DealDotCom Update
I was recently asked if DealDotCom was still making me any money. When I last provided an update I was 3 1/2 months into using DealDotCom and had the following stats:
Tier One Affiliates: 62
Tier Two Affiliates: 263
Profit Made: $392.01
After analyzing my stats a little bit I decided I really needed to beef up my down line if I wanted to continue making money. Knowing that John Chow was on my Tier One list (he is no longer there, I’m not sure what happened, and that is a big loss), I pinged him asking him to provide an update post on how well he has done with DealDotCom. While he did reply stating that he was planning to post an update on his blog, it never came.
Since then DealDotCom was slipping, there was a period of time that I didn’t make any sales, so I basically gave up on it. I figured the products were not of the same quality, and the “newness” factor had worn off. After being asked how it was doing for me, I logged back in and analyzed my statistics.
As of October 24, 2008, I am up to 96 Tier One affiliates and 270 Tier 2 affiliates. This is up from the end of December, with very little to no work done to promote DealDotCom.
Here is my earning chart for DealDotCom:
As you can see after 2007 my profits slipped greatly, however remember I had all but given up on DealDotCom. It is however encouraging to see that so far in October I have made $16.00 from three (3) sales, one from a Tier One and two from a Tier Two. The last promotion I did was my blog post in December.
With that being said I am off to try to get some of my Tier One affiliates to promote DealDotCom on their blogs. If they sign new people up my second tier will get larger which means more money for me with no work. Unfortunately my biggest Tier One (John Chow) is no longer listed, however I was able to recognize another large player Jon Waraas.
Jon made a post titled, DealDotCom It Really Works, back in October 2007, so I sent him an email asking him if it is still making him money with it and if he would update his blog readers with his progress. We will see if he makes the post, I’m guessing he won’t, but I figured it was worth the chance.
If you have a website that targets webmasters or marketing visitors I’d encourage you to give DealDotCom a try. Not only do they offer some great products at big discounts, the affiliate program can’t be beat.
Turned Down from Market Leverage
So I’ve been toying around / working on affiliate and web development projects for the last eight years. Back in College I did a lot more web development and web hosting and slowly started into making sites of my own and monetizing them. I started making decent money with affiliate programs but those of you know me, my life kind of switched directions and I sold / ignored the majority of my sites for a while.
Lately I’ve started getting back into web development. I have a couple of blogs going, a membership site in the works, and a few affiliate sites. I’ve once again started researching the different networks and reading how various folks are making money. I’ve also toyed with PPC, however I’m not a fan for the amount of time it takes.
After reading about Market Leverage on JohnChow.com and TylerCruz.com I decided I needed to get into their network as its the current “big one”. I decided to enter Tyler’s contest to see if I could take one of the new sign up prizes. From reading about Market Leverage I applied on their site and was expecting a phone call. Now, I’m getting back into this game so I figured I would have to sell myself a little bit in the phone call, but hey, if a guy who doesn’t have a website and is just promoting zip code offers can get in it shouldn’t be a problem. right?
Well, instead of getting a phone call I received this email:
Hello Dan,
Thank you again for applying to MarketLeverage. Unfortunately, we are unable to approve your application at this point. Please contact me with any questions or to receive the specific reason why we can not approve your application at this time.
Thanks,
Sal Guarino
President
So instead of getting the opportunity to speak to an affiliate manager and talk up some of my past sites, my current sites, and my plans on utilizing Market Leverage to build back up my network of sites, I received an impersonal email from the “President”.
With the way Market Leverage presents itself I wasn’t expecting a form email… disappointing. Kind of goes against all of the reasons I wanted to be part of their network. They present themselves as working with bloggers and connecting with their publishers, but can’t even follow through with a phone call?
Looks like I won’t be winning Tyler’s contest…
Keeping Customers After a Disaster
Recently The Planet, a large web hosting company that has numerous data centers, experienced an explosion in their H1 DC. At one point over 9,000 servers were offline. It’s been fun to watch the commotion. I am very happy that I am no longer in the hosting business (with the exception on one non-profit site) since the two dedicated servers I had at one point were located in this DC. No, I never used The Planet, but The Planet bought out ev1Servers.net which used to be rackshack.net.
Anyway, Douglas Erwin, CEO of the Planet, recently announced the compensation for customers affected by the outage. It ended up being two months free service and 10% on new services for the rest of the year. Most customers were expecting one month free, so the second was a surprise. There was a twist though, the second month of free service will be in December. Why would they do that? Why not get it out of the way right now? While some folks were speculating it was to keep their cashflow up in the short term, I don’t think that was the answer. They did it to keep customers from jumping ship! Folks who were looking to leave will stick around to get their free month in December! If The Planet can keep a customer until December, they probably aren’t going to leave. Smart, if you ask me.
If you are still in the hosting business, this should serve as a reminder for the need of local backups, offsite DNS, load balanced servers in different geographical areas, your customers contact data, and lots of caffeine!
Resolution Followup
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to expand my little web development company, Missing Arrow Publishing.
I’ve been struggling trying to decide what I want to focus on, I have a great number of ideas but so little motivation to follow through. The only site that I have really “spiced” up is Scouting News which based on its topic will never be a large money maker. I tried to do some work on Joke It, but unfortunately the back end which is protected by a zend optimized script is broke, and at this point I don’t think there is anything I can do to fix it short of rebuilding the whole CMS.
Sites I had wanted to develop:
1) Wii Rat – I’ve lost interest in this topic, but will try to build up the blog and sell it. I obviously need to come up with a theme and build up some posts to start getting some keyword interest.
2) CSP Corner – This is the site that I am the most excited about, but will take the most work. I have a coded design, but realized my php skills are very rusty and are slow to return. There is a demand for this niche, I know how I can monetize it, and I would have fun running it. I just need to get the CMS coded so I can start gathering data.
3) Camp Skits – I’ve had fun doing the “research” for this site, but haven’t done much else. I was curious as to how much search traffic I could get with this topic, so I threw up a sample page, and have been amazed at the stats I’ve seen with no promotion. Once again my rusty php skills have slowed me down greatly, which bothers me as this is a very simple script. I thought I had it all set up but I kept getting an error that was frustrating as I couldn’t discover the source, so I stopped work on it for a while.
4) Green Website – yeah, nothing… couldn’t even find a good domain name yet.
So as you can see, things are slow going. I really hope to get some sits set up so I just have to maintain them as I could use the extra income. I know CSP Corner won’t end up being a low time involved site but it is based around a hobby so I’m not too worried about having to dedicate a large chunk of time.
Why did I post this? No, it wasn’t to entertain my large number of readers 
It was to help motivate me to get moving.