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

New Monthly Net Income Record: $31,444.64

It’s the beginning of a new month, which means that it’s time for me to give an update on how my affiliate marketing campaigns fared for the previous month.

Since my efforts have largely been focused on affiliate marketing over the past year, I hope to keep this new "series" a regular thing on the first of each month.

February 2013 was my best affiliate marketing month by far. In fact, I made more money last month than I ever did in my entire life (not counting site sales). I was setting new daily records left and right, with my most recent one being a whopping $7,097 ($2,835.78 net) in 1 day.

So, what were the overall numbers for the month?

February 2013 Affiliate Campaign Income:

$103,961.00

Boom! February 2013 was my highest grossing month ever, managing to hit 6-figures, despite it being the shortest month of the year.

Unfortunately, that is gross and not net. Paid traffic isn’t cheap, and came out to:

Expenses:

$72,516.36

It may sound like a scary number, but it’s not so scary when you look at it day by day. For the most part, I was billed on a daily basis, so the numbers were manageable. I wasn’t prepaying $20,000 media buys, for example. That would definitely have elevated my blood pressure.

Net Profit:

$31,444.64

Woohoo! That’s a new monthly net profit record for me! My previous monthly record was $23,349.91 made just 1 month prior, in January 2013.

That new record works out to a monthly ROI of 43%.

It also average out to $1,123 net profit per day (more on that below).

My First 6-Digit Month

I’ve already blogged about this a couple times before, but remember how one of the main reasons I got into affiliate marketing in the first place was from seeing super affiliates at the time post screenshots of their affiliate marketing income? I saw guys making $100,000+ per month online through affiliate marketing and just couldn’t believe it. I was in awe.

I struggled for several years, trying affiliate marketing off and on, making a little bit of money here and there, but nothing real substantial. And now, in February 2013, I finally managed to generate my own $100,000 month, with a third of that being profit.

I know that I’ve been posting a lot about new personal affiliate marketing records lately, but you must admit that $100,000 is a real big milestone, which is why I’m so happy… and I’ll even say it… "proud".

The thing is, there is not really any other milestones within close range from here. There’s new personal bests, which are always great, but milestones? The next milestones would have to be $150,000 or $200,000 gross in a month, or $50,000 net in a month. Daily milestones would have to be $10,000 gross in a day… so you can see why I’m happy with the $100,000 in a month milestone – because it could be years before (if) I ever hit another one!

The Sad Truth About March

Okay, so February 2013 was awesome for me. I profited over $30,000 from my campaigns.

But February is over and we’re already into March. The thing is, the last week of February was actually really bad for me.

A couple offers got dropped, most of my main offers got pay cuts, and competition on one of my traffic sources increased. All of this happened at the same time, which has caused rather devastating results for my campaigns.

I was actually on pace to finish February at $36,000 net profit, but the last week punch-in-the-gut news shattered that.

So while February was great, things are looking rather dire for March.

For example, on February 28th, my net profit was only $390.79, and yesterday, on March 1st, my net profit was only $531.28 (at a rather low 30% ROI, too).

While those numbers may sound okay, remember that my monthly average in February was $1,123 net profit per day, and that includes the bad last week of the month as well.

At this pace, I’m looking to only net around $12,000 in March. Again, I shouldn’t complain about those kind of numbers, but the thing is that is a third of what I made in February. Imagine if it dropped by a third again in April – then I’m down to $4,000 a month…

We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

There’s Money Out There

There aren’t enough hours in the day.

While I could absolutely, positively be working more hours (I don’t work nearly as many hours as I should), I also need time to relax and have fun. After all – what’s the point of working and making money if you can’t enjoy it?

I just wish there were more hours in the day so that I could work, play, and then work some more! There’s so much money out there in the world of affiliate marketing to be made… I just need to work more and keep at it.

I’m seeing record-high CPM’s on Facebook (US: 0.4%) and record low CPC’s (US: $0.09), I have friends making what I make in a month in a single day, and there are tons of tactics and strategies I haven’t tried yet, not to mention niches and offers.

