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

Another Free Tool That Will Save You Time

10 days ago I let you guys know about a great free program called ZScreen.

In my continued effort to try to work more efficiently and save time, I found another awesome tool for the job a few weeks back. It’s called AutoHotkey and is amazingly powerful for such a simple and small program (Only 2 MB!).

Basically, it’s a free, open-source utility for Windows that allows you to program or script your own hotkeys, macros, actions, and tools. You can seriously do almost anything you can think of with this small program, and can even simply make your own standalone executables (.exe’s).

While I use it mainly for its hotkey and macro features, AutoHotkey is just so cool that it’s going to be one of those tools that I will be using for years now.

Below is an 15-minute screencast of me showing how AutoHotkey works and why it’s useful:

You can download AutoHotkey, completely free, here.

PeerFly Launches 4 New Awesome Features

I haven’t done any affiliate marketing in a couple months because I’ve been focusing on Movie-Vault.com and RobotWarz.com, but I still try a few things here and there.

Over the past month, I noticed that PeerFly has been busy adding a lot of new features to their affiliate network.

One of the distinguishing characteristics about PeerFly is that they have always been built upon 100% custom code; they have never used software or services from 3rd party companies such as DirectTrack, HasOffers, or HitPath. This allows them to offer features and services that other networks can’t or won’t.

Here are 4 great new features PeerFly have added to their site during the past month:

Emergency and Early Payments

While not everyone may want to admit it, a lot of us live very close to the margin and can get ourselves into situations where we occasionally need money fast.

Especially when it comes to affiliate marketing, there are times when waiting for Net-30 just won’t do and you need money right away to pay off a credit card or other bill. Or perhaps you ran into the perfect opportunity to acquire a site but need fast and can’t wait 2-4 weeks to get paid.

Whatever the reason, PeerFly now offers an emergency (within 8 hours) and early (3 days) payment request feature. Whether your request will be granted or not will depend on your traffic quality and general history with PeerFly (as well as $50 minimum), but as long as your account is in good standing you’ll more than likely be granted your request.

Now, there is a caveat. Requesting a payment within 8 hours will incur a 22% penalty fee, and requesting a payment within 3 days will incur a 17% penalty fee. Most of you can probably understand and expect a small fee for this service, but may be surprised at how high these fees are.

The reason behind this is risk. PeerFly, and all other networks for that matter, are paid by the advertisers usually on a Net-15 or Net-30 basis, after the leads and/or sales are processed and confirmed. If PeerFly pays its publishers before they get paid by the advertiser, they are taking a risk that the traffic may turn out to be fraudulent, of low quality, or that the advertiser themselves go under or simply don’t pay them.

I know of a publisher I referred to MarketLeverage who sent them quality traffic, but one day the advertiser refused to pay MarketLeverage. MarketLeverage had already paid the publisher for the month, which was around $120,000 or so, and so you can see just how much of a risk an affiliate network takes when paying out their publishers early. Fortunately, in this example, MarketLeverage did the right thing and worked out a deal with the publisher (I think they ended up agreeing that the publisher would give MarketLeverage back 50% of the $120,000).

However, while I understand the risk factor, the fees still do seem quite high, especially if someone needs an early payment request of a larger figure. For example, 22% of $18,000 works out to just shy of $4K in lost money to the publisher.

It would be nice to see if PeerFly could lower these fees a bit, and/or make the system more sophisticated so that users with older accounts and a consistent quality traffic history can get lower fees.

In any case though, this is still a nice feature for when you need money in a pinch. I know of a case where one guy requested money using the “within 8 hours” option, and got paid within 8-minutes instead. Now that’s fast!

Tiered Payment Schedule

PeerFly now has a tiered payment schedule system whereby you are eligible for faster payment turnaround times based upon how much revenue you generate each month.

For example, if you generate under $1,000 a month with PeerFly, you will be paid on a Net-30 basis. However, if you generate over $1,000 a month you will be paid once every 2 weeks.

Likewise, there are other tiers such as if you consistently generate $5,000+ a week you will be paid weekly.

PeerFly already gave faster payouts to larger affiliates previously, but now it is all clearly laid out when you log in and is implemented right into your account as opposed to being done manually.

PeerFly Stats Firefox Plugin

Luke, the guy who is pretty much everyone’s affiliate manager at PeerFly, recently developed a free plugin for Firefox that displays your current day’s total as well as unpaid balance in the bottom right corner of your Firefox browser.

