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

Affiliate Marketing Update: New Gross Record

I set a new personal affiliate marketing record yesterday, grossing a total of $441.90 in a single day!

My previous high was on January 12th, 2010 at $397.

I fully understand that it’s rather silly to "celebrate" a gross income record, as anyone could have spent $400 or $800 and done the same thing, but I still like to celebrate it anyway as it hopefully means I’m moving in the right direction. Plus, I’ve always loved celebrating new personal bests in anything I do.

Below is a screenshot of the development of my campaigns in December so far:

While I set a new personal gross revenue day, I didn’t break my best net profit day, which was $233.39. However, I did come fairly close, ending up with a net profit of $166.96 for the day:

However, due to the variety of traffic sources, time zone differences, and bidding methods (CPM and flat daily/month rate, for example), these numbers may be off by 10%-20%.

This is one problem with calculating things on a daily basis. The longer the period I calculate, the more accurate it will be though, to the point where a calculation of 1 month should should yield 99.5% accuracy (I just made that number up, but you know what I mean).

223 Leads

I also ended up doing 223 leads for the day, which comes close to the record I set on November 7th, of 250.

I mention this because I want to again point you to the power of the bump. As mentioned in my previous post, I am expecting (and hoping) for a bump next week. It will probably be $0.25 but may be higher.

At 223 leads, a $0.25 bump works out to $55.75. So if I get a bump and have another exact day like yesterday, I will profit $222.71 – that’s nearly a 35% increase in net profit just by getting a bump.

Anyway, we’ll see how things go. The bad news is that a large majority of my traffic completely tanked yesterday, netting me exactly $1.01. I’m hoping that yesterday was just a bad day for that traffic source but we’ll have to see.

Affiliate Marketing Update: December 15th, 2011

I haven’t posted in a week because most of my "work time" lately has been devoted to working on my affiliate campaigns. Although, a good portion of that consists of hitting the refresh button

In my last update, I wrote about how I had a really good ROI and that I was going to try to scale things. However, I also mentioned how whenever I try to ramp things up that my ROI goes down the tube. It’s expected to drop, no doubt, but mine really plummets whenever I try to do any half-decent volume.

So I scaled things up this past week (and am continuing to do so), and did get my # of leads up to an average of 130-140 a day, but as I just mentioned, my ROI has plummeted.

The good news, however, is that the advertiser of the main offer I’m currently focusing on is likely going to give me a bump next week, which will really help me out. It looks like the bump will probably only be $0.25, but at 140 leads a day, that works out to an extra $35 a day, so you can see how that would really help me.

The Past 4 Days

Below are the overall results from my campaigns over the past 4 days:

My ROI appears to be sticking within the 30-35% range, which is okay with me, but the overall daily profit is too low.

My immediate focus is to get that up to $100/day.

Testing New Traffic Sources

Aside from doing my daily analysis of the previous day’s traffic and then optimizing my existing campaigns, I’ve been testing out new traffic sources and methods the past few days as well.

So far, I’ve mainly been doing banner display, but have also dabbled a bit in CPV (via DirectCPV) – although, ironically, I don’t get very much traffic via CPV… at least traffic that converts.

I also am doing a tiny bit of direct buy’s on sites, although the quality on that has been suffering lately (I’m assuming banner blindness).

Lately though, I’ve been trying some smaller 2nd and 3rd tier ad networks as well as pop-under ads with mixed results.

I’ll continue to keep you guys posted on my results.

Affiliate Marketing Update: December 8th, 2011

It’s been a month since I last gave an update on my affiliate marketing efforts, so here’s an update on things.

I last left you off with the results of how my "Super Sunday" ended up faring, which ended up being a net total of $162. What had made me so excited at that time was that I still had a ton of room to scale things, due to having a ROI of 100% (102.23% to be exact).

Unfortunately, my traffic source had suddenly disappeared and so I was never able to continue and scale things out.

I spent the next couple weeks trying to figure out what happened and how to get the traffic back, with mixed results. I was able to get the traffic back, but at a dramatically lower ROI… to the point where I was basically breaking even.

I did gain valuable data from the traffic I did run though, which is always a bonus.

I also tried a bunch of new offers. I found a couple of good new ones that converted pretty well, but then they got paused. One of them in particular had a lot of potential so it’s a bit of a shame, as it looks like it might not come back.

I started doing a little bit of direct ad buy’s on sites and continued with a tiny bit of PPV in addition to my main sources.

Almost…

A couple days ago, I almost had something big going. I generated $309.00 by around 10:30am, and it was continuing to scale at a lightning pace. For example, about $100 of that was generated from around 10:00am to 10:30am, and in the final few minutes I was bringing in around $0.50 per second.

I hadn’t even truly scaled it yet… if I did, I probably could have generated $10-$20K.

