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

Affiliate Competition: Tyler vs Gyutae

Gyutae Park from WinningTheWeb.com and I are both newcomers to PPC affiliate marketing. We both have roughly the same skill level and experience, although I think I personally have a little more experience, but that isn’t saying much.

We also have roughly the same budget that we’re able to invest into PPC affiliate marketing. In addition, Gyutae and I have competed in a head-to-head competition before. It was to see who could get the most blog posts of other bloggers voting for one of us. In the end, Gyutae just narrowly beat me with a score of 55-52.

So, I thought running another competition between us for affiliate marketing would force each of us to word harder on our affiliate marketing campaigns. It will also give me a chance for my long awaited revenge… 😉

The Rules

The rules are simple. Basically, whoever nets the most from PPC affiliate marketing during the competition wins. Here are some more details:

• Only net profit counts. If we both finish in the red, then obviously the person who lost the least would be declared the victor.
• Only traffic/income from direct PPC marketing counts. For example, we’re allowed to use AdWords or YSM, but not organic traffic from our existing sites, otherwise it won’t be counted.
• No trickery is allowed such as borrowing campaigns from a super affiliate friend. All of our campaigns must be our own.
• We must share our stats (net profit) with each other as often as possible – preferably every day or every second day.
• We are not allowed to receive special money such as sponsorship money from affiliate networks to use for this competition.
• We’re allowed to use past or existing campaigns that we have set up.

Competition Timeframe

The competition runs from August 12th, 8:00PM Pacific (10:00PM Gyutae/Boston Time) to September 12th, 8:00PM Pacific (10:00PM Gyutae/Boston Time).

The Penalty

I thought of this penalty, and I love it. Last time, we had to give money away. This time, it’s a humiliation penalty.

The loser of the competition will have to record a video of himself reciting a speech that the winner writes for him. He will then have to post it on his blog for everyone to see, and the winner has rights to post it on his as well.

My Thoughts

I love the penalty idea. It’s a lot more incentive to work hard to win than simply having to give money away. Last time, I lost the competition and have to give $300 away, which didn’t really bother me. After all, I’ve lost $3,000 in one hand of poker in private games around town here before.

It’s not so much me being scared of having to do the video than it is relishing in the fact of watching Gyutae have to read what I write him. I have so many good ideas…

Unfortunately, I’m not sure of my chances. I believe I have a bit more hands-on experience with PPC affiliate marketing than Gyutae, but he has proved to be a worthy adversary. I thought I was going to slaughter him in our first contest, and he actually came out to pull out the victory.

Also, I have a huge problem: time. I’ve been incredibly busy the past few months, especially lately. I have BlogWorld and an 8-day trip in Vegas to arrange and prepare for, my good friend’s wedding is coming up, and I’ve been neglecting my daily exercises and errands lately. But the number 1 thing taking up all my time has simply been my online work.

I run a blog, which in and of itself usurps a lot of my time. I just received orders for 2 paid reviews this morning, in fact. I also run Merendi Networks Inc. which owns and operates a couple dozen websites, and just processing advertiser’s orders is a huge time whore by itself.

Finally, I’ve been working hard on PublisherSpot the past couple months, and will be unveiling a horde of new features and improvements later this week. It’s a big unveiling so it will require a lot of my time to promote and market it.

To top it off, I’ve been getting lethargic again lately – most likely because I haven’t been doing my daily exercises and have been eating unhealthily again.

So, as you can see, I’m very nervous about this competition. However, to be fair, Gyutae works a full-time job as a SEO for a large company. I think the difference, however, is that my stuff is more erratic (at the moment at least), while his is more structured.

However, the whole point of the competition was to push ourselves. We could have put no penalty up or run the competition when both of us had a lesser work load, but then that’s essentially being lazy. The point is to force ourselves to work harder, and make it a priority. I figure a major factor for this competition will be simply organizing ourselves and being resilient.

Anyhow, wish me luck. My current campaign has been dying this month (I’m deep in the red again!), so that’s very bad news. But, I’m working on launching a second one, and plan to launch a 3rd one soon thereafter as well.