Back to the Basics
May 20, 2008 Posted by Tyler CruzI’ve been so busy attempting to grow my blog and monetize it the past year-and-a-half that I almost forgot why I started it: to chronicle my day-to-day operations as a web entrepreneur.
A lot of trolls and critics flame me in my comments or on forums for not being successful enough or not making enough money. What I don’t think a lot of people understand is that my blog has never been a “how to become rich” site. I’ve never proclaimed myself as a guru or multi-millionaire, and I’ve certainly never said that if you read my blog that I’ll teach you how to make a lot of money online.
Now, I can understand how some people may have got that idea. I haven’t posted a lot about my projects and what I do day-to-day for quite a while. In fact, I haven’t really posted like that for 2 years, as you’ll see below.
Part of the reason is because I was working hard to grow my blog and start monetizing it, which meant a lot of promotional, marketing, and link-friendly posts such as useful articles and blogging contests. The other reason why I stopped chronicling my work journal posts is because of thieves. I noticed that there were many people blatantly copying my ideas and sites, and it’s also a very bad business decision to reveal everything I’m doing with certain projects and sites due to competitors reading.
However, I’m going to try to make an attempt to go back to my roots and start posting basic journal-type posts of my day-to-day operations. I think I’ve grown my blog and monetized it enough to rest that aside for a while… I must admit that it feels good to have increased it’s earnings from $0 a month to over $1,800.
Below are a few examples of how I used to post back in 2006:
So, What Have I Been up To?
While my blog is still my main focus at this point, I’ve still been working on my other projects as well. Lately, my secondary focus has been on PublisherSpot.
As outlined in my Community – My Secret Ingredient post, I’ve been busy integrating new features to facilitate community. I’m currently waiting on my programmers to fix a couple of bugs in the blog and forum. Hopefully they will take care of this tomorrow. Once they do, I will be launching a fairly large marketing campaign by purchasing paid reviews on a bunch of blogs at the same time.
I hope to have reviews on 6-7 large blogs, and 25-30 smaller blogs. I already have John Chow, Joel Comm, and several others lined up. It’s a bit of a risky decision… running this marketing campaign before more features have been implemented, but the fact is that new features and improvements will never stop coming. I’ve already put off this marketing campaign for many months due to waiting for more features, and there’s nothing stopping me from launching another marketing campaign in a few months anyway.
Anyhow, I’m just waiting for the few bugs to be ironed out and then we’ll see how the effects of the paid reviews pans out.
I’ll be writing a more detailed post on PublisherSpot in an upcoming post.
Apart from my blog, PublisherSpot, and taking care of e-mails and advertisers (no small task), I spent the last few work sessions by going through all of the sites that I’m an affiliate of (which is a lot), and updating my contact information so that payment and user details are put in the name of Merendi Networks Inc. instead of my personal name. So far, Merendi Networks Inc. has only made around $325 this year so I really need to start having payments getting sent to it.
Yesterday, I updated the WHOIS details on all my domains to put them in the name of Merendi Networks Inc.
I’m now working on updating all of my sites to change the PayPal details from my personal PayPal account to the corporation’s business PayPal account. So far, I’ve only finished TylerCruz.com.
Later, I need to update all of the footers on my sites to put the copyright as Merendi Networks Inc. instead of SiteName.com.
I’ll have to leave this post as is here, as if I’m going to start to try to write journalistic posts again, I need to learn to cut down on their length.
24 Responses to “Back to the Basics”
A breath of fresh air. Thanks Tyler.
It is easy to get off track. It is great that you are launching a new site. I can’t wait to check it out. It would be easy for everyone if they had to money to buy all the advertising like you are doing. It takes a while to get found if you don’t pay money for advertising. When you aren’t getting much from search engines, you are left with under 100 hits a day. You can do all you want with keywords, density, ect, but until you get some weight, you are left in the dust on Google.
Shudogg Dot Com – Make Money Online Blogging
Great post Tyler… it sort of brings back memories of what blogging really used to be about. =)
Cheers!
Miguel Alvarez
http://www.MarketingFactor.com/
I didn’t find you report your earning lately. Are you still doing that or decided to keep private? I really want to see how much you make on all these sites.
We just starting a dating site
dating-places.org
Marketing is still the most important thing for a web site.
Can’t wait to see what you have coming for us 🙂
-Mike
Nice to hear about how your business is going! Looking forward to hearing the results of your reviews.
Great to see this Tyler 🙂
I will be a lot more interested in posts like you used to write.
Hey Tyler, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to these trolls, lurkers who throw useless criticism or insults, they obviously have nothing better to do, certainly not run any sites. I would also keep private about earnings all together. imho, i find it alittle intrusive telling me about my earnings.
I wasn’t sure what was going on. I had my internet get shut off a few months ago, at which time I was a subscriber to your feed. I get back on, and the last months posts have been shotty.
Looking forward to reading the “old” you. I have even subscribed again. Thanks Tyler, keep up the good work.
Good to her that, keep up the good work.
Please answer my *ATTENTION TYLER CRUZ!* post on Movie Vault. Thank you, soor.
Tyler,
Can you share the costs your incurring to have those reviews done for you on the other sites.
Thanks!
– Mike
Just signed up for chitika under your aff link from publisher spot. if john chow’s ttz media doesnt start responding to customer service emails you’ll getting some referal cash from me.
Also i like the idea of you going back to your roots. I like hearing about how people run their business and experiments and such people are doing.
Who is saying that you aren’t making that much of money?
You are one of the best from what I know!
http://www.wahb.biz
Nice to see how better you do everyday.
Best of luck for future too 🙂
I actually don’t mind the length of your posts so much. I find them interesting to follow through the entire post.If you are concerned with your post length, maybe you can sectionize them. That way visitors can just skip certain sections if they do not interest them. 🙂
Keep up the good work Tyler. You are one of my inspiration model!
Great blog. Let us know how you schedule your day, how much time you spend answering emails, how many hours a day you put in on your blog, yada, yada, yada.
I’d also love to know which distractions waste the most time in your day.
You’re prone to make huge success if you continue to aim high like this! So, always keep us updated!!
I have also experienced the things you mentioned in the second paragraph. But my marketing blog is in a “post as I learn” format along with what I call resource content. It’s a medium of exchange…why else would comments be allowed?
Reading your post certainly gives me encouragement to continue to move forward with my online business initiatives and efforts. I think the most important thing to remember is be patient and never give up. You’re definitely a good example in both areas.
People will always try to poke holes in you because they aren’t getting the success you are. It doesn’t matter where you are in the chain, someone will be below you jealous of your spot..
Its a good blog and well its really up to you about what to post on it but its come a long way 🙂
[…] Ready for BlogWorld May 28, 2008 Posted by Tyler Cruz Paid Advertisement A week ago I announced how I was going to start making an effort to post the way I used to, in more of a […]
I like the journalistic styles of blogging so much better, although I find it nearly impossible to do myself.