Nearly 3 months ago (good God, has it really been that long already?), I acquired an established website to help fill the void from my poker website sale.

Although I had blogged about the website a few times, I never revealed what the actual site was because I wanted to wait until the new design was up first.

The new design finally went up a couple of days ago, and so, as promised, I am finally revealing the site to be… *drumroll*: 1upAds.com.

It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, as many of you had already correctly guessed that was the site before, but it was fun reading what some of you thought it was over the past couple of months.

What is 1upAds?

As explained on the site itself, 1upAds is a gaming ad network that allows publishers to monetize their game-related websites and Flash-based games, and advertisers to purchase targeted gaming traffic.

It is not an affiliate network.

The New Design

One of the main reasons I acquired this site is because it had existing traffic but a rather horrendous design and very poor programming. It was a project that I felt I could improve dramatically.

Below is a screenshot of what the old design looked like:

And below is the the new and current design:

As always, I worked very closely with the designer to end up with a final design that I am very happy with. I have already received compliments from a number of our members.

I’d go as far as to say that it’s the best designed gaming ad network out there. In fact, I received an e-mail from one of our members saying just that earlier today!

Even our Twitter page is sparkling!

There are still a few very minor things that need tending to, but those will be fixed tonight.

New Features and Improvements

But simply having a nice design won’t turn 1upAds into the industry leader.

That’s why I have my development team working on a long list of improvements and new features. It took me a while to properly detail all of these features into a language that the programmers could understand, so they didn’t actually start working on the site until a couple of days ago.

The entirety of the first batch should be completed by the end of the month, but as items are completed, they will be rolled out onto the site.

One of the major new features that will be implemented is a custom bidding platform for advertisers, so that advertisers can bid higher to receive a higher share of the traffic.

Getting all of this development work done is very expensive, but it will really improve the site so it’s definitely worth it.

Marketing and Promotion

I have yet to market and promote the site, believe it or not.

I wanted to wait for our new design to go up before doing so. I am now deciding whether I should also wait for some of the programming improvements to go live first, or just start promoting the site right away.

For how I plan to execute growth, well, I won’t be going into too many details here. While I’ve always been very open and transparent on my blog, I am very conscious of my competitors in this field, and don’t want to be aiding them in any way if I can help it.

One thing that I am considering doing is running a competition on PublisherChallenge to the top publishers. Perhaps I’ll run that for the month of August.

Focus

This isn’t just “another project“ for me. I’ve been spending a lot of time on improving the site, and really want to see it succeed.

I love gaming and have a lot of experience with ad networks, as both a publisher, advertiser, reviewer, and intermediary (PublisherChallenge, referrer, etc.), so it’s really a good match for me.

I also just sold one of my sites about an hour ago to help lessen the load of my other sites and really help me focus on 1upAds.

I apologize for the lack of new blog posts lately. At this rate, I won’t make my 140 blog post goal this year.

While I could certainly be putting more work hours in each day, I had a number of things pop up lately which took away from my blogging and work time.

This post will summarize what I’ve been working on lately and give updates on some of my more recent projects:

Movie Vault Hacked

I’ve had various servers and websites of mine hacked numerous times. It’s one of the reasons why I have so many backup redundancies in place.

When you run a lot of websites, many with 3rd party scripts and plugins, you are prone to be “hacked” sooner or later, usually due to a vulnerability in one of those 3rd-party scripts or plugins you installed.

Unfortunately, this happened to Movie-Vault.com recently, and so I was busy working with HostGator support to clean it up. It ended up taking several “cleaning up’s” before we were finally able to finally expunge the malware from the site completely.

This sucked, because Google detected the malware and “blocked” our websites on Chrome and Firefox (Google Toolbar) as well as anyone coming from the Google search engine.

Fortunately, after reporting to Google that our site was clean, they were quick in giving it the green light again. Thanks also to HostGator for cleaning and securing the site after the malware attack.

Anyway, I’ve gone through this type of thing a lot before, so it’s nothing new… but very annoying and rather time consuming to deal with.

My ‘New’ Project

I’ve been busy with my ‘new’ project, which I still haven’t unveiled yet, and isn’t so ‘new’ anymore either.

I had spent a lot of time writing out very detailed descriptions to my designer and programmers for the revamp of the site. The new design is now finished and is currently being converted to XHTML/CSS and should be up in about a week. Once the new design is up, I’ll finally reveal what the site is. I promise.

I’m investing a lot of money and time into this project. It’s certainly risky… but it’s hard to get anywhere worthwhile without taking a risk here and there. Plus, it’s a calculated risk.

I’m really relying that this project takes off, though. My income over the past couple of years hasn’t been the greatest, and I could sure use a “pick-me-up”.

Lessening the Load

One of the biggest mistakes (if not the biggest) I made business-wise was diversifying my portfolio to the extent that I went overboard.

While I know that some people are able to juggle a lot of sites well, the truth is that I am not. I need to focus more on a much smaller number of sites, instead of trying to tend to a lot of sites at once. Besides, any risk in an existing income-generating website suddenly going under, is greatly exaggerated.

