Super Affiliate Blog Birthday, 1 Year Later…

One year ago today, I wrote my first post and the blog going live. Awesomely enough the blog went live on St.Patrick’s day… so it would seem I’ve had the luck of the Irish on my side. Thousands of comments, 2,100+ subscribers and 300+ posts later, the blog has become everything I had hoped for. Not only have I been able to help spread my wealth of information, but I have also met so many readers and other influential bloggers along the way. After attending BlogWorld back in November and Affiliate Summit just last month, it only impressed upon me that much more how important the blog is, and how many people actually read the blog that I didn’t even know about.

So what’s to come? The first nine months of running the blog were on a custom designed layout with no advertisements or revenue monetization in place. Once I met up with UniqueBlogDesigns at BlogWorld, ZacJohnson.com quickly went live with it’s new design, which allowed for monthly case study reports on how blogs can be monetized to turn a profit. Since then the blog has successfully be earning a few thousands dollars a month, while giving better exposure to top article posts, comments, picture galleries and top advertisers/affiliate networks in the industry. Through the life of this blog I will continue to post on industry news, new affiliate programs, marketing methods, conference coverage and my experiences over the years… things will only continue to get better!

Comparison Between Original Design & New Monetized Blog Design

When I first started ZacJohnson.com back in March 2007, it was my first attempt at running a blog, and I wanted to make sure it was done right. There is so much anticipation when you are starting a new blog. You want to provide the best content you can, but in the beginning you have no readers. However, as the saying goes, “build it and they will come“. I did my best to focus on providing quality content and tried to write a new post at least 3-5 times a week, now I try and get a least one post in daily. In the beginning it’s tough and we all hit “writer’s block” sometimes, but as you get more familiar with your readers and writing it gets easier. After working on the blog and writing for a few weeks, I went ahead with my first review, which was featured on John Chow’s blog. Now it’s becoming a passion… and something I look forward to everyday!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Here we are, one year later and I am so excited for the future. With the recent explosion of “Make Money” blogs, they seem to be everywhere. Some people are complaining, but I think it’s a good thing… even if some of these bloggers are new to the industry, I’m sure they still have something we can learn from. Happy St. Patrick’s Day and I wish you, your families and your blog/business or money making efforts all the luck and success of the Irish! (and a little luck from Rocky too)

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Farewell to My Best Friend, Super Rocky Dog!

A few months ago we brought Rocky to the vet for a checkup, and received the horrible news that he had cancer. What I thought would only be a few short weeks for him, turned into a glorious few months. As much as hated to, and would have kept Rocky forever, we laid Rocky to rest yesterday. Instead of being selfish and letting him wither away and suffer in pain, we gave him the gift of euthanization. Since moving into our new home and bringing Rocky in, we got to spend so much more time with him and keep so much better care of him. Now that he is gone, everything is out of whack and nothing will ever be the same. There are no amount of words I could write or express to show how special Rocky was to everyone he met.

Nothing will ever be the same without Rocky. He will be missed.

Since I work from the house, and Reena works outside of the house, it was great to spend so much time with Rocky. He would walk around the house and come strolling into my office room all the time. Even though it has only been a day, it is so weird and horrible without him. Just sitting in my office room now and hearing any creaks or house noises… I still think he is here and going to stroll into my room. Rocky would have turned 15 years old on April 1st.

It’s so important to appreciate everything you have. We never would have been able to give Rocky the great life and care he needed in his last months if I wasn’t able to work from home. I would wake up several times a night to check on him or let him outside and always keep him company during the day. Never once did I complain if I had to take him outside, make him breakfast or clean up after… I simply appreciated every moment I had with him. If you are thinking about getting a dog or pet, don’t forget about the thousands of homeless pets in animal shelters that would love nothing more than for you to take them home and give them a second chance at life.

We will miss you Rocky!

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How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!

First off, I would like to make it clear that this post is NOT to impress you, but to impress upon you what’s possible! This is a quick review on how I went from one of my worst years of making money online to my best year, and all it took was one big idea, one web site and several hundred hours of effort along with many sleepless nights. This is “How I Made $860,538.38 Profit in 4 Months!“.

MARKETING EXPERIENCE & RIDING THE WAVES:
Time and time again, I talk about how you must change your marketing niche every once in a while to continuously make new money online. Over the years I have done everything from content web sites, to sweepstakes and freebie type sites, to running my own affiliate programs and even permission based email marketing. In early 2004 I had one of my best years with making money online, then later on in the year things started to slack off and this continued on through most of 2005. At the time I wasn’t making much money and it was quite depressing. It’s very tough to get back into the groove when you hit a few underachieving projects in a row. In short, I was in a dip… and at the bottom of my latest successful wave. It wasn’t until October 2005 that I came up with my next big idea that would soon bring me my best months and year!

