TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur’s JourneyThe journal of a young web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Playing Catch-Up is Tiring

January 5, 2009 Posted by Tyler Cruz

It’s been two weeks since I last gave update on my web projects so here’s my first project update of 2009.

I worked very hard the 2nd and 3rd week in December and so by the time Christmas Eve neared I decided to take a little break. Well, that “little break” ended up turning into a two week vacation!

First, one of the gifts my girlfriend bought me for Christmas was a DVD box-set of the first 4 seasons of House, and so I naturally had to watch those back-to-back which took me about 4-5 days including watching all the special features. When I watch a TV series I haven’t seen before on DVD, I always like to watch them from the beginning to the end.

After my House fiasco I bought Grand Theft Auto IV which entertained me for 2 hours before I got bored with it. I then caught up on a lot of my video sites such as CollegeHumor and TodaysBigThing. Starting to get bored again and being stuck inside with all the snow and ice outside, I bought a bunch of games for the Wii including World of Goo (which I highly recommend BTW. I played a lot of it 2-3 days in a row and beat it on the 2nd or 3rd day as I do with most games), Tetris, and Dr.Mario.

Before I knew it, two weeks had passed with only a few work sessions here and there. So now that my entertainment fix has been consumed I’m ready to go back to work. I started another little work challenge which is something I regularly do, set at 51-hours, which basically means I get no entertainment other than TV until I complete 51 work hours. This system has proved to work very well for me and I usually get a lot done during these challenges, as long as I don’t quit which happens from time to time.

Here then, is what I’ve been working on during the past 13 work hours/sessions:

Blogging

This is only my 4th post in January so far but blogging takes a lot of my time. I typically spend 1.5 to 2 hours per blog post which is probably a lot longer than most bloggers. Then again, my average post is a lot longer than most bloggers as well.

I also spend time doing side things on my blog such as updating the Affiliate Marketing Challenge stats on my blog once a day, and earlier today I spent a good 2-3 hours completely rewriting and updating my Recommended Resources page.

Advertiser Catch-Up

I’m old-school and still manage all of my private advertisers by hand. I have excel spreadsheets for each of my sites and contact all the advertisers by e-mail to negotiate renewals, new campaign purchases, etc.

Sometimes I have to create insertion orders (IO’s) for advertisers of bigger companies, other times I need to set up bank wires, etc. I hadn’t done one of my ‘advertiser rounds’ for a while which meant going through all my accounting records manually to remind advertisers whose campaigns were expiring (or had expired recently) to renew.

Yes, I should automate this, but it’s partly how I’m able to maximize the revenue my sites make by having a direct hands-on approach with advertisers. Once I make more money from more automated sources such as PPC affiliate marketing or more passive income from referral income, for example, I’ll probably automate my private advertising since it won’t be worth my time to do it all by hand anymore.

Revisiting My “To Do” List

I have a simple notepad text file that I keep to jot down any ideas or things needed doing that aren’t immediately important. When I’m caught up on most other things such as e-mails, blog posts, etc. I’ll open my “To Do” list and complete an item or two from it.

It has been so long since I have had the opportunity to revisit my “To Do” list that a lot of the items in it were comically outdated and I had to go through each of the items to weed out any that didn’t apply anymore. It was also scary to see how behind in things I was (and still am).

Anyhow, I managed to complete half a dozen of the items there. I still have about 40-50 left that still need doing though.

The Big Project

Lastly, there’s the Big Project which I still haven’t unveiled. Don’t worry, I might unveil the domain and a little teaser in a couple weeks, but not until the backend programming gets underway first.

Unfortunately, there was quite a delay with getting the site frontend coded. The XHTML/CSS coder was 90% done coding it two weeks ago, but the code wasn’t commented or formatted to my liking and there were a few other minor bugs that needed attending to. It ended up taking so long to fix those remaining issues due to the many holidays in late December and early January.

Fortunately, I was given the completed front-end design earlier today and so I am finally able to get the backend programming started (I wanted to wait for the frontend coding to be 100% complete first).

I now need to begin writing my long and boring detailed description that I will hand off to my programming team. It will probably span close to a dozen pages and will be very technical and tedious so I won’t be looking forward to that. The programming on this project will be very complex, but my launch date for this project is February 1st, 2009. That only gives the programming team 3 weeks to complete the programming so it will be very tight.