Unfortunately, the advertiser apparently didn’t like the quality of those leads and so I was told by my AM to stop

Below is a screenshot of my numbers for that day:

Not Dead Yet

While the advertiser didn’t like the quality on those particular leads, they absolutely loved the ones I had been sending previously.

And so I continued sending in traffic (the traffic I know they like). December 7th was pretty uneventful as I was working on building some new campaigns and things, which started to get going in the afternoon of the next day on the 8th.

Below is a screenshot of the results from yesterday, December 8th, 2011:

So, nothing amazing or anything, but overall a good day for me.

The ROI is great… unfortunately I seem to keep running into hiccups when I try to scale my campaigns. I’m actually in the midst of scaling them right now… in fact yesterday was supposed to be a mid-range scaling, but I only achieved about half (or less) of what I was expecting (or hoping?).

My goal was to hit 150 leads, but I only reached half of that. I’m hoping that today I see better results. $100/day profit is nice, no doubt, but why settle for $100/day when you have a 317% ROI?

I’ll continue to keep you guys posted.

ToTheGo.com: Jobs, Homes, and Cars – Oh My!

The following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.

With the US and European economy still down in the dumps, forcing companies to have to continue to lay off employees en masse, having to search for a job is a sad truth for millions of people these days.

Fortunately, there’s the Internet. While the traditional job searching methods such as the "Help Wanted" ads and local job assistant programs are still useful, you have to admit that the Internet is an invaluable resource.

ToTheGo.com is a brand new search engine that focuses on 3 elements: jobs, homes, and cars. It aggregates data and listings from various sources on the web and provides the results to you.

In fact, ToTheGo currently aggregates more than 3 million listings in the US.

While ToTheGo currently caters only to the US and UK, it plans on later extending the service to Europe, Asia, and South America.

This is great and all, but it does leave me to wonder where Canada is in all of this. Being Canadian myself, it certainly made me wonder while I was researching and testing out the site for this review.

Now, ToTheGo certainly isn’t the first site to offer search results from various aggregated sources on the web. So what makes them different from their competition?

In their press release, ToTheGo briefly addresses this by stating that their main strength over their competitors in their focus on user experience. They try to provide a clean design with unobtrusive advertising, simple navigation, and an overall simplified design.

And I would say that for the most part, they do succeed in that arena.

However, they do have a number of bugs that they need to address.

The Bugs

For example, on several occasions I received a timed-out JavaScript warning message:

Another example are the 4 "Property type" radio buttons on their Homes search tab, under advanced options, which appear to be returning and/or parsing results from the database incorrectly, as shown below:

The bugs and glitches on the site aren’t overwhelming, but when your main focus in differentiating yourself from your competitors is by providing a better user experience, you need to be sure to squash out these things.

The Search Results

The meat and potatoes of ToTheGo are its search results. Unfortunately, it appears to be lacking in that area.

I ran a number of queries before I was able to find any relevant results.

I started by searching for "dog walker" which didn’t come up with any results. But that wasn’t too surprising since a dog walker isn’t exactly a career.

So I searched for "dog psychologist" – nothing… "dog behaviourist" – nothing… "dog trainer" – still nothing! I then tried simply "dog" which yielded no relevant results.

Okay, so there appeared to be no careers directly related to dogs (apart from 1 job listing for a search for "canine" – Multi Purpose Canine Trainer - Southern Pines, NC, US), and so I ran several other queries.

Unfortunately, the next few queries, such as for "pastry chef" still yielded no relevant results.

In fact, the AdSense ads directly above and below the results were far more relevant (not surprisingly) than the ToTheGo results, as can be seen in the screenshot below:

This could actually be a really smart idea if you think about it though. Make a site with irrelevant results, mix in well-blended AdSense ads, and boom – high CTR!

To be fair though, ToTheGo did provide accurate and relevant results for some of my queries.

For example, while "veterinarian" returned no results in "Seattle", expanding that geological range to the state of "Washington" did yield 4 results, as can be seen below:

And so the site does work.

I’m assuming that the main issue is that ToTheGo simply needs to aggregate more data. Once they do this, I can see ToTheGo as being a very useful tool and resource.

In fact, one thing I really like about ToTheGo is their awareness of advanced search options. You can really fine-tune your searches (for jobs, homes, and cars) and use numerous filters, ranges, etc.

For example for jobs you can narrow down by salary, the date the job was posted, the distance from where you live, etc.

These are great features, however can’t really be utilized to their full potential until there are more listings in their database.

Not Just Jobs

I mentioned in the introduction that ToTheGo is a search engine not only for jobs, but also for homes and cars.

These other 2 areas function similarly to the Jobs search area:

Realistically though, ToTheGo definitely has a lot of competition. For job searches there’s Monster.com, for home searches there’s MLS.com, and for car searches there’s Edmunds.com.

If ToTheGo works on fixing their bugs and glitches, and drastically increases the size of their database and thus the size and relevancy of their search results, they will be in the right direction to competing with the big boys.