• The most inspirational is the blind painter
• The best instructions is how to solve the rubix cube
• The best music clip is chocolate rain
• The best political clip is stop the clash of civilisations
• The best series is the wake up call
• The best short film is my name is lisa
• The best sports clip is the balloon bowl
• and my personal favourite from the list is the eyewitness category for the battle at kruger. You just have to watch it believe it. It is the most emotionally moving clip of them all.

Popularity: 6%

I’ve skimmed through a few articles in recent weeks of a stupid music video that has everyone stumped because it rose to become the most viewed youtube video of all time - even beating the evolution of dancing guy. I thought nothing of it because I think the dancing guy isn’t worth watching either and wondered why he was the most watched vid. There’s also other mysterious vids - like magibon, the girl who just stares at the camera but gets a million views (seriously…wtf?!). So as you can see, most viewed does not mean most entertaining or best vid.

What’s really taken my attention though is that a few days ago though, Clarus Bartel (the guy who uploaded the video), has pulled it down citing

“I was fed up [with the abuse and accusations of statistical manipulation], I am not interested in the first place if this is the price I have to pay.”

It’s such a shame because it was a part of internet history ( Luckily, some resourceful people have put it back up here, here, and here). What it shows is that too many people get affected by what gets said online (hence all the uproar about cyber bullying). There’s always going to be people online who don’t like you, you just have to learn to filter it out and get on with what you are doing. If it is warranted negatively, then take it constructively, improve, and move on. If it is personal attacks, then don’t bother replying or justifying yourself as it is often futile and only ends up in more flaming wars.

What I think Bartel should have done was just to leave all the commenting there and leave it to the youtube administrators to moderate the comments ( I wonder if he could have requested for commenting to be closed off!). In the end, they are just comments and they do not take away the significance of his achievements. He should have also gotten in touch with a celebrity agent, flown around the world doing all the letterman, rove, and leno shows that he can get his face in, and laugh all the way to the bank!

My personal theory of why his vid became so popular was that he started off by using some highly searched for tags like ipod, sex, girls, hot, obama (whatever). I know because one of my friends has a video and he changes his tag to some closely related keywords and bam he has a few thousand views overnight. The key though was the next step where this hit the bloggersphere and became viral. As blog after blog chases this story, more and more people around the world - hence all the legit IPs - hit the vid. Finally, it reaches mainstream print media and bam, there’s no stopping it. Again, this proves the power of the collective blogging community - we have the power to control rankings and move elections! Well that’s my theory anyway… then again there could be the other one where the Russian bot net mafia was just randomly testing out their tools and accidentally took this one too far.

Popularity: 8%