Therefore, I’ve begun to try to offload some more of my “network”. A couple of days ago, I put up a couple of my zero-traffic websites, and a couple dozen of my domain names.

So far, there has been no interest in any of them, but I felt it was still worth trying to offload them as I simply don’t have the time to focus on them.

SEO Updates

I won’t go into any detail on my SEO updates here, as that is what my SEO update post reports are for, but since I know many of you are interested in hearing an update, here’s a very quick recap.

First and foremost, a few days ago, my affiliate site got sandboxed for the first time. This is very unfortunate since it was finally starting to rank extremely well. It has stayed in the sandbox since… my SEO guy thinks that my previous SEO guy must have removed a lot of his backlinks, but I’m undecided on that. I can only hope it will return to where it was…

My movie keywords have made very slow, gradual improvement and are now appearing on page 2. However, will probably need to get to page 1 before any decent traffic is awarded from them.

The surprising change is that RankPay made significant progress on my 2 keywords I’m running through them. I’m now ranked #35 and #43 for them! Please remember that these 2 keywords receive nearly 6 million EXACT Google searches a month, making ranking value much higher.

For example, even though I’m on page 4 for these searches, I am already receiving an average of 27 visits a day from them. That is phenomenally high for page 4.

And I don’t even have to pay them since I’m not in the top 30 yet Although it’s still too early to give a final concrete review of RankPay, I would actually recommend them right now based on the recent performance I’ve seen. Plus, their customer support is great.

I worked out a special deal with them so that if you sign up and use the promo code “TYLERCRUZ”, you’ll get an instant $50 credit applied to your account.

Lastly, I added 2 new keywords for my SEO guy. This time, however, I’m paying him a large flat fee once he gets them ranked in the top-3, and then a low monthly rate to keep them there. After a few days, he already has me ranked #9 and #50 for them.

RobotWarz

Work on RobotWarz ceased for a long time because the developers were having internal company issues. People were leaving or being fired, and a lot of restructuring was being done.

The owner contacted me a little while back to explain everything and to try to get the project back on track again. I had agreed to continue the project if he could deliver me a sample of the “Arena” in action, before I committed to anything.

The last time I spoke to him, they were nearly done the Arena, but needed clarification on how the various Attributes would interact with each other.

Our time and language/communication differences have stalled the progress once again. I need to catch the owner on Skype very late my time so that I can see what’s going on.

Lesson learned from developing a game so far: be prepared to spend at LEAST $30,000 if you want a simple game developed. That is, if you want it developed on time, with quality, and professionalism. Also, get everything done by the same developer/agency.

Weight Loss Update

Since I have dedicated posts to my weight loss updates, I’ll keep this update very short.

A couple days ago, I had my lowest weight so far this challenge, although it was still slightly above the minimum pace I need to make the challenge.

Unfortunately, I gained 0.6 lbs. yesterday, and somehow gained an extra entire pound today. I don’t know why, as I’ve been eating pretty good and have been exercising, even increasing my daily walks.

I do have badminton tonight though, so I’m hoping that will help my numbers tomorrow.

The thing is, based on my current weight as I write this, I am already 3.3 lbs. behind the minimum pace for the challenge!

My only comfort is knowing that Paul is doing even worse than me – 4.5 lbs. behind the minimum pace.

I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to show you better numbers when I do my next weight loss update post.

Lethargy: Never Conquered

I’ve done numerous posts on this before, but lethargy remains one of my biggest enemies.

As I write this, I am incredibly lethargic. It is difficult to look at the screen and type. In fact, I am forcing myself to work… it’s a real challenge to focus and stay alert.

I can’t blame this on diet or exercise… at least I think I can’t, because I’m eating quite well due to my weight loss challenge, and am exercising every day. Perhaps I’m simply not doing enough?

I don’t know what it is, but it sucks.

Perhaps it’s just lack of sleep. I didn’t have the best sleep last night, but it wasn’t the worst either. I usually nap once a day, however, and usually feel my best shortly after I get up from my nap.

Maybe I’m just not a morning person?

Anyhow, that sums up what I’ve been busy with lately. Overall, not the best of news… in fact, rather depressing.

Nevertheless, I’m staying positive and hope to be able to turn things around soon!

Five weeks ago, I announced that I purchased a website which interested a lot of you.

There were 58 replies to that post, of which many were trying to speculate and guess which site it was that I bought.

I’m still not ready to reveal which website it is yet, but promise that I will soon enough… probably in 1 more month.

I’ve commissioned for a brand new spanking redesign of the site from the ground up, which has just recently started but is making great progress. Over the next few days, I will be commissioning for a lot of new programming to be done to add new features and improvements to the site.

Once the new design is up and some of the new programming is completed, I will begin to market the site and reveal what it is on my blog here.

Meanwhile, here are some additional hints and fun sneak previews that you guys can use to try to guess what it is.

New Hints

• It’s a .com domain
• The Alexa ranking is just over 100,000
• It is not a content-based website

Photoshop Images

Below are different sections from the front page of the new design for the site, applied with different Photoshop filters.

