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

PPC.BZ Affiliate Marketing Blog Sells for $1,655

For those of you who are regular readers of affiliate marketing blogs out there, it may be interesting for you to learn that the trolling, flaming, affiliate blog PPC.BZ was recently listed for sale at Flippa.com.

I noticed it for sale when I had Movie-Vault.com listed as well. PPC.BZ was a 7-year-old affiliate marketing blog that was popular with the type of crowd who frequents WickedFire. The blog even focused on attacking me in a few posts

Anyhow, I counted only 8 blog posts made there since July 28, 2013, so I guess it was already a dead blog. It just goes to reinforce my repeated point that long-term blogging is extremely difficult. Anyone can start a a blog and offer fantastic content during the first year or 3, but as time goes on, it only gets harder.

PPC.BZ ended up selling for $1,655.00 USD.

Truth be told, I was considering purchasing it myself I thought that it could be worth it purely for the existing backlinks and swapping out its existing affiliate links over to mine, but I ultimately decided against it because I am trying to reduce my own number of sites so that I can focus on Votesy.

The new owner does not seem to have posted anything on the site yet, so it will be interesting what he does with it (if anything, he may just swap out the affiliate links as well).

There have been many affiliate marketing and "make money online" blogs that have simply been abandoned and shut down throughout the years, but I don’t recall many that have actually been sold or put up for auction, which makes me wonder if the previous owner was desperate for cash.

I wonder how much I could get for TylerCruz.com if I sold it now. You can see the major downside to running a blog with your name in it…

I Sold My Oldest and Most Worked-On Website

A few weeks ago I sold my oldest and most worked-on website, Movie-Vault.com.

I’ve owned Movie-Vault.com for over 15 year which is about half of my lifetime, and so I have a lot of history and attachment with the site, especially since it was my first big website.

First, I’ll explain why I even bothered to put it up for sale in the first place considering the above. There are four primary reasons:

Firstly, I’ve actually been selling off my network of sites over the past few years. For a while I was focusing exclusively on affiliate marketing and didn’t have time to run them, so it had already been my goal for a while to dramatically reduce the number of sites I own.

Secondly, I really want to focus on Votesy, and while I was hardly spending any time on Movie-Vault over the past 5 years, having it sold and out of my hands would still take some weight off my shoulders.

Thirdly, I simply lost interest in film over the years, and once you lose interest in a project it is doomed for failure. I was once passionate about movies and film, but that simply fleeted over time.

Lastly, since Movie-Vault.com was essentially "dead", I could have used the money from the sale to put towards Votesy.

Unfortunately, it only ended up selling for $1,500. I had set the reserve at $1 so I was willing to take the risk of a low sale – I was committed to selling it.

The new owner got an absolute steal on it. I can’t begin to tell you how much of a steal he got. Just the robust custom-programming of the site is easily worth the sales price several times over; the entire system could easily be rehashed to make a gaming review site, for example. Then there’s the fact that the system has 15,000+ double opt-in registered members, over 2,500 exclusively-written movie reviews, etc.

But sites these days, unless absolutely swarming with traffic, almost exclusively sell based on existing revenue, and Movie-Vault.com was making next to nothing.

I actually first created Movie-Vault.com as part of a grade 12 Information Technology assignment in which we had to make a website. I created a purple website called "Movie Planet", and after I was graded for the assignment, decided to keep working on the website. Shortly thereafter I purchased a domain for it (it cost like $150 at the time!) and the rest is history.

I had worked incredibly hard on Movie-Vault.com, and honed a lot of my skills on it. I learned HTML, Photoshop, Javascript, CSS, MySQL, Perl, and some basic server stuff such as console commands, Apache, etc.

In fact, my decision to try to make money online for a living originally stemmed from those first few months of putting banner ads up on Movie-Vault and making $5 a month, then $11, then $15, etc. That was the exact moment I decided to do this for a living. I don’t believe I ever wrote about that before.

I have a lot of memories with Movie-Vault.com. Apart from personally interviewing people in the industry (directors, producers, film scorers, actors), one of the notable memories I have is when Lucasfilm Studios sent me a cease and desist notice after one of our news posters leaked behind-the-scenes photos of Star Wars Episode II.

We received so much traffic as a result of that, that it took down our servers for a couple of days. We were getting links from all over the internet, including the front page of Yahoo! (Yahoo! was still very popular at that time).

And of course, for a while Movie-Vault.com was attending red carpet premiere’s and interviewing A-list celebrities.

Here’s one we did with Justin Bieber:

(Note: You may need to visit the post directly at TylerCruz.com if you’re reading this via e-mail or RSS in order to see the video.)