Goodbye AdToll Peel Away Ad

January 4, 2009 Posted by Tyler Cruz

Just short of a year ago I added a Peel Away Ad advertising option to my blog. Located at the very top right corner, the Peel Away Ad was a flash ad which showed a small animated image (about 50×50 pixels). When hovered over with the mouse, it would show a quick “peel away“ animation (hence the name) and reveal a much larger (around 500×500 pixels) image.

I originally added the Peel Away to simply add another revenue source to my blog. I also liked the innovative aspect of the ad.

However, the Peel Away Ad didn’t end up doing well for me and the ad company that I used to add it to my site started to go downhill. As a result, I just finished removing it from my blog.

Here is a detailed list of the reasons why I removed it in case any of you are using it or were thinking of adding it to your blog.

1. Company Sold and Managed by New Owners

I originally heard of AdToll after they purchased a couple of paid reviews on my blog back in June 2007. In addition to reviewing them on my blog and on PublisherSpot, I spoke to the original owners and developers numerous times, giving them suggestions and constructive feedback.

They worked hard on improving their advertising network and actually implemented many of the suggestions I had provided.

However, on October 11th, 2008 they announced that AdToll was acquired by a US Company (they were Australian-based). While I’m sure they got a great price for it, the real losers ended up being the publishers.

Since the purchase 3 months ago there has only been one blog post, as opposed to the 2-3 per week that were usually announcements of new features and improvements. In addition, the site started getting very buggy (as you’ll read below) with no apparent concern by the new owners to fix them.

2. Buggy Site and Stats

I noticed AdToll starting to get buggy shortly after it was sold. Previously, if I found a bug or something minor that needed fixing, the old owners usually had it fixed within a day or two. Now it almost seems as though the new owners have abandoned the site completely.

First, the stats appear to be incorrect. I always thought there was something odd with the stats my Peel Away Ad showed as they seemed rather low. It appears that my suspicions were correct, as an advertiser who purchased my Peel Away Ad for a week contacted me and told me that he received a fair bit more clicks than the AdToll report showed.

I also don’t like how the rate card displays information. It appears to reset the stats each week which is a very small sample size, and is also unfair since it will count RON (run of network) ads too. Since RON are usually untargeted, their CTR will naturally be lower.

Secondly, the same advertiser apparently got an extra free week even though he only purchased 1 week.

Lastly, the RON ads don’t appear to track properly. Looking at my stats, I can see literally several stretches of months where the Peel Away Ad didn’t get a single click. I wasn’t expecting to make much from the RON Peel Away Ad earnings, but stretches of 90+ days with not a single click? Come on…

3. Stupid Publisher Payments

AdToll has a stupid policy where they will not pay the publisher until AFTER the set amount of time the campaign has been run.

Since advertisers choose how many weeks to purchase on your site and are allowed to purchase up to 6-weeks at a time, you can end up waiting a very long time for payment. Since they send out payments on the 15th of every month for the previous month’s earnings, depending on when exactly the advertiser purchases the ads, you could end up waiting 2+ months to receive your payment from when the advertiser purchased the spot on your blog.

Why not just put the advertising blocks in monthly increments instead of weekly, and pay out monthly instead of whenever the advertiser’s campaign ends?

4. Worthless Advertiser Pool

It’s almost always best to sell ads on your site privately for the main reason being that there is no middleman to take a cut. The one reason you might want to use an advertising network is to take advantage of their advertiser pool.

Especially with an ad network like AdToll, where advertisers can purchase advertising space directly on your specific site, it is only beneficial to you if the quality of the advertisers are high. Getting a big sponsor with deep pockets such as Coca Cola or Apple, for example, is near impossible for most people. However, it is much more possible to land a big advertiser through the aid of an advertising network if your site is big enough and can deliver a lot of traffic.

The problem with AdToll is that 99% of the sites listed are “low quality” flash arcade sites. I say low quality because such sites offer very little value to advertisers. Users of free arcade sites are usually kids and young teenagers who can’t purchase anything online and the demographic just isn’t valuable to most advertisers. As a result, you can deduce that there are not many big advertisers using AdToll.

Therefore, it is not beneficial to someone like me whose targeted, niche traffic is worth much more than an arcade site. Most advertisers look purely on CPC and CPM price and not the quality of the traffic, and since my blog doesn’t get much web traffic, AdToll delivers basically zero advertisers to me. In fact, I believe that 100% of the advertisers who purchased my Peel Away Ad came through my own advertising page, making using AdToll useless and giving them a free commission.

