Miscellaneous Ramblings – Weekend Edition

Kontera Technology

I got an email from my Kontera rep. He said that I have helped over 1,300 publishers discover Kontera ContentLink, which is good. However, many publishers are not giving it a chance, which is bad.

The problem is they either hate what they see after just 1 hour of using us, or they’re not up to speed on all of the different optimizing techniques and efforts that can happen through just giving us time. A lot of them pull without a lot of thought, and given that the majority of our higher paying advertisers don’t kick in until about a week after a site signs up, I think we’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

In my Kontera optimization guide, I stated that Kontera needs at least a week to adjust itself to a new site. The system can’t work if you remove them after a day. If you’re going to run Kontera – and you should since it’s a good moneymaker – you need to give it at least a week. I recommend trying any new ad network for full month because you can’t judge performance with just a few days of data.

Grace Cheng – The Voice of Money

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I like to welcome Grace Cheng as a new blog sponsor. Grace makes money online by trading money online – a lot of it. Now that’s my kind of girl! Hopefully, she’ll be able to help with my biggest online income killer.

Grace will be sending me several copies of her book, 7 Winning Strategies For Trading Forex, to give away in a blog contest. In addition to writing the book, Grace offer a course of FX trading and her blog is full of interesting ways to make money by trading money.

Ed & Michael Sitting In A Tree, Bloggggging

Michael Kwan and Ed Lau are working together on a new hockey blog. The only problem is, they don’t know what to call it. So they’re asking for your help.

Think of a good name for a hockey website and send your idea to hockeyblogideas@yahoo.com. Please include your domain idea in the subject line and perhaps a short blurb about why you think it’d be a good name in the body. Make sure that the domain is an unregistered dot com. We are not going to settle for a .ca, .net, or any of that garbage. You can check on Go Daddy.

The person who sends in the winning name will win an 8GB iPod nano. There will also be a random draw for a 4GB nano. Full rules are available here.

Reverse Culture Shock

My friend Carl Nelson just came back to Vancouver after spending the last two years in Hong Kong. Carl is doing the “get the hell out of Canada to avoid tax” game. In his latest blog entry, Carl write about the reverse culture shock he suffered upon landing back in Vancouver.

While I was laying in bed trying to get back to sleep half an hour ago, I was thinking back to my first full day in Canada in almost 2 years. There were a few instances of what I can only call ‘reverse culture shock’. Everyday things that have changed in my life since moving to Hong Kong, that are noticable when I come back.

Some of the culturally shocking things includes very expensive food, tipping, mobile phone plans and the fact that Vancouver seems to run in slow motion compared to Hong Kong. Hey! We like to relax here. 😎

Can a Nobody Be Successful Online?

Kyle sent me an email asking me to start a new blog but not tell anyone I am behind it. He says it would be good motivation and proof that a nobody can be a somebody.

In this experiment you would detail your strategy, hardships and successes at starting this new blog (an experiment) but never mention the actual blog url/name. You can always sell it off at the end, or give it away on johnchow.com as massive super challenge/reward… to gain a ton of publicity for john chow dot com.

Good idea Kyle. I’ll think up something at tomorrow’s Dot Com Pho.

Can a Freelance Writer Really Make Money Online?

Freelance writer Chris Bibey has posted his freelance writing income for July 2007. He pulled down $4,894.78 by writing 43 articles. That’s pretty good! I wonder if he’s doing better than Michael Kwan?

John Cow Goes To The Slaughter House

It looks like the cows are about to come home for John Cow. The growing parody site has been slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit.

Carefully considering our current position, we have decided that it’s time to give in. The money we’ve made so far would not cover any lawsuit. It is with great regret that we are throwing in the towel because we really thought we were well on our way to become dot cow millionaires.

Before anyone ask, it’s not me suing the cow. This is one of those sue them to rack up their legal bills type of lawsuit. The guy is not looking to win. He knows he won’t. However, he also knows the cow doesn’t have the milk to pay for a lawyer. I’m going to work with the cow to see if we can come up with some evil way to get him out of his legal mess.