Written By Markco, Previous Writer for JMTC
One Thousand Posts and Three Million Unique Views
I did the math on that as well and it's an average of 3,000 unique visits per post at Just My Two Copper. WOW! Not to mention over 5,000,000 page views and that's from when I actually started recording statistics here. This calls for a recollection, a celebration, and last but not least, a stern warning for the gold making community.
Recollection
When I first started blogging there was one other blog that discussed making gold in game, and it wasn't even the main focus. Some forums and gold guides existed, but they focused mostly on other aspects of the game and no one really had ever gone into the science behind making gold in wow.
Then I showed up and things slowly began to change.
A hundred concepts just like Buy Low Sell Normal, Saronite Saturdays and 22 Steps to Using Auctioneer Correctly redefined what people thought about gold making in world of warcraft. Suddenly there was someone analyzing all aspects of making gold, from cross server to pet sellers to every profession in the game utilized in conjunction for one single goal: dominating making gold on any server. This is the JMTC legacy and it's something that will probably never die, as is evident by the fact that I no longer play and yet this site survives as a resource center and gold making think tank.
What made JMTC a thriving success was the way I approached blogging. I put myself out there on every single media I could find, from forums to podcasts, and I tried my best to spread the information I was deriving from in game mechanics and gold strategies. Part of this process involved creating catalysts for making gold that previously never existed before. These new platforms included the first ever solely focused on making gold forum, two podcasts, an IRC channel, youtube channel, facebook, twitter, a gold guide, coaching program and of course, JMTC itself. In the process of creating these platforms, I developed a relationship with my readers that involved brain dumping everything I knew slowly but surely about making gold and in the process improving their gaming experience significantly. As I write for The Traffic Blogger today, my new goal is to take this mentality but apply it to making real life money instead of in game gold. Believe it or not, the strategy is virtually identical for both.
Also, the Castaclysm Podcast is coming back, this time as a generic gaming medium. We've been testing Starcraft 2 live streams and recording them to youtube. Here's an example of one that Jhaman recently uploaded for Starcraft 2 2v2 play. I'm looking forward to getting back into gaming with Jhaman and Thunderer once again.
Celebration
To celebrate 1,000 posts I am temporarily dropping the price of the gold guide down to $23 for a single day. Never has the guide been so cheap and never again will it drop below $37. This is your shot at getting it for an absolute steal. The 10% discount will not work for this day, so that's why you won't see the price go below $23 when you enter it. Even though I no longer play wow, the strategies being added to the guide by experts I am working with and the walkthroughs being inherited from what I wrote already are well worth the asking price. Just the other day I entered the JMTC weekly meeting and was naming core strategies for making gold that were helpful to many of the participants. What that should show you is that having a bible-like product such as 20kleveling really does give you a leg up in terms of understanding why things make you lots of gold in world of warcraft.
Celebrating past successes would take a few thousand words, so I'll keep this short. The number of posts, subscribers and unique hits mean nothing in terms of a blog's success. The real measure of success and the real story behind Just My Two Copper is the community that it has inspired. Your forums, blogs, podcasts, emails and everything else you have created around the site here are worth more than... excuse the pun... gold.
The Warning
Now for the fun part of this post. The stern warning that is meant to be a swift kick in your collective rear end. No I don't mean the audience here but rather a small portion of it. The rest of this post is meant for the fifty or so bloggers and content creators who have appeared in the last three years while JMTC has been around.
Just My Two Copper is at the top because you care more about your page views and who's the "best" than you do about the content you're creating. Don't lie to yourself, you know that you're checking your page views at least four times a day as well as your google rankings. I'd like to remind you that the few times where JMTC faltered were because I fell into the trap of caring more about being the best than actually creating the content that made me the best. The day you stop looking at your google analytics and your "expert seo" is the day you will actually start succeeding with flying colors. That's what my latest project, The Why People Course, is really all about. It's a wake up call for bloggers blinded by limited amounts of success and the numbers associated with their blogs.
Some of you are going to think I'm just being Markco again, ranting to the populace and ramming my way of thinking down your throats. Guess what, sometimes it's the only way to wake you up. The drama and pathetic fighting between bloggers that has been going on for years isn't going to end, but if you're part of it then it's going to drag you down and hold you back. Even though I was never afraid to take a swing at those who attacked my person and blog, I wish I could take every single one of those retaliations back. I wish that I could be the guy who rose above it all and never responded to ignorant accusations and false twisting of my intentions. Why? Because you would rather I focused on making gold, not defending myself against those whose only aim is some extra traffic and an unprofessional, cheap laugh.
Bloggers, you need to get back to the basics and start talking about what makes wow gold making work in the first place. Challenge misconceptions and address the concerns of newer gold makers. Don't just focus on the news. Write something thorough that goes above and beyond your typical post (regardless of how thorough you're writing now). Don't try to write every day unless you can actually produce something worth reading that often. If you can't well that's perfectly OK, so try to remember that.
If you guys and girls don't take my advice then the wow community of gold bloggers that has formed around JMTC is going to devolve into petty arguments and pathetic squabbles about NOTHING. This kind of negativity isn't healthy for the wow gold blogging community as a whole. Why don't you try building each other up instead of tearing each other down? Isn't that how JMTC has been run this whole time? It's a place where any blogger can come and have their voice be heard, regardless of how many posts they have written in the past.
That's it for the negatives. Thank you Mageshadow for the past few months as you have done a tremendous job writing for Just My Two Copper and I look forward to seeing you get better and better at what you do on a daily basis. Thank you to the readers here and the content creators who have decided to embrace the challenge of blogging because they were inspired by JMTC.
Best wishes and congratulations to the community here, you're all winners in my eyes.
Markco
PS: Vacation was a blast, I was on a cruise ship for a five day sail to Bermuda and have never experienced anything like it before. Even with poor weather and some really bad "turbulence," it was still totally worth it.
