Not A Pro Blog with Jordan Cooper » fail

Not A Pro Blog Acquired By ProBlogger

Jordan Cooper — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:55:40 +0000

For Immediate Release:

NEW ALBANY, Indiana. (April 1, 2010) – Not A Pro Blog, the web’s worst blog tips site, today announced that it has been acquired by ProBlogger.net.

This acquisition will be a part of Darren Rowse’s extension of the ‘ProBlogger’ brand and a precursor to his new paid forum for the hopelessly unsuccessful, NotAProBlogger.com – where broke bloggers sabotage each other.

“Blogging continues to grow in popularity, but since no one actually implements my advice – I might as well hedge my bets.” said Rowse on one of his horridly boring UStream chats today. “Not A Pro Blog will put an amazing array of obstacles in front of those copycats wanting to overtake my market dominance.”

“What better brand to align these fundamentally flawed concepts with than Jordan Cooper, a blogger that has consistently taken my advice, yet thoroughly parodied & ridiculed me and my colleagues for just under five months.”

“Some have called me a ‘traitor’ for even considering selling my soul to ProBlogger,” said Cooper, the founder of Not A Pro Blog, “but I’d be a fool not to allow the my brand to seep in, eat away and completely destroy one of the world’s most influential blogs. I’m excited to see how far Darren will fall going backwards.”

The acquisition of Not A Pro Blog will allow Jordan to concentrate on his other projects including his main site – FM-Britain, which peddles worthless digital products about a video game that poor British kids become addicted to quite easily – and an upcoming project – NonScalableBlogging.com with Chris Brogan.

Jordan Cooper will remain a part of Not A Pro Blog where he plans to launch a product with Rowse entitled “31MWWW” – 31 Minutes to Write the Worst Weblog – an alternative to the successful series of a similar name, but geared for those who have no clue and like it that way.

Last minute update:

Upon hearing the news of this merger, Google has immediately voided their purchase of ProBlogger from earlier today.

“Unfortunately, Darren Rowse’s haphazard acquisition of Not A Pro Blog significantly undermines our positioning with his brand”, a representative of the internet giant stated. “Competing against ourselves is not in our business nature, as we already have a firmly planted presence in the ‘fail whale’ marketplace… with Google Buzz and Google Wave.”

What It Takes To Be An Overnight Failure

Jordan Cooper — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:03:20 +0000

Posted in Business Life Social Media

Chris Brogan has talked a lot on his blog about what it takes to be an overnight success. While I appreciate his candor, I think he’s only speaking to a very small demographic that has the chops to make it happen. What about the rest of us who, despite our pathetic attempts at becoming a super awesome social media uber-guru, will never reach those heights… or even 20 unique visitors to our blog? (fingers crossed!) Has Chris forgotten about the little people who exalt him as their savior while they do the complete opposite of what he says?

Well, I’ll speak for you then! For the tens of thousands of wanna-be blogging ninjas and internet rockstars. For the hundreds upon hundreds of fake experts who regurgitate fast-food content and auto-follow their way up on Twitter to boost their worthless self-esteem.

For you, the affiliate marketer who couldn’t sell a blind man a new pair of eyes. For you, the membership site wizard who sells membership site subscriptions to discuss membership sites with people looking to sell membership sites on membership sites. For you, the teenage “living the life” entrepreneurs who still rely on mom and dad’s allowance to pay hosting costs. For you, Blogspot users.

For everyone out there who still has $98.64 to go before receiving their first Adsense check. For everyone out there who networks so poorly, even Tom on MySpace isn’t your friend. For everyone out there who wants to be an overnight success, but knows deep down in their heart that they’re a failure!

Let’s show all the six-figure entrepreneurs making money online that our job takes a lot of hard work too! It’s difficult putting in 45 minutes a day in between watching every episode of Lost (again!) and working as the Clucky’s Chicken advertising mascot! It’s difficult to write about what you know when your “passion” is dropping roofies at high school house parties! It’s difficult to be an overnight success when you don’t even know that “overnight” is only one word!

I will speak for you, my children. What does it take to be an overnight failure?

Little Known New WordPress 2.9 Features

Jordan Cooper — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:15:34 +0000

Posted in Blogging Comedy Technology

A Not A Pro Blog exclusive! In late breaking news that was somehow missed by millions of bloggers and tech news sites worldwide – WordPress 2.9 has been released!

