Slow but Steady Wins the Race

May 1, 2006 Posted by Tyler Cruz

Good morning 🙂 Here is today’s menu:

  • Monthly Earnings
  • MovieForums Preview
  • Bookmark.com Update
  • Other Updates

Monthly Earnings

Well, it’s May 1st and I’ve kept with tradition and recalculated my daily and monthly earnings. Here are the results:

(I tried to present it in a table, but Blogger decided to be bad and had crazy formatting. I then tried to upload it via Blogger but again, Blogger crapped out so I had to FTP upload it. Hence, please enjoy it, lol)

So, to those who don’t already know, I recalculate my average of the past 6 months on the 1st of each month. The chart above therefore reflects the recalculations of the previous 6 month averages, not the income for that particular month.

The growth/trend is very optimistic, however, January and March were abnormally great months due to advertisers renewing or purchasing slots for 6 months or 12 months. This has a dramatic change on even a 6 month average. However, to compensate, my new projects should all be complete in a few months and should start to see revenue (albeit miniscule to start off) which will help provide a boost in income.

According to this chart, though, there is no way I’m going to meet my September goal of averaging $10,000 a month. Although, I believe I may reach an average of $6,000 a month by then.

Recalculating my earnings is always extremely scary. I want to see an increase each time I do it, even if it’s only by $1 a day. I’m always terrified it will be lower than the previous. I’m looking forward, not backward!

MovieForums Preview

Here’s a preview of MovieForums.org’s skin. I’m not all that happy with it, and am going to write a list of things I want changed/modified to the designer:

It should be up on the site in about a month I’m guessing.

Bookmark.com Update

Some bad news for Bookmark.com. I talked to my contact this morning and we discussed some numbers after he had some time to analyze the site’s data. He didn’t make an offer, but told me roughly around what he think they’d be able to bid. Unfortunately, they are bidding solely on the site’s type-in traffic earnings. This equates to a much lower number than our asking price; they are not factoring in the sheer value of the domain itself.

So we’re going to let the testing period run for a few more days then he will give me a real final number, although it doesn’t look like anything is going to come out of this.

So that’s unfortunate, but my search will continue.

On a positive note, the site is making between $3-5 a day from type-in traffic alone, and the owner will be pleased to hear of this, as I can put up some AdSense for him and make him an extra $150 a month.

Other Updates

I’ve been working a little bit here and a little bit there on all my sites, but here are some of the more notable updates:

Affiliate Site

I’ve decided that I’m going to start an affiliate site. That is, a site focused on selling merchandise/leads from an affiliate perspective solely, instead of CPM/CPC. While I’ve done my fair share of affiliating in the past, and am an affiliate with dozens of poker companies with PokerForums, I’ve never built a site as an affiliate for products.

A few things prompted me to try this. One was that I’ve never tried it before and the industry intrigues me. The other is from revenue magazine, which is virtually 100%-affiliate focused. I want to try my hand in this, and am excited.

I’ll have to pick a niche/topic/subject first though, and progress will be fairly slow as I have a million other projects on my plate right now, but I will indeed pursue it.

However, this will be the last project I add, I swear!

Project AA

I’ve spoken to my long-time programmer/developer about the status and progress of Project AA. He said it’s 20% done. This equates to about 15% done, as I’ll be hiring a web designer to go over his basic framework and make it all pretty.

I’ve been thinking, and I believe that this project will most definitely be one of my major sites soon after launch. There is just massive need for this site in the webmaster industry. I really can’t believe there hasn’t been more of these made. And the way in which this is being constructed… it’ll just be fantastic. It will also be greatly beneficial to me in so many ways, the biggest being that I’ll be forced to ‘test’ and research things that will, I believe, provide me with a wealth of important information.

I can not wait for this project to launch… 🙂

Replayer.org

I haven’t heard from my programmer for Replayer.org in about a week. I’m beginning to get a bit antsy about this project.. it’s taking a while, and I haven’t seen much progress in the past 3 weeks. If I don’t hear from him within a day or two, I’m going to start to get back on his ass again.

I’ve poured much too much time and money (Oh, God, the money…) into this to let it start to slide.

MMAForums.net

MMAForums.net is going well. The skin is done, and the site already has a fair bit of discussion on it:

Threads: 100, Posts: 689, Members: 27, Active Members: 26

Granted, most of these are from paid members, but only about 90% or so. I have a few members who aren’t paid members, and they are returning and posting.

However, I need to go cry to the company I hired to help me market the site. ARGHH.. What’s with this, I search long and hard and pay a lot of money to purposely target reputable and top professionals in their fields, and lately I’ve just been getting.. not screwed.. but.. ugh.. you know how it is..

Anyhow, that’s my update for today. Good luck, and good earnings to ye!

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Posted: May 1st, 2006 under My Websites  

9 Responses to “Slow but Steady Wins the Race”

  1. John D says:

    Where can I get the revenue mag?
    Saw a few people talking about it.

  2. Ryan Amos says:

    The magazine’s website can be found here:

    http://www.revenuetoday.com/

  3. Tyler says:

    Hi bas!

    You are from sleekskins, so you are obviously biased.

    That being said, how is it coded bad?

    Tyler

  4. Bas! says:

    No Tyler, that has nothing to do with it.
    ANY XHTML/CSS coder can tell you it’s coded bad. Nested tables are used for everything on the page.

    Not to mention, there are 100+ errors on almost any page while the default vBulletin skin only has a few or none per page.

  5. Tyler says:

    Are you talking about HTML validity? Let’s be realistic here – only like 0.001% of sites conform to the W3C standards.

    Face it, you’re resorting to
    pathetic tactics to gnash away at your competition.

  6. Bas! says:

    What I said is true and many XHTML coders will agree with me.
    I wasn’t pointing out the HTML validity but the use of nested tables.

    vBulletinSkinz isn’t even my direct competition as their skin designs are way more expensive and therefore attract different clients.

    And I’m not the kind of person that would (need to) do that.

  7. Jon says:

    Tyler Durden-

    You know you can hit at least $7k by Sep 06 if you melded your ads into the design..

    Mook Jon

  8. Tyler says:

    Hi Mooky,

    I’m sending you an e-mail via your bloggy blog. Let me know if you don’t receive it.

PeerFly

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