Category Archives: Blogging Tips

$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.

Video interview w/ Yaro Starak

Over 3 years ago I stumbled upon a great blog, it was entrepreneurs-journey.com run by Yaro Starak, in my opinion, he is a one smart entrepreneur/blogger with great content and wealth of blogging information, I decided immediately to follow his blog’s feed.
It’s not a hidden fact that I basically started blogging seriously because of Yaro’s influence, every time I spoke in a seminar or did any phone or online consultation I normally mention his blog as a great source for businesses and bloggers information.
Yaro started a blogging school called “Blog Mastermind” and this year Yaro is on a journy world wide promoting what he called “Conversion blogging” which I think was a very smart idea for blogging for profit.
I couldn’t beleive that Yaro was in my home town of New York.. My own backyard! I immediatlly got in touch with him and we met in a local cafe there and that’s where the video interview took place.
This interview is full of information (Just about the best 5 minutes of information in a video) I will share the tips in this video and more about Yaro’s work in another post soon, for now, pay attention and enjoy this video:


If you can’t view this video, please view it online at www.guruofsales.com

Interview with John Chow (Tips on Affiliate & blogging)

Here is one of the most important interviews I have ever done, John Chow agreed to meet me in Boston and agreed to share with us his greatest tips for affiliate marketing and for blogging. Being the great blogger that he is, I advice any blogger to listen to these tips. Here is the video:

(If the video does not open in your RSS reader, please go to www.GuruOfSales.com instead)
There you have it from the great one himself.
When you sign up with an affiliate program, make sure to contact your affiliate manager and ask them to increase your commission rate, 9 out of 10 times they will do it. (That is true, I did that with one company before. Now I am doing for all the other companies I am with).
Also when blogging, do it like John said, be passionate about it, don’t do it because you have to or because you want to make some cash fast, that never worked before and will never work for anyone.
When I speak in seminars about blogging, I always mention 3 names:
Darren Rowse, John Chow and Yaro Starak. As some of you may already know my plans for an online school for blogging/Online marketing/Web 2.0 tools/Social networking (Coming up soon), I will make sure to showcase most of their work as bloggers, but for now, please enjoy the video above 🙂