David Pitlyuk

Between seeing some decent traffic from Twitter over the past couple days, and Darren’s post about it…I’ve decided to try and join the bandwagon.  My main gripe is that I can’t update using AIM…which is the only IM client that I actively use.

Anyway, we’ll see how it pans out over time…I can see it being useful to share little links and gripes here and there.  If you are a Twitter, make sure to follow me:

http://twitter.com/davepit

For those that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s like a mini-blog.  You can only post 140 characters at one time, so a post may be something as simple as “Off to the slopes for the weekend”.  Short and sweet.

Last week I had a post go live on the blog that generated a good amount of buzz around the blogosphere, What Do The Top Bloggers Drive?. As of right now the post has had 77 Diggs, 44 comments, and has been posted about on quite a few big blogs you may have heard of:

• John Chow dot com
• Twitter - A bunch of big name interneters (Yes, I made that word up) Twittered about it, including Guy Kawasaki, Ryan Caldwell, and Anne Swift
• CrunchGear (Sister site for TechCrunch)
• Jalopnik
• Self Made Minds
• SEOmoz
• AutoBlog Green

That’s not a bad list to get a few linkbacks from, huh? If you read the article you’ll know that I obviously had to get in touch with all of the bloggers…many of them get hundreds of e-mails a day, so how did I get them to respond to me? Read on…

How To Get A Response

I sent an e-mail to all of the bloggers I wanted to hear back from on Thursday, January 3rd. Here’s how quickly I received responses:

As you can see, the majority of responses came within 1-2 days of sending. You’ll also notice the subject I used for some of the e-mails. I always personalized by the blogger name so that they knew it wasn’t just a spambot:

Scott - Quick Questions

I also used the subject “Quick Questions” because I wanted the blogger to know that I wasn’t sending an e-mail to waste their time. I needed an answer, and my e-mail needed to get right to the point. As I mentioned before, these guys get hundreds of e-mails a day…you cannot bore them with a long e-mail. Get right the point, or your e-mail will end up in their delete box. My e-mail almost always went something like this:

Hey John,

David Pitlyuk (http://www.davepit.com) here. If you have a free moment to answer a few questions, I’m compiling info for a hopefully inspirational post about what cars some of the top bloggers drive.

1. What kind of cars/vehicles do you drive now?
2. If you had to buy a new car today, what would it be?
3. If money was no object, what car would you drive?

If you have any pictures of your vehicle(s) that you’d like me to use in the post, please feel free to send them my way.

Thanks for your time!
Dave

You can see that I got right to the point. First, I personalized the introduction, then I made a quick introduction, told them I had some questions, gave them a good reason to take 30 seconds to answer them (inspirational post), and asked the questions. Simple as that. Now keep in mind that the article I wrote and questions I asked were fairly unique I think…they probably don’t get asked that too many times. This generally will make them be more inclined to answer. If you’re trying to get some sort of interview, and you’re asking things that you can find answers to on 100 different websites with just a Google Search, don’t expect a response.

ShoeMoney wrote a good post, “10 Reasons I Delete Your Email“. Who better to hear from in terms of what will get deleted then from an A-Lister himself.

They’ve Responded, Now What?

First of all, I want to note that not everybody responded. I e-mailed a lot more bloggers, so don’t get discouraged when you don’t get a response. For example, Leo Babauta from Zen Habits responded saying this:

Hi Dave … normally I would try to help you out but at the moment I’m swamped. Would you mind if I respectfully declined?

While it was nice of him to respond, he could have easily just not responded (Thanks Leo! - Although he could have probably answered the questions in the same amount of time he took to write that ). You never know what the situation is on the other persons end.

I didn’t respond to everybody’s e-mail as soon as they responded. I waited until my post went live so I could give them a link and thank them. I did this for three reasons:

1. I didn’t want to send thanks AND another e-mail with a link…I haven’t said it enough, these guys are already extremely busy
2. I wanted to send them a link to the post so they could see, and also with any sort of hopes of them linking back (which worked of course)
3. I’ve now created a relationship or contact with each blogger. This can be useful for future scenario from both my end and their end. For example Guy Kawasaki and I went back and forth several times…he even showed me a new project he was working on that isn’t public yet!

I hope this information helps you get in touch with an A-Lister should you need to…just make sure you need to. Nobody likes to have their time wasted.

Readers of my blog will know that I’m a huge car person, you can see my own progression of vehicles here. I’ll add my current stable of vehicles to the bottom of this post for new readers that are interested. I believe that cars can be an inspiring thing for other entrepreneurs (at least they inspire me), so I wanted to see what some of the top bloggers on the net have in their garage. I got in touch with a bunch of bloggers, and while not everybody responded, many did (for those that didn’t, contact me and maybe I’ll be able to do a part 2!). What I found is that many of the bloggers, even the ones that have a high net worth, don’t really drive anything insanely impressive…a few don’t even have a car. While seeing a top blogger driving around in a Ferrari is inspiring, it’s also inspiring to see some of these guys not have anything special.

On with the list:

John Chow

John Chow dot com

Current Car: Acura TL

If you had to buy a new car today, what would it be: Porsche Carrera GT

What would you drive if money was no object: Chevy Volt

Jeremy Schoemaker

ShoeMoney

Current Car: H2 Hummer

If you had to buy a new car today, what would it be: I just went yesterday and looked at the 2008 h2. I do 1 payment 2 year leases and mine will be up this may.

What would you drive if money was no object: I would still drive a h2. I live in Nebraska (land of monster snow drifts) and it comes in handy to have a full time 4wd vehicle that I can also help other people with.

(more…)

Blog of the month is a new feature I’ll be doing here where I feature some of my favorite blogs as well as readers of this site. I have to admit that this is not an original idea, in fact I’m stealing it from John Chow. The first month I launched this blog (back in March 2007), John featured me as his blog of the month. Since then he has not done another blog of the month (probably all of those ReviewMe’s taking place ), and I remain the one and only.

His feature definitely helped kick start my blog, and it was a nice way for him to “give” to the blogosphere, and open his readers up to other blogs that he is interested in. Albeit the fact that I don’t get nearly as much as traffic (yet), I decided to do the same thing.

Who Is Derek Semmler and What’s His Site About?

For the first featured blog of the month, we’ll start with Derek Semmler dot Com. This is Derek Semmler’s personal blog. Derek is your average guy…working the 9-5, but trying to break free in the world of blogging. You may have noticed him around here posting comments from time to time, or me posting comