I feel like I am running on fumes at the moment. There’s been a ton of issues with rakeback payments etc for Cellsino Poker. Nothing too big - but basically Everleaf were super confused about the rakeback payments, and first didn’t make them, when when they made them it was only for February, and they either rounded up or down(so one person due $3.47 got $3.50, another person due $1.06 got $1).

Anyhoo basically just a pain in the ass, and it’s been keeping me busy all day - and all week to be honest - I just did a search for “Cellsino” in my e-mail and there’s been over 70 e-mails sent out by me in the last week wheeee. Just haven’t had time to write here yet, but I am going to lay the smack down on Everleaf tomorrow, and get all this sorted. As well as write more here, because I have lots to write about!

However now sleep beckons.

Way back in 2003/2004 I worked with an awesome affiliate manager in Claire L., who worked at Partnerlogic, which has Intercasino, Interpoker etc. under that brand.  She’s from the UK, and was just a phenomenal affiliate manager.  I promoted them strongly mainly due to her, and even though I inadvertently sent a lot of bonus whores there and was costing them money some months, we still had a great relationship.  Right from the beginning when I only had 3-4 players, to the end when I had over 3000 players there  she was just phenomenal to work with.

She left them back in late 2006 I believe, and my relationship with Partnerlogic was never the same, although this was mainly due to the fact that whoever they hired to replace her was absolutely useless at responding to e-mails etc.  Claire went to work with a new program Affiliate Club, but I was promoting too many casinos at the time already, and their poker room was on the boss network and I only promote Fortune Poker there.

So fast forward to London of January 2009, and I met up with Claire and we chatted, and I finally agreed to promote Affiliate Club.  Well I was all set to do that this month when I got the bad news that they had recently sneaked in a change to their T&C.  What it basically says is you can send them 12,000 casino players in January 2009 and make them $8 million dollars, yet if you don’t send them one new player in February 2009 they can cancel you as an affiliate, so you lose any future commission on those 12,000 players.  Awesome, eh?

So I MSN’d Claire, and told her that unfortunately I wasn’t going to be working with her due to the new T&Cs.  I was quite disappointed as I was looking forward to working with her again.  Well then I got the good news from her - she was leaving there the end of this month, and told me where she is going next.  I’m not sure if it’s public information yet so don’t want to write about it, but this is a place I already promote but have been asking them for a dedicated account manager so we can move forward, and BOOM, just like that, everything has worked out

Today’s a great fucking day.

So I thought it might be interesting to provide weekly updates on my latest project, which is the website http://www.BuyDVDsForSale.com. Throughout these updates, I will give insight as to how the site is doing in regard to visitors and income, as well as give an inside perspective into what I actually do as a webmaster.

I’ll go into a bit of detail about the actual website, seeing how it is the first week and there isn’t much stats to talk about.  For the consumer or visitor, the website will provide them with a list of DVD deals.  If an online retailer puts DVD, be it movie or TV show, on sale, it’ll be posted on that site.  So people can keep up to date on the site, via visiting it, RSS Feed or a daily e-mail, and can keep track of what DVD deals there are.

Furthermore, the site will hopefully capture people searching for deals in google.  For example if you are wanting to buy “Batman Returns” on DVD, you might search google first for “Batman Returns DVD Deal”, and hopefully find that website.  So along with providing sales, whenever there is a highly anticipated movie being released on DVD, I will find the best price for it and post it.

From a business point of view, I make money when the web visitor clicks thru my affiliate link, and spends money.  So for example - you visit the site, you see Moonlight: Complete Series for sale, and you click the link to go to Amazon.  You add it to your cart and buy it for $25.99.  I earn a percentage of that sale, and that’s how I make money.

The percentage I earn depends how well I do.  For example right now I earn 4% of all referrals, so I would earn $1.04 from that $25.99.  However when I have did referrals for 6 items, it goes up to 6%.  Once I hit 31 items, its 6.5% and so on.  The highest rate possible is 8.5%, which is achieveable once you have been responsible for 3100 items being shipped.

At this time, I don’t have any financial goals with the site.  I have no idea at all how weill a site like this will actually do.  Assuming I spend 20 minutes a day adding DVD deals to the site, and say 350 days a year for that, that’s going to be a total of approximately 116.5 hours a year.  If I value my hourly rate at $100 an hour, I’d have to make $11,650 a year net for the site to be successful.  Is this achievable?  I have absolutely no idea at this stage, but I’m going to give it a go anyway.  I feel with my experience in regard to search engine optimization etc, I should be #1 in google for all DVD Deals & Sales related terms by September.  If it looks like I’ll make $2500 a year or less I’ll sell the site, and if its between $2500-$7500 I’ll look into hiring someone to do the updates.

I do not plan on using Google Adsense or anything to try and bring in people right now - I’m going to focus purely on posting deals, and rely on search engine results, so I can get a better understanding of the market.  Until the end of February, my one goal with the site is simple - to get it doing well in google, and have google indexing the pages daily.  This can be tough, however if I update it regularly and keep the code clean, as well as get links from people, I should be okay.

So the site was done and basically launched on Thursday, January 15th.  I’ve already got indexed in google because well - I’m awesome - although Googlebot hasn’t returned since its first visit.  That’s okay - it will take time - and I expect it to come once a week for the next little while.   So far I have 23 pages of unique content which is a great start, and hope to add 2-3 items a day, to convince Googlebot to visit daily.

