Battle of the bloggers

I’m talking about the Conn/Cow Controversy. Is it a publicity stunt? Is it a real competition? We’ll all find out sooner rather than later, but the fact remains that the resulting case study could turn out to be a very valuable lesson for new bloggers trying to learn how to make money online.

It all started a few days ago when Garry Conn published on his blog an exposé about of how the owner of JohnCow.com (his name is still unknown, but for clarity’s sake we’ll call him John) had listed his blog for sale at SitePoint as a publicity stunt.

In his controversial post, Garry claimed that John never actually intended to sell the site and was only doing it as a lame publicity stunt to create buzz in the blogosphere. On the other hand, “John Cow” claims that he is, in fact, the new owner of the site - and to be fair, many of his readers have said that the quality of the posts in that blog vastly improved after the alleged sale.

But then the situation escalated when John defended himself on the cow blog and did what in my opinion was the smartest move he could possibly make: He called out Garry publicly and challenged him to a “blogging for profits” competition.

Each of these two bloggers will start out a new blog, in totally un-related niches and will try to turn them into solid money-makers. A few details on this competition are still getting sorted out, but a few interesting developments have taken place. Each blogger is rounding up a readership and offering to reveal every step they take in their path to coming out victorious (if you only subscribe to their respective mailing lists).

Some are saying it’s all a big publicity stunt. Some are saying the battle is real. To be honest, I’m still not sure… What do you think? For one, I’ll be keeping an eye on both sites and report my findings at the end of the whole thing. I’m sure there will be a few golden nuggets that come out from this whole thing.

Note.- Starting a controversy is one of the BEST ways to grow your blog and these two gentlemen are doing it masterfully - it has a true potential of going viral. And even if this all turns out to be a big publicity stunt, I’ll applaud them for a job well done.

· Topic: Blog Marketing  · Tags: blogger, blogging, controversy, viral marketing