My turn to be interviewed (and ice cream!)

Yes it is my turn to be interviewed, as you can tell from my YouTube channel, I interviewed almost everyone else, and I am proud to announce that my first public video interview (About my business) was made by (non other than) Yaro Starak himself, the same person that brought to you the always resourceful blog: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/
Yaro interviewed me in New York when I insisted on meeting him (As one of his loyal fans) and the video just went live last night (Again perfect timing).

Here is the video:

I know I looked nervous in the video but the good thing is that when Yaro tagged the video on YouTube, he tagged it with keywords like (Ice Cream) which just happened to be one of my recent tags on my new personal video blogging serious on YouTube as well, called: Alex’s Random.anias! so the videos actually relate on YouTube immediatly. Just perfect timing.

Speaking of videos and tagging, I am revealing a bit more about the Online training school to all of you right now: Yes I will include sessions about video blogging, tagging, and even some tips to have all your YouTube videos to be available in high quality.

So stay tuned for more details about the school by subscriping to the Guru Of Sales RSS feed.

Bankaholic.com sells for $15 Million!

The incredibly famous blogger (& one of my three blogging heroes) Darren Rowse of ProBlogger wrote an article today about this one blog run by one man, Bankaholic.com is a Wordpress blog run by John Wu, Darren said that he received emails reporting that Mr. Wu blog was sold for up to a nice $15 million to PaidContent.org The deal is to pay $12.4 million upfront and another $2.5 mill over the next 12 months and Mr. Wu will remaiun blogging on the site.
I think it’s a very fair (& a bit higher than normal) price for just one blog, but like Darren mentioned, with a current 42,168 alexa rank and a growing Google trends for the site, and the huge affiliate marketing potential on the blog, I also think that I made the right desicion for not selling this blog for $65,000

The good news is this:
Again, perfect timing! As I announced yesterday about the new school, I will be revealing details about it throughout this month.
Well, I think that students will be happy that a big part of the school will be about (My number one passion) Blogging, and how to profit online from it. (Hint: The last sentence includes the name of the new school).
Also, I think students will be happy to know that I will include instructions and details on how to use and rank in alexa, how to integrate Google services into your everyday life and of course into your business, and ways to get a good “Organic” Google trends rank for your blog or website.
Also in the school…(Wait! I am not telling everything now, you have to subscripe to the feed by clicking here).

Thank you Darren for the perfectly timed info, and congratulations to Mr. John Wu for the great sale.

$65,000 for this blog!

The picture above is an actual $50,000 photo of cash I took out today from the bank.
Why did I do that?
I am just sick and tired of this one company (That they requested to remain anonymous) offers.
Here is the story in a nutshell:
4 Weeks ago, a New York based electronics company contacted me via the contact form asking me for my number!!
I thought it was like any consultation request or any developing service of mine. I was wrong..
Their “Sales manager” called me (Not even the companies manager nor the owner or CEO), simply to offer me $50,000 for this blog that you are reading right now.
As you may know that I migrated 5 of my blogs into this one, one of them was about gadgets (Electronic gadgets of course) and he said that they wanted to buy this blog, delete all categories (except for the gadget category), have me write for them for the next year in a regular bases, then they will redirect the URL to their own blogs…. HUH?!
First of all, this blog was appraised for more than that, then the fact that I would make this amount in less than a year, got me asking my self: Why stop the cash flow after a year?! And why would I work for someone else for an entire year?
I simply said: Thank you for the offer but my answer is no.
2 Weeks later the owner of the company called me (the day after my interview with John Chow) and raised the price to $60,000 and I don’t have to work for them (Except for a 2 weeks visit just to get them used to the blog “blog training” he said), I thought about it and said no again.
4 Calls followed some of them were very rude (That’s not a good way to do business) 2 calls were the day after my (interview with Yaro Starak).
They have contacted me again 2 days ago by email, the offer was $65,000, and left me with 2 choices:
Ask them for no less than $100,000
Or
Ask them to stop the rude and annoying calls and leave me alone.
I took my time to answer this time, I thought about my readership (You guys), I thought about the income that would stop coming in, and I thought about my future plans for this blog (Like the Online school I am working on launching soon), So I tweeted about it 2 days ago (If you follow my twitter you’ll know how annoyed I was). I guess they didn’t like that, I got a twitter reply by one of their employees asking to keep them anonymous.
OK… it’s over now… no wait another phone call this morning from the secretary telling me they want to raise the offers price but I have to approve to them that I actually make this kind of money, So I took on the challenge to send a clear message and went to the bank, withdrew the cash and used my photo studio to take the picture!!!
If all the above was not working, I thought maybe this blog post will, here it is loud and clear:
I am not “under-selling” this blog, for all the reasons above.
That’s the bottom line.
Another reason I blogged about this is for the lessons I learned that I will share with you:
Lesson 1: Don’t under estimate your power.
Lesson 2: Negotiate, don’t send rude emails or bad calls, be smart and you might get what you want.
Lesson 3: Don’t play games (Like having your secretary calling to raise the offer) just be straight forward.
Lesson 4: Don’t forget your people, your friends, your readers. They are the reason that made this blog as big as it is today.