5. Can’t Edit Pre-Peel Image

Ad creative, especially graphic ad creative such as banners in my opinion, needs a strong call to action and captivating ad copy.

Unfortunately, AdToll doesn’t let you specify the pre-peel flash image on Peel Away Ads. Since this is the default image/animation that is shown before a mouseover, it is even more important than the 500×500 mouseover image.

Instead, advertisers are stuck with a “PEEL HERE NOW” text. I’m sure advertisers would double or triple their CTR if they were able to submit their own pre-peel image, such as perhaps using “HELP ME!" or “PSSST! COME HERE!” as text instead.

I want my advertisers to get the best bang for their buck and limiting their creative options like this is not conducive to a successful campaign.

Before the mouseover and after:

Conclusion

In the end, I only made $352 from the AdToll Peel Away Ad for the entire year of 2008. That works out to $30/month which is cheaper than my Sitewide 125×125 Banners which are only $40/month.

I was thinking of replacing the Peel Away Ad with one of those top stripe ads (as seen on JohnChow.com), but I decided not to. They are too intrusive and I’ll just enjoy the faster loading time without the Peel Away Ad. Besides, removing one ad only gives more value to the others on the site.

Affiliate Marketing Challenge 6 Results

January 3, 2009 Posted by Tyler Cruz

Unfortunately, the 6th Affiliate Marketing Challenge had a number of big setbacks, the biggest one being a super affiliate slowing his campaigns down a lot.

On the other hand, even though his campaign slowed down by 60%, he’s still producing very impressive numbers and easily took 1st place. In addition, there was a great increase in new active sign-ups which is always encouraging to see. While November set a record-breaking month for gross commissions, December seemed to have the opposite effect with many of the pre-holiday shoppers having been exhausted of funds, as well as the many holidays spread throughout the month.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated for entering, and especially thank MarketLeverage for sponsoring their 6th competition in a row!

Winners

We give out a lot of great prizes, so I apologize in advance for the long list that follows. Here are the official winners and their prizes:

Top Main Category

1st Place: CD8470 - $27,254.60

Prize: HP Compaq Business Notebook

Congratulations to CD8470, aka "The Behemoth", for once again dominating the competition. As a result, he’ll be receiving an HP Compaq Business Notebook for his efforts. Hopefully this laptop will be of some use to him when he travels so he can work on his PPC campaigns while on vacation.

CD8470 has now won all SIX CONSECUTIVE Affiliate Marketing Challenge competitions and remains the undefeated champion. His prizes from all the competitions now include an LG - Scarlet 52″ 1080p LCD HDTV, Olympus E-520 10.0MP DSLR Camera, Panasonic 60GB HD Drive Camcorder, HP Compaq Business Notebook, Dell 22″ Widescreen Monitor, and an 8GB iPod Touch. What will MarketLeverage and I be giving him next? Perhaps a yacht?

While The Behemoth once again dominated, his commissions dramatically fell in December. He was actually on pace to exceed $100,000 at the beginning of the month so it’s unfortunate how things progressed. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if this was just a temporary hiccup and The Behemoth returns to indeed hit the $100,000 mark.

2nd Place: CD8467 - $9,184.00

Prize: Samsung 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor

CD8467, aka "The Dark Horse" is sure one mysterious competitor. In the previous competition, he came out of absolutely nowhere in the final 6 days of the competition to generate over $7,000.

While he $9,180 in December was an improvement in commissions generated for the month, it needs to be noted that this was generated that most of this was generated within the first 5 days! After that he completely stopped. It’s a shame as he was on pace to hit the $50K tier.

I’d love to talk to this guy and see what the story is. He seems to be able to push big numbers but in such short bursts. Here’s hoping that the mysterious Dark Horse returns!

3rd Place: CD10565 - $1,860.60

Prize: 16GB iPod Touch

CD10565, aka "The Magician", aka Paul Piotrowski from InspiredMoneyMaker.com is a regular leaderboard winner in my Affiliate Marketing Challenges.

What’s sick is that this is actually his THIRD time finishing in THIRD place, making it his THIRD iPod Touch won. While I believe he gave his second one to his wife, I don’t think he’s into pologamy and therefore won’t have a second wife to give this one to.

No fret, MarketLeverage would be happy to send him the cash value of the 16GB iPod Touch ($300) via PayPal. That is, unless he wants to add another iPod to his growing collection

4th Place: CD9050 - $1,809.00

Prize: Flip MinoHD

CD9050 saw quite a drop in commissions in December, despite finishing 4th place. In November, he brought in $3,969.00 which is over twice as much. It could be the pre-Christmas season that did well for him, as December didn’t seem to do as well for many people (including myself).

