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

Maybe affiliating isn’t so bad…

Good evening class. Today we shall learn:

• Monthly Earnings
• Poker Affiliating
• Replayer Updates

Monthly Earnings

It’s June and I’ve kept with tradition and recalculated my daily and monthly earnings. Here are the results:

So, to those who don’t already know, I recalculate my average of the past 6 months on the 1st of each month. The chart above therefore reflects the recalculations of the previous 6 month averages, not the income for that particular month.

May came out to only a +$3 daily average increase over April, which is definitely not great news. I’m happy it’s positive at least though.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to recalculate once a month anymore, but once every two months starting now. There are two reasons behind this.

First, unless something really major happens soon, next month will have a lower daily average. This is because six months ago I had a really good month. Shifting over one month would not factor this month in anymore and thus I’d have to show a lower average for the first time. By recalculating once every two months, this will help reduce the importance that one month can have.

Secondly, by recalculating once every two months, it will allow me to save time. Calculating the earnings of all my sources of income on all of my sites, then making charts and graphs on my blog takes a fair bit of time.

Poker Affiliating

I’ve always made the vast majority of my income on PokerForums by selling advertising privately; that is, I sell via my own rates and not by using a 3rd-party ad agency who gives me 50%. However, that is not the strange part. The strange part is that I do very little affiliating.

I sell all of my ad spots to advertisers – when slots are unfilled I’ll either fill them in with nothing, an “Advertise Here” banner, or else a site I’m an affiliate of. I also have other areas on the site with my affiliate links, such as the Poker Site Reviews section, as well as whenever certain keywords are posted in the forums (they get automatically linked to my affiliate account). The rest of the site are all private ads.

Most other poker/gambling webmasters I’ve talked to were surprised I was doing this and wasn’t simply affiliating all the sites myself. I’ve always rebuted stating that I wanted a more stable income so that I could gauge and predict trends easier. I’ve always felt that affiliating is a rather risky business; after all, players must not just click, download, and sign-up, but click, download, sign-up, and then deposit money. In many cases, after depositing money they must play a certain amount before any money is released to the affiliate!

Anyhow, I’ve heard stories of many people making $20-30k a month from affiliating, and some people as much as $100k+ a month. In fact, most poker affiliates I’ve talked to are making a lot of money from affiliating. I guess I’ve just always been skeptical.

However, the other day I was checking my affiliate earnings and saw the real potential of affiliating. The following image is taken from one of the many various poker sites I’m promoting. The stats are from the month of May:

I rarely check up on the stats of this site because the site is not one of the major sites I’m promoting, and in the past has not been making much to warrant often viewing. However, apparantly a new user signed up sometime in April and is an active mid-to-high stakes player.

He raked in over $11,000 in one month! The rake is the portion of each hand that the casino takes for their own profit. I was curious as to what limits this player was playing so I signed up on the site myself and looked around until I found him (they didn’t have a search user feature). He was playing the 5-10£ NL tables, which is around $10-20 NLHE in US currency. Pots there can go as high as $5,000-$8,000.

Anyhow, this user gets back $3,965 as a result of signing up through my offer which gives him a 30% rakeback (34% in this case as he’s reached a certain tier) for life. It also gives me 5% for life. So, I made nearly $600 as a result of his playing this month.

Wow. Imagine signing up 9 more players that play medium-to-high limits who play around the same number of hands as him. That’s $6000 a month! And the real funny thing here is that you keep earning for life as long as they keep playing – you are not selling ad inventory or having to keep a site up to date. In fact, if you really wanted to, after you signed up those players, you could shut your site off entirely and retire (as long as they keep playing).

Now, the problem here is that most people you end up referring are micro-low limit players. And they usually don’t last long; they’ll lose enough money where they’ll stop playing (at least at that site). The real goldmine is signing up very good players (or really really bad but rich players who play high limits).

Anyhow, this does shed a different light on things for me now. I may be more willing to affiliate on the site now, as well as actively promote them more.

Replayer Updates

A couple of blog posts ago I had mentioned how I was disappointed with now Replayer.org was progressing. Well, I’m pleased to say that there have been a number of positive developments since then.

The programmer hired for the project had difficulties last week with PHP on the server. This seems to have been resolved (mysteriously) and he can now get back to working on my server directly as opposed to on his local machine (made showing me things difficult) which was having connectivity problems.

I had mentioned before how I was very disappointed with the actual website part of the project – granted, I had only wanted something simple and would have it revamped by a proper designer later, but it was (is) still of an extremely low quality, and so I had assumed that the main graphics for the Replayer would be way below my expectations as well.

Luckily, I was wrong 🙂 Below is a screenshot from mid-development of the Replayer’s graphics:

Sexy, no? 🙂 It is still being revamped and worked on; it already has complete player graphics and proper logo integration, but other aspects such as chips and cards are still being worked on.

Anyhow, this development gave me a lot of confidence and optimism for Replayer.org. I was talking to Mooky on AIM and he was very impressed with the project. I told him I was possibly thinking of selling the site when it was completed for a minimum of $25,000. He spit on that idea and said I’d be stupid if I sold it for anywhere near that cheap. Well, here’s hoping that it will take of well…

Anyhow, that’s all for now folks.