I installed the plugin this morning and I really like it.

The plugin is very simple and easy to use and is a great timesaver for people like me who are addicted to constantly checking their stats.

RSS/XML Feeds

Programmers and developers will really like this feature. PeerFly has now made available to all members, RSS and XML feeds of their system data. This is actually how Luke created the Firefox plugin above.

You can use there feeds to get the following information:

• All Offers
• Popular Offers
• Paused Offers
• Account Info
• Daily Earnings

Here is some more information as stated from the PeerFly blog:

“There is a lot that can be done with this information from a developer standpoint.  We are actually using these feeds ourselves at PeerFly to develop some new features.  For example, when an offer goes down you will be automatically notified if you’ve run any traffic to it in the past 2 weeks.  So, if you have any creatives ideas and would like to attempt to develop something based off of our feeds please feel free to give it a try.  If you have any questions or need any assistance you can comment below or contact us.”

I Don’t Just Talk the Talk, I Walk the Walk

I really love PeerFly. They’re just an awesome affiliate network. I only wish that all companies were like them. In fact, I wish PeerFly would launch a sister-site for CPM ads and become a CPM ad network as well.

Anyway, last year I made over $33,000 with PeerFly, and no – those aren’t all referral commissions – I run all of my affiliate offers with them as well.

As you can probably tell by now, I highly recommend PeerFly and encourage you to sign up with them if you haven’t already!

ZScreen: The Awesome Free Screenshot Tool

Over the past year I’ve been more backlogged with work and projects than I have ever been in my life, and so I am always looking for ways to save time whether that be by automating as many things as possible, hiring other people to do work for me, or by simply finding faster ways to do things.

Over the next series of posts, I will be sharing with you various tools, tips, and techniques that I use to save time while working. While some of these things may seem minute in their amount of time saving, you could be very surprised in just how much time they save you in the long run.

2-3 months ago, my friend Brian and I were doing a lot of chatting on AIM, discussing everything under the sun from business to personality types, when Brian noticed that I would often pause for a minute to take a screenshot, copy it into Photoshop, upload it to my server, and then send him the link (I couldn’t send it to him via AIM file transfer since he uses one of those multi-instant messenger programs which are usually buggy with those advanced features).

Since this would often ruin the flow of conversation, Brian recommended that I use a program called ZScreen. It’s a completely free, open-source software tool that makes taking and sharing screenshots extremely easy. It also does a number of other features as well, but its main purpose is to quickly and easily share screenshots.

Below is an 11-minute screencast of me showing how ZScreen works and why it’s useful:

You can download ZScreen, completely free, here.

2 More Reasons Why You Should Hire Interberry

I last recommended Interberry 7 months ago in a post which you can read here (I highly recommend reading that post if you haven’t already). In fact, I’ve only ever made 2 posts recommending and promoting them, but you guys listened to my advice and 54 of you actually contacted them.

Of those 54 enquiries, 21 continued on to receive actual quotes, and of those 21 quotes, 11 of them actually went through with the projects.

Kudos to you guys for having an idea and actually following through on it. So many people have ideas and like to tell their friends and family about how good their ideas are, but never actually do anything about it. 54 of you at least attempted to do so, and so I salute you.

I have been working with Interberry for a year and a half now and have got them to do two very large projects for me. So far, I’ve commissioned roughly $11,000 worth of work from them, so you can be sure that I personally like and use these guys.

In fact, after I write this post I’m going to get them to add some more cool features to Movie-Vault.com (which they made for me) including full Facebook integration.

Work with Interberry and you will get your own private team assigned to your project. Here was my team for PublisherChallenge:

Remember how I said that 11 of you actually listened to me and went ahead and hired Interberry for your projects? Well below are testimonials from 2 of those 11 people:

Greg Vermis’s Testimonial

Greg Vemis is a lurker of my blog who trusted my recommendation of Interberry and hired them for not 1 but 2 projects. He was so happy with how the first project turned out that he hired them again a few months later for another project of his.

FantasyPickup

FantasyPickup.com is a very unique idea for a website. While I think that the idea itself may be difficult to grow and monetize, I do think that it is a very interesting idea.

Basically, it’s a type of online scoreboard that is meant to help push you out of your comfort zone and be less shy with the ladies. As I am very shy myself, I can really understand how this game can help some people.

