John Chow has chosen my blog as the blog of the month, a new feature he just launched. John and I have very similar interests, as he mentions, if you find his topics interesting, then I think you will find what I have to say interesting as well. Here’s a few quick bullets about me so you can get a quick overview without reading my about page:

• I started a business when I was 16, and sold it 4 years later
• I currently own 4 companies
  • Two blogs, this one and VideoExperiment.com
  • An automotive manufacturing company built mainly through eCommerce sales. ActiveTuning, LLC
  • A local IT solutions company. Tri Megatech, LLC
• I currently work for a large corporate new media company as a day job
• I have a passion for cars, technology, business, entrepreneurship, management, design, and investing

If you want to know more about me, stick around and read some of my posts. I put this blog online in order to share information that interests me as well as information that can help you be successful. On top of this, I’m also looking forward to learning more my readers, networking with new people, and having a journal of my life adventures.

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.

Today, Google announced a new advertising format called Pay-per-action. I’ve always referred to this as CPA or cost-per-action.

What Is It?

This is going to be a major deal in online advertising from both the publisher and the advertiser perspective. Google advertising has always worked on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis where the advertiser would pay when a user clicks on their ad. With this new model, the advertiser will only pay when the user does a certain action, like filling out a form or buying something. In this new model, it does not matter how impressions or clicks are generated from the ad, as no payment is due until the action is completed. Some of the actions would be:

• Leads
• Signups
• Site interactions/pageviews
• Sales (always the same value)
• Sales (% of sale with many different sale values)

I have signed up to be a beta tester with my automotive site, ActiveTuning, as we currently use AdWords for part of our advertising budget. I haven’t decided how I’ll use it, but as of now I’m thinking that I will be looking for sales as well as leads/site interactions. I’ll use the leads for a scenario where a user will get as far as adding a product to their shopping cart, but may not necessarily go through the entire checkout process. It will definitely be a new world in terms of tweaking and playing around with different formats to see what works the best. Hopefully I am accepted as a beta tester.

Conversions would be tracked by using Google’s conversion tracking.

Making It Work

PPA works, and if optimized correctly can make much more money. An advertiser is willing to pay more for an action rather than a click because they can pre-formulate the ROI (return on investment). For example if I have a product that costs $100 and my cost is $60. I know I have up to $40 to play with before I start losing money on the product sale. Rather than pay $1/click where maybe the ratio of clicks-to-sale end up being $20 and 20 publishers essentially made $1…I’d be more willing to pay $10 to one publisher to generate that same one sale.

The problem is actually making it work. What I mean by that is making an ad that is just asking to be clicked so that as a publisher you can actually provide leads to advertisers that convert. The best way to do this is not by your regular banner ads, but by highly targeted in-content ads. For example if I write a review on a digital camera, a link in the review directly to a vendors product page that sells the camera will more than likely have a high sales conversion rate.

This is where Google’s new ad format called “text-link ads” comes in:

What is the text link format for pay-per-action ads?
Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to

Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we’ve found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

This new format will really help out in terms of making PPA successful for the advertiser, publisher, and ad network (Google in this case). It will be interested what other ad products come out of all of this.

Thanks to Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch, as his post made me aware of Google’s announcement.

I was going through some old designs on the Wayback Machine of my old company l that I had sold back in 2002. I happened to find some interesting content, including an interview with one of my favorite bloggers and somebody I’ve known for a long time, John Chow. John Chow is what you would consider a “dot com mogul” (at least according to him ). At the time that I had met John, we both owned computer hardware review websites, he is still running his. One of the articles I had written for my site was an interview with John, but it hasn’t been online for a long time. I happened to stumble across it on my computer, and figured there would be a good amount of people, including himself, that would get a kick out of some of the responses (TTZ is John):

SL: Tell us a little bit about yourself (Age, Location, etc.)

TTZ: John Chow. Nick name “Moto”. 34 from Vancouver BC Canada. Born in China, came to Vancouver, Canada with my parents at age 7. Been here ever since. I guess I would be considered a grand dad to most of the young techies. I have a daughter name Ashley who is 8 years old. My background is in finance. I graduated from the British Columbia Institute of Technology with a degree in Financial Management. Computers are a hobby. Always been interested in them.

SL: What exactly got you started working on The Tech Zone?

TTZ: The Tech Zone started out as Moto’s Project 504. It was a personal home page about the first computer that I built myself. Never dream it would become what it is now. Back then, the whole site was just 6 pages long.

SL: How long do you spend working on your site a week?

TTZ: I normally spend 2 to 4 hours a day updating it. I use to have to find the news. It’s much better now that most sites send me their news to post. Most of my time is spent testing products and writing articles.

SL: How many people do you have working on the site?

