Learn from the Cow vs. Conn MMO Battle!

Controversy creates cash is a famous motto someone once said. The more controversy you create, the more interest is generated in you or your product. Take for example the brutal sports entertainment known as professional wrestling, such as WWE. They constantly try to push the limits of stories in their brutal male soap opera just to gain more viewers, ratings and people buying their merchandise and monthly Pay-Per-Views. So it's really no surprise that the blogging world uses similar tactics.

Bloggers aren't necessarily competing in steel cage matches, but have a close equivalent of them in the blogosphere, using written wars and blog-based competitions. In fact, many bloggers swear by the concept of calling out other bloggers just to stir things up. A-list bloggers also realize the potential for a good blogging battle. Take for example the battle of John Chow vs. Shoemoney. The two powerhouse bloggers had a challenge to see who could gain more RSS subscribers during their contest. In the process they gave away some great prizes while doing an excellent job of adding more subscribers and fans for their blogs. Many people said both guys won in the process, as did the readers who followed along, or even won prizes.

Now we have two more bloggers going at it in the Make Money Online blogging world. I won't get into all the specifics, because I enjoy reading both their blogs, and don't want to be blacklisted from any A-list events they host. In essence, Garry Conn called into question some of the MMO practices of John Cow, prompting the Cow to "moo back". Eventually it got to the point where the two decided to have a good ol' fashioned battle to settle the feud. The guys really aren't mad at each other, but they still are going to have one heckuva "cowpetition" just to see who's best at MMO. So now we, the readers get to witness the Conn man vs. the Cow, and as you can see from the above image, both guys have already declared themselves the winner!

What's great about this sort of thing is both guys are offering free "classes" to those readers who want to see it all go down. The contest involves them each trying to build a niche site to see who can sell theirs for more on Sitepoint. So in this contest, everyone wins, because the readers can see firsthand what two successful bloggers do to make money online. By signing up for both John Cow and Garry Comm's class updates, you'll be gaining insight into the process it takes to build successful sites online and you'll gain valuable tips to aid your own quest online. Both these guys have done great work, so you'll be missing out if you don't sign-up or peek in on their cowpetition battle from time to time!

Check out John Cow's post about the cowpetition here.

Check out Gary Conn's post about the cowpetition here.

Using Socialmarker & Niche Sites

Here's a few late Christmas presents. These items will help you in creating niche sites for profit, getting your blog noticed by Google and others, as well as giving you valuable link backs to your blog.

First things first, you should definitely get set up with Socialmarker.com. This site includes 30 social bookmarking sites and allows you to easily submit your items to them all. It's better than having to go and log in to each site every time. The Socialmarker site includes the well known choices of Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious and then 26 more, some you may have never heard of.

Make sure to register with all the bookmarking sites first (yes it's tedious, but worth it). It's been suggested that you create a newly created email for all of these, maybe use myway.com or inbox.com where you can create free email accounts. Once you are registered, Socialmarker allows you to easily submit a site or blog entry to all of those 30 bookmarking sites. You simply supply the title, the URL, description, and tags. Social marker will go through site by site and auto-populate the fields. You will be able to alter them of course, as not every site is the same in what it asks for. But this definitely will make your life easier and give you backlinks to your blog itself, posts or other site. Socialmarker.com also has a special icon you can drag to your bookmarks/links area on Firefox. Then next time you want to bookmark a site or blog entry, just click the button for Socialmarker!

The above tool will help you promote any blog entries or sites you have, including specialized sites. Also known as niche sites, these can provide you additional passive income. The Monetizer has enjoyed building these on Squidoo, which is one free place to do so. An entry by Monika at Writer's Manifesto Blog presents the several ways to build niche sites, including Squidoo, Hub Pages and blogs. Read Monika's article here

There's a great article which discusses how to use your blog with Squidoo, related articles you wrote and RSS to create a sort of Squidoo goggle dance. Following the 9 steps will help to get Google to take notice as well as create links back to your sites. It can even get you multiple listings on the first page of Google search results, if done properly. See the article here.

Hope that all moneymakers and bloggers had a fun, happy and prosperous holiday!