Since these are from the new design (which nobody has seen yet), I’ll be pretty surprised if anyone can guess what the website is from these, but take a shot at it anyways. Try to guess the theme, at least:

So, what do you think the website is? Sorry for stringing you along like this, but all shall be revealed soon enough…

This is a bit of a teaser, but who doesn’t enjoy a good teaser every now and then?

A few weeks ago, I posted about how I sold my largest money making website. In the post, I mentioned how the sale was bitter-sweet because it meant that a good chunk of my recurring income each month was now gone.

Well, today I just released escrow payment on a website I purchased a little over a week ago.

Part of the reason I sold my poker site was because I was already so busy with all my other projects and I wanted to free up some time to allocate to them, so purchasing yet another site didn’t really help in that regard.

However, I did feel the need of replacing some of my poker site’s lost income, and I’ve never run a site like this before so the idea of owning it intrigued me.

Since this is a teaser, I won’t be revealing the website’s URL in this post. I will reveal it soon though, perhaps in 1-2 months from now. I don’t want to reveal it now because frankly, it’s in pretty rough shape and is a bit embarrassing. I’d like to reveal it once I’ve spruced it up at little.

A bunch of you already know what the site is, as I’ve told you personally, or you’ve found out through other means. Please don’t reveal it in the comments if you do know what it is. Consider it your own special little insider knowledge for now

The Cost

I ended up paying more than I had originally planned to for the site, but it was necessary if I wanted to secure the sale.

Although I paid in the low 5-figures for it (more than $10,000; less than $30,000), there’s a lot of added costs that I will have to pay. Apart from hosting (see below) and transfer fees, I’m going to be spending a fair penny on a complete design revamp and a ton of custom programming.

I also have a little ad campaign idea in mind once the site has been revamped.

The Hosting

As you know, I absolutely love HostGator and highly recommend them. They are perfect for 99% of you.

However, their most powerful dedicated server, which I currently have, is not powerful enough to run my new site… at least not with any growth. That’s saying a lot, because the Pro Dedicated Server at HostGator is pretty damn powerful.

I got a quote from HostGator to upgrade my server, but it was too expensive. HostGator excels with their pre-packaged servers, but cannot offer good prices when you want a custom one.

So, I ended up going with LiquidWeb and ordered the following BEAST of a server:

I still highly recommend HostGator, but if you need something more powerful than what they offer (which will be 0.01% of you), I recommend LiquidWeb.

Forget quad core, this is 16x core!

It’s actually only $334 a month, but I’m paying $100 extra a month for the Guardian remote backup package. 57 retentions mirrors… 1 for every hour for past 48 hours, 1 for every day of the week, and 1 every 2 week.

Worst case scenario if my site ever crashed or anything – I lose 59 minutes of data

However, this isn’t cheap. I now pay $10,000 a year in hosting fees. Ouch!

The Traffic

Check out the traffic for this site from the past 2 weeks:

Half a million unique visitors and 2 million pageviews. That’s a million unique visitors a month! And this is mostly US-traffic, too.

Now I can actually log into Analytics and feel real good about my numbers for once, heh.

So, are you curious yet? What type of site do you think it is? I’ll give you a hint… it’s not an image or file hosting site… not exactly anyway

A couple of weeks ago, I sold my largest money maker, PokerForums.org.

I haven’t blogged about it until now as I didn’t want to publicly declare anything until the escrow was received in my bank account and the site was fully transferred to the new owner.

The selling of this site is a major event in my life as an internet entrepreneur. Not only does it mark the single largest transaction I’ve ever received, but rather, and more importantly, it represents a major shift in the evolution of Merendi Networks Inc, my corporation.

A Brief History of PokerForums.org

Many years ago, I was an active member of a Starcraft forum. Some of the members started getting into online poker, which in turn got me interested as well.

There started to be a lot of new poker discussion bubbling on the forums, but we were limited to one single thread to discuss everything related to poker. This made sense, considering it was, after all, a Starcraft forum, but there were a lot of us who were really interested in discussing the topic.

And so, on 17th Apr, 2004, I made PokerForums.org. Its genesis was made purely out of the desire to create a forum completely dedicated to poker. I told some of the other members on the Starcraft forum, and a bunch of them immediately (and happily) joined.

This was all just prior to the huge poker boom that occurred due to the World Poker Tour and Chris Moneymaker winning the WSOP from a freeroll. PokerForums.org, almost entirely due to its domain name, consistently ranked in the top 3 (usually #1) for the term “poker forums”, which helped to drive new traffic to the site.

The online poker boom was so fierce that advertisers were contacting me left and right to advertise on the site. In 2005, just one year after creating the site, PFO already made 10x more than it did the year before. In 2006, it made 3x what it made in 2005, which is more than most people make full-time.

Life was good.

Then, on September 30th, 2006, the republicans sneakily snuck an “anti-online gambling’” section into the port security bill, known as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, or UIGEA. Two weeks later, George Bush signed the Act into law.

What followed was immediate turmoil. PartyPoker.com, which was the largest online poker site at the time, had its publicly-traded stock drop almost 60% in 24 hours as a result of this bill being passed.

