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They say good things come to those who wait, so who I am to disagree?

I’ve been so busy the past few months, the past few weeks especially. I have my hands in so many different projects that it can be very overwhelming at times. However, this week all my hard work seems to have paid off since I’ve had a number of new records and milestones on various sites and projects. This is one of those new records.

In my previous blog earnings update, I had predicted that July’s earnings would be somewhere around the $1,500-$1,600 range, and that my goal was to set a new record.

Well, July didn’t end up in that range, but I did set a new record. In fact, I completely shattered the old one by exactly $1,000.40 - what a funny number!

My July 2008 blog income came to: $2,746.59

Yee Haw!

My graph now looks like it took a dose of Earnings Viagra - coming to a website near you. (Please consult a guru before using Earnings Viagra. Earnings Viagra may cause extreme happiness, jaw-dropping syndrome, or tears of joy.)

The huge increase was largely in thanks to MarketLeverage. As you should know by now, I’ve been running my second MarketLeverage contest and have so far referred a total of 82 affiliates. They generated $20,292.80 in July, and since I get 5% of whatever they generate, I made $1,014.64.

Now you guys can see the power and methodology behind PublisherSpot.

I also got paid by AdToll finally. AdToll’s payment system is weird in that you don’t get paid until the advertiser who purchased the slot has finished their campaign with you. While the maximum amount of time an advertiser can purchase at once is 3-months, it means you have to wait up to 3-months to receive payment. This also explains why May and June saw no revenue generated from AdToll.

The $140 under the Other category is from a paid review I did via ReviewMe.

The pie chart below has undergone a significant change from prior blog earning reports. The $1,014.64 I made from MarketLeverage referrals in July really stirred things up. If it continues to grow, it will soon resemble PacMan:

For the same reason as above, the following chart sees the Affiliates wedge grow from an average of 18% to 26%.

Affiliate Sources

• MarketLeverage has recently been a great additional revenue source for my blog. In the month of July alone, my referrals generated me over $1,000 in commissions. This is not counting the money I make with them through my PPC affiliate marketing efforts.

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The following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.

There is certainly no shortage of affiliate networks out there. In fact, more and more are popping up all the time. With so many affiliate networks and the competition for new affiliate acquisitions being fierce to say the least, this review of XY7Elite.com may surprise you.

This is because 99% of affiliates are not even eligible to join XY7Elite. XY7Elite is, as the name suggests, for elite affiliates only. Essentially this means super affiliates. The absolute minimum prerequisite to joining is generating at least $5,000 in commissions per week. This is not a network for newbies or small affiliates.

While XY7Elite originally only allowed E-mail Super Affiliates (affiliates who promote offers via mailing lists), they’ve recently added a number of web offers due to strong affiliate demand.

XY7 vs XY7Elite

A lot of you may be familiar with or have heard of the affiliate network XY7.com. XY7Elite is simply an offspring of the XY7 network, but catered to strong affiliates who can generate big numbers and perform.

There are two main differences between XY7 and XY7Elite apart from the highly exclusive membership:

Pre-Tested Offers

All offers on XY7Elite have been pre-tested and have proved to run well. A lot of affiliate networks constantly add new offers all the time, but it’s usually left up to the affiliate to actually test which offers run well and which don’t, since basing things on the network’s reported eCPC isn’t all that reliable.

Paid Weekly by Wire

Since the application requirements of joining XY7 are so high, once approved, all XY7 applicants are automatically approved to be paid weekly and by wire.

Payment is wired out every Tuesday for commissions generated up to the midnight the previous Sunday. This means that if you generated $18,000 on Sunday, you’d see it in your bank account on Tuesday (or perhaps a day or two after depending on how fast your bank processes wire transfers).

Such a fast payment service is often essential for super affiliates since they are usually constantly growing and invest a lot of their income back into promoting new offers.

Payment is also available via a traditional check, although I’m not sure why a big affiliate would opt for that over a wire transfer.

Invitation Only

XY7Elite is by invitation only. You must be invited by an XY7 representative (usually your affiliate manager) or by a current XY7 affiliate doing at least $5,000 a week.

You may be wondering, since it is by invitation only, why did they purchase a paid review on my blog? I asked them the same thing. Basically, you can apply without an invitation, but will need to prove yourself first.

If you apply to XY7Elite and are not already a current XY7 affiliate, you will be asked to first join XY7 so that they can “see what you can do”. They are very adamant about only letting big affiliates in. This is truly an elite members-only program.