With a super strong work ethic and dedication, I’m sure I can set a new monthly record. The question really boils down to: how much do I want it and how hard am I willing to work?

Anyhow, that’s my monthly report for February. Wish me luck in March… I’m definitely going to need it!

College Dropout Now Making $100,000+ Per Year

This story is the journey of a college dropout that started an online business in his college dorm room from scratch and grew it to a business generating over $100,000 yearly…

Hey guys, my name is Kevin and Tyler has given me the opportunity to tell my story about how I’ve built an online business from scratch starting out in my college (that I got via collegejaguar.com) with no experience.

It all started in 2004 when I was 16 years old. My friend had been making a couple thousand dollars per month as a poker affiliate (referring real money players to poker sites). To a teenager, as you can imagine, “a couple thousand dollars” monthly was a huge deal and I was wondering how I could do the same.

He gave me a little bit of background info on how he got started and he referred to a forum that would help. I did some research but at 16 I had no background in running websites and didn’t even have a clue how to get started. I eventually gave up and continued on with my life.

3 years later I was in university (Physics – University of California Merced) in my hometown and one of the classes I had to take was Computer Science. This was basic computer science that included created basic html websites that we would upload onto the university server. I had created my first very basic and very ugly html website and learned how to use an FTP program to upload a website.

While creating my first website in class I remembered about my buddy who was making money online back a few years. I went back to my college dorm room where I was living for the school year and searched for that forum I had signed up for in the past. My account was still around from when I was 16 and signed up – “Poker69” – what a great forum name.

Anyways I started doing a bunch of research on the forum and almost right away starting asking a bunch of very basic questions on how to get a website online and running. Luckily for me there were some very great people posting on the forums and they didn’t shut me out of their community, like I notice a lot of forums will do these days. Instead I got a ton of help and advice and figured out the basics, including buying a domain and getting a hosting account so that I could have my first website online.

I created my first two websites, which were both poker related. The first was one directed towards my university and the other was just a general poker site. I kept asking questions and doing my own research about SEO so that I could have my websites found by people in Google. I remember spending like 5-6 hours a night with my dorm room door shut just working away. I became hooked when my first website went live.

Making My First Dollar Online

Almost right away I made about $200-$300 on my first site, but the catch is that it was all from friends signing up for poker sites through my referral links. The second site would take a couple months to make it’s first dollar, but when it did I remember being ecstatic. Someone in the world actually searched in Google, found my site, read my content, and signed up for real money under my referral link. The first $100 felt like a million bucks.

I had been reading blogs with people claiming to make a couple thousand, even $10,000+ per month online with their websites. At that time I felt like it would be nearly impossible for someone like me to make that much money, and I would be happy with even $500/month.

My first website I created targeted my universities name and they didn’t like that, so they had me shut it down. It didn’t make any money outside of the few friends I referred so that wasn’t a big deal. I continued to work hard on my second website and ended up making a couple hundred dollars for two or three months in a row.

Then something else happened that I remember thinking was insane. Someone contacted me through the forum I would post on and asked if they could purchase advertising on my website. I had known that people bought ads from other sites, but I didn’t think anyone would be interested in my site. And at the time I was thinking they were going to offer me maybe $50-$100. They ended up offering me $800 for a handful of ads on my websites pages and again I was ecstatic. Of course I accepted right away.

This just made me more excited to work on my websites and I would continue logging 5-6 hours straight on my computer reading, writing, creating, and asking questions. The only problem with this is that I wasn’t putting much time into my school work, and it was showing with my grades. I did enough to just get through the first year of university and by that time I was making about $500/month.

A Bold Move

Instead of getting a summer job that year I decided that I would work on my own websites, and then also do some writing work for others to earn some extra money. My full time summer job the year before had me earning about $400 per week, and I figured I could write about 15 articles at $20 a piece each week and make just as much money after adding in my own website’s earnings.