A couple days after the bill was announced, one advertiser, who was paying me $4,500 in ads each month, cancelled their campaign. That was the biggest immediate effect I felt from UIGEA, and it sucked. That was $54,000 a year lost right then and there.

Not too long after, online e-Wallets such as Neteller refused to allow online poker-related transactions. Credit card companies banned the use of online gambling-related transactions as well. This made it very difficult for people to deposit online, which in turn meant less advertising dollars for me.

At the time, I wasn’t worried. I saw so much demand from advertisers that I just couldn’t see how it would affect me dramatically. In turns out that I was mostly correct, as the site’s income didn’t see a dramatic drop until 2009.

However, I actually believe that was not so much due to the UIGEA as it was for the following two reasons:

1. I became too busy with other projects.

Out of concern for having all my eggs in one basket, I decided early on once I started making good money online that I wanted to diversify my portfolio in case one of my sites quickly died.

While I still believe this to be a good business move, what I didn’t see myself getting into was going overboard with this mentality. I kept making more and more websites. I was using the shotgun approach – making and buying a bunch of websites, with the hope that one in a dozen takes off.

Having so many projects eventually caught up to me and wore me down to the point where I was completely neglecting some of my sites, PFO being one of them.

2. My interest in poker waned.

While I was very interested in poker for a long time, playing in private home games, multi-tabling 24 tables at once online, reading books, and watching TV, my passion slowly diminished over the years. By 2009, I had already stopped playing poker altogether.

I do not like to work on projects that I am not passionate about (unless it bring in good coin, then I’ll be passionate about anything).

The Sale

And so a year ago I decided to put it up for auction on Flippa. I ended up listed it three times, with no sale going through. I had received a number of private offers, but I turned them all down as I was looking to get more for the site.

I actually received a higher offer at that time from the person who ended up buying it a couple of weeks ago. I ended up selling it to him for less, a year later, as the site’s income dropped dramatically, making only half of what it did the year before.

He had contacted me after the 3rd listing on Flippa ended with an offer, and after some back and forth negotiating, we agreed on a price.

I spent an entire day considering whether or not to accept what I felt was his final offer, and made my decision to accept the following day after “sleeping on it”.

The price I received was lower than I had wanted, but when you look at the income the site was making right before I sold it, it was actually a good decision to sell.

At the same time, it was a fair price to the buyer. He already owns a large poker website and is familiar with the industry. He is also still passionate about poker and doesn’t have as many sites as I do to bog him down.

Part of the sales agreement was that I couldn’t publicly disclose the exact amount of the transaction, since I know that pretty much every one of you are dying to know. I’ll just say that it was definitely not a fortune, but at the same time, based on the last 3 months income prior to sale, it would take me 30 years to make that amount from the site (assuming income stayed at that same level).

That particular fact is what ultimately lead me to accept his offer.

PFO does have potential though, which is why I originally wanted a higher price for it. I had made $220,000 from the site during my ownership of it, and the income dropped mainly due to my complete and blatant neglect of the site.

Right before selling, I had commissioned for a complete redesign of the site and had big improvements in line, including upgrading and converting the site to vBulletin Suite, allowing our members to have their own blogs, etc. I passed this onto the new owner and he is going to continue with that route, so I think he will do well. I certainly wish him the best of luck.

It was just time for me to let the site go and let somebody else take care of it.

The Future

So now I have a lot of extra cash in my pocket, and I bet a lot of you are wondering what I’m going to do with it.

Can you say, “Mercedes-Benz”?

Just kidding.

Obviously the absence of PFO will now create a void in my monthly income, so I can’t just go out and spend the money on candy. And after taxes and the exchange rate, it’s really not all that much.

No, my plans are to reinvest that money into purchasing a new website. I know that I wrote above that one of my mistakes was having too many projects (websites), but I also wrote that I started to lose my passion as well. If I find a new website that interests me, it should help compensate for the fact of replacing the site.

I’ve been looking on Flippa nearly everyday, looking for a nice site to buy. Unfortunately, 99% of the listings there are complete crap (literally… around 99%. I’ll see maybe 1 in 100 listings that look half decent).

There is one listing there currently that I’m interested in, and might possibly purchase if the price is right.

Other than being on the lookout for a nice established site to come on the market and acquire, I’m thinking about using a bit of the sales cash to put towards my mortgage. However, my new mortgage interest rate, which I renewed just 1 month ago, is very low, so it may be smarter for me to use that money to invest online instead.

Anyhow, goodbye PokerForums.org. You’ve certainly served me well.

I was originally planning on publishing this post shortly after my Revisit of my Work Goals for 2010 post, but rapidly became backlogged with guest posts and paid reviews which I needed to get up.

As a result, I am creating and publishing these goals already a month into the year, leaving me only 11 months to achieve them. Perhaps that will give me more of a driving force to really focus on them this year.

I haven’t had the best track record for achieving my work goals in previous years (2008, 2009, 2010) but hope to change that in 2011. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been starting to get that entrepreneurial spark again. I can’t exactly explain it, but hope to demonstrate it in action instead.