Bare Bones

XY7Elite is a “bare bones” system. There are no fancy graphics, motivational pitches, or tutorials. The features are minimal, and only the ones that are absolutely necessary actually exist.

Basically, you can find offers, grab HTML code and creative, and check your stats. That’s all an affiliate, big or small, really needs anyhow.

However, as the number of offers on XY7Elite continues to grow, an improvement on the offers page will be needed such as a search function and being able to sort the columns.

The Offers

I was going to compare the payout’s of the offers on XY7Elite to other affiliate networks, but wasn’t able to since currently all the offers on XY7Elite are exclusive offers, which is a good thing.

I spoke to the CEO, Kevin De Vincenzi, and asked him straight out just how lucrative the payout’s were and he was very adamant in telling me that they hold the best payout’s on the offers they carry. I asked him if he could guarantee that XY7Elite has the highest payout’s on their offers and he replied with:

“We built this network to ensure our affiliates always had the most exclusive deals with the highest payout’s. I guarantee it.”  — Kevin De Vincenzi, CEO of Rapid Response Marketing, LLC

At the time of this writing, there are 36 offers available in a number of different categories including Automotive, Business, Ringtones, Education, E-mail/Zip submits, and Finance to name about half of them.

More offers are being added all the time, since I’ve noticed a lot more from when I started reviewing and checking out the site about a week ago.

Support

Most XY7Elite members will probably continue to stay in touch with their existing XY7 affiliate manager and use them for support.

However, the actual CEO of both XY7 and XY7Elite, Kevin De Vincenzi, is often available for assistance as well. In fact, he is online and available pretty much every day for the majority of the day and night, and I’ve been able to get all my questions answered by him either immediately by AIM if he is online, or else later that day if he is offline, by e-mail.

Both XY7 and XY7Elite are a bit more casual in how they conduct themselves compared to other affiliate networks, but don’t take this casual approach as a sign of amateurism since XY7 has been around a long time and has many longtime super affiliates with them.

Basically, expect them to talk to you more like a close buddy than a traditional “representative”. This is a good thing, but may take some traditional people a bit off guard at first.

Conclusion

XY7Elite is truly an affiliate network for elite affiliate marketers. To be eligible, you need to be generating at least $5,000 a week.

The entire program is catered to super affiliates who can perform, and in return they get lucrative payout’s and weekly payments by wire.

If you’re somebody who is generating over $5,000 a week in affiliate commissions, you may want to consider checking XY7Elite out.

Paid Advertisement

I’ve received a lot of comments and requests from visitors lately asking how exactly to make money with affiliate networks like MarketLeverage.

Last month, I gave a pretty in-depth tutorial on how PPC Affiliate Marketing worked, so this time I thought I’d make an even simpler video which took PPC completely out of the picture.

After all, nobody ever said you had to use PPC networks such as AdWords and Yahoo Search Marking in order to make money with affiliate networks. It’s just one popular way. The only way an affiliate network differs from a CPC or CPM network such as Bidvertiser or TribalFusion is that they pay on a cost-per-lead or cost-per-sale basis.

Note: The video is catered to beginners. It explains how you can add MarketLeverage offers to your blog to make money.

Update: Vimeo has apparently banned my account because they don’t want affiliate marketing videos on their site for whatever reason, so I had to upload all my past videos to YouTube. I apologize for the very bad quality YouTube does to my videos.

The Wordpress E-mail plugin I mention in the screencast is called Email Users and can be found here.

Paid Advertisement

I receive a lot of e-mails from people asking me to promote their site, and I usually delete most of them without even responding. First of all, it’s clear that I sell paid reviews and paid plugs. Secondly, I’m far too busy and backlogged with my own posts to help promote other people’s sites for free.

But, on occasion, I will plug the odd site, contest, or post for free. This is one of those times.

So, why did I not delete his e-mail right off the bat? Simple. His site is all about customizing your photos and adding “bling” to them, and he took one of my photos, added some bling to it, and added it to the e-mail.

This immediately showed me what his site was all about, saved me time by not having to make the image myself for if I did post it, and most importantly - showed me that he valued my time enough to spend at least a few minutes creating the image for me.

Oftentimes, people send me pre-written cut & paste e-mails asking to promote their site, blog, or service, and don’t even bother to customize the letter. For example, it will simply say “Hi” instead of “Hi, Tyler”. I delete these types of e-mails without even thinking about it. I can understand how this may seem very rude or elitist, but the fact is: why should I spend a couple hours writing a post to promote their site for free when they can’t even spend a minute or two to write or customize an e-mail to me?

