I’ve mentioned John Cow (the bovine John Chow impersonator) before. I subscribed a while ago because I found a couple of the posts vaguely amusing… and partly because the Cow has a really cool blog template.

But lately, most of the posts I’ve seen from John Cow simply not worth bothering with. But this post was the one that really got my attention (in entirely the wrong way).

The title “Why the John Chow Affiliate Scheme Sucks” made me think there may be some useful information on why I should avoid said scheme there, so I clicked through and read the article.

I read through their review (which didn’t really have useful information), until I got to this line:

“So why does the John Chow Affiliate Program Suck? Well it doesn’t really, we just wanted a catchier headline than the hundreds of ‘plain’ ones that have been posted since the affiliate program went live for the public.”

Basically, they posted a misleading title to get attention for their post.

And they may well have attracted a few new readers to click through to their site. But when they got there, all they found was an article that was really just a spam post to push their John Chow affiliate link. And then in the comments, the blog author wrote:

Shame on all you people that just came to read how someones project sucked!

…and that was the final straw for me.

I don’t know about you, but I read blogs either to be informed or entertained. I don’t read them to be insulted, exploited or lied to.

A quick read of other recent articles from the “cow”, and I rapidly came to the conclusion that I wasn’t getting any useful info from the blog at all. So I hit the “unsubscribe” button in my RSS reader.

So let this be a lesson to you.. using gimmicks can sometimes be a great way to attract readers. Being controversial in order to get attention can work too. But doing it at the expensive of your existing readership, then insulting them is a really, really bad idea.

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