Tyler’s Work Goal List for 2011

Here are the 5 goals I would like to achieve by the end of 2011. If I can meet 3 of them, I’ll be very happy and 2011 will have been a great year. I have listed them in order of ascending difficulty (not in the order of which I would like to achieve most):

1. Publish 140 Blog Posts

This is probably my most interesting goal, as it is also the most simplest. Unlike my other goals, where I need to do a lot of creative things in order to achieve them, all I have to do in this goal is to simply post more.

I’m sure that almost all of you will probably be happy with this goal. Many of you have been telling me for years to post more. It’s also something I know I should be doing as I tell others that you need consistent, regularly updated content if you want to have any success in a content-based website, and so I should follow my own advice.

In order to achieve this goal, I will need to refrain from always spending so much time on all my posts, and making them so detailed and long. This post, for example, will have taken me 2 hours once I finish it.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ll definitely keep up the quality of my posts and have good detailed long ones like I usually do, but I’ll also throw in some quick short posts as well.

How did I come up with 140 posts? Why not 100 or 150? Well, I counted up the total number of posts I published each year, and made the chart below:

I found this very interesting. First, to answer the question above, I chose the number 140 because it’s more than 2010 and 2009. I didn’t make it 251 in order to beat 2007, because 140 is already close to double what I did last year, and would be therefore too drastic of a change for me to make.

140 posts in a year works out to an average of 11.6 posts a month – roughly 1 every 3 days, so it’s certainly feasible and will be a great increase over what I did last year.

Looking back at the chart though, it’s really interesting to see just how much I dropped in post frequency since 2007. Did I really average a new blog post every 1-2 days back then? Wow.

It’s also very interesting to note how post frequency seems to have a near direct correlation with traffic and growth. My RSS had the highest rate of increase in 2007, but plateaued over the past 18 months or so. Traffic and income also plateaued declined in 2010 as well.

By dramatically increasing my post frequency, I hope to increase all metrics of my blog including traffic, RSS, Twitter followers, and income.

2. Reignite and Improve PublisherChallenge

PublisherChallenge was a huge success when you consider that I built the site in about a year and in roughly that same time, members on the site generated a total of approximately 1.3 million dollars.

So what happened? Nothing, really. Some of the affiliate networks decided to cut down on their advertising and marketing budget, such as MarketLeverage for example, and I just never got around to contacting other networks to fill in their places. It’s really as simple as that.

There were a few band new networks who contacted me wanting to run a competition, but I didn’t know them well enough to want to promote or endorse them.

I had actually been working on a new competition the past few months with a brand new network (I know the owner, so know I can trust them) which I was (am?) very excited about, as it’s not an affiliate network, meaning that you don’t have to be an affiliate marketer to enter the competition… you can just add their ads on your blog, for example. Unfortunately, they are still working on perfecting their network so it may still be a few months before this particular competition goes live.

So, I think I will find a replacement network. I really like the idea of using an ad network (CPC, CPM) as opposed to an affiliate network (CPA) as it really opens up who can enter the competitions – especially bloggers.

In addition to simply running competitions on the site again, I also have a few improvements and new features planned for the site.

3. Revitalize PokerForums

I failed this goal last year, but really need to do this and so am adding it as a goal again this year.

Poker Forums had been my biggest money maker since its genesis in 2004. 2009 was the first year in which it slid down to #2 (narrowly).

Once upon a time, it was making as much as $11,000-$12,000 per month. At the time, I was scared about having all my eggs in one basket (even though I already owned 6-7 sites at the time) and wanted to diversify my portfolio.

I ended up going overboard, which left me no time to work on the site, and it has suffered as a result ever since.

The good news is that there seems to have been a bit of a resurgence in the site recently. Old active members have returned and new, passionate and energetic members have arrived. I hope to jump on this opportunity in 2011 to bring it back into the popular, high quality poker forum it once was, in both activity and poker-related discussion.

I may do a large revamp of the the site, porting the current setup and design to the brand new vBulletin Suite 4.0, streamline the advertisements for better advertiser exposure, and clean-up dead areas of the site and/or port them over to the new custom pages within vBulletin Suite.

I also hope to get grow the content and activity on the site, perhaps by setting up weekly poker tournaments and bringing back news to the site, hiring freelance writers.

In addition, I also have some unique and innovative ideas and features that might bode well for the site.

4. Finish RobotWarz

Ugh. RobotWarz. Probably the worst experience I’ve ever had in an online project.

I won’t get into the details of it, but basically I’ve had nothing but problems with this endeavour due to the developers.

This goal is simple: to finally finish RobotWarz and have it up and running to the public. I’m not even attaching an “average $500/month income” statement to this goal as I did last time, as all I really want now is to finally finish this project!

While most of this goal is out of my hands, I still made it a goal as I do need to make sure this happens this year. If that means firing the current developers and hiring yet another team, then so be it. The point is that this is getting beyond the point of ridiculous now and something needs to be done about it.

I’ll be very interested to see what I say about this goal 1 year from now.