TTZ: No one really “works” for me. The Tech Zone is still run like a personal site. I don’t want to get too commercial with it. Most of the articles and reviews are done by myself. I do have others write for me from time to time. Right now the site is run by me acting as Editor-In-Chief and Kahthan “Kat” Deane will be the new webmaster and CGI guy. Kat also runs SavageXtreme.com and was a webmaster at the Review Zone. I also have people working behind the scene to help make the site run smoothly. Pauline Taylor is the most important. She puts in long hours to help me out with the site. Then there’s Mick®, Mudzy® and Kincaid®. I always seem to be using their computers as guinea pigs. I also have a few Tech Babes who model products for me.

SL: What do you like to review and how often?

TTZ: I would have to say video cards and CPU. Let’s face it, there isn’t much different between one 7200 RPM drive to another.

Continue Reading »

My daily driver car right now is the Infiniti G35 Coupe. I got the car when I originally had a Nissan 350Z with twin turbo and a 94 Toyota Camry. I wanted to have a nicer car as a daily driver, so I swapped the Camry with the G35:

Infiniti recently released the new G35 Sedan, a much better improvement from the older version. I’ve been anxiously awaiting what the new coupe would look like, and based on concept pictures I knew I would be impressed:

Here are the production pictures:

It definitely doesn’t look as good as the concept, but it does look better than the version that I have…unfortunately not good enough in my opinion to justify replacing mine with it. It’s really not a complete re-design in my opinion, but more like a lot of refinements. Automobile Magazine stated that the interior is a 100% improvement, and the G37 looks much better when parked next to the G35 in person. I guess it’s something I’ll have to see when it’s in the dealerships. But looks aren’t everything…The new G37 now moves into a 3.7 liter motor with a preliminary 330hp, a big upgrade from my 275hp 3.5L. There are many other performance upgrades like VVEL technology, better fuel economy, higher redline, 36% stiffer, larger brakes, and more.

I’m dying to see the car in person. What do you think:

[poll=4]

Update 3/26/07: I found a picture of the G37 Coupe interior for your viewing. As soon as they have a model at my local Infiniti dealership, I’ll be there for some pics.

Now that you've got your new car, have you considered donating your car to a charity? You can also donate your boat and donate a RV too. There are benefits to vehicle donations including tax deductions for you. Learn more by reading car donation FAQ today.

Viral marketing is a great way to get some major promotion to your product or service for cheap. The hard part is coming up with a clever campaign, especially if you want it to generate a lot of buzz. An interesting one I was just reading about was done by Nissan, where they created 200,000 sets of fake keys that they are putting in places like bars, clubs, concerts, etc. The keys feature a tag that promotes their intelligent key with push ignition, so it would no longer need a regular set of keys. This is a great concept for marketing the technology, and is definitely creating a buzz (hence this blog post). People that find the keys can go to AltimaKeys.com where they can enter some sort of code and they will win a prize.

Nissan spent $100,000 on this campaign. It may seem like a lot, but when you compare it to one TV commercial, it’s much cheaper when you factor in the budget to produce the commercials and the air time.

Have you done any viral marketing for your site/blog? If so, what did you do, and how did it work out for you?

I found a bunch of new Wordpress plugins thanks to John. The programmer, Lester Chan, has developed 15 plug-ins, I’ve decided to use 3 of them:

WP-Polls - This allows me to post ajax polls anywhere throughout the site. For example, vote and see what you think:

[poll=3]

WP-PostRatings - This gives an ajax rating to all posts, you can see below this one you can choose your rating up to 5 stars. You can also print out a list of highest rated posts.

WP-PostViews - This simple script counts the views for each post made. I’ve put that number right below the post rating. You can also print out a list of the most viewed posts. I’ll more than likely play with this more as my blog continues to grow. Keep in mind that view counts will start as soon as the plug-in is activated and put on the page.

All of these plugins were very simple to install, just upload and activate. They also offer simple ways to remove, which is great because they do make some modifications to the MySQL database. You can grab any of these plug-ins and more from this site.

Last weekend after house hunting with a friend, we decided to stop by a new place in the area for some dinner. The place is called Pei Wei Asian Diner, and it’s owned by P.F. Changs China Bistro. If you haven’t been to P.F. Changs, it’s best described on their about page:

The P.F. Chang’s experience is a unique combination of Chinese cuisine, attentive service, wine, and tempting desserts all served in a stylish, high-energy bistro.

Pei Wei is an interesting play on a concept that is new to me. They offer some select items from the P.F. Changs menu, as well as some new stuff, but it’s not your typical restaurant. They call it the “quick-casual restaurant”, and I liked it…a lot. Upon walking in, you go to a counter and order your food and drink. Simply choose a table to sit down at, fill your cup at the beverage station, and shortly afterwards somebody brings your food. There is no waiter to talk to, nobody trying to up sell appetizers, just a nice relaxing environment where you don’t get bugged. Somebody will also clean your plates up, so there is no work required on your part. Since you do not have a waiter, it also means you don’t need to tip, so you can still have a nice dinner, and save a few bucks. Will and I both got the same thing:

This is the honey seared lemon chicken, and is my favorite dish from P.F. Changs. We walked out of there with a $16.28 check between two people. It’s no $1,300 meal, but we were happy when leaving.