I remember people would always ask me if I’m getting a “real” job (which continued for a few years as well). In my mind this was a real job. I was making just as much money as I would have doing any other summer job, and my websites were making more and more money each month. By the end of the summer I had created a few new websites, and they were earning over $1000/month combined.

I decided to take the year off of school and continue to build my online business. That ended up being one of the best decisions I’ve made in my young life. Throughout that year off I grew my websites and was making probably $3,000/month on average. I figured it would be smart to go back to school for an easier college business marketing class. I would learn marketing and business and have something to fall back on in case my income disappeared.

While in my first year of that two year program, I continued to work hours at a time on my websites in my room. At the time, I was living with three good friends so it was tough to choose work over stuff like watching sports or playing Xbox, but I was so focused on my websites and making a living working online that I buckled down and continued to put in the hours. I had my poker websites going and started to create sports betting sites as well, enjoying the NBA picks and parlays, which can earn me more extra money.

A Game Changer

Another game changer for me. I had an offer on my network of poker websites. One of the big time affiliates had contacted me via email asking me if I was interested in selling any of my sites. After some negotiation I ended up selling my network of websites for $80,000 (it worked out to $79,472 after fees). The decision was tough as those websites were generating a lot of revenue, but I had lost my passion for poker and started getting really interested in sports betting like 카지노 사이트, for instance.

Being 21 years old at the time I could have gone a while living off that money and could have bought a lot off stuff for myself and lost motivation in my websites and my business, but I knew even with that money I would continue to be focused. I paid off my car and invested most of the rest of the money back into my sites over the next year.

2010 was my first year making “six figures”, but that included a website network sale that wiped out a lot of my monthly revenue. I knew to get back to six figures in 2011 I would need to keep the daily grind going. I went back to school in September of 2010, but a few months in I decided that with where my business was I needed to put 100% of my efforts into it. I ended up dropping out of my college program in December.

Dropping out of college was a huge decision for me. At the time, I spent hours and hours debating it, asking others for advice, and eventually came to the decision. I drove to the college and filled out the paper work to drop out of my classes. Now looking back I am very confident I made the right decision. After dropping out I immediately got focused on my business and spent all of my focus on building my websites, instead of having to worry about going to class and doing school work.

I started to focus on one sports betting site that would cover all sports and everything sports betting. TheSportsGeek.com has come along way since it first went online, but it is now my biggest website and income generator. It gets roughly 1500-2000 visitors per day with over 50% of those repeat visitors (most which visit daily for betting picks).

Between The Sports Geek and my other smaller niche sports websites I ended up breaking the six figure mark again in 2011.

I think it was near the end of 2011 when I started branching out and creating fitness websites. I was (and still am) really interested in and passionate about sports and working out/fitness, so I decided to focus my efforts in those two areas. I knew of some fitness experts that had been making very good money with their workout related websites and products and thought I could do the same. I launched my first fitness product through Clickbank and tested out paid traffic. I burnt through about $3,000 from my ads and only made about $900. Looking back at it I probably didn’t test enough variations of my sales page, but decided to put that project on hold because it was taking up a lot of my valuable time and I was losing money.

My focus has almost all been on my sports betting websites like https://www.ufa88s.vip/แทงบอล/ over the past few years, and I’ve started membership type sites where I provide daily betting picks for three sports I handicap (NFL, NHL, and MLB). I started these as free websites, but again it was taking up a huge chunk of my time and I wasn’t earning enough money to make it worth my time. I had been told I should be charging for my picks because of my success, so I gave it a shot. I enjoy providing my insights to a large number of people so I kept my membership prices low. This has worked out great as I am now getting paid for my time and efforts.

My time and income for 2012 (and so far in 2013) has been split with about 95% of my efforts and revenue coming from my sports betting websites, 2.5% effort and profits from my fitness sites, and 2.5% effort and revenue coming from my personal Internet marketing blog where I test, review and recommend products for internet marketers. 2012 was my third straight year hitting the “six figure” bench mark that so many entrepreneurs look to hit.

I am truly blessed to have come as far as I have come so far with my business, but it hasn’t come without hard work. I will leave you with a few key points from my story that can help you build your online business.