At this point I wasn’t expecting any stats to talk about, but we do have some.  Of course, the majority of these are useless visitors - you see I plugged the site on here, and also on one of my gambling sites(just to help get it indexed).  My wife also put it on her facebook, and e-mailed family & friends of the URL.  So all these people came to visit.

However as I said - these visits are generally useless - because it’s curiosity clicks.  If a friend tells you to check out a website you’re most likely going to check it out, but you really aren’t that interested in the subject matter.  So I don’t expect much from those visitors(and got nothing).

The visitors I am more interested in, which will come over time, are the people searching for things that I am able to provide.  Looking for a cheap deal on The Shield Season 6?  Boom, they find my website, they find the deal, they click through and they buy.

So far we’ve had no specific hits - just one search engine result so far, which is “dvd deals USA”.  This actually isn’t bad at all - this is actually quite good - it’s someone that is interested in deals in general, and that’s what my website will provide.  Someone who is looking for something specific clicks through my website and they’re gone forever(or until the next search engine results which hits my site), however people looking for deals in general are more likely to subscribe to the mailing list, bookmark the site, visit daily and click through my links often.

So that’s basically it so far.  I’ve had 50 click-thrus to Amazon, but no sales so far.  I’m going to give the site until we start getting search engine results daily, before I start analyzing things.  For example I’m able to see what people click - for example, link to Wall-E has had 8 clicks(the most), Firefly the Complete Series 7 clicks.  However there is no point looking at that till my real target market starts coming in.

Anyway that is all for this weeks update. Hopefully this stuff is interesting to you guys because I find it fun to write about.

…seriously.

I talk to tons of my sub-affiliates a day, as well as fellow affiliates.  I talk to friends who have thought about or even tried to start websites.  Everyone has this one goal: to make money online.  Yet time and time again they fail, and they don’t understand it.

Me neither.

Oh, I understand why they don’t make money online.  I just can’t understand why THEY can’t see it.  Seriously - it’s not that hard.  It’s supply & demand - find something that people want, then give it to them, in a way that makes you money!  It’s something you can get started in a day!

My latest venture was a two day process.  Here’s what I did:

Day One:

1. Looked around online at affiliate programs to see what I could market online.
2. Wrote down a list of ideas, then used programs like Wordtracker to see how popular certain phrases were and see if I could find a niche.  For example - you could have a website with book reviews, but there’s a lot of books out there.  So you could narrow it down to buy fiction books or fiction book reviews.  Narrow it down even further to mystery fiction.  Hell, narrow it down even more to buy john grisham books online.  Look through the stats, and get a general idea of how many people are looking for whatever you want to market.
3. Look at your competition.  Key in phrases like buy john grisham books or mystery fiction book reviews and see what your competition is doing.  See how many sites there are that could compete with you.  If you google “buy john grisham books” right now, you’ll see that there isn’t much competition out there, so this could be a site you want to do.
4. Brainstorm.  I like to take a pen and paper, make a pot of tea,then go relax outside, smoke, drink tea and just brainstorm.  Jot out ideas for what I want on the site, what I think people are looking for etc.
5. At this stage I like to sleep on it, get an early start the next day and most likely have more ideas.  By sleeping on it, you get your brain more relaxed and are able to think better.

Day Two:

1. Buy a domain.  If you don’t have hosting, buy hosting(fuck I’ll give most of you guys free hosting).
2. Set up a content management system like Wordpress.  Install a theme/template from one of the millions of free ones out there.
3. Install any necessary plugins.  Things like “All-in-one-SEO Pack”, “Google Sitemaps” and “Duplicate Content Remover” are 3 examples.
4. Install Google Analytics for stat tracking.
5. Write at least 5 pages of content.
6. Sign up at the relevant affiliate programs, and add links on the written content.

And boom, you’re done.  Sure I simplified that a bit - but fuck, it really is that easy.  The “Day Two” part you could seriously get accomplished in like an hour to two hours.  Depending on the site and your mood, you can either write content every day, or every few days, or once a week or whatever.  While doing this you spend time analyzing your google stats, seeing what phrases visitors are coming to your site via, what they are looking for - and guess what - you provide that for them.  If someone googles the cheapest price to buy The Firm online, you create a page that tells them that exact fucking information!  Then guess what happens - they google, they find that page, they see it’s $5 at Amazon or whatever and they click the link to go buy it, and just like that you’ve made money.

Seriously people - this shit ain’t fucking hard.  If any of you want me to help you do anything like this, just PM me on NPP.

And with all that - I now present my latest project - hey, do you buy DVDs online from time to time?  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a page that listed all the latest DVD deals, so you can keep tabs on what DVDs have just went on sale at online retailers and so on?

Daily DVD Deals / Sales for USA & Canada.

Yep, that fucking easy.

Well now my personal and urgent To Do List, after like 2 years, is finally complete, it’s time to move onto the Website To Do List.  I spent some time today organizing it, and there are 163 items on it.  Much like penises, some are big, some are small, but I’m going to attack them with eagerness anyway.

I’ve also made a list of the important websites I need to get up ASAP which also should be relatively easy to get started(ie: 2 days work).  I’m going to start doing at least one of them every weekend from now until they’re up, because really I am fucking sick of sitting on all these domains.  Once I get them up, I really only have to add content to them, so it shouldn’t be that freaking hard.

Anyhoo, I realized today I still had to watch The Ultimate Fighter Season 8, so I’m gonna go make some veggie chilli and get started on MIR VS NOG.