FIND A NEW IDEA & TAKE CONTROL OF IT!
Social networking was just starting to catch fire and for months I knew there was a way to profit from it, but I just hadn’t come up with an idea yet. MySpace had millions of users on their network 24 hours a day, there had to be a way to take advantage of this. Soon enough I realized, instead of trying to sell to all of these users, why not offer them something for free. I ran through some ideas and came up with my own site to provide free content for social network users. To make a long story short, my site and my content went viral extremely fast. Instead of having users upload their own content or have to search around for what they were looking for, I provided everything for free. In no time I was receiving thousands of users to my site daily. At max points I was pushing up to 180,000+ unique visitors per day, while pushing TERABYTES of data bandwidth. Imagine hosting thousands of images, viewed by millions across several different social networks!

MANAGEMENT OF MASSIVE GROWTH:
Just two months after going live with my new site, I was starting to accumulate some amazing hosting costs. Imagine the cost on hosting thousands of widgets, text applications and images, which are loaded millions of times a day across social networks like MySpace! The only reason why I was able to afford these insane hosting costs, was because of the massive volume of users I was receiving back to my site, not only through social networks, but also from Google and other search engines. You only need a small percentage of a very big number to click on ads, fill out surveys or take any action, to make money. In two short months I went from having a single dedicated server to having over TEN, then with the insane bandwidth costs added in I was paying up to $12,000 a month. At this time I was currently with EV1Servers.net, and leasing all of my servers. Since I’m not a tech/programmer type guy, I also had a server management team watching my servers constantly to make sure they were always running, just being down for a few minutes would have lost $100s of dollars. This server management team was not part of EV1Servers, and cost $1000 a month to manage all of the servers, and keep the servers balancers in place. By the end of the third month, I talked with my server management team and we decided it was time to for me to invest in my own servers and take out the middleman for hosting. I went on to order 17 servers from Dell, which are all held and managed in a data center now.

MONETIZATION IS KEY:
On average, my site was receiving around 100,000 unique visitors per day, and I was generating most of my ad revenue through Yahoo Publisher Network, ValueClick Media and CasaleMedia. It wasn’t until a year later that I would start testing CPA offers on the site. To my surprise, the CPA offers from networks like NeverBlueAds worked extremely well. Originally I had stayed away from promoting a few of their offers because I thought they were over saturated and wouldn’t convert. I finally took their advice and listed a few on the site and to this day they are still pushing some great earnings through the site.

TO EXPAND, SELL OR STAY THE SAME:
Back in April, I wrote a post asking the question… “To Sell, or Not to Sell?“… This was a question I had to ask myself when I was approached by a company that wanted to merge/purchase my MySpace resource site. I not only turned down their seven-figure deal, but I was lucky enough to not be one of the many sites screwed by the company, as they tried buying many other sites as well. Once acquired by the company, they would wreck the site with adult-like video content and I heard from several people on how they got screwed out of their owed money and contracts.

SUCCESS IS FOUND:
Two years, and over seven-figures later… my little site idea that rapidly became one of my most profitable ideas yet, is still running strong. Despite the fact that I really haven’t touched the site in several months, it’s still receiving over 25,000 uniques per day and still making a decent amount of change.

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EARNINGS DETAILS:
As I mentioned earlier, three of the main initial revenue sources I monetized my site with were ValueClick Media, CasaleMedia and Yahoo Publisher Network. While I did use other programs such as NeverBlueAds and Google Adsense later on, these three programs were heavily used during months of peak traffic. As for promotion costs of the site, during this three month period, there were none. No ppc Advertising either, everything was viral traffic and a couple links off my other sites. This write up focused on how I made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 months. The site is now well over two years old and has since earned over seven figures in profit/earnings.

ValueClick Media is a company that buys your web site advertising space on a CPM basis. From my stats chart below, you can see the monthly increase in revenue went from $243.63 to nearly $30,000 a month.

CasaleMedia provides the same type of service as ValueClick Media, but are more strict with acceptance into their program. They also have higher CPM rates, but usually purchase a smaller percentage of your ad space. Peak earnings with CasaleMedia were around $7,000 a month.

One of the major reasons for my dramatic increase in income, was due to the release of the Yahoo Publisher Network. This program, run by Yahoo, is basically their response to Google Adsense. Like Adsense, you are paid an unknown percentage for each click you send to the contextual advertisements displayed on your site.

It wasn’t til about a year after launching the site, that I would start testing with CPA offers from NeverBlueAds. To my surprise, the majority of offers I listed on the site performed extremely well. Even though I thought the market was over saturated on these offers, there was still a high demand. With the new revenue generated from NeverBlueAds, the site was able to pull in another $60,000+.

For any of the doubters, or photoshop addicts… Just to prove my legitimacy, take a look at the video below!

