Feel Reality

Jason Henderson Hacked Big Marketing Blog Down

Big Jason, the consummate MMO Internet Reality contestant, seems to be in a bit of a bind. His plan of attack for the TAC was to leverage his network and use his blog to give away over $25,000 worth of ebooks, seminar tickets and other worthless garbage in hopes to gather money to buy his win. Unfortunately his clever “big marketing blog” appears to have been hacked. I say “appears to be” because it’s possible that he just crashed his wordpress installation, it got upset, went back to it’s default template and changed it’s title to “Fuck Jason”.  You never know, computers sometimes have a mind of their own. 

In other news, the only good thing about the show, the hot host, is now single. Just in time for the release of her new blog. John Chow posted a quick flip video of a parking lot bachelorette episode, during which on of the contestants “Chan Van Norman”, escapes in a minivan to avoid having to talk to a girl.  Monica seems to be a little cozy with John and you would think she was milking him for exposure up until the point that you read “powered by johnchow.com” on the bottom of her blog. Now that my friends, is pimp work at it’s finest.

**UPDATE: Big Jason appears to have regained control of his blog. He now has a “hello world” post up and he changed the title back to “Big Marketing”. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that big jason never did a mysql dump and will probably be starting over at this point.  Ouch!

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Top Affiliate Challenge Episode 3 Spoiler

I caught a glimpse of Episode 3 which is still being leaked.  Here is a recap for those of you who should miss it.

Day 2 Earnings…

John Chow’s Team: $220.40
Ken’s Team: $791.63
Shoemoney Team: -7.00 (yes that is a negative)

Shoe Money calls in a favor and gets $2,000 to spend on PPC for the next challenge.

TAC votes off Ian Fernando because he doesn’t like spending his own money to win (what a concept). But, then Monica decides to not vote anyone off, forcing him to stay on.

John Chow suggests leveraging your own network (aka spamming your friends) to raise capital without having any start up budget.

Jonathan Van Clute admits to spending his own money to drive large amounts of targeted traffic to their contest sites. In a egotistical rant he brags about his ability to be net profitable. The show producers kindly show us the figures on the screen, but leave one important component out… I’ll fill in the gaps for you.

Jonathan spent $2-3 CPM on 200,000 targeted leads

at the low end that is $200 spent (which they show)

at the high end that is $300 spent…

John Chow’s team brought in $220.40. Van Clute asked you to do the Math, now I’m going to ask you to connect A to B.  If Van Clute spent $200-300 and his team brought in $220.40, then his net profit was $20.40 at best and -79.60 at the least. Definitely not anything to write home about.

Tips shared:

Blog in your own voice

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What happened to the Top Affiliate Challenge?

The first episode of the ”Top Affiliate Challenge” aired today and it was quite abysmal.  I tried to give it a chance but the production quality… scratch that… the whole effort was crap.  As you can tell from my previous posts I wasn’t expecting much. Unfortunately (or should it be fortunately?) I wasn’t able to make it through the Top Affiliate Challenge broadcast. Not because I turned it off, but because it just didn’t work. 

Was anyone able to watch the entire show without fail?

Shoemoney claims that it was because their server was bombarded and he says Thor was working on it. It’s now 12:00am and I’m still unable to get past the 15 min mark. We certainly aren’t looking at an overload or “digg” effect. More than likely it’s 10 Shoe and Chow pole smokers, who can’t stop hitting reload, pegging the Angel Fire box in hopes that someone will come on and tell them the secret to IM success.

I know Thor has posted a response on my blog, defending his show.  I really feel bad for the gurus and the sponsors. I think John Chow and Shoemoney are okay guys, but this show is just smearing their face in the mud.  The sponsors like Pecker Jam, Tool Bag and Ken’s Jewelry certainly aren’t getting their moneys worth. 

My plan was to follow the show and critique what was offered up to the public, maybe expand on concepts that were brushed over.  I give up on that plan as I see that this show is pathetic, amateurish, and painful to watch. I think I can learn more about making money from Mathew Lesko…

By the way… who decided John Chow was the “black hat of black hats?”. Was he awarded this title for hacking the poor password schema of the TAC blog?

update: I was able to make it through the entire first episode of the Top Affiliate Challenge.  For those of you that weren’t as fortunate I will go ahead and share the affiliate tips that were covered in this show. 

If I missed any, PLEASE fill me in. Thanks.

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Top Affiliate Challenge is Bottom Feeding

The ”Top Affiliate Challenge” is just 3 days away from airing it’s first episode and the controversy is already starting to brew. I figured this would be an appropriate time to look at efforts of Thor Schrock’s ”Top Affiliate Challange” to see just what is driving it.

The big picture… Why would the show’s two biggest gurus Jeremy Schoemaker and John Chow choose to participate in a low budget internet reality show? What do they have to gain? Perhaps the better question to ask is; how much more could they afford to lose? It is common knowledge in the Online Marketing world that Shoemoney and John Chow have raked in a significant chunk of cash over the years from their blog. What isn’t discussed (for obvious reasons) is that they have been on a steady dip for quite some time now and they are quickly losing traffic and reach. Lets take a look at the charts…

First up, take a look at the dwindling reach of John Chow and Shoemoney over the past 8 months. “Reach” shows us how many internet viewers out of a million, come across your website. Thor’s blog does little more than serve as a baseline. To give credit where credit is due, Thor has only been blogging since his appearance on Joel Comm’s “Next Intnernet Millionaire” so he hasn’t had the time that Chow and Shoemoney have to build traction.