What You Can Learn From My Story…

Work Hard – Like I mentioned a few times throughout my story, I would sit at the computer for 5-6 hours each night (after school and sports) working late into the night on my websites. There were a lot of 12 hour days at my computer where I would work from early in the morning to late at night. I still work almost 7 days per week on my business and although I don’t put in as many hours these days I am always trying to work hard.

Dedication – There have been tons and tons of nights that I’ve turned down stuff like going out drinking with friends so that I could work on my websites, or make sure I’m not hungover so I could work all day Saturday. I’ve got writers helping me now, but I used to spend about 10 hours each Saturday writing and posting NFL picks for my sports site, so I almost used to never go out on a Friday night. Working from home I could easily head downstairs and play Call of Duty, but I’ve continued to keep the dedication needed to grow my business each year.

Get Help – When first starting out I had a few people that would help me out all the time. They probably spent hours over the first year or two helping me with my websites and answering my “stupid” questions. You can’t be afraid to ask for help. Find a mentor and give them something in exchange. It doesn’t have to be money. A lot of people will be willing to help you so just ask – it is good karma for the person helping you (think pay it forward).

Follow Your Dreams – I was lucky enough to be a teenager when I started up my online business. I didn’t have a wife or family to support at all, so it made the decision a lot easier to go “all in” with my business dropping out of school twice. If I had a family I needed to support, or didn’t have the business built up to where I had it I probably would have finished school, but I know I would have went right into working for myself full time afterwards. Everyone has their own unique situations, but at some point you need to make an educated decision on if you should go “all in” yourself with your business.

My advice to others is to work on your online business while working a full time job. Wake up early or stay up late and work on your business. Once you are making more online than you are with your job, and you’ve got a good chunk of emergency money set aside you can decide whether you want to go all in and follow your dreams or keep at it on the side.

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If you’d like to continue following my journey as an online marketer you can check out my blog (DropoutGotRich.com) which I linked to above, or follow Kevin on Google+. I hope you enjoyed my story, and good luck to all of you just starting out!

How To Find Profitable Facebook Campaigns

As you may know, I use Facebook as one of my primary traffic sources for my affiliate marketing campaigns.

Facebook is an awesome paid traffic source because of the sheer amount of traffic it has. The truth is that if you can get Facebook working, you won’t even need to try any other traffic source because you’ll never be able to spend enough at Facebook – it’s that big. Some affiliate marketers are spending upwards of 6 figures per day on Facebook – and these are just lone wolf affiliate marketers. Imagine what big brand companies are spending!

While Facebook has a ton of traffic, it also brings the problem of competition. As a result, Facebook can be tricky to profit from due to it not being the cheapest place out there.

So then, why not use a service that helps you find real winning and profitable affiliate marketing campaigns on Facebook?

Meet SocialAdNinja

Enter SocialAdNinja.

SocialAdNinja is a Facebook ad spy service that gathers and harvests ads from Facebook and allows you to browse and search through nearly half a million (and growing) ads. You can then search for ads that are likely to be profitable by filtering your searches to ads that have been running for longer periods of time and ads that are promoting the same affiliate offers you are.

I recorded a 33-minute screencast giving an in-depth overview and walkthrough of SocialAdNinja. I’m still a bit sick so please excuse the coughing in the video.

It also starts off a bit slow, but gets pretty good around the 19-minute mark. I even find an ad campaign that would be great to copy (profitable campaign anyone?).

Since this is a screencast, I’d recommend watching it in full-screen and in HD (720p):

(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 it.)

Get 15% Off For Life

I don’t have a referral or affiliate link with SocialAdNinja, but have a promo code for you guys anyway.

Simply use the promo code: TYLERCRUZ when signing up to get 15% off your monthly subscription, recurring.

SocialAdNinja is currently $147 per month, so it’s only $124.95 per month with the promo code.

Use It Wisely

SocialAdNinja isn’t some golden wand that you can use and expect to become rich tomorrow. Instead, think of it more as a tool to help you brainstorm, or as some pieces to a puzzle where you need to fill in the rest of the gaps.

