How I made over 30k in 1 month with free-ipod type sites...

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PFNetwork

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I'm pretty new to this forum but I see it can be a very good place for advice and help. I wanted to share my story in case it'd help for anybody.

Early 2005, I got involved with freeipods.com. I went to forums, did my research, blah blah -- I ended up getting about 3 ipods, over $3k in cash, and some other toys for "free" from this site and similar sites. I'm sure most of you know how these "free" sites work -- they're not really free, they require you to complete a bunch of affiliate offers or refer friends to complete offers. After doing my research I knew who was legit and who wasn't so it enabled me to get a lot of free shit. (PS -- don't use freeipods.com or any of their sister sites now -- the company has turned to shit and will only give you headaches.)

So that started it. I bought my first free-ipod-esque script for $125 and set that baby up. Had 3-4 websites the first year, I think I earned about 40k. Not too shabby for my first real online venture. 2007 exploded for me though. In the first 5 months my revenue was about $80k, with over $30k coming from the month of February alone. All from affiliate earnings.

Most of the revenue was from a new GPT website I'd opened. I'm pretty good at taking existing ideas and making them better -- so people got wind of this new site I'd created and started to really go hard with my site.

Soon after I came out with this site, the copycats came out. I came across over 20 similar websites within the year, all of them promising better and faster. I think I lost my footing around this time because the revenue just wasn't the same anymore after April. Plus I admit -- I got fucking LAZY, this is the WORST THING TO DO when you're going up! You need to step it up even more and ENSURE your top position. I thought I'd be pretty set for life but it didn't even last a year.

The copycats were just the beginning. There were a lot of factors but that was the beginning of the end. With a lot of stupid factors in place, my profits continued to slide down.

Right now I don't think these types of sites will be making that kind of money for anybody... Maybe the top players but the field is pretty full right now. I have a guy working for customer support related stuff but I'm seriously thinking about just selling the whole shebang (got about 6 sites in our network) and just using that money for funding future ventures.

If anybody has questions, feel free to ask. All I want to do at this point is to learn, grow, and make some damn money. I'd also love to make connections -- I know we all have different areas of knowledge, different skillsets and ideas, and if a few of us got together as a group I think we could accomplish some rad things (separately but helping each other). PM me if you want to be a part of this group ;)

I'd also love to hear about anybody else's homeruns with affiliate marketing. You can always learn from someone else's success.
 


Well that's pretty cool, but there's definitely always money on the table for things like that, I think. For me, the defining moment was reading through my logs for once and finding out that the crappy sites I'd made for fun were pulling in fuckloads of traffic, but the stuff I'd optimised, planned and primped were barely making waves. So I stopped doing stuff I hated and stuck to what I enjoy doing.
 
Good story there.
Only way to stay at the top of the game is to take a gamble on what's going to be the year's MUST HAVE product before other people even think of getting on board. You're totally right about laziness being the real killer.

If you don't mind sharing, what do you think you'll be up to in 2008?
 
Can you explain what is a "GPT" site?

On these types of sites do most people not complete all the offers? How many iPods on average did you give out per month? Was that $30K all profit? Did you promote PPC, SEO, or both?


Thanks!
 
This type of site doesn't sell for a good price on the market. Most sites go for 12Xmonthly revenue. GPT is more in the 5X - 6X range.
 
clownstep said:
Can you explain what is a "GPT" site?

On these types of sites do most people not complete all the offers? How many iPods on average did you give out per month? Was that $30K all profit? Did you promote PPC, SEO, or both?


Thanks!
Click to expand...

GPT= Get Paid To

People complete offers to receive points. Once the user accumulates enough points, they then buy the item(s) promoted.

I think the hardest part about GPT sites is finding offers that allow incentives and then making it a good value for the user because most of these offers today require an actual purchase.
 
clownstep said:
Can you explain what is a "GPT" site?
Click to expand...

Joining the question.

I have done lots of PPC but it was all for redirects and very simple click-through landing pages.
What I really want is to create a few websites ( a network ? ) To promote with every method available.

So, is "GPT" the type of site I want to make ?
 
Why don't you quit making excuses why the market is bad and do some hard work and dominate the niche again. After that then you can tell us how much it sucks. Figure out what they're doing and do it better. That's what they did to you.
 
One of my sites is a GPT site. Its currently dominating the niche that its in and during certain months it has done up to 50k+ net. It takes alot of work to stay #1 and to constantly add new features, giveaways+contests, etc etc.

It sucks into the market so late especially when most networks have pretty much either gotten rid of most of their incentive offers and new offers are hard to come by. There are only 4-5 networks I use now that are still doing well for me. However the days of easy trial cc offers with high payouts are pretty much gone.

As someone has said, if you choose to sell the site you generally won't get more than 6x monthly revenue for a GPT site.
 