In any case, congratulations to him for winning the first Flip MinoHD we gave away in these competitions. Those flips really are very handy. I have two myself, but need to add the HD to my collection!

5th Place: CD12686 - $1,791.00

Prize: $175 Prepaid ML Rewards Card

This was CD12686’s first time participating in my Affiliate Marketing Challenge but did very well. I’m interested to see how he does in the future.

Top New Signup’s

1st Place: CD12686 - $1,791.00

Prize: 8GB iPod Touch

In addition to placing 5th in the main category, he also won 1st place in the New Signup’s category to take home an 8GB iPod Touch as well. Not a bad Christmas present!

2nd Place: CD12563 - $159.00

Prize: 8GB iPod Nano

Congratulations to CD12563 for generating $159 in December to earn himself an 8GB iPod Nano.

3rd Place: CD12997 - $76.80

Prize: $125 Prepaid ML Rewards Card

CD12997 brought in $76.80 which works out to less than $2.50 per day. As a reward, he’ll be receiving a prepaid $125 American Express card.

See? It’s not too difficult guys… he only generated an average of $2 per day but now has some extra pocket money to himself something nice!

Blog Winners

Lastly, here are the 3 lucky blog winners taken from a random drawing:

• http://www.moneymakingscoop.com/blog/1270/tyler-cruzs-affiliate-marketing-challenge-6/
• http://iluvcontest.blogspot.com/2008/11/affiliate-marketing-challenge-6.html
• http://melvsrock.multiply.com/journal/item/105/Tylers_Affiliate_Contest_6

In total, there were only 4 bloggers who posted about my competition. That meant that the average submission had a 75% chance of winning an easy $35! Hopefully you’ll consider those odds for my next competition!

Each of the above will be receiving a $35 Prepaid MarketLeverage Rewards Card.

I have e-mailed each of the blog winners and notified MarketLeverage as well. They will be contacting each of the winners shortly.

Final Rankings

I’ve now referred a total of exactly 150 affiliates to MarketLeverage, 15 of which signed up during this past competition.

Together, they generated a total of $49,120.00 in commissions. The final standings are shown below (only those with earnings of over $100 during the competition are shown, for the sake of space):

My personal goal for the competition was for the total commissions to hit $115,000. Unfortunately, this was the first competition in which we didn’t completely smash the goal. This was due to The Behemoth having a slow month (for him). Hopefully things will pick up in January.

To date, my referrals have generated a total of $360,862.80, and I only signed up to MarketLeverage in June 2008!

Here are the results of the contests held so far:

Thank You Market Leverage!

This competition would simply not have been possible without the massive support of MarketLeverage. They are putting up all the prizes, not me. Thanks a lot ML, we really appreciate it!

Affiliate Marketing Challenge 7

The 7th affiliate marketing challenge is already under way. If you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure you do. MarketLeverage is taking a little break from being the sponsor (they’ll be back, don’t worry). Instead, we have XY7 sponsoring the 7th competition.

Competition is currently very low so your chances of winning a prize are extremely good.

Blog Earnings: December 2008

January 1, 2009 Posted by Tyler Cruz

Last month my blog income set a new record of $6,663.94 which was $800 more than my previous record. While it’s an absolute treat getting to announce new income records, in most cases it’s nearly impossible to keep up such a pace. Standard deviation and variance dictates that there will be some dips. The important thing is what the long-term trend shows: are things moving up over time, or moving down?

That being said, it should be pretty obvious that December 2008 didn’t perform too well for my blog. There are three reasons for this:

First, the holidays really slowed things down. Companies and employees get a lot of time off in late December, and people go visit their families and friends, taking a break from the Internet. Secondly, my largest referral with MarketLeverage saw a big drop from the volume he was doing. Lastly, a new referral I had signed up was doing absolutely awesome but suddenly and mysteriously stopped completely about a week into the month.

It’s funny because I had predicted that the month would actually exceed $10,000 from the pace things were going the last few days of November. In the end, however, December 2008 finished with a very disappointing $3,329.24

While December was a disappointment, 2008 was great as a whole. I had entered the year with $955 in January and 10 months later brought in $6,663.94 in November. For the year of 2008, my blog brought in a total of $35,215.65. That’s an average full-time salary for a normal job I think, not bad for working about an hour or two a day on my blog!