You can definitely find winning Facebook campaigns with SocialAdNinja and make a lot of money, but you will still need to put in the work and split-test things for yourself.

You shouldn’t have that hard a time making your money back (and then some!) if you look around for some nice gems to copy borrow.

Enjoy!

My 1% Cash Back Cheque From Visa

Last summer, I blogged about how I upgraded one of my credit cards by cancelling the old one and applying for one with higher cash back.

My campaigns were starting to skyrocket at that time, especially my spending (my ROI wasn’t so great!), and I wanted to take advantage of all the paid traffic I was purchasing with my credit card.

The post explains that the best card I could find at the time, for cash back (I don’t travel enough for a travel card to be worth it to me), was 1% (save for a somewhat sketchy 1.5% card which I opted not to try) – credit card perks in Canada are nowhere near as good as those in the States.

My old card was 0.5% cash back and had an annual cap of $250 (in refund), so that was definitely a pretty pointless card to have. My new one was 1% with an unlimited cap, although with an annual fee of $100 per year.

My Cash Rebate

I received my new credit card around May 2012 and have been using it ever since.

About 7-10 days ago, I received my first annual cash back cheque from Visa on this credit card. It is for the period of May 2012 through to the end of the year, and is exactly 1% of the total balance of all the transactions I made on the card during that time.

It ended up at $3,301.99:

While my "rebate" was for $3,301.99, I actually ended up making $3,201.99, after you factor in the $100 annual fee. It’s an important note to make, as it means that you probably only want to get this card if you spend at least $10,000 per year on your card in order to pay off the annual fee (although, I do have a lot of other perks with the card too such as auto perks and travel insurance).

Simple math will show that I ended up spending $330,199 on my Visa during the 8 months from May 2012 to December 31st, 2012, or an average of around $40,000 a month.

Never Spend What You Don’t Have

The point of this post is to show how credit cards are absolutely wonderful things to have as long as you aren’t careless or reckless with them.

I’ve seen too many financial shows or news programs where people bash credit cards and point to them as evil, when the fact is that credit cards are awesome as long as you don’t spend what you don’t have.

It actually kind of boggles my mind that some (a lot, perhaps the majority?) people put transactions on their credit card when they don’t yet actually have the money to pay for it. To actually buy "on credit", rather than use the credit card like a debit card where the money is coming straight out of your bank account.

It’s all part of the new "instant gratification" and "entitled" culture. Everyone thinks they deserve the latest car, Apple device, and smartphone. Nobody wants to wait or save up for anything anymore.

Basically, as long as you use a credit card as if it were a debit card, you’ll be fine. Most of the time, I actually have a negative balance on my card because I always overpay/prepay my bill/account. I never use my credit card if I don’t have the actual cash in my bank account to pay it off.

I never use my credit card for actual credit, but rather just as a payment tool to purchase things online – just like I do with PayPal. That, and the fact that I get rewards as well – that’s just a bonus.

Credit cards aren’t evil, they just take advantage of greedy people. And that is why I never feel bad for anyone who is in debt with their credit card company. It’s also why I don’t jump on the bandwagon and call credit card companies evil.

Anyhow, my rant is over. It’s just a big pet peeve of mine how everyone seems to have a new car, go on a lot of vacations, and have the latest gadgets and then complain that they don’t make enough and are in debt.

I Want a Bigger Cheque!

Getting back on track, my first Visa cheque was for $3,301.99, which is great, but I want my next one to be even bigger.

It’s far too early in the year for me to be able to accurately predict what my next one will be, but unless things really slow down for me, I expect it to be at least double. I should end up spending at least $700,000 on my card in 2013, which would be a $7,000 cash back cheque.

But hopefully things continue to improve and I spend over 1 million dollars during the year, which is currently looking pretty attainable/likely, which would mean a $10,000 cheque!

Hopefully one year from now when I publish an update to this post, I’ll be showing a 5-digit cheque instead of 4!