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Google Holiday Gift: USB Flash Drive & Gift Card to DonorsChoose.org

I just got my gift from Google for the Holidays, and I’m a little disappointed, but not so much surprised. I had read from another site that they were sending out some type of USB flash drive this year. Last year I received a sweet LCD Digital Frame that said “GOOGLE” across it. The package I received this year was a bit different. It’s contents were a 2.0 Gig USB Flash Drive that size of a Credit Card, and a $100 Gift Card to donate to any education program of my choice, through DonorsChoose.org. The $100 gift card to donate is a cool idea, but the USB flash drive seems kind of crappy to me. It’s awesome if you need to carry around a cool USB plug in your wallet and show off to your friends, but who doesn’t already have a USB, and I pretty much never use one. It’s also disappointing because a 2.0 Gig Flash Drive only runs $14.95 through TigerDirect.com! The digital picture frame last year was definitely much cooler.

With a last glimmer of hope, I plugged my Google USB flash drive into my computer to see if anything was enclosed in it. Unfortunately it was blank. How cool would it have been if there was a $100 Google Adwords coupon code or something. Why not entice your advertisers and affiliates to spend more, by offering something a little extra?

As for the DonorsChoose.org $100 gift card, I applaud Google for making the change for people to “have to” give donations to charity, (as I’m sure anyone working with Google is doing pretty well for themselves anyway). Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for donating and I personally make sure to do my part, but I really don’t like that this would seem to help Google so much in the end. Everyone who works with Google is always looking forward to what they will send out at the end of the year. Just search on last years LCD Digital Frames and you’ll see what I mean. Instead of sending something new and revolutionary out, many will probably be disappointed to see their gift, if a gift from Google to another charity… which will lead Google to a hefty tax deduction at the end of the year.

Anyway, it’s always cool to see what Google, Yahoo and other companies send out each year. I’m not sure if I received this gift as a Google Adwords advertiser or as a Google Adsense affiliate. As an advertiser, I only spent $11,724.24 this year on Google Adwords… and through promoting Google Adsense, I’ve earned $23,453.49 this year. If you haven’t received a gift from Google yet and are spending/earning anywhere near these numbers, hopefully something will arrive over the next few days! Nonetheless, thank you Google for sending out gifts again this year, as it seems more and more companies slack off each year and just send nothing!

Have you received your Google gift or any other packages so far this year? Also, what are some of the best gift’s you’ve received in the past from online companies?

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Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. Appreciate Everything!

The past several weeks have been quite hectic, and more than anything else, just a reminder how precious everything is and not so much to fret over the small stuff which most of us usually do. Here’s a little run down on how the past few weeks have went.

Reena and I moved into our new home and we were very excited to be able move her 14 year old lab, Rocky, in with us. In her old house he had a lot of problems getting in and out of the house because he has little to no muscle left on his back legs and hip area. Since moving Rocky into our new home, he has been doing much better. We’ve also been taking him to the doctor regularly to do everything we can for him to keep him comfortable. Over the past several months, Rocky had lost a ton of weight and we had no idea why. After bringing him to the vet, they said it could just be from him getting out and maybe from the stress in Reena moving out and other changes during recent times. We ended up changing all of his food and giving him all beef and high protein foods. We brought Rocky back again a couple weeks later and he was maintaining his weight. In doing everything we possibly can for Rocky, we also wanted to get his teeth cleaned, but they would have to sedate him since they do this with all dogs, but were very cautious since he was an older dog. We brought Rocky back for a few more health tests and the vet told us he has some mass build ups in his liver and that he probably has cancer. This was a few weeks ago and the news really hit us hard and sucks, but he seems to be doing pretty well lately. It’s really wonderful that I can work from home and spend time with him all day.

Next on the list of suckiness, two weeks ago Reena’s dad had a horrible diabetes attack and ended up going into the emergency room. What we assumed would be a one or two day visit to the hospital has now been a trip through hell. With drops in blood cell counts, a ton of tests, haven been given multiple blood transfusions and even had bone marrow taken for tests, nothing has gone right lately. To make things even worse, the doctor that was responsible for the bone marrow test, ended up poking him something like 40 times to withdraw the bone marrow. Not only has this left her father with excruciating pain for several days now, but his leg is internally bleeding down to his calf muscles from a bad procedure, which is now being worked on. We can only hope and pray he will be released and better by Christmas.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, over the past week my chest has started to bother me. It feels has if someone is sitting on my chest with all the weight condensed into one area. It was steadily getting worse and yesterday I finally decided to go into the emergency room. Reena and I drove over and my father met us there as well. After an EKG, xrays and some other tests, they said everything was mostly fine. Apparently the end diagnosis is stress, which would make sense with the way things have been going lately. (picture: I made sure to keep my hospital tag for my blog post… had to think about something while laying in the hospital for a few hours! ) Let’s see how this week turns out… hopefully I feel much better and Reena’s dad is released from the hospital and feeling much better.

As mentioned earlier, this is just a reminder of what we should focus on in life and not overwhelm ourselves with little things that really don’t matter in the end. Live every day like it’s your last, because you never know what tomorrow holds and time flies by way too fast. I’m not trying to depress anyone, and I focus this blog on "making money", but honestly, I would trade it all if anything was to happen to anyone I love.

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