Apologies for such a late reply, didn't know anyone responded...

HarveyJ, for 2008 I'm going in the direction of building directories and helping brick & mortar businesses rank in the top 10 for their keyword phrase and charging for it. I'm currently working on a restaurant directory for my local area, will let you know how it goes.

zlatan, I don't really recommend you use a script for these type of sites. To stay at the top of your game you need to constantly be offering more features, better service, etc... and with an encoded script you're basically depending on your coder to implement things for you. I asked my coder if I could buy an unencoded version and he said no. Made things VERY difficult because there were tons of features I wanted to add and I just wasn't able to.

Clownstep, I gave away a lot of other things besides iPods. My profit was 1/3-1/2 of the total revenue I was pulling in. I promoted in PPC and via forums, word of mouth mostly did it for me amazingly enough. PPC didn't do shit.

It can definitely be hard to find good affiliates that allow incentive traffic, and doubly so for cash-based incentive traffic, but being in this biz for a few years, I've built up a pretty good list of affiliates to use.

shithappens, I'm done making excuses. I would try to make the site better but my hands are tied -- my stupid script is encoded and I can't modify it the way I want. Besides, I'm sick of this line of work. I'd rather do something else now, I've got my fill of the freebie world.

wdsguy, I probably have heard of your site if it's that popular. I'd condemn you to hell and all but I know I can't really expect zero competition. It's what makes us better and forces us to improve.

I don't care if I only get 6x monthly revenue for my sites. I'm perfectly happy going in a totally different direction.
 
Did you promote the 'free' ipods etc honestly? If you were one of the many misleading the poor sheeple into thinking they were getting a better deal than it was then maybe it's karma...

I was so tempted to get into this game, but I really fucking hate bullshit advertising that wastes my time and not many people are gonna drop their email or zip in that box if you tell it to em straight.

Gl selling your sites, sure you've learned a lot and can apply it to whatever direction you take.
 
There are so many unscrupulous companies out there that make it sound so easy to get a free ipod or other gadget of the year but then make it impossible for a person to complete their requirements. There were a lot of times I could've fucked people over and taken advantage but I never did. I always paid out, always shipped people what they were owed, and never hid any of the requirements for doing so. In this biz it can be hard to do the right thing; I've seen dozens of companies come and go, too tempted by greed and laziness. Even ones that started off legit in the beginning went that way, after years of being good.

I've got my morals. Shame that so many others let theirs collapse.
 
PFNetwork said:
There are so many unscrupulous companies out there that make it sound so easy to get a free ipod or other gadget of the year but then make it impossible for a person to complete their requirements. There were a lot of times I could've fucked people over and taken advantage but I never did. I always paid out, always shipped people what they were owed, and never hid any of the requirements for doing so. In this biz it can be hard to do the right thing; I've seen dozens of companies come and go, too tempted by greed and laziness. Even ones that started off legit in the beginning went that way, after years of being good.

I've got my morals. Shame that so many others let theirs collapse.
Click to expand...
Out of curiosity, how do you keep those morals if you decide you don't want to continue the site? No matter how you cut it it seems like shutting it down would be seen as a "cut and run" type thing.
 
I know what you talking about. My best for a GPT site was 10k in a month. And it was with in the first 2 months. I feel that I started really late March 07 and pretty much incentive offers went down hill after that. There were so many great offers in 2006 and early 2007.

But I seriously don't understand how some of those advertisers made any money at all. Like for example true.com had a free trial that paid out arond $35 in march 2007. The user could just cancel within 7 days or use gift cards. So how they made money off of that is beyond me. And there were tons of offers just like that.

Most of the offers now a days you have to pay more then just shipping and a lot of the offers are e-mail/zip submits. Which doesn't have nearly as high a payout as some other offers. So the business model is a lot different. How you going to give an ipod away when all you have zip submits and surveys that pay $1? The user would have to do 100's of them. And for the most part people are impatient. When before when the offers were good you could do about 2-10 offers and get an ipod. (depending on the site if it was referral based or not) But there was way too much fraud in the incentive industry that advertisers said fuck it.

P.S. If you plan to start a GPT good luck make sure you do a lot of research. But I personally don't think it is worth the time.
 
xmcp123 said:
Out of curiosity, how do you keep those morals if you decide you don't want to continue the site? No matter how you cut it it seems like shutting it down would be seen as a "cut and run" type thing.
Click to expand...

Not at all. I put a lot of work into the site and I'd hate to see it die. If I take your point, you're saying the only morally right thing to do would be to keep up the sites until I'm dead and buried; not an option. I'm offering the winner 30 days free support as well. Of course I'd be depending on the new owner to be honest but if they aren't, well, I can't really police them.
 
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