In comparison, in 2007 my blog brought in a total of $5,830.26 and in 2006 $646.29. If you look at the progression from 2006 to 2008 then 2009 could be pretty astronomical!

Here is a chart depicting the growth trend of my blog during the past 12 months:

Yes, the big decline on the graph hurts to look at, but I’m not going to hide anything or go into denial about it. Besides, my blog is only one of my sites, so there’s no need to hang a rope quite yet

Here are my affiliate sources. It’d hard to believe that MarketLeverage referrals brought in over $18,000 since the summer!

 

The pie chart below shows MarketLeverage continuing to dominate the rest of my affiliate sources. In fact, pretty soon I might have to stop displaying it since soon it will just be a giant pink dot…

Looking at my blog’s earnings breakdown pie chart below, I’m still not sure what the best mix is, but I think the most I’d ever want one single source to take up would be around 70% at the most.

I’m happy with the distribution of the pie chart below, although you can expect the Affiliates piece of the pie to start overtaking the Private Ads piece soon.

Affiliate Sources

• MarketLeverage has continued been a fantastic revenue source for my blog. In the month of November alone, my referrals generated me over $5,500 in commissions. This is not counting the money I make with them through my PPC affiliate marketing efforts.
• WordZe has continued to prove to be a consistent source of residual affiliate income. I only wish I catered more to affiliate marketers so I could promote it more. Their referral program is really lucrative, check it out if you have the chance, or read my extensive review of them.

My AdToll income stems from the Peel Away Ad located at the top right of my blog. I love Peel Away Ads because they are a new and unique form of advertisement. They are also very visible yet not over intrusive. If you want to buy a Peel Away Slot on my blog, the cost is $15 per week through AdToll.

BannersMall has an affiliate program and since their service is awesome their conversion rate is very high. I made $85 from them in March of 2008 which says a lot about their conversion rate considering I only get 10% and their banner prices are cheap…

Private Ad Shoutouts

I’d like to give some quick shoutouts to a few of my repeat sponsors and advertisers:

MotiveInteractive - They’ve been my 300×250 Embedded Ad Sponsor since March 2008 and have continued to renew every month. They’re now also my 728×90 Leaderboard sponsor which the recently renewed for another 3-months, as well as one of my 125×125 banner sponsors.

BooksWealth.com - This is their 10th month renewing their 125×125 Sitewide Banner with us. Scott Phelps runs the site and also writes great guest posts here, so if you haven’t checked BooksWealth.com out yet, maybe you should!

SharpWitDesigns.com - Another advertiser who has renewed many times. Need a custom Wordpress skin? Check out their colourful designs.

SEOIntelligence - SEO Intelligence is a comprehensive set of SEO analysis and keyword building tools which can really help you to improve your rankings on search engines. View my in-depth 1-hour screencast review of them here.

SpeedPPC - Speed PPC is a software tool that helps you generate thousands or tens of thousands of keywords and ads for your PPC campaigns within seconds. It will create highly targeted longtail keywords and ads built upon a set of predefined lists that you create. I personally use SpeedPPC for my own PPC affiliate marketing.

• InspiredMoneyMaker.com – This is Paul Piotrowski’s blog. You might find his name familiar from the superb guest posts he occasionally submits to my blog.

Get a Paid Review

For $175, you can order a custom review written by me on your website, service, or product. I cannot guarantee a positive review as it is after all a review and not one long ad. However, you will get the benefit of receiving an entire post written about your company or product in great detail.

Feel free to view some of the many past paid posts I wrote. Below are the most recent ones:

• Review of Amped Media
• Spy on Your PPC Competition with PPC Bully
• StoreStacker Review
• CoolProducts Review
• Iranian Blogger Nima Heydarian
• EfficientPPC Review

Or…

For the same price, you can purchase a Paid Plug, which is essentially a paid review written by yourself.

Grab a Paid Plug or Paid Review!

January Goals and Predictions

January is very difficult to predict. My largest referral with MarketLeverage had a very disappointing December but I noticed his campaigns picking up the past 2 days so hopefully he can make a comeback.

I’m also running my Affiliate Marketing Challenge 7 with a new affiliate network (XY7) so that might bring in new referrals income, but at the same time could alienate some MarketLeverage referrals.

My goal for January, however, is to set a new record. This won’t be easy as it would mean having to generate over double what December did.

As usual, stay tuned a month from now to see the results from this month, and wish me good luck! I’ll really need it this time…