While I was at the Alexa page today, I noticed that John Cow has done something very clever, he made a picture parody of a Facebook page called “pensionbook” and it has received a massive amount of traffic over the past month. Check out his stats for the site that hosts the image (johncow.us)
Because of this traffic, his site got listed on the “movers and shakers” part of Alexa. Moving from a rank of 511,000 to 20,000 since the beginning of December. The root of Johncow.us has an image showing a template for sale image. Click through and you get the option of buying a basic version with links to johncow intact or pay a premium to have it without the links.
A pretty awesome pre-planned traffic attack! This is a really good example of monetizing a social bait page, he must have sold quite a few templates!
Unfortunately there are already people who are offering to provide the template for free (but not for long!)
My own Alexa rank has dropped below the 100K barrier now, sweet! For the UK it is below 8000, haha! and with over 50,000 unique visitors in through the doors before Christmas, all my traffic targets have been achieved. By March next year, I’d like to have over 100,000 more visitors and have my Alexa rank down to less than 50k.
I have a pretty good idea how I’m going to proceed, I have some wicked plans for CommentLuv, contests, tutorials and ebooks that will be fun to try. Roll on 2008!
I hope to see all my good blogging buddies rocking on through the new year, see you then!
December 27th, 2007 on 3:18 pm
Twitter: psychicgeek
That’s quite an achievement, Andy. Heck, I consider myself lucky to come up with new content on a regular basis. But then, not everyone wants to know how to achieve an altered state. Somehow, no matter how much social networking I do, I doubt that I will be for everyone.
witchypoo’s last blog post..Toilets
December 27th, 2007 on 7:12 pm
thanks Witchypoo, I think an altered state blog is as niche as you can get! You seem to do pretty well considering you have a niche blog so I wouldn’t worry about too much.
I see advice all over the place to do social sites to get traffic but just about all I do is read other blogs and comment if I like the article. That and stumbleupon traffic did all the rest (plus countless links to me for the commentluv plugin).
I’m too lazy to keep up with sites like digg, sphinn, cliq et al . that’s why I made the commentluv plugin in the first place – so I don’t have to do anything to develop a community of links and commenters!
December 27th, 2007 on 9:31 pm
I am excited to see what you have in store!
Talina’s last blog post..Holiday lights stopped working but we can count on our rope lights!
December 27th, 2007 on 9:39 pm
me too! lol, I hope I have enough time to put them all into practice
December 28th, 2007 on 1:19 am
Geez, so much to learn. Great to have sites like this giving tips. I’d be lost without it.
T’s last blog post..Sexual Consent
December 29th, 2007 on 2:35 pm
I am too tired (and perhaps a bit too lazy) to keep up with the social networking stuff. *sigh* There aren’t enough hours in the day to do the lengthy blog promoting I would like to do. I wish I had a freakin’ staff over here. Perhaps I should sucker some young college student into working for free by placing an ad for a marketing internship. heh heh heh
AntiBarbie’s last blog post..My Daughter, Buckethead.
December 29th, 2007 on 5:47 pm
I find Cow’s marketing and viral techniques to be very creative and inspiring…Definitely 1 smart Cow! Great site design you have here as well..love the catch phrase!
January 2nd, 2008 on 7:14 pm
T: glad you liked it
AntiB: lol, a marketing internship. you could totally do that!
THe M: thanks! Cow is pretty clever at taking advantage of traffic, I’m too bloody lazy to do most of them though !
January 5th, 2008 on 9:15 am
I have read his post when Cow first posted it. That is a very successful linkbait. And to link his .COM site with his .US site, that is freeking genius.
Medical Tourism’s last blog post..Medical Tourism in India
January 14th, 2008 on 12:26 pm
Just one small ammendment, John Cow didn’t create the image, that was me, over at straightfrommybrain.com
If your feeling bored pop over and have a poke around
January 14th, 2008 on 2:08 pm
thanks for the correction Stephen! I’ll be sure to pop over..
February 7th, 2008 on 1:02 am
I can’t believe how good he’s gotten in such a short amount of time.
sir jorge’s last blog post..System of a Down Toxicity Review
February 7th, 2008 on 9:59 am
I think he does work hard at it though, that’s all it takes sometimes !
February 7th, 2008 on 10:03 am
Well a mixture of hard work and not crediting others work! He’s refusing to place a link to me on the page that displays my pensionbook image. which as you can tell has hit a raw nerve
February 7th, 2008 on 10:15 am
oh dear. I think sometimes people think ‘ruthless’ means that they can be ‘thief’
I get my images and copy taken all the time and it’s a pain to be sure.
I see it does still contain the straightfrommybrain.com in the bottom right corner.
there is the issue of fair use though, as I see it, he can use a thumbnail that links to the original page but taking the whole image as I see it is a bit wrong, especially as he is using it to promote his own site and some people could be confused and think that he made it.
Did you consider making a complaint to the domain host? isn’t it infringement of copyright?
February 7th, 2008 on 10:21 am
A lot of people have been confused, (including this blog, sorry!) and a lot have other people have used the while image, but provided a link to me, which is fine really. He just seems to be ignoring me, and it looks like he’s done quite well out of the whole thing!
June 18th, 2008 on 1:48 pm
John is extremely inventive with his self promotions, but I still think the hardest part of the entire process is coming up with original content good enough to really blow up. Even without his unique self promoting, if his stuff gets really big, there’s no way he’s NOT making money.
July 15th, 2008 on 9:19 am
The interesting thing about Alexa is that not everyone uses its plugin in their browsers. What that means is, that Alexa’s results are not always accountable. I mean, if you are getting much traffic from i.e. Macintosh users who not necessarily use the Alexa Sidebar as I do in my Firefox, these visits will not be recorded.
I think what Alexa is doing is a great idea to be developed and fine-tuned in the future when the awareness of internet users grow and they start to install the Alexa plugins in their browsers on a massive scale.
October 16th, 2008 on 8:52 am
@ steven wildish, any chance of getting a link to that original image. It’s really BS the way Cow is treating you and I would love to do a post on my Load Of BS Blog
Sire´s last blog post..The Meaning Of Life In A Poem
March 16th, 2009 on 5:10 am
I am quite weak in terms of pulling traffic to my blog. Need to learn more obviously. I wonder how people can traffic from here and there. It just amaze me. I setup a new blog and my target traffic for the first phase is 1000 unique visitor per day. This time I will focus more on SEO. Hope that it works well. By the way, thank you for your post. It gives some idea and inspiration on how to attract more traffic.
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