I know that “reach” doesn’t hold the same weight as overall rank, so I’ve saved the best for last.  This is where you see the sharpest drop in the success of Shoemoney and John Chow’s blog. “Rank” is your sites overall rank of all indexed sites in Alexa’s database. Alexa is the authority on internet traffic statistics and they have well over 20 million sites indexed.  In the hay day of John Chow’s and Shoemoney’s success, their blog was ranked in the top 5,000 of all internet sites. Anything in the top 25,000 is well respected and a lucrative candidate for monetization. 

Ouch!  Looks like our heros were taking quite the hit.  As I pointed out in the images, once the “Top Affiliate Challenge” was announced, all three sites saw a slight bump in traffic. Once it goes on air will see them recover? I guess that is something that only time will tell.

In the mean time the shows gurus and producer are attempting to drum up controversy and draw attention to their dark horse. A week ago Shoemoney aired Ty Hurd’s dirty laundry and subsequently threw him under the bus at the advice of his “legal council”.  Today John Chow announced on his blog that Shoemoney has already given up. Ahhh the drama.  Come Monday we will get our first glimpse at what happens when 12 contestants picked to live and work together at the Hampton Inn New Victorian Suites for a week, choose to have their lives taped, and start being real. Or something to that effect.

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Top 10 Amateur videos on YouTube

Display quality video imaging sensors are now being incorporated into cellphones, cameras and fad gadgets like The Flip. This coupled with the fact that media and video production software now comes standard on windows and mac computers has resulted in a ProAm era where consumers are outproducing the producers. 

To put this into perspective: When Elvis Presley first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show during prime time, 60 Million viewers tuned in. It was the second highest rated US Television show ever (based on viewers). In April of 2006, Judson Laipply started off his YouTube video “The Evolution of Dance” to Elvis Presley’s “You Ain’t nothin’ but a Hound Dog”, 89.5 Million viewers have watched to date.

Here are a list of the top 10 Amateur videos on YouTube today, ranked by viewcount…

1. Views: 89,589,770 Evolution of Dance — middle aged man emulates the dancing styles from 1959 to the present.

2.  Views: 52,780,635 Hahaha — a guy makes strange noises that cause a baby to laugh uncontrollably.

3.  Views: 46,150,038 Potter Puppet Pals in “The Mysterious Ticking Noise” — Harry Potter finger puppet musical.

4.  Views: 45,100,920 guitar — Canon played by funtwo (pretty amazing really).

5.  Views: 38,939,867 Pleasing Partner with Mouth — halfway decent looking blonde with a tongue ring talks about providing oral pleasure.

6. Views: 34,246,273 Charlie bit my finger - again ! — little Brit kid puts his finger inside his baby brothers mouth. Twice.

7. Views: 27,898,840 Free Hugs Campaign — Grimey looking guy offers free hugs, the campaign spreads and everyone engages in public display of affection… well hugs anyway. 

8. Views: 25,072,974 Remember Me — Slideshow dedicated to American Soldiers overseas.

9. Views: 22,779,132 Hey clip Lip Sync video produced by two jailbait girls in tight and or revealing clothing.

10. Views: 20,928,688 Chris Crocker - LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! It took me a while to decide if this was a really ugly (and scruffy) girl or a metrosexual (at the very least) guy.  It’s a guy… this was pimped heavily by the mainstream celebrity gossip shows. 

There were two videos on this list that I questioned whether they should be included or not. The first one is #5, I think the video title was probably misconstrued, resulting in the large number of hits. However, the girl in the preview is the girl that you get in the video (no image splice trick) and she does explain the topic at hand. The second video that I had to question was #7. This video is done to a music score and they even pimp the background track in the title. However, the music takes second stage to the story line, so I figured it was like an amateur hour silent film with music.

Wanna know what it takes to make a top 10 video?  Check out this great article on the Top Ten Online Filmmaking Techniques at newteevee.com. 

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Top Affiliate Challenge Reality Show

Thor Schrock, the second runner up of Joel Comm’s “The Next Internet Millionaire”, is about to embark upon a reality show of his own; “Top Affiliate Challenge”.  I first met Thor in Lincoln at an event held by Shoemoney for the NPMMO group.  First impressions… I thought Thor was a real go-getter with a charismatic personality. I was excited to watch him represent Nebraska on Joel Comm’s internet reality show, even though I have never been a big fan of the long copy sales letter king, Joel Comm.  Thor owns a successful computer repair shop in both Omaha and Lincoln Nebraska and he is now starting to dabble on the web, which has turned out to be a great match for his networking skills. 

The “Top Affiliate Challenge” will be filmed in Lincoln, Nebraska and unlike Joel Comm’s exploitation, all of the advice and tips will be available free during the season.  Thor is bringing in some heavy hitters from Search Engine Marketing world for his show including Shoemoney, John Chow and Ken McArthur (whom I have never heard of up until now).  Shoe has the home fienld advantage, I’m not sure how this will help other than shortening his commute. At least Shoe will be able to share his new 2000 sq ft Shoemoney Plex with John Chow so that he can see how the other half lives, haha. 

In all reality, this should be an exciting show and I really look forward to it.  I will be giving my few cents worth of insight and episode recaps as the season progresses . As an interesting side note… both Thor and Shoemoney have a difficult to remember silent “c” in their last names. 

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