This post is sponsored by EmpireDotCom.
Make-Money-Online blogs have been around and increasing in numbers every single day. I tend to see more and more blogs doing this just because it seems to be the way to make money online. First of all, they are all exposed to the people who are teaching them how to make money online. Secondly, they have no idea what products or services they can offer. Thirdly, since they have been paying money and learning so hard about making money online, it makes sense to start another topic about making money online.
Before I get into details about this blog which started up since only in March 2008, I have some thoughts about all the new-born make-money-online blogs out there. There is not much marketing vacuum to work on in this topic. Though they have an easier way out to start another such blogs (that’s because the previous gurus have filled up the marketing vacuum and pathed a route for the newbies to follow), it really takes a lot of stamina and time to bring their blogs into maturity where people are beginning to believe in them. And while these new blogs are building up, they are actually giving more credibility to the matured bloggers since they are so established that it is better to be associated with them, than not to. Will this Empire DotCom rise to our expectations while the blogger behind is still working part time? We’ll know in two years’ time… As for now, let’s continue with my blog review.
About EmpireDotCom
I was reading through the contents of this blog. This guy seems to know what he is doing with his blog, even though it is only a few months old. His name is Wong Chendong (also known as C.D Wong), and he started his journey as an affiliate since August 2007, making his first online income of US$375.65 within 4 months. Not too bad. And by the way, I don’t like his background music in his About Me page (even though it is quite meaningful) because it is disturbing me from reading his blog.
Just by reading through his profile, I can feel his passion and that he is really looking into making money online. He is now building up his credibility, and I think he is a very frank person online when he revealed that he is still learning and rephrasing the contents in his own style. This can be a potential niche itself if he can continue to post related topics consistently in the years to come.
The Brand Identity
I like his domain name. I also like his blog interface. It consists of a good mixture of some of the proven blog interfaces used by Carl Ocab, Darren Rowse and John Chow. The three infamous sections on top and below which most of us will look at it naturally since it has been adopted down since Nate Whitehill from UniqueBlogDesigns invented it (I think).
I may not know how, but he has gotten everything done professionally. It could be a blog theme Alvin Phang has done for his atomic blogging product. No, I didn’t buy his product because it was too shallow for me after reading John Chow’s review about it. This theme is definitely optimized to look good on Make-Money-Online topic. There is just one missing picture over here. Probably because I am somehow blogging about internet marketing, I tend to ask myself what niche he is in this broad topic about Make-Money-Online. Hence, I would go to his About Me page, and I was pretty much disappointed to see what he has wrote. Well, he has definitely done a good job to introduce himself, leveraging his contents on the knowledge he is learning from others. That is absolutely ok. But I am wondering what he is trying to teach about. He didn’t cover the purpose of this blog. He basically covers everything, and his About Me page is not telling us any particular topic he is covering.
Or is his brand identity an atom from the molecule called “Atomic Blogging”?
Going Horizontal Market, Not Vertical
Ok, let me explain why he is covering horizontal market. That means, he is basically telling you tips and tricks of making money online. He is not as laser-sharp focused like Alvin Phang, Darren Rowse or Yaro Starak who focused on different levels on the topic “blogging”. That’s probably because C.D Wong is covering the new-born marketers who are looking at how to make money online. And I must give applause to Alvin for his viral effect in the Internet of teaching blogging where his customers actually adopted fully with his branding. Definitely a win-win-win situation for Alvin, Alvin’s resellers, and Alvin’s customers. C.D Wong has really been spoon-fed a lot by Alvin! No wonder it is called Atomic Blogging. 
Nice Try To Get The Engine Started
I must give some credits to C.D Wong for his time, patience and his passion. Definitely at the very beginning, the website is like an empty shell. It’s like a chicken-or-egg story here. Do you have the supplies for the potential demand out there? Or do you have the demand for your potential supplies? Whichever the way, just get the blog started and talk later.
Somehow, I feel he should have waited for a little while longer before getting brand awareness by getting reviews around the blogosphere. But definitely, it is good to get it from the lower entry levels first since it is an unlimited source of potential referrals. Probably he has reached to the stage of knowing what he doesn’t know and filling it up the gaps. And now, he is trying to find out what he don’t know about at all. That’s where the entry level bloggers tend to give a better next-stage thoughts. But anyway, I still must say that he has a better blog design than mine right now.
