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

I Got a Surprise in the Mail From LukePeerFly!

I like receiving presents, and 95% of the time a company sends me branded bottled water, I end up posting about it – even if it’s blatantly promotional on their part. I guess I do that to encourage the practice .

A few weeks ago I was briefly chatting with LukePeerfly on Skype when he randomly asked me out of nowhere what shirt size I wore.

PeerFly had sent me numerous gifts in the past, including shirts, so I thought it was previous obvious that he was going to send me some new styled PeerFly shirts. That was more fine with me as I still wear the black one they sent me years ago (I still have the white one but prefer the black one).

So I told him I wasn’t sure as I had regained some weight over the past year and so was either a L or XL (there are also some differences between Canadian and American sizes I believe). I then forgot about it until I received a package in the mail a couple of days ago. A package that felt like it contained… well… shirts.

So I opened it up to see what new style of shirt PeerFly has now and was instantly shocked. The Votesy logo stared me right in the face and I think I may have even said “WTF” out loud.

I stared at it in disbelief for a few moments. First off, I was simply confused. I didn’t order any Votesy shirts, and the design was perfectly clean and crisp and looked as though somebody with the original logo source files had had them printed out.

I then took the shirt out to find 2 other shirts in the package. “Aha”, I thought. “Very cute! The PeerFly shirts must be these other two…” – but the other shirts were 2 more Votesy shirts! LOL.

I guess Luke just decided to send me 3 Votesy shirts. There was a large clean logo on the placeholder site at one point, so he must have just Photoshopped one part out and then had them made.

Thanks Luke! I’m surprised how well the design came out… I’ll have to use Teespring outside of just affiliate campaigns in the future.

Here’s a pic of Luke and I when we met in person. This was just over 4 years ago already… scary how time flies by.

I actually knew Luke for 2-3 years before he even worked at PeerFly. Now he’s synonymous with the company and is more recently a father as well!

Anyhow, thanks again Luke, I was really shocked when I opened the package and now I can spam Votesy whenever I go out

Having WordPress Trouble Due to v4.4? Here’s the Fix.

I just updated WordPress to v4.4 this morning but upon doing so, I started to receive errors when I attempted to upgrade my themes.

Apparently you can also get the error when you try to upgrade plugins, or use certain features of WordPress.

Apparently others are having this issue too, but it took a bit of Googling to find a fix for it. If you encounter more WordPress problems like this in the near future, don’t panic because you can always call experts like the wordpress support agency.

Below is a link to the original site I found that lead me to the fix:

http://myonlinesecurity.co.uk/wordpress-4-4-update-breaks-itself-with-ssl-certificate-problem-unable-to-get-local-issuer-certificate/

Here’s an excerpt:

WordPress4.4 has just been released and it is highly recommended to update. BUT it is broken on many servers.  The update will go OK but it will also update the SSL certificate bundle that WordPress uses to update itself, the themes and plugins. The certificate bundle appears to be damaged or incorrect and stops any WP updates

You will get a message saying http_request_failed: “SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate” whenever you try to do anything involving WordPress updates, updating or installing themes or plugins or using Jetpack features like stats or sharing etc.

You can also get this error with many other plugins that use SSL to communicate for functionality like sending emails or even posting to twitter or Facebook etc. .  Mailchimp is one that comes to mind

Anyhow, the fix was just posted 20 hours ago thanks to WPChina on the WordPress support boards who posted:

Go to http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem and save it as ca-bundle.crt

Upload this file to: wp-includes/certificates/ca-bundle.crt

Remember that any update WordPress does will overwrite this. So until WordPress fixes/updates themselves, you should manually do this yourself.

I wish WordPress could send out a hotfix of some sort now to make this update. Updated certs is very important for security and communication between sites.

I followed the above directions and it fixed everything for me. Just thought I’d share this for all my fellow WordPress bloggers out there who may be having the same issue!

Votesy Explainer Video Released

It’s been just over 2 weeks since I finally divulged that “Project V”, the new web project I’ve been working on over the past 3 months, was “Votesy” and I unveiled the logo as well.

However, I did not provide any information other than that, so I guess you could say that it was a bit of a tease. I don’t want to reveal everything at once, otherwise I won’t have anything to update you guys on while it completes its development phase.

To make up for that, here is a full explainer video describing just what Votesy is all about:

(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.)

So that’s what Votesy is all about.

The ironic thing is that when I was torn on which domain to use or logo version to go with, I couldn’t use Votesy to help as it didn’t exist yet!

Votesy has many applications and uses. For example, since a lot of you are affiliate marketers, think about how you could submit banners for your product or service and then see which ones are the most popular. Then you could see detailed demographic information on who tended to click on which banner more often. For example, you could find that banner #3 was a lot more popular with single females aged 20-25 from the US.

My suspicion is that Votesy will be used by visitors for a more casual nature though, such as voting on which singer of a boy band is the cutest.

Development Updates

Unfortunately, development of the site has been slow-going during the past couple of weeks. Thanksgiving took an extra day out of production (ha, that makes me sound so bad) and a number of bugs came up such as user-interface flow issues (for uploading images) and registration problems. E-mail was also set up on the site and some time was spent deciding on which service to use for that (we ended up choosing a 3rd-party e-mail service).

However, the video production was completed (as shown above) which I’m happy with, as it would be difficult to launch the site without it. If you need help with video production, check out services like Chatter Marketing video production.

In addition, I took care of a lot of more “boring” work such as writing out the privacy policy and terms of service. I now cannot think of any really boring work left to do on the site, but I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

There has been absolutely no work done on any of the “premium services” of the site, and it’s possible that I may have to hold off on that feature until some time after launch.