In FantasyPickup, you and your friends agree to a set of rules (that you make yourselves) and assign points to different actions. For example, going up to a pretty girl in the mall and asking what the time is could be worth 1 point while actually asking a girl out could be worth 30 points.

The points are put into the website which keeps track of everybody’s score and the winner could receive some cash, bragging rights, or whatever the group of friends decide.

Below is a YouTube video describing how the game works in more detail:

I personally believe that using competition and games is one of the best and most fun ways to do things, so I do like this website idea. I just think that it may be a bit hard to market and monetize.

But Greg had an idea and went with it, and Interberry helped make it happen.

“To Everyone,

I just wanted to take this time to thank everyone for making Fantasy Pickup a reality. It was very refreshing working with such a competent group of individuals. Your professionalism and pride in your work did not go unnoticed.

I hope to do future business with Interberry and will be happy to refer others to do the same.

Thanks Again,

Greg Vemis”

Brackulous

Brackulous.com is a sports pool website in which users can join a public pool, private pool, or even create their own sports pool.

The website appears to still be under a bit of construction – mainly content such as the about and FAQ pages, but it looks like the core of the system is complete. I wonder if Greg is planning to allow users to place actual bets on the website in the form of cash.

It’s not a bad idea for a website. I would actually recommend for Greg to expand the site a bit though, and not have it focus exclusively on sports. For example, a lot of computer gamers run private tournaments for games such as Starcraft. It would be cool if users could create their own single or double elimination brackets on Brackulous, and then be able to link to the brackets and/or insert the dynamic images into their websites.

“I would like to thank Interberry for another job well done. Everything was handled in a professional way and the quality of work was exceptional.

A special thanks goes to Bijoy for his hard work and dedication on a project that proved to be more difficult than expected. It’s never easy modifying existing code from another developer but we were still able to finish the job successfully.

Looking forward to working with you again in the future.

Thanks again,

Greg Vemis”

Stefan Kalevski’s Testimonial

Stefan Kalevski is another lurker of my blog but also a long-time reader.

EmailMarketing

EmailMarketing.rs is an e-mail list management website that looks to be the Russian version of AWeber, only cheaper.

Developing such a site is no easy task, and requires a lot of backend programming. Due to the sheer volume of e-mails and lists being managed, proper server and programming resource management is also vital to developing such a website.

While it looks like the English version of the site is still being translated, I like the overall look of the front-end of the site. In fact, I remember hearing from Interberry now that the site is in it’s final stages of development now and isn’t 100% done which explains the translation not being done as well as a few other minor areas of the website

But overall, I really like how clean and user-friendly the website is. A site like this could really do well with proper marketing.

“I am a long time reader of Tyler’s blog and when I was looking for a proven development company for my project I was lucky to see Tyler’s review about Interberry. From the review I concluded that the guys from Interberry were capable of developing complex projects, so I decided to contact and hire them.

My project wasn’t easy and it required a lot of advanced knowledge in the area of advanced email marketing systems and the implementation of latest email authentication standards.

Now that my project is nearing completion, I can only say that I never regretted hiring Interberry as they are really professional in what they do and are always very helpful.

Thanks,

Stefan Kalevski”

It’s Not Just Me

See? It’s not just me. Above are 2 glowing testimonials from readers of my blog who hired Interberry and are very happy with the results.

Need Programming Done? Try Interberry

I’m sure many of you have hired numerous programmers in the past that left you unsatisfied, I know I have. If you like the programming of PublisherChallenge and Movie-Vault, then you’ll be happy with Interberry.

They prefer to work on larger projects ($3k+) and really enjoy working on big projects ($7k+). They have the staff to take on almost anything you can throw at them, so be sure to take advantage of that.

They excel in web programming and developing CMS (content management systems), and are therefore great for most website ideas you have. They don’t do Flash or iPhone apps, but can do Facebook apps.

You can find them of course at Interberry.com in which you can request a quote, phone them  toll-free at +1-888-367-1110 (during 9:30am to 6:30pm Indian Standard Time), or if you’re like me then you’ll want to talk to them via Skype chat. Add cheb.iberry to your Skype contact list for that.

I really don’t like revealing my sources when it comes to designers and programmers so please let them know that Tyler sent you so that I can get some discounted work done from them in the future. That’s how you can repay me back for sharing such a great resource with you

Let me know how your project with them goes – hopefully you can be the next person giving a satisfied testimonial!