Meeting JohnChow.com in Boston

I have never thought that I will go back to Boston that fast, after being there for a week last year attending eBay live, in fact I still have photos to upload to my flickr account from last years trip (which I am planning on doing within the next week).

However, I was reading my RSS feeds from all over the Internet, like I normally do everyday (Of Course I am subscribed to www.JohnChow.com RSS feed) and I found out that John was coming to visit the U.S. attending the Affiliate Summit east in Boston.

I acted quickly and tried to contact John in every way I could (Mostly by commenting on his blog), and to my surprise, John answered: “Sure! Come on down.”

I quickly got a bus ticket online (it is a long 4 hours ride, but the bus had WiFi access on board, which was just perfect), and I went down to meet John.

Now I have to clarify this: I am not writing this blog post as a blogger, but as a loyal fan of his work.

John was absolutely a humble person, very quite, and straight to the point.

I took the chance to ask him for a video interview to be posted on my blog with some advice from him. He agreed (The video will be posted on my YouTube channel shortly and on this blog along with a post).

After meeting John for 15 minutes (That’s all I needed) I felt that I was the luckiest blogger in the world for that moment, so I went on to keep lucky by going to an Irish pub to get my lucky charms from Boston (I had to kill time until the bus time anyway).

However right before I left John, he gave me a gift that any blogger or affiliate marketer will like:

As in the picture below: a duffle bag, a water proof flexible keyboard (lights in the dark), a 2GB flash memory/writing pen and a nice T-shirt.

That was very cool of him, so I thanked him then I asked him this question:

The bag was from an affiliate company called Market Leverage, so I asked him what he thinks of the company, he highly recommended them as a good affiliate network, to check them out click here.

I will write more about this interview and post the video very soon. I will also have a big surprise for you guys soon

This was like a dream come true to me, meeting 3 top bloggers in the world is a thing that I considered to accomplish within the next year, now I am one third done (The other 2 bloggers are Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak).

Kangaroos can save you money. (Really!)

Yaro just informed me that his Blog Mastermind coaching program charges in Australian dollars. 
Most online coaching programs charge in American dollars, and since the US dollar is anywhere from 5% to 10% stronger than the Aussie dollar as I write this, that’s a 5% to 10% price saving for
you if you join Blog Mastermind.

You can sign-up here: Blog Mastermind
By now you probably know about Blog Mastermind. Thanks to the Conversion Blogging video, the Blog Profits Blueprint and the interview with a million dollar blogger, Yaro’s blog coaching program opening built up a lot of buzz last week.
If you haven’t seen any of the videos, or read the Blueprint or listened to the million dollar blogger interview, you can start right now (it
won’t cost anything) by going here.
Already over 300 people have joined and are busy studying the materials, interacting in the community forums and using the Social Traffic Club to drive traffic to their blogs.
Yaro explained to me that he wanted to charge in $USD, but his Australian bank would not accept the currency, and since it was so close to the opening of his program, he decided to just go with $AUD.
In case you don’t know, Yaro is from Australia, though he sounds a lot like a Canadian sometimes because of his parents.
He did say that his bank would change in the near future, and as soon as $USD is accepted he would switch back.
If you want to lock in the discount by paying in Australian dollars, you should join Blog Mastermind as soon as you can. Here’s the order
page:  Blog Mastermind
Blog Mastermind is not just a course where you are left on your own to go through the training by yourself. It’s a real community, led by mentors
who are successful bloggers, including Yaro himself.
If you are still not sure, but because of the cheaper price you are interested, you should head to Google and type in “Blog Mastermind Reviews” and see what other people are saying about the program.
500 people have participated in the course since it’s first run back in 2007 (it was closed since December 07), so there is plenty of feedback online coming from completely impartial people who have already taken the course.
It’s a smart idea to do research before joining any program, and I think in this case you will find the general consensus is that Blog Mastermind is well worth the cost of admission, especially when it is in Australian dollars.
Here’s the link for more information (and make sure you watch the behind the scenes tour video Yaro presents at the start of the page): 
Blog Mastermind
Good luck with your blog!

PS. The US Dollar, as you probably realize, is not doing so well lately. There’s a possibility that the Australian dollar will get stronger, so the discount if you are used to paying in US dollars, will not be a discount any more - instead it will be more expensive.
I suggest if you have any inclination to join Yaro’s coaching program that you do so soon so you can lock in the discounted price thanks to the currency difference.
Blog Mastermind

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