There are a lot of CSS issues with the site and a lot of bugs to iron out, but the core of the site is there. It just needs a fair bit of polishing.

Completion Prediction

In my last update,  my prediction for an early alpha working version of the site was another 7-10 days. Well, it’s already been just over 2 weeks so that prediction didn’t work out.

I now predict the alpha version of the site (that is, a version where a user can register and use 90% of the site functionally, even if it looks a bit rough around the edges) to be in another 7 days from now.

I won’t be able to delay the launch for too much longer, so I will most likely have to forego some of the features I had originally planned for and hope to implement them down the road instead.

My Case Study on TwitterCounter Follower Advertising

A few years ago, I posted a couple of case studies when I used the service Twiends in an effort to boost the number of followers I had on Twitter.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve managed to keep a very high retention rate from those followers. In fact, I currently have 92,500 followers. Unfortunately, most of those followers are not very active or engaging – my tweets do not receive that many favourites, replies, or retweets. The followers from Twiends were indeed real Twitter users (not bots or fake accounts), but the engagement was just low.

And so, a couple of weeks ago I set off to look for another source to gain more Twitter followers, this time wanting the focus to be on quality over quantity.

The first place that came to mind was TwitterCounter – I use the site fairly regularly to view a graph of my follower growth over time, and was often intrigued by the "Get Followers" section they have on the site. And so, I decided to give it a try.

Purchasing The Traffic

I opted for the one-time package of 25,000 impressions, of which an estimated gain of between 230 and 280 new followers was given, for a price of $150. That would work out to around $0.60 per follower which is a hell lot more than Twiends costs, so I was really hoping for quality followers.

My goal was for 1% of those new followers to be active and engaged, meaning that 1% of those new followers would either reply, retweet, or favourite each of my tweets on average. That works out to between 2-3 engagements per Tweet. That was the goal, as that is easily worth $150 to me.

In order to properly run this case study, I decided to run the campaign for the Twitter accounts on one of my other websites, Movie-Vault.com, as its Twitter account (@movievaultnews) only had 76 followers with no existing engagement, so I would be able to accurately measure any future engagement properly (since my blog’s Twitter account does get some engagement already).

When ordering the campaign from TwitterCounter, there were a number of settings that I could choose from, such as spreading the traffic over time or having it go all at once. I chose the latter option.

One of the options was a bit sleazy; for the cost of 2 credits (impressions), you could target a specific country, otherwise you would receive worldwide traffic. So right out of the gate, if you want to avoid gaining followers who may not even speak English, you have to pay double the amount you initially thought. I decided to go with the global traffic.

The Wait

For some reason, I was under the impression the entire time that upon paying and setting up the campaign that I would receive the traffic quickly; I thought it might take at most a day to approve the campaign, if it didn’t start instantly.

Part of this was due to the fact that the site stated "Estimated Start Date" to be November 11th, 2015 (the date I ordered the campaign). I realized that it was a holiday and so checked back the next day. The traffic still hadn’t started and the "Estimated Start Date" changed to November 12th, 2015.

A few more days of this and I decide to reach out and contact their support to ask when it will start. I get a cold response saying that it could take a week and that the system will e-mail me when it starts.

Fast forward a week and traffic still hadn’t started. On the 8th day, it finally did start, although I never did receive an e-mail notification that it did.

In the screenshot below, you can see what the campaign dashboard looks like while it’s running. In addition, you can also see where and how your ad appears on their site:

Waiting 8 days for the campaign to start wasn’t so bad – it’s the fact that I had no idea when it actually would.

But it gets worse: it ended up taking 6 days to deliver the traffic. I had ordered the smallest one-time package they had. If I had ordered one of their larger options, such as around 2,000 followers for $800, then it would have taken 80 days to receive the order (assuming the same rate held up).

This makes the whole "one-time" package a bit misleading, as I had ordered their smallest package on November 11th, and received my order filled on November 25th.

Okay, so it’s not instant – not a huge deal. My goal here was quantity followers, so let’s focus on that.

The Results

Here’s how the campaign looked like when completed:

The conversion rate of just over 1% held throughout the campaign and TwitterCounter ended up delivering me 263 new followers which was right smack dab in what they had predicted and advertised, so they get a thumbs up for that.

So what about the initial question of how good the quality of their traffic is?

Unfortunately, from the small case study I did, it’s pretty crappy.

The @movievaultnews Twitter account automatically sends out Tweets whenever a new news post is published to the site, which has recently been around twice a day.

The screenshot below shows the typical response in engagement the average Tweet would receive:

To clarify, that’s around 28 "impressions" which is meaningless – there are no expands, clicks, retweets, favourites, or replies.

And some of the Tweets were a bit interesting too, so I don’t think "boring Tweets" were really a factor. For example, one of the Tweets was "Toy Story 4 Leak Confirmed" with a link. That Tweet did end up receiving 2 retweets, but upon closer inspection I realized that those were because I retweeted it myself on my blog’s Twitter account and the other retweet was from one of my blog’s Twitter account’s followers – not from @movievaultnews!

Also, I am not sure how Twitter counts engagement… for example, if I click the link twice does it count as 2 link clicks even though it’s from the same computer?

Because of this, I am not sure how much of the stats I accidentally manipulated by engaging with myself:

Below is a graph from Google Analytics showing all referral traffic from Twitter. Remember, traffic didn’t start until November 19th and some of those clicks were from me:

In the end though, there seems to be no doubt that despite gaining 263 new followers, there was no noticeable gain in engagement from followers.

I guess my case study would have been better if I had ordered a larger campaign for a larger sample size, but if these results are any indicator, then it would have probably just been more money wasted.

I may try running a campaign using Twitter’s very own built-in ad platform and see how that goes, and publish a case study on that.