And here’s one from the Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon premiere:

(Note: You may need to visit the post directly at TylerCruz.com if you’re reading this via e-mail or RSS in order to see the video.)

Anyhow, the sale of Movie-Vault marks an end of an era for me. PokerForums was my largest money-making website, but I invested the most blood, sweat, and tears into Movie-Vault.

In some ways it feels good to sell it though. Maybe the new owner can resurrect it back to life again, and selling it does take a bit of load off my shoulders. It’s nice to look forward, not back.

Votesy Has Officially Launched

It’s actually been quite a while since I gave an update on Votesy. In fact, my last designated update was back on December 3rd, 2015, so let’s get you up to speed.

A couple weeks ago I actually did a soft launch of Votesy… talk about soft, I didn’t even blog about it!

And it turns out that the decision to do a quiet launch was sound after all, as there ended up being over 45 bugs that weren’t discovered until the site went live, including some very critical ones. No matter how much you test things beforehand, there always seems to be some bugs that you never identify until your project is already out there.

Fortunately, all but a few lingering small bugs have since been fixed and the site is now running pretty smoothly.

No Mobile Support

The major drawback to Votesy at the moment is that there is absolutely no mobile support. While iOS and Android apps are planned for the future and will piggyback off of the site’s existing API system, the site currently does not even render properly on mobile devices, so there is literally no mobile support at all.

However, it’s a lot cheaper and faster to make the site useable for mobile web-based viewing than it is to develop apps, so I may have that done while the apps get developed so that people can at least use the site on their phones until then.

That being said, I am currently out of budget to develop the site any further, so it’s really up to the site to excel from this point onward in order to help pay for its continued development or justify pouring more money into it.

Right now, I’m just happy that it’s finally up and running.

Promotion Efforts

With my focus over the past 2 weeks having been on tackling all the bugs and issues that were popping up (by the way, that is another reason why I was AWOL from my blog for a while), I obviously didn’t want to start marketing or promoting Votesy until most of the bugs were fixed.

So, marketing efforts on the site so far have been fairly minimal apart from a Facebook and Twitter mention or two, and a couple of threads made on Reddit (which didn’t gain any traction).

I am currently considering sending out a press release for Votesy, although I am not sure how press-worthy the site would be. I also have never had any successes in the past with press releases. I’m still considering it though.

Initial Reception

Here are the stats of the site so far (as of January 30th, 2016; I’m drafting this post a few days in advance of publishing it):

About 10 of those users are test accounts from me and the developer, but the rest are all legitimate and verified users.

With such a quiet launch, and with numerous setbacks (some of the bugs didn’t allow people to register, create a question, or even load the site) I’m actually happy with these numbers so far. It will be interesting to compare them with the stats in my next Votesy update.

What’s Next?

My goal now is to start getting the word out. I’m still on the fence about a press release, but I plan on contacting some websites and communities to share the news of the launch and communicate how Votesy could be of benefit to them.

It’s all about getting the word out now.

So there you have it – Votesy has launched – please go check it out!

5 Things I Learned From My First Kickstarter Campaign

Five weeks ago, I published a blog post announcing that I had created a Kickstarter project. I’m sure you’ll remember it.

Unfortunately, it finished as a total flop and I only ended up “raising” around $264 USD of my $50,000 USD goal. Since it wasn’t met, none of the backers will be charged though.

Now, I’m no Kickstarter expert. In fact, I actually knew very little of it apart from visiting the site on several occasions in the past. When I created my project on there, I thought that  there was maybe a 20% chance that I might hit my funding goal, so the results neither surprising nor devastating to me.

What did surprise me, though, was just how little interest there was in the campaign. I had thought that I could have raised at least a couple thousand dollars in interest.

Here then, are 5 things I learned from creating my first Kickstarter campaign:

1. Easy to Launch

Having never launched anything on Kickstarter before, I didn’t know what to expect in regards to actually setting up the campaign. I had seen established companies launch products there before, often with expensive professional video presentations, and so I didn’t know what to expect when creating my fundraiser, or if I’d even be allowed to create one.

Fortunately, I found the experience and process in creating the campaign to be relatively simple. You are guided step-by-step along the way in a wizard-type interface, and apart from having to submit proof of your identity, there is virtually nothing else standing between you and having your Kickstarter put up apart from a final manual approval from a Kickstarter staff member.

So, if any of you have been on the fence about launching something on Kickstarter, I’d recommend doing so as you have nothing to lose since it doesn’t cost you a penny.

