Yesterday was a huge day in terms of sales!

So what happened? It was a direct result from a neutral review by John Chow. I am calling this effect the Chow Chow Train.

Initially I did not think I would even see any return on investment since it was published on a Friday night on St. Patrick’s Day Weekend.

I started the day off at a measly $200 and during the night hit just over $1,000 directly from the Chow Chow Train. John sent an unstoppable amount of traffic, hungry to purchase keywords on the next big internet project!

Within 15 days of the official launch of The Social Millionaire I have already hit $1,000 in sales. I would say that’s pretty damn good for just starting. Let me know what you think!

Ok folks - it is time for my first contest! Up for grabs are the following wonderful prizes:

• $100 in keywords here on The Social Millionaire.
• 1,000 Credits at Entrecard

There are a few ways to participate in the contest:

1. Post comments on this blog (1 entry for each comment)
2. Subscribe to the RSS feed (5 entries)
3. Engage in the “Blog Link Exchange” (25 entries)

(more…)

That’s right Michael - move out the way! I hate to break it to you on your birthday but the rumors are true you are getting some stiff competition from me.

P.S.
Please don’t hurt me Micheal
A bad review from you could be devastating

I finally thought someone finally created the ultimate free traffic link exchange. Boy was I wrong!

The eye candy Spottt website has a cute adorable puppy that no webmaster could ignore until you bring it home and it starts barking viciously at you!

What exactly do I mean? Everyday I would log into this blog to see how things were going and to my horror Spottt would be running completely irrelevant banners. Then it clicked - if my website is showing irrelevant banners then my banner must be appearing on a completely irrelevant websites generating very low clicks.

So I dashed over to my Spottt account and to my horror found that I had 7 measly clicks for the over 10,000 page views I have generated for them. I do not even want to take the time to figure out the click-through rate on that but I know it ain’t gonna look pretty.

Part of this blog’s purpose is to show the readers what does and does not work in terms of bringing quality traffic. At this point Spottt does not bring any traffic let alone quality traffic. But - who knows this could always change!

Until then Spottt is in the dog house!

Came across this video today on Tech Crunch. The post itself is a few days old. I had a strikingly similar idea a few years ago but did not take the proper steps to execute the idea. I did how ever send a synopsis to a Marketing Experiments Back-of-a-Napkin Business Plan contest and was one of the finalists.

Sweet - I hit the $200 and over 200 friends mark today. It should be interesting to see over time if they stay parallel.

I have been busy plugging away on my marketing strategy for this website and should see a huge spike in traffic soon. I would like to point out that one aspect of my marketing that will only take effect over time but will probably be the most profitable. When it boils right down to it there is not quick scheme just work your ass off and follow your vision. I am sure most bloggers follow this path!

By the end of this month I will have a clear idea of what works and what does not work. From there I will be able unleash my marketing into the wild web even further then now. It should be an interesting month!

P.S. - Anyone look at my Alexa Graph?

When a cow moos what kind of effect does it have?

Well it produces about $55 in sales, 12 comments on my blog, three other blogs writing a similar blog post and and over 22 new friends.

This was the work of John Cow and his latest review of The Social Millionaire.

To be honest I am amazed at the review! It was well written and gave some ideas on how I would like future reviewers to engage their audience with their review. Although I did not see a full return on investment in terms of dollars; I did however earn it in knowledge and other metrics.

One thing I learned came from a blog post today about ‘Getting The Most Out Of Your Review’. While I did share a link on Facebook, stumbled and dugg my review I felt I should have spent more time driving traffic to his article through my existing clients. I still can and will promote traffic to his review just to get more eyeballs on his website and my website. Isn’t this social web traffic a wonderful thing?

My last post was geared towards how Web 2.0 Makes the world a better place. Today I saw a video posted on TechCrunch of Chris Anderson the editor and chief of Wired Magazine that I felt I should share.

This blogging job is a lot harder than I thought so I give props to John Chow, Shoe Money and Michael Arrington who make it look so easy!

While I was running tonight I was trying to think of an interesting blog topic. This is what I came up with: Web 2.0, Making The World a Better Place?

Early entrepreneurs were involved in creating businesses that could create profits right away. Entrepreneurs like K. C. Irving and Sam Walton knew they had to create a business where there would be some return in investment quickly. Most people would agree this is the foundation of business, start a company that can make you lots of money.

When the internet first was born entrepreneurs were trying to gage how they could bring existing bricks and mortar companies to the online world. This created some of the most valuable internet companies like Amazon and eBay. Then came along a company called Google. They did not have any real plans of monetizing their service but they knew money would help them create a central place for the worlds information.

Investors and Venture Capitalists now realize how big of behemoth Google has become after their IPO. Investors try to focus on these services that have no real current monetization model in the hopes they eventually find one.

Investors do not want to miss out on another Google hence why Facebook is so highly valued and easily got funding. They are having current troubles monetizing though.

This began the real Web 2.o funding as I call it. Build a service that tailors to people then find a way to monetize it. Be people-centric not money-centric. Unfortunately a lot of entrepreneurs have problems monetizing their service once they have become popular with the ease of viral marketing in the Web 2.0 world.

Since the web is all about being people-centric now with no censorship (except in China and Australia) people can see the media in an unbiased or really biased opinion. They are now able to engage in comments and give their thoughts about news or articles. It has enabled Wikipedia to have some of the most updated Wikis on anything and monitored by anyone. So when your university professor tells you not to use Wikipedia for that reason be sure to mention to him that before Wikipedia anyone could write a book and have anyone from a publishing company read it and publish it. Don’t you think having millions of people reading and reviewing does a much better job? This in my opinion is why Web 2.0 helps make the world a better place.

The companies who will really cash out in the next 5 to 10 years are the ones who have spent the last 5 to 10 years acquiring a huge amount of users. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are among them, as the world embraces Web 3.0 (semantic web) and OpenID.

Now services will be built around OpenID and the privacy of the users will rest in these big companies hands.

You may agree or disagree with my post but I would love to hear your points so please comment.

Jonathan Volk, a friend of mine from my early internet marketing days, wrote a review about The Social Millionaire for me. I am extremely happy with the review and he helped bring the total sales up to $106.05 up from $46.05 just a few days ago.

There was one part of the review that stuck out:

“All in all, I think Pat has a pretty great idea if he can back up his purchases with actual traffic from social networks. Only time will tell if it catches on.”

At the moment I have 121 friends. These are people who have stumbled onto this website and requested we be friends on their social network of choice whether it is MySpace, Facebook, or Bebo. As this website grows so will this number! I am not sure about the psychology behind becoming friends with me but my assumption is that side of my audience wants to be apart of an internet phenomenon.

But it begs the question how will I get those friends to return to the website and become involved (engaged in the advertisements). Simple - I engage in their social network as we are friends. I recommend links, update my picture, anything that will click into that user’s mind “I wonder how The Social Millionaire is doing?”.