5. Grow Movie-Vault to 100k Unique Hits Per Month

This is another goal that I failed in 2010 but hope to achieve in 2011.

I did an extremely successful entire revamp of Movie-Vault in 2009 and early 2010 which was a major undertaking and badly needed to be done. Last year, while I had wanted to focus on both traffic and content, I only ended up getting the content going, although I did put a decent effort into growing traffic via social media and a few paid campaigns.

Movie Vault is now an awesome site with great content. In fact, just yesterday we were at a red carpet premiere and did a video interview with Helen Mirren and John Hurt.

All the site needs now is traffic and exposure, and that is what I hope to give it in 2011. I already have a number of things in the works, but in order to achieve this goal I am going to have to really focus on getting our presence known out there on the interwebs.

My main plan at the moment is very simple – to simply contact a crapload of movie and movie-related websites, and see how we can partner together. Perhaps I will get my developers to make our news and/or reviews into special XML feeds that webmasters can use (with backlinks to our site), submit some of our unique news posts to larger sites, etc. but we just need to get ourselves out there.

I may also harness our extremely popular forum community, which receives 300-600 new posts a day, to help spread the word of our site (through referral contests, taking advantage of social media, etc.).

Those are my goals for 2011. Let’s see how many I can achieve!

While I’m a little bit late in getting this post up, I haven’t forgotten about it… although I probably wish I had. Every year around this time, I reflect back on the work goals I created for myself for the year to see how I fared.

You can see my past revisit posts for the years 2008 and 2009, and you can also read My Work Goals for 2010 post as well.

Last year, in an effort to try to remember my goals and see them everyday, I purchased a whiteboard (although mine is actually silver), wrote my work goals on it, and placed it in my office next to my desk. It is still there as I speak, with my original goals:

Was it effective? Not nearly as much as I had hoped it would, as I quickly got used to ignoring it. It’d probably be much more effective to actually physically write down my goals every day, but that is also going overboard, in my opinion, and would be too much of a chore.

The whiteboard did have some benefit though, as I would once in a while look at it and try to remind myself that these goals needed doing, so I don’t regret putting it up.

Anyhow, without further ado, here is a look back at my goals for 2010:

1. Revitalize PokerForums

Result: Fail

This was one of the goals that really needed doing, and wasn’t just one of those "that would be a nice milestone” type of goals.

Unfortunately, I never got around to making this happen. This is a hard one for me. The poker industry has roughly been in decline ever since the UIGEA was passed in late 2006, which slowly had an impact on my poker site.

But I can’t just blame the UIGEA. The fact is that I went overboard in trying to “diversify my portfolio”, and got myself tied up in too many projects at once. So many projects that I didn’t have time to put to the site. I also started playing poker less and less, and by 2010 was not playing at all. And when you’re not interested in something, it is very difficult to try to dedicated time to it. Just ask any 10-year-old taking piano lessons.

A month ago, I did enter some very big discussions with a couple of poker behemoths in the industry (I’m talking HUGE here) and we were extremely close to working out a deal, but in the end I turned it down because it deviated too much from what we initially talked about, and would result in too much stress for me. And I’ll do almost anything to avoid unneeded stress.

I also put the site up for sale earlier in the year and had a bunch of offers, but they were just a bit short of what I wanted to part with the site. I think I will relist it again soon because I just don’t have the time for it, and it’s such an old, established site.

2. Grow Movie-Vault to 100k Unique Hits Per Month

Result: Fail

Although this is a fail, since I only managed to increase traffic by around 2%, I don’t feel bad about this one. While the traffic didn’t really improve, the fact is that I did everything that I said I was going to do at the beginning of last year.

Movie-Vault.com now has regularly updated great content, and my hired SEO freelancer is now on his 7th month working on the site. In fact, it is currently ranked high on the 3rd page and on the 7th page on Google for two very premium search phrases.

I signed a tight contract with a movie advertising agency early in the year which gave them the exclusive right to represent me as an ad agency. They turned out to be an incredibly bad company as the had promised me CPM’s of $7.50 – $15, but hardly sent any campaigns my way, making me pretty much nothing. The good news is that my contract with them expires in a couple weeks.

Later in the year, I had a lot of discussions with Zediva, and we are forging a strong relationship together that will hopefully flourish through 2011. We are looking forward to some cross-site integration together that will be implemented soon.

I did a lot of work on Movie Vault this year, and so I am happy with its progress even though its traffic didn’t increase. The revamp is done and it’s a great site with great content – now it just needs traffic.

3. Hit Average of $100+/day Profit from PPC Affiliate Marketing

Result: Fail

Another fail. I spent a lot of time on PPC affiliate marketing early in the year, and also tried my hand at promoting zip submits for the first time as well, with mixed success.

In early May, I actually managed to make $739.94 profit in only 7 days… so during that brief time I actually made my goal of $100/day profit.

But the goal was to average $100 a day over the long run, not just a week, and so I didn’t make this goal, although I did end up profiting $450 during that month.

