www.yongfook.com

Mar 29th, 2009 Famous People 2 Comment

Jon Cockle (aka Yongfook) is a popular web developer and blogger, based in Japan where he started out as a JET teacher. He most recently launched Sweetcron, OpensourceFood and the now defunct 8apps.

Yongfook Sites

He’s quite a consistent and high profile blogger, constantly posting (via twitter) and giving an insight in daily life in Japan and his travels around Asia. He’s also become popular by releasing the following applications:

Sweetcron

Sweetcron is sometimes confused as a Wordpress replacement, however in fact it’s more like a “Souped up” Feed aggregator which can take your feeds, combine them and then publish them in a readible way on your site. The ability of streaming your content has great potential but hasn’t yet taken off, for example if you’re interested in American Soccer you can use this software to combine your favourite related feeds and then display it on your site…perhaps combining with some related adverts and voila – a homemade site.

Sweetcron is popular among techies, since it’s adaptable via it’s open source software. As it’s open source he doesn’t make any revenue from this product (or see how he could in the future), although his profile has been raised which leads to greater traffic to his other sites.

Open Source Food

Open Source Food is/was a great niche site for chefs to exchange receipes and connect to each other. The site had a great potential over rivals since the layout was clear and photos had to accompany receipes. However, Opensourcefood was sold and rebranded to a strange name – Nibbledish.com. Previous revenue for this site was minimal via Google Adsense.

Yongfook.com

Yongfook.com is the flagship site, containing photos, videos, tweets and sometimes actual blog posts. The navigation and layout is very clear, which then led to the Sweetcron application. Revenue from this site looks to be minimal with on/off Amazon adverts to favourite books, such as work by Seth Godin. I think his main revenue comes from consultancy work/site development from outside sources derived from his site.

8apps, Jonkenpon, Zapzap, Gumtrail…

Sadly the above sites were created, then disbanded. I think Jon has realised he needed to concentrate on a particular untapped niche and something he enjoys doing. Each one of the above sites had potential, but since there was other similar sites already in the market there was no way to advance them…however, the skills learnt from developing those sites has passed onto his most recent work.

Driving Traffic

His secret of driving traffic to his blog is through his link backs from his other sites as well as his daily postings. Being featured on sites like TIME Magazine, TechCrunch, Digg, Ars Technica and CNET could only increase visits. I think the conclusion is to build something personal, satisfy a niche and constantly keep in touch with visitors.

I had a quick look at Mr Cockle’s info

Page Rank: 5 | del.icio.us: 794 | Digg’s Popular Stories: 2 | Yahoo Links: 30,800 | Compete.com Rank: 127,401