2. Forced Currency Conversion

With the USD-CAD currency exchange rate being the highest its been in about 13 years, I was frustrated to learn that, being Canadian, my Kickstarter was forced to be made in CAD currency. I simply had no option to make it in USD currency.

What this meant was that both my fundraising goal and all backing dollar amounts were displayed in CAD currency, which may have had a very negative psychological effect on Americans. If you want t o learn more about current currency prices and conversions, visit https://freecurrencyapi.net.

For example, I had to make the campaign goal $68,000 since that was what $50,000 USD worked out to at the time. $68,000 sounds like a lot more than $50,000.

And since the backing dollar amounts were in CAD currency too, it meant that I couldn’t offer quite the right amount of backer rewards that I would if it was in USD funds.

Lastly, it would mean a lot of wasted funds in currency exchange conversion fees since even if the campaign was successful, Kickstarter would have send me the funds in CAD, which I would then have to convert back to USD since all my expenses are in USD.

So for any non-Americans dealing with Kickstarter, keep this fact in mind!

3. Spam, Spam, Spam

I was not expecting this.

Kickstarter has an absolute chronic spam problem.

Within 30-minutes or so of launching my Kickstarter project, I received a notification e-mail from who I thought was a representative at Kickstarter, offering me Kickstarter marketing and promotion services to help spread word of my newly launched campaign.

I was actually strongly considering his proposal and even replied back before finally realizing that he actually, in fact, did not work for Kickstarter and was just a guy with some Kickstarter marketing service.

Although I was a bit annoyed at how he misrepresented himself, I shrugged it off and moved on. But then I received another e-mail from another Kickstarter marketing company. Then another, and another. And this was all in the first day! By the end of the week I had probably received at least 2 dozen such proposals… and not just by e-mail either – people were contacting me on Skype, Twitter, and on Facebook trying to hustle me with their promotion services.

Perhaps the most annoying part of all this was that most of those were sent to me via Kickstarter’s in-house messaging services (which e-mails me the same as well), meaning that Kickstarter isn’t cracking down on these spammers. It’s also why I was so confused with the first message I received, as I had thought it was sent from Kickstarter staff.

So if you launch a Kickstarter project, defend yourself with a shield to ward off the onslaught of inevitable spam you will receive.

4. Websites are Rare

I actually kind of knew this before I launched my campaign from the small amount of research I did prior to launching the campaign, but I think the fact that websites as Kickstarter campaigns are pretty rare is for a good reason – potential backers just don’t seem to be that willing to fund a website-based Kickstarter campaign.

In general, most Kickstarter campaigns are for physical products, games, comics, and film-related projects. This does make sense though – would you rather receive a free subscription or “thank you” on a webpage or be mailed a physical product that you backed? I think most people would choose the latter.

As a result, I think that getting Votesy funded was an uphill battle due to it being a free website. I bet it would have stood a better chance of getting funded if it was a SaaS-based website, where I could at least have offered free subscriptions.

5. Kickstarter is a Platform, Not a Community

I saved the most important thing I learned for last, and this is definitely something I had completely overlooked when deciding to launch a Kickstarter campaign: Kickstarter is a platform, not a community.

For some reason, I thought that once I created my Kickstarter campaign, that Kickstarter users would happen across my project and then decide whether or not to back it. I had imagined that there was this big group of Kickstarter users who just browse listings and back ones that interest them.

While there may be the odd few Kickstarter users who do in fact do this, the reality is that Kickstarter is simply a medium for entrepreneurs to fundraise money, and nothing else. It simply provides the platform for companies to raise and receive money. It doesn’t really have a user base that peruses its listings; it is up to the Kickstarter creator to drive traffic and promote his/her own listing.

Since I was not prepared for this, my Kickstarter campaign failed miserably. I had set a 20-day deadline on the campaign and didn’t fully realize that I had to promote it myself until there was no chance of meeting the $68,000 goal.

I knew that if Kickstarter had featured the campaign on its homepage that I would probably have stood a good chance of getting the project funded though, so in some ways it’s still worth launching a Kickstarter project for that very reason alone.

In any case, I can’t reemphasize this last fact enough. You need to have a strong promotion game plan in place if you plan on launching a Kickstarter campaign.

Once you have the ball rolling in terms of backers, then I imagine it’s likely to snowball from there (easier to get press to pick up on it, more likely for other backers to trust or be interested in it, and more likely for Kickstarter to feature it).

Anyhow, those are the five things I learned from launching my first Kickstarter campaign. I do recommend it for anyone trying to raise money for an entrepreneurial effort that could benefit backers, but just be prepared to market and promote your ass off (you should actually already have a good list of possibly-interested backers ready).