This new version is packed with loads of features that have been previewed for months previous to this release. Many reports though have concentrated on the major additions to the platform, but have failed to give users all the information they need to know about WordPress 2.9. Fortunately for you, Not A Pro Blog has looked at the fine print, trawled through all the help files, scrutinized every line of code and has camped out in the air vent above Matt Mullenweg’s office for three months to bring you the least known additional features you can expect to find in WordPress 2.9:

Ultimate Global “Trash” Feature

We all have already heard how we can now take out the trash and restore deleted posts and comments… but many are not talking about how global this feature can really get. With one simple click in WordPress 2.9, unsuccessful bloggers can actually “undo” their entire blog in one fell swoop. There’s no confirmation message either, but you’ve only written one post anyways since starting the blog, so what’s the big deal?

Currently, this feature is only available to blog administrators, but is looking to be expanded as a displayed widget for ordinary visitors. Combining the interactivity of comments, polls and ratings – If you think a blog deserves to be thrown in the trash, then you have the ultimate power to do so! With 300+ million blogs out there and growing like a virus… we finally can undertake in some population control, or at least eliminate competition for high valued keywords!

Batch Plugin Auto-Update of Compatibility Questions

WordPress administrators are applauding the ability to update multiple plugins as a batch, but many are not talking about the new compatibility checking integrated into this feature.

Instead of asking “does this work with 2.9?” to 84 different plugin developers (because of course, you have every known plugin installed for “super awesome” sidebar widgets), WordPress will now post this question automatically upon upgrade. Plugin developers, though, are not providing much backlash towards this functionality whatsoever – but most have not provided much past the 1.0 release of their work anyways, so it doesn’t come as a total shock.

Post Thumbfails

Bloggers have shifted more towards “magazine” style displays and WordPress 2.9 has delivered users with a new post thumbnail feature for easy integration into these themes. Fortunately for everyday blog visitors, they have also included a pop-up for administrators who don’t take in account file sizes of images when using this new feature. “OMG, I can totally resize this 2400×1800 pixel 6.7 megabyte 300 dpi photo of my cat’s ass into 16×16 favicon! This roXorZ!”

Oh, Embed!

WordPress 2.9 now supports the Oembed format, which makes it easier to embed content from multimedia sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Of course, these embed codes are readily available with a simple cut & paste – but pre-2.9, that didn’t stop 95% of WordPress admins installing 37 different plugins to handle each specific format with a shortcode. Little do many people know, this functionality also extends to the visual editor as well. Little do many people know, there is actually a visual editor in WordPress. Ironically though, those who use the visual editor are people who know little.

Top 10 Failed URL Shortener Spinoffs

Jordan Cooper — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:30:30 +0000

Posted in Comedy Social Media Technology

Now that Google has officially entered the URL shortening game, it’s put into threat many of the countless other services that are struggling to remain relevant in this space. Will goo.gl crush all it opposes or will their competitors rely solely on differentiation? That users will prefer random letters made into cute words they don’t pay attention to whatsoever anyways?

I figure this would be a good time to reflect on the ‘heyday’ of URL shortening – when anyone with $10 and a game of Boggle could launch a multi-million dollar business! We can obviously see the results of this gold rush now, but let’s also take a look at the ones that didn’t quite make it… ones that never lived up to their potential or may have been too bold, too soon.

I present you with the list of the Top 10 Failed URL Shortener Spinoffs of all-time:

facetio.us

A spinoff of the now defunct faceto.us aimed at sharing humorous links. Coming in at a whopping double digit number of characters, company went under after web users thought they were “just kidding”.

biCurio.us

A sub-brand of curio.us aimed at users who want to share links, but aren’t sure which social media platform they lean towards.

DigBig.as

Created as a collaborative project between just.as and DigBig as a shortener exclusively for fans of Sir Mix-a-Lot.

is.god

The religious right wing of is.gd branded as “the moral way to shorten”. When questioned that their web address contains an invalid top-level domain name, the company creators stated “it all comes down to faith that the Lord will get you there”.

fire.me

The merger of fire.to and bloat.me was destined for success… until most users who were found clicking on their links were subsequently fired for spending too much time at work on Twitter.

shur.ly

Why did shurl.net go out of business? A 47 year-old loner obsessed with the movie Airplane! thought it was cute to purchase this domain name… then launch a “don’t call it Shirley” campaign against the company.

bacn.il

The eccentric founders of bacn.me attempted to expand into the lucrative Middle Eastern market without realizing most of their users couldn’t click on their links for religious reasons.

MooUrl.in

Same fate as above for this MooURL spinoff.

clit.ly

In the attempt to compete with the popular bit.ly, the downfall came early when female bloggers saw that all male visitors were getting 404 “not found” pages.

fuck.it

A rich entrepreneur paid $10 million from the Italian porn industry for domain name to compete against hurl.it. As a monetization method, approximately 3% of the shortened links take you to advertisements, spam & malware. Directed at the gambler inside all of us, the service’s tagline was “A viral video or a virus? C’mon, fuck it!”