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

Tyler Mail

Sorry for the late update. I was waiting to hear back from my contest-investor; he had promised to get back to me by the weekend and he obviously hasn’t. I wanted to be able to confirm the contest, but guess I’ll have to wait some more. To be honest, I’m starting to have growing doubts on to his legitmacy on the whole thing, but am still keeping hope. Well.. here’s hoping..

• Tyler Mail
• Paying $35 Per Ad Network Review

Tyler Mail

I guess this may be a new possible ‘feature’ (if you can call it that) of my blog. I get a lot of e-mail, PM’s, and IM’s, and so I thought the other day that it may not be a bad idea to reply to some of them publicly. It gives me some stuff to talk about on my blog and answers the person at the same time. Two birds with one stone.

Here we go:

I just finished reading your blog(entire blog tylercruz.com) and love it. It actually inspired me to considering purchasing and selling domain names, and creating sites. However the only experience I have with web site creating is when I was in 8th grade making Dragon Ball Z sites on angel fire. I have recently quit my job and have a lot of free time on my hands. Since I’m looking for a way to make money(don’t want to be bossed around anymore) I might try this. Since I don’t have any real experience with it, I figure I will go to my community collage and take a couple of classes. My question for you is what type of classes would you recommend for someone like me. Thanks in advance.

Hmm.. well first off I think it’s somewhat important to note that most web entrepreneurs and publishers that do this as a living or for decent income have done so kind of by accident; that is, most were web designers or programmers at first, then slowly discovered the revenue potential and went from there.

That being said, I think you have to ask yourself a few questions first. Do you want to do this purely for money and investing? Or do you want to also learn a bit of the trade and some of the technical stuff as well? If the former, you may want to go the route of domain arbitrage (buying and selling), PPC arbitrage, or buying/investing existing sites, thinking of them as assets.

If the latter, I’d suggest taking more of a hands on approach in that you think of an idea or two, and try to build from the ground up. That way you’ll learn a lot of valuable lessons and skills in the process; your first few sites may fail, but you’ll be gaining priceless experience.

In either case, I’d advise against a community college. Best case scenario, you’ll find a great school and teacher and learn a good core knowledge of HTML/Web Design or programming. Even so, that would take time and money. Most web designers and programmers are self taught – there’s so much free teaching material out there, and you’ll probably learn best by hands-on testing and tweaking anyhow.

There are far more downsides to going to a community college: cost and time are only two. Many teachers are complete morons, actually teaching incorrect or bad programming/web design practices. You also will only learn the technical skills. You will not learn about monetization or entrepreneurialism. Remember, you can always hire freelancers or companies to do the technical work for you…

Anyhow, hope that little bit of advice helps. I could go on and on but only have so much room and time 🙂

I’d really like to hear you talk more about why you feel Pokerforums is such a success and what the main factors were that made it what it is today. I searched through your previous posts but didn’t really get much content about my particular question. Thanks!

I don’t believe that PokerForums is a huge success, but I do believe that it is valuable and a valuable passive-income resource. Why? Mainly because, as a forum, it is basically self-run and maintained. Income has been generally stable over the long term, although of course the recent poker ‘ban’ in the US was definitely not a kind hit to the site.

As for the main factors that attribute to it’s success? I can think of four: Domain, Community, Simplicity, Advertisers.

Domain:

PokerForums.org. PokerForums.com is a parked page and PokerForums.net is an inactive forum. PokerForums.org therefore ranks very high (#1 for ‘poker forums’) from a large part of it’s domain. Natural search brings not only traffic, but paying advertisers as well… having a site #1 on Google doesn’t hurt to win them over.

Community:

PokerForums.org (PFO) is a very strong knit community. This brings a lot of repeat and loyal visitors. They, in turn, bring their friends.

Simplicity:

I once had a page to the site, and I have a few ‘side’ pages now, but really PFO is simply just a forum. A poker forum. We don’t try to do too much and overextend ourselves or take away from the forum by adding a lot of extra ‘features’. We’re a poker forum and we’re used to discuss poker.

Advertisers:

I keep a strong relationship with my advertisers. Many have been long-term repeat advertisers; some have been with me from pretty much the start, advertising with us for two years. A few months ago I had one advertiser paying me $5,000 a month, and renewing that each month. Unfortunately they had to stop when the US poker ‘ban’ came around. If it hadn’t, I’m confident that I’d still be receiving that extra $5,000 monthly passive income.

Hope that helps some!

Paying $35 Per Ad Network Review

I’m paying $35 via PayPal (other payment methods possible) for each high-quality, detailed, in-depth review of ad networks, such as Google AdSense, ValueClickMedia, CasaleMedia, etc.

A bit of history if you’re so inclined (otherwise scroll down):

What for?

I’ve been a member of a number of webmaster forums over the years and it’s always surprised me that there isn’t a quality, comprehensive site of information and reviews of ad networks. I therefore took the liberty of creating one myself: PublisherSpot.com.

PublisherSpot.com caters to internet web publishers by providing informative reviews and summaries of the various internet ad network companies.

Aside from presenting detailed reviews and specific information such as what ad network media packages contain and what forms of payment they accept, PublisherSpot.com allows visitors to search dynamically for network companies via an in-house search engine. Some examples of search features include searching for ad networks that serve pop-ups, ad networks with a rating of 90% or better, or searching for contextual ad networks.

What do you want exactly?

I’m looking for people who have a lot of experience monetizing sites through various ad networks. Aside from that, I’m looking for the following guidelines:

• Length: The longer the better. You can use this review as an approximate acceptable length, although they really shouldn’t be any smaller.
• Quality: Grammar and writing should be of very high quality and written as objectively and fair as possible.
• Actual experience with the network is a must, and specific details such as what creatives are offered (468×60, Interstitials, etc.) need to be stated as well as how well their rates (CPM/CPC/etc) fare to the rest of the industry.

I see, anything else?

Just a few notes:

• The review must be custom written for PublisherSpot and we retain sole ownership of the review, and therefore it can’t be used by author for anything else.
• We reserve the right to decline your review; we don’t want to do this but if it doesn’t meet the above criteria it may be rejected.
• We only accept one review per network; make sure you ask if the one you want to review is available before submitting.
• Payment is to be paid via PayPal, but other payment mediums are possible upon request or inquiry.

E-mail me (please don’t PM me) at tylercruz@gmail.com if interested.

Well, that’s all for now.

Good luck and good earnings!