I stopped all PPC affiliate marketing after that, and switched to SEO for promotion, for those wondering about any affiliate marketing updates. While I was making a little bit of money with PPC affiliate marketing, it was taking FAR too much time from me, and SEO takes up virtually no time.

4. Finish RobotWarz and Average $500/month Income

Result: Fail

This is an extremely tough one to talk about. Basically, the development of RobotWarz has been an absolute disaster ever since I started. I’ve run into bad developer after developer after developer, and had the same problem with designers (but have a fantastic one now).

This was my first time developing a game, so I learned a few things for next time (if there is a next time). I’ll save you guys a lot of time and headache: if you’re planning to get a game developed, plan on shelling out at least $20,000, but more like $50,000+.

This goal was mostly out of my hands due to the developers, so I’m going to put the blame on them for this one.

Hopefully we can finally finish the game and get it launched in 2011.

5. Earn $150,000+ in 2010

Result: Fail

I didn’t actually calculate this, but off the top of my head I don’t think I made this goal.

The Year In Review

Oh well, I’m not going to lie. I’ve always been about being transparent and honest. That’s one reason why people read my blog.

Overall, 2010 was a horrible year for Merendi Networks Inc. While there were certainly some successes, such as flipping a domain for a profit of over $14,000, huge SEO improvements, and bringing Movie Vault back to life, the truth is that there should have been a lot more successes to talk about.

I accept almost all of the blame (I still have a grudge about RobotWarz, heh). There is no doubt in my mind that I could and should have worked a lot more. Honestly, I hardly worked at all since early summer.

Click the play button below to hear a 5-second audio clip summarizing my 2010 year:

But that was all last year. It’s 2011 now. I have a whole new year to look forward to, and I’m going to look forward, not backwards.

Stay tuned for My Work Goals for 2011 post which I will be publishing soon.

Where have I been? I only made 3 posts in November, and my last post (written by me) was back on November 17th.

Was I on vacation? No. Was I sick? No. Technical problem? No. Was I gaming? No. In fact, I haven’t played a single game (not even Tic Tac Toe) for a month as a personal challenge to myself to see if I could, and as a method of freeing up time to work more and get caught up on work.

I’ve been here the whole time. Apart from adding a 4th night of badminton to my week a couple weeks ago and watching more movies than usual (to compensate for my gaming ban), I’ve been working. Just not on my blog.

It wasn’t a deliberate choice… more just a lack of time. I had a lot of e-mails pour in over the past 2 weeks, and just a lot of things going on.

Below is a summarized update on my various projects and what I’ve been focused and working on lately, in no particular order:

Endless E-mail

E-mail has always been a huge time whore for me, but it’s been extra bad the past couple of weeks. I devote a good share of my working time to tending to e-mail, and I still rarely ever get caught up to all the e-mail in my inbox.

I’ll take care of 30 e-mails in a morning work session, only to see 35 new ones by early evening. And these are actual, legitimate e-mails too, not spam or simple notification type e-mails.

Payroll Set-Up Change

A few days ago I contacted the company that handles my payroll and had them “cancel” my main account. I was manually doing my payroll each month, which wasn’t that big a deal. It only took 5-10 minutes of logging onto their website once a month and initiating next month’s payroll. But it also meant that I had to remember to do this each month.

It was also rather a pointless manual task since I always paid myself the same salary each month. So I just finished signing some new papers with them and set up a type of “automatic payroll”. I still have a couple more things to go over with them before it’s up and running, but basically my payroll will now be automatically processed each month at a fixed monthly salary.

It’s a minor thing, but it does automate 1 more task that I have to remember to do each month. The new automatic payroll processing will start in January 2011 onwards.

I also did my year-end for this year and received my T4’s the morning after. I remember that clearly as the courier came to my place at 7 in the morning… ugh.

RobotWarz Updates

RobotWarz is still slowly progressing, and unfortunately I have nothing new to show you that you haven’t already seen before.

The basic framework of the “Operations” module has been completed, which is shown in the screenshot below:

Work is now being focused on “stitching” together the various modules that have been completed so far. Up to now, each different area or screen of the game was built in separate modules which only comprised of the features of that particular module. These are now being hooked together to make what will resemble the final game.

The Arena, which is the module where the bots actually battle, is still not done, but I assume that will be worked on once the main stitched-together portion is completed.

I actually received the first iteration of the stitched-together version last night, but it has a bunch of bugs which need ironing out first. It also has very slow loading times when you switch from screen to screen, so we’re going to have to need to have some type of prelaunch preloader set up.

Once the bugs and loading times are fixed and the Arena is finished, we will be very close to an early Alpha version of the game.

Started SEO Campaign with New Company

Last week, I set up a 2-keyword campaign with a new SEO company. I am very interested in trying this company out as they only charge based on results. Basically, you pay for your position.

For example, if you’re ranked 25th for “cat nip” you might have to pay $40 a month, then when you’re #4th you’ll have to pay $230 a month.

It will also be good to compare this company’s results with the SEO guy I am currently using for my other campaigns.

My friend has only been using this company for a few months now and is already ranked #29 for his keyword, so it’s working well for him so far.