I think this is an interesting concept in dining out, and I would like to see some more of the popular franchises out there like Friday’s, Applebees, Olive Garden, etc do something like this. Is this something you would prefer compared to going to an actual full-service restaurant? Keep in mind that the food is just as good.

Now that my blog has been live for over a week, I think it’s time to look back at how the traffic was. 2,245 unique visitors and 2,934 pageviews (Monday 3/12 through Sunday 3/18).

You can see a spike in traffic mid-week, this was due to some of the blog posts getting some promotion multiple days in a row. Even though there is a huge drop in traffic afterwards, I retained some visitors, and this is the most important factor. As I continue to post more content, I expect to see the daily average numbers rise.

The top five posts for that week were these:

1. Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter
2. An Ugly Lamborghini?
3. Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia
4. Home Page
5. Who is David Pitlyuk?

I figured the Who is David Pitlyuk? page made it into the top 5 only because people are new to this blog and want to know more about the author.

So where did the traffic come from, and how did I get so much for nothing? The majority of it came from just a select few forums that I am a member of, and just posting in off topic sections. Here’s a list of some of the top referrers:

1. My350Z - A message board community for Nissan 350Z’s
2. AutoBlog - A popular automotive blog, owned by Weblogs
   • AutoBlog posted an article on my Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter post, unfortunately I had issues with my hosting company that day, so I lost a good amount of traffic.
3. G35Driver - A message board community for Infiniti G35’s
4. NissanClub - A message board community for Nissan vehicles
5. Maxima.org - A message board community for Nissan Maxima’s
6. ViperClub - A message board community for Dodge Viper’s
7. Digg - A user generated news site

I am a member of many other message board communities as well, so I can still do a good amount of promoting on those, and I plan to. When doing something like this, you must make sure of a few things:

1. Do not spam the forum. I tried to post on relevant message boards that would find the topics interesting. I did not post everything that I wrote about on this site, just specific topics that I thought people on the forums would like. For example, I posted about the Dodge Viper With A Matching Helicopter in “Off Topic > Other Vehicles” forums on a car-oriented site.
2. I typically do not like to register for a forum just to make a post about something I wrote. People normally consider that spamming, and you don’t want them to have a negative opinion of your blog. I like to add to a community I am already a part of, and have been posting for a while. If you aren’t a part of any message boards, consider finding one of something that interests you, and join.
3. One way to generate more clicks is to give a teaser picture. For example I wrote about my Lamborghini Art post, but rather than just having some text, I posted one of the pictures from the article (which linked to my page of course) as well as the link and a blurb. Seeing something visual will help your click rates, which in turn generates more traffic for your blog.

Other than posting on forums, I also submitted relevant posts to relevant sites. I sent over my Viper With A Matching Helicopter post to Autoblog, and they ended up writing about it. That brought over hundreds of unique visitors. RealEstate Undressed posted about my Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia article. As long as you write good, original content, there will more than likely be other people interested in reading what you have to say. If they link back to you, it brings you traffic, new visitors, and a better ranking in the eyes of sites like Technorati and Google. My point is that had I not sent my links their way, it would have probably never been written about, and that’s a lot of benefits I would have lost out on. I also submitted select posts to user generated news sites such as Digg and Netscape. Even if the submission don’t make it onto the front page, it does generate some traffic.

Last, but not least, I sent links out to friends that I thought may be interested in the content. Word of mouth is easily the greatest form of advertising (and flattery) out there. Word of mouth is how sites like YouTube end up getting big enough to be bought up by Google for 1.65 BILLION dollars.

Just make sure you are writing good content, and you are doing it consistently. By following this simple rule, you will see traffic to your site get bigger and bigger. Have some other suggestions for generating free traffic? Feel free to post your comments below.

Would you like to know what the ultimate piece of art is for a car enthusiast? How about a Lamborghini hanging on your wall. That’s exactly what millionaire Vintner Richard Moriarty did. He took a 1974 Lamborghini Countach and bolted against the wall of his $2 million Newport Beach, CA home.

It took a 70-ton crane, crew of workers, and a hole in the ceiling to get the car in the house and on the wall. The engine was removed from the car prior to getting in the house, leaving at around 1,000 lbs.

Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time a Lambo has been mounted to a wall for display. The more expensive Diablo hangs from the wall at the Lamborghini Museum in Bolognese, Italy.

Richard bought his Countach for $60,000, and if you’re interested in doing the same thing,there’s one for sale with low miles on eBay for a mere $127,000. Or perhaps the Diablo better suits you for $219,000. For the high-rollers, try the Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 on your wall…just make sure to send me pics!

Have some old cars laying around? Donate a car towards a good cause! You can also donate your boat or donate a RV to your favorite charity. There are benefits to vehicle donations including tax deductions for you. Read car donation FAQ today.