David Pitlyuk

For 2008, Washingtonian Magazine rated Citronelle the best restaurant in Washington DC. There are a lot of places to eat in a city as big as our capitol, so you can imagine what an honor it would be to get this rating. We had to go and see what all the hype was about, so a few of us headed into Georgetown for a night of French fine dining. One of the really cool things about Citronelle is that some of the food is made to look like one food, but made with another. I’ll get more into that when I go over what we go to show you what I mean.

We were originally going to get the promenade gourmande, which is a preset menu. We decided against it because if you do promenade gourmande, everybody on the table has to do it…and we wanted to have more of a selection. Here’s a selection of some of the stuff that we got throughout the night:

We all started off with a pre-appetizer (amuse bouche) to get the pallet ready. From left to right we have quayle egg, salmon, and a chicken lollipop:

For my appetizer I had the lobster “begula” pasta. This is one of the foods that are meant to look like something else. It’s mean to look like caviar, but in reality it’s actually pasta balls covered with ink squid, with lobster underneath. This was to die for.

Stephanie got the escargot, which had a great presentation:

Andrew’s appetizer was another one of those look-a-like foods. He had the “egg symphony”, which was four different plates meant to look like a variety of eggs, but were something else. For example on the bottom left it was actually slices of mozzerela with cheddar on top of it:

For my entree I had the lamb:

CD and Marcel had the chateaubriand, the presentation was absolutely amazing:

For dessert I had the chocolate soufflet:

Andrew had the breakfast sampler dessert…another look-a-like food:

Rather than explain everything, here’s a little video explaining:

Here’s a shot of all of us afterwards, I’m the guy in the font between the two girls:

Citronelle isn’t for the faint of hard. Dinner for the 6 of us including 2 bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne was about $1,600. It was quite an experience in fine french cuisine. There was an obvious amount of effort spent in the presentation, and it showed. If you are looking for a very nice dinner, you can’t go wrong with Citronelle.

Citronelle
3000 M St. NW
Washington, DC
Georgetown
T: (202)625-2150
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
Kid Friendly: No
Cuisines: French, Modern
Price Range: Very Expensive

I’ve recently been trying to learn as much as I can about affiliate marketing. Not only are a bunch of people I read on the internet making a ton of money doing it, it’s also helpful knowledge for my own pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that promote my various businesses. As of right now, I’m like a sponge, just trying to read as much as I can about it since nobody I personally know can show me the ropes. One of the affiliate marketing blogs I read is The Affiliate Toolbox, which is done by Scott Weaver. In a recent post, he reviewed a book by the name of Affiliate Millions which he quotes:

“Much like the last book I reviewed, Moonlighting On The Internet, this book is all about Affiliate Marketing (as you might have guessed from the title). The major difference is that this book is completely geared toward the newbie. In fact, the authors divulge full knowledge about various campaigns“

I’d consider myself a semi-newbie when it comes to affiliate marketing! Therefore I decided to head to my local Borders and give the book a shot.

The book is a pretty easy read, I finished it in pretty much 2-3 days of reading…and I don’t really read books all that too often. So my impressions of it is that it is in fact geared very much towards newbies…those that don’t really know anything about affiliate marketing or pay-per-click. The book is semi-outdated, which is somewhat reasonable considering how quickly things change on the internet.

I found some of the personal stories intriguing, but I got the book to learn some new things….and I walked away not really feeling like I learned too much. I could see how it would be extremely useful for somebody that knows nothing, as it even goes through the steps of making accounts to advertise on the three big contextual networks (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN)…but as I mentioned, I only consider myself a semi-newb. The main thing that turned me off slightly was the author had done most of his PPC campaigns by making ads that go right to the company’s landing page…and not his own. From what I’ve been learning, you pretty much have to make your own landing pages.

Final Thoughts: While I didn’t feel like I learned too much, if you are just thinking about getting into PPC and affiliate marketing, but know nothing..consider this book. If you know some stuff, or consider yourself fairly internet savvy (Like I would hope most of my readers are ), I would just do research online and find the basic information out. There are plenty of blogs and forums that cover many of the basic topics for free. Note though, that the book was intriguing enough for me to read through the entire thing, and you always do learn a couple things here and there.

Instead of checking your basic stats like Alexa, Technorati, backlinks, etc by going to each source individually, you can save time with popuri.us. You simply enter your URL, and the tool will list:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Complete Rank
• Google, Yahoo, and Live backlinks
• Technorati Links
• Bloglines Subscribers

It’s a nice, easy to use interface, that shows all your stats in one place. If they continue to add more dynamic stats, it will get even better. I did notice that for some sites it doesn’t give you all of the stats, for example my blog didn’t show Technorati links (kept trying to load).

For anybody interested, it looks like the site is for sale.

Today is a new declared holiday at my blog, it’s John Chow day! John Chow is a Dot com Mogul that can teach you to make money online. John is the owner of TheTechZone, a large tech site that he started in 1999. In December of 2005, before blogs got really popular, John started his own personal blog. Over the last 6 months or so, it has turned into so much more than he had expected. It is now generating a ton of traffic, and he even monetized it to the point where last month alone he brought in over $7,000…enough to make a good living on. John vowed to take proceeds from his blog and use them for charity and his daughter’s trust fund. Take a look at how his site has done over the past few months:

These are very impressive numbers, but the most interesting part is how he gets there. From first glance you would guess that his site is just generating more traffic, therefore generating more money, right? This is definitely not the case. Although he does generate a good amount of traffic, he has increased income by optimizing ads and diversifying revenue streams. The blog is interesting in this aspect because John goes into detail about how much he is making and how he makes it. He discusses the various changes that he makes and how it affects revenue. If you are running a blog, or even a website, the information John provides is worth a ton. Just remember to not put all your eggs in one basket, and that goes for generating traffic as well as generating revenue.

John has come up with some fairly clever campaigns for generating traffic. One of the most successful is one where he allows site owners to review his blog. But why would a site owner want to do that? John has set it up so that he provides a linkback back to your site with whatever keyword you want as long as you link certain keywords to his site in your review. This is beneficial to both parties because John’s blog is so popular (as of writing this it is ranked #76 on Technorati) that his post linking to your review can drastically help your Technorati and Google ranking, which are key points for growing your own site. It helps John because he gets more linkbacks to his site, further helping his rankings and doing things like making the search for “make money online” on Google display John’s site as the #4 result. In fact, it was a goal of John’s for 2007 to make it into the Technorati top 100, and he made it in March…just a few months in.

John isn’t all business though. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been into cars, and seeing the Pagani Zonda F in his header will give that away. He is also into food, as he often goes out to fancy dinners and posts about it. One of the most memorable food posts that he has made was his trip to the Lumière restaurant, where the check total came out to be $1,314.37 between 6 people. He also runs various contests (which of course benefit him somehow), the most recent was a partnership with 1234Pens where he is giving away a Nintendo Wii console.

If you run your own blog, I highly recommend keeping up with John’s blog. Either way, check it out, and make your own opinion. If you want to read more about John, check out the interview I did from back in 1999.