I will be doing an in-depth post on this company (where I will reveal their URL) soon, so be on the lookout for it. I think it will interest a lot of you.

Quick SEO Update

I will be publishing my second SEO Case Study post next week, so I won’t divulge too much information here.

This is my 6th month with my SEO guy and I am still seeing mixed results. If I hadn’t hired him, I wouldn’t even be ranked in the top 1,000 for my targeted keywords on my affiliate site, and now I’m in the top 100 for 7 out of 8 of them in Google.

I also made over $200 from my affiliate site in November via SEO, which actually pays for the SEO work on that site and means that I actually broke even and am on my way to a profit.

On the other hand, it has been nearly 6 months and I was originally told that I should be in the top 10 for all 8 of my affiliate site’s keywords by now, and I’m not.

Also, I have not seen any improvement on my movie site’s keywords in a few months now, which is not encouraging.

And over the last 4-5 weeks I’ve pretty much plateaued overall for both sites or slowly dropped in ranking, so I’m going to need to see some positive results soon or I may very likely have another SEO guy take over who was recommended to me.

Movie Vault Updates

I’ve been working on a huge contract deal on Movie-Vault.com with a new start-up over the past 6 weeks or so. I won’t reveal what company that is until everything is set up on the site, but it’s pretty exciting.

I spoke to the vice president and CEO on the phone and we’re working on a symbiotic relationship which should help both of our sites flourish. We have all the unofficial agreements drafted up, and are now just waiting for their lawyers to conjure up the official contract sheets.

In other Movie Vault news, we will be attending the Tron: Legacy red carpet premiere on December 17th and providing video interviews of the cast and crew.

We have awesome content. Now I just need to figure a way to get the site noticed by people and drive traffic to it. Right now my only method of driving traffic to the site is via SEO.

New PokerForums Partnership

I am currently in negotiations with an online poker coaching membership website and PokerForums.org.

We are discussing an integrated partnership together which would be very beneficial to both of us. PokerForums.org (PFO) would promote their coaching program and possibly provide some forum integration, while they would in turn promote our forum and have their high limit professional players post on our forums.

We are also entertaining other ideas, such as offering private forums that are available to all members of the coaching program, in which users can get actual direct responses to their questions and analysis of their hands, etc. from the pros.

I won’t disclose the names of the pros here just quite yet, but one of them is a well known pro that you’ve all seen on TV many times. The others are online pros who have won many large tournaments and play as high as $100-200 NL and $200-$400 NL. For those of you who aren’t that familiar with poker, at those limits it is not uncommon to see pots as high as $100,000 and over.

We are still in negotiations in this, and it may be a bit of a slow and gradual process integrating together if we do go ahead with this, but this deal certainly has a lot of potential.

This could just be the ticket to ignite to get PFO going again.

Premium Domain Searching

I had been spending a lot of hours over the past few weeks searching for good-to-premium keyword-rich domain names.

I had been looking for a good domain or two that I could invest in, with the intention turning it into another affiliate website and running a new SEO campaign for it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any decent domains for sale that people were willing to sell at a reasonable price, and I was paying up to $5,000 or so per domain and still couldn’t find anything.

It’s really too bad that I just missed out on the perfect domain a few months back. I honestly believe that I would have made so much money if I was able to grab it.

Since I spent far too much time searching for product and affiliate-based keyword related domains and came up with nothing, I have since stopped this aggressive search. I’ll now just keep my eye open for them in the future if I happen across them.

PublisherForums $7,000 Contest

I have also been busy with the huge PublisherForums contest that is still running.

I’ve been posting a lot on the forums, helping to keep the threads going and just to make a presence, since this is something that I didn’t do in past contests. I’ve also been contacting other bloggers and internet marketers to help spread the word.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, be sure you do. Right now, there is only 1 guy who is on pace to win a prize… by default no less! He has only been posting around 5 posts a day on average since the contest started, and now it looks like he’s going to walk away with a prize package worth $2,163 for his efforts.

There are still 24 days left in this competition, so you still have plenty of time to sign up and make an appearance! I can honestly say that if somebody else was hosting this contest that I would personally compete in a second.

New PublisherChallenge Competition and Improvements

I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with all my other projects that I haven’t had time to focus on PublisherChallenge. In fact, it’s been exactly 1 year since we held our last competition!

PublisherChallenge has referred over 700 affiliates who have generated just shy of $1.3 million dollars and we’ve given away $30,000 in prizes. Looking back at it, the site was really a huge success, so I don’t know why I just suddenly forgot about it and neglected it.

The good news is that I’m working on a brand new competition which I hope to run during January. It is a new ad network (from a company who has several other ad networks) that will have some awesome prizes up for grabs.

What makes this competition different from all the others is that you don’t have to be an affiliate marketer to compete! As long as you have a website, whether it be a full-blown huge website, a gardening forum, or a basic blog, you can use this network and make money by adding a simple Javascript snippet to your website.

We are currently working on integrating this network into our site and organizing the prizes.

In addition to the upcoming competition, PublisherChallenge also has some new features underway, one of them being the addition of a blog and news section.