So, without further adieu, let me tell you a bit more about BlingEasy.com. BlingEasy is a simple free site that lets you customize your photo(s) by easily dragging and dropping animations onto them, turning them into an animated .gif format. The entire site is all all web based.

Here is the blinged-out photo that Joe from BlingEasy sent to me in his e-mail:

Haha. I love it. Sure, it’s incredibly tacky and there are white “halos” on the speakers, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? It’s just for fun! It’s fast, simple-to-use, and fun.

I actually heard about BlingEasy prior to the e-mail from other bloggers such as John Chow, but after seeing the image above, the site seems to be a bit more “powerful” that I originally thought. You don’t need to have Photoshop or have any graphic skills to make these images, yet you can still make some great customized images. This is what can make the site a success in my opinion.

Obviously, the the use of BlingEasy would be found most prominently in social networking and media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Users can “pimp” out their own images or perhaps a friends. It’s just the type of thing I can see people doing for their friend’s birthday.

I know that I’d much rather receive a blinged out photo of me than a stupid e-card since it’s a lot more personal than receiving a pre-built template that was made for the masses.

If I could make a few suggestions for BlingEasy it would be the following:

1. Make multiple “sister” sites built upon the same theme. While you can customize photos with imagery that isn’t directly related to “bling”, the theme of the site still remains apparent. I’d love to see additional sites, or at least multiple themes built perhaps in subdomains (Ex. rambo.blingeasy.com) such as  “RamboEasy”, “SexyEasy”, and “ScaryEasy”.
2. I’m sure that BlingEasy this isn’t the first or only site to come up with this concept, not being an avid user of social networking sites (I don’t even have a Twitter account), but it’s the first I’ve personally seen. And I think it’s done well, too.

   With that in mind, I think it’s imperative that Joe constantly improve and grow the site as fast as he can, because there will be imitators. And the best way to combat copycats is to stay one-step ahead of the game or else be large enough where the site will propagate itself.

   If left ignored, I can assure you that copycat clones will take over. I bet you that there are a few requests for “BlingEasy clone” on freelancing sites such as Elance.com already, if not soon.

3. Lastly, as a small feature improvement, I would recommend giving the user the option of positioning the “Blingeasy.com” logo in any corner of the image, instead of the default bottom right. There could be times where the text might interfere with the image/photo.

With that being said, I think that BlingEasy is a great site, and could grow huge. Girls especially eat this stuff up.

Good luck to Joe and his great idea. I wouldn’t be surprised, if Joe works hard, to see the site sell for some big bucks down the road…

If you haven’t entered yet, I highly recommend you do. MarketLeverage has put up so many great prizes that your odds of winning them are actually very good. I’m actually very envious of you guys and wish I could compete in my own contest! If I did, I’d be in 3rd place right now and would walk away with a Flip Mino Video Camera…

For those of you who have signed up, but are having trouble making any leads or sales, stay tuned. In particular, I’ll be showing how you don’t need to spend a penny and use PPC marketing in order to make money with an affiliate network, and will show you an offer that you should have no problems making at least $20 with without spending a dime.

Prizes

Before I get to the rankings, here is a reminder what is up for grabs. Full details of the prizes and contest details can be found at the original contest page.

Top Grossing Affiliates

• 1st Place: Dell 22″ Widescreen Monitor with Built-In Webcam
• 2nd Place: Sony PSP + Secret Agent Clank
• 3rd Place: Mino Flip Video Camera
• 4th Place: iPod Nano
• 5th Place: $100 Prepaid Rewards Card
• 6th Place: $100 Prepaid Rewards Card

Top New Affiliates

• 1st Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 2nd Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 3rd Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 4th Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 5th Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen

Random Blog Draws:

• 1st Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 2nd Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 3rd Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 4th Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 5th Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen

Current Rankings

Here are the latest rankings as of July 26th, 7:40pm Pacific time after less than 13 days in. I’ve now referred a total of 74 affiliates to MarketLeverage, 17 of which signed up during this latest competition.

Together, during this competition so far, they’ve generated a total of $7,975.80 in commissions. The current leaderboards are shown below:

CD8470, aka “The Behemoth” as I like to call him, has continued to show his dominance in the competition. He must really want that 22-inch monitor

But we have a new competitor in the running, and he’s on The Behemoth’s tail. He only signed up less than a week ago but has already secured 2nd place with nearly $1,000. From the pace he’s set so far, it doesn’t look like he’ll be able to catch The Behemoth, but if he scales his campaigns or adds 1 or 2 it certainly won’t be out of the question.

