How to: Ruin Your Reputation and Blog
This is a quick how-to guide on ruining your blog, reputation and any progress associated with personal branding.
- First, start a contest.
- Announce a huge prize.
- Make people link to you, or something else that will benefit only you for entry.
- Give the prize to a fake site run by you!
By now, you’ve probably heard of the whole Ashwin Khanna scam contest thing. He gained a ton of Technorati points by holding a fake contest with the supposed prize of $2500. The winning blog was a brand new WordPress.com site started by himself.
To quote Niel Patel, “There is such a thing as bad PR“. This desperate attempt at linkbait so pathetically shows Ashwin’s true motivation for blogging. Maybe make a quick buck off some easy traffic, and get a whole lot of Technorati points.
I’m not going to link to his site, but if you want to go over to Sam Breadstone’s blog, she does (and entered the contest). That’s where I found out about all of this in the first place.
I didn’t find out about this today because I detest the fake ‘make money online’ blogs for the most part and especially the fake internet entrepreneurs. A quick glance at his homepage and it’s a series of mediocre posts regurgitated from other similar niche blogs with no added style of his own.
So, now what? When you take a blog that wasn’t exactly ‘gaining traction’ to begin with, and now destroy any reputation he might have had? Now it’s just a copycat blog running on a copycat free theme, writing copycat posts, holding fake, linkbait competitions, and every contact you’ve made now hates you.
To make it even worse, I quote from the blog:
Finally, I would like to say to all you doubters that this is a genuine competition.
Moral of the story? Well, I wouldn’t exactly use the word “moral” with this story, but don’t screw your reputation up by being greedy for Technorati points, and stay true to your word, if you give it.
Update: Contest blogger is holding an awesome contest in an attempt to reverse it. They’re using a unique way to get it out, by trackbackining every single person who entered (including the fake winner 
).
Leave a comment
Deron Sizemore
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:35 PM
That is terrible. I can’t believe someone would do something so shady. Check that, yes I can, but still don’t believe it.
Hopefully you don’t detest my blog. I would consider myself a serial internet entrepreneur in that I’m always thinking and developing new site ideas. Hopefully I’m not looked at as a fake.
Connor Wilson
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:38 PM
No, Deron, one second at your site and you can tell you’re not a fake, or anything like that.
As a serial netpreneur, I’m sure you actually do stuff. Ashwin calls himself a “Dot Com Entrepreneur” when really he just had a month old blog that now will fade into abyss.
ABYSS!
Adam Mckerlie
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:39 PM
Beat me to it Connor. I was going to write something on this. Oh well c’est la vie. This whole competition was a disgrace. It’s sad when bloggers are so desperate for traffic that they do something like this.
Deron Sizemore
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:50 PM
Well thanks Connor. I was about to remove the “serial entrepreneur” from my site.
Yeah, good for him, he’s got a bunch of links and a high Technorati rank that the bottom is about to fall out of because no one will ever link to him again. Just don’t understand why everyone is looking for the quick fix. This game is a marathon, not a sprint (ok, well most of the time)
Connor Wilson
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:55 PM
You’re right, it is a marathon, but sometimes it is nice to sprint. You just hope you don’t get shot in the face while you’re sprinting
Mutiny Design
August 26th, 2007 at 6:56 PM
Doing ‘bad things’ is good PR so long as no one find out - just look at the CIA.
Connor Wilson
August 26th, 2007 at 9:12 PM
Well, what people don’t know can’t hurt them, right? But as they say, the truth always surfaces.
David Airey
September 18th, 2007 at 12:27 PM
Hi Connor,
I hadn’t come across this fake contest, and I’m glad I didn’t. Good on you for shouting out against it, and for not linking to the site also (although I’d probably have just used rel=”nofollow” on the link). Still, that would’ve given some traffic.
Connor Wilson
September 18th, 2007 at 6:42 PM
I guess you came to this entry from The Computer Zone’s entry which pinged this, but it was a while ago. The guy hasn’t posted in almost two months, and deleted the post pertaining to the ordeal from his blog.
I guess he efficiently created his own demise. All at the cost of a better Technorati rank
David Airey
September 19th, 2007 at 5:23 AM
You’re right Connor, I did arrive via Computer Zone. Ah for the love of Technorati eh?
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