Centralized Around Marketers, Not Engineers
Over here, C.D Wong mentioned a lot about Ewen Chia, Joel Comm, Russel Brunson and others. These are great marketers, though I don’t really like the way these three guys marketed. I remembered the times when Mark from 45n5 and I were responding heavily towards Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets which has a recurring charge that was previously not shown in the ordering table. They are definitely great marketers, and I would like to classify them as Web 1.0 marketers who used traditional ways of paying lots of money in Pay-Per-Click to bring in the traffic, and then wait to see results… It looks so similar to the big companies out there who are spending millions of dollars in advertisement and yet they will never know how effective it is. But of course, Pay-Per-Click lets you know the effectiveness… It can cost about tens of thousands of dollars every month just to arouse brand awareness.
But after playing around in the Internet, I would prefer to connect to those Web 2.0 marketers via twitter, blogging, friendfeed and other social networks. We no longer need to depend on search engine marketing solely for our traffic generation.
This blog is definitely focusing around marketers where we speak about marketing, and not engineers. Well in my opinion, he has done pretty well here.
Smooth transaction for the beneficial visitors
He has made it smooth for the visitors to get what they wanted. If you want to subscribe to his secret newsletter, it is there. If you wish to subscribe to his RSS feed, you can enter your email address. He seems to have abolished the anonymity of the RSS subscribers by cutting off the smoothness to get that feed url. Instead, his anonymous RSS subscription clicks are found at the end of every post in the blog.
Focusing specifically on Digg and Del.icio.us as the official bookmarking sites for this blog, that’s smooth. But I personally think StumbleUpon is a much better traffic generation not to be missed. So for StumbleUpon users, this is not smooth. You can only either use your StumbleUpon toolbar, or to go back to your stumbleupon website to get what you want.
What’s With All The Diggs?
While he is still creating a buzz behind using the Digg traffic, he seems to have actually dugg every single post he has in his blog. Well, I personally think that’s not a cool thing to do since it actually depreciates his value in providing to the visitors. Quality posts become saturated. It makes things look so manipulated. Anyway, it seems like it’s getting some diggs along the way too.
Anybody still wants a Link Exchange?
I think it is a bad idea to ask for link exchange. Google identifies this as Link Schemes. John Chow has got himself into trouble and in return, he doesn’t get any search result for his own name even though he has his domain name named after him. Those were the days when he has done a massive link schemes around the blogosphere. He also got himself into trouble with the Technorati ranking too. Whichever the case, it would be the best to focus on building up the contents and bringing in traffic with style!
Would You Be Interested In Article Resource from EmpireDotCom?
A Article Resource page dedicated to show all the various urls of the articles you can find. It looks a pretty cool link for the people who wants to submit their articles. Any explanation to the market for these article sites? Because of the kind of target market EmpireDotCom is focusing, I think this article resource might be a redundant. It is definitely useful for the internet marketers who are more seasonal. You would probably need a post to explain about it. (Or it could be in a series of posts as well.)
I would actually suggest a page focusing about “Recommended Money Makers” might be a better choice to guide the beginners where to start, and how to get started.
Advertising On EmpireDotCom
If you take a good look at the advertisement page, C.D Wong simplifies the whole advertising page by showing you the stats. The stats may be good to see, it is just too boring. While it is a well-known fact that google does a Page-Rank slap to many of the bloggers (including myself), it is often used by bloggers who still have something to show. The value proposition is actually very blur if he were to continue to leave it like this.
People will only know the few numbers that he provided. What the advertisers wanted to know is the target market he is focusing on. Whether this market is related to the advertiser’s products and services. These two factors alone can tell generally about the conversion rate of the visitors into customers.
Uninteresting Archive Page
So what if he tells me the archives by month, or even by categories which are already provided by the side? As a first time visitor myself, I don’t know what his recommended or top posts are in his blog. Or at least an introduction of a few posts which speaks about the blog which gets me interested. Generally speaking, I may only stumble upon one of his posts from Google as his landing page for me. It might get me interested in that particular article. Then further on, I would want to find out what other interesting articles he may have. Any blogger will tell you that all of his posts are interesting when they have put in a lot of effort in every single one of them till they finally gave up.
Conclusion
On the surface, I would give this blog a good Thumbs-Up for the blog interface, and its seemingly interesting series of posts in the blog. But as I scrutinize further, I start to see some of the things which an amateur is likely to make. And they are so obvious to me.
Chendong, it’s a nice blog you have put up. You must have spent a lot of time and money working it out. It definitely has lots of room for improvement. One last thing before I close, I think you better add in your RSS link to that RSS Man who is reading RSS newspaper while sitting on a toilet bowl.
Find out if a newbie can teach you make money online with his passion and sincerity.