CD8137 has always played his role as The Tortoise - “slow and steady wins the race”. He’s never been flashy, but he’s consistent and solid.

CD8346 seems to be vying hard for 3rd place but can’t quite make it, at least yet. However, he does have a comfortable lead on 5th place.

CD8036 is another “slow and steady” competitor, however he seems to have a bit of a heavier shell He should consider working hard on his campaigns as the newcomer CD9050 is hot behind his heels.

For the new affiliates, we see the strong newcomer CD9189 easily take 1st place, and CD9050 secure 2nd. All you need to do is earn 1 cent and you’d be in 5th place right now and eligible for a prize, so sign up if you haven’t already!

So far, 8 people have blogged about this competition. That means that as it stands right now, if you wrote a blog post about this competition, your chances of winning a 2.0GB USB pen would be 55% . What else can I say? 

It looks like I may reach my goal of having the competition generate a total of $15,000 by the time it ends, however I’m not so sure I’ll meet my goal of also referring a total of 100 affiliates. So sign-up and help me reach my goal!

There is still 19 days left for this competition, so if you haven’t signed up yet, come on and join the fun! All you need to currently do is earn 1 cent to be in 5th place of new registrants and win a prize.

Plus, what better way to get your feet wet into affiliate marketing than to join a contest?

I’ll give you guys another update in a week from now. I hope to see your name on the leaderboards!

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any time to work on my campaigns yet again. I’ve just been so swamped lately, and things only look to get busier if anything. In many ways that’s a good thing as it means I have a lot of things going on and growing, but at the same time it means I can’t spend the time I want or need to on some of my projects such as my affiliate marketing.

I believe I managed to work for only 2-3 hours on my campaigns during the past week, with almost all of the time being spent on creating two new landing pages. I analyzed my landing pages and noticed that one was outperforming the others, but just slightly, and so I created the 2 new landing pages which are very slight variants of the one that was performing better than the others.

My change was very subtle on one of the landing pages; all I did was change the photo from a man to a woman. in the other landing page, I reduced (eliminated) busier areas of the page to try to make the call-to-action more apparent. I need more data to see how these landing pages perform, but so far the “woman” landing page has the lowest CTR of all my landing pages, and the reduced landing page has a 10% (53%) higher CTR than any of the other landing pages.

It’s too early to analyze the sign-up rate and EPC since, again, there is not enough sample data to construct a conclusion.

Anyhow, here are my latest numbers as of yesterday:

Wowsers, Batman!

-13.53% ROI! Yes, yes… I know. It’s silly to be so excited about losing money, but I’ve come a very long way and if the trend continues I might just make my goal of breaking even.

My update from last week showed a -19.57% ROI, making the past week a 6%+ improvement over the month’s average ROI.

Here is the progress of my total average ROI, taken after the first week and then every few days thereafter: -57.12%, -53.42%, -43.71%, -36.83%, -31.76%, -25.67%, -19.57%, and now -13.53%!

If you take the data from only the past week, you’ll find that I lost $0.95 which is roughly the break-even point.

I can’t wait to see how my numbers change in the next few days. I have to be honest - I don’t know how much longer I can keep seeing such great improvements each update, and it will probably start to slow down soon, but hey - here’s hoping I’m wrong.

SEOIntelligence has been advertising on my blog since early May. You may recognize their 125×125 banner on the left sidebar of my site. A few days ago they ordered a paid review as well.

Due to the immense amount of features that SEOIntelligence offers in their service, we both decided it would be best to conduct my review in a screencast video format. I had been wanting to do a review in the form of a screencast for a while, and so this was the perfect opportunity.

I knew there was so much to show and therefore tried to make the screencast as short as possible, but even though I talked fast it still ended up being 1-hour long! When I finished, I found myself sweating and being exhausted, heh.

Be sure to check it out. It is long, but it is a very comprehensive walkthrough and review of their service and even if you’re not interested in the service itself, you might learn a thing or two by simply watching.

After watching the review, visit SEOIntelligence and take advantage of their free 2-week trial.

However, after I finished second place in his MoneyBites Affiliate Challenge and won $200 for my efforts, I agreed to the interview as I felt it was the least I could do in return.

In the podcast we talk about how I started blogging, PublisherSpot, forum management and growth tips, and my recent foray into affiliate marketing.

The podcast is below:

The original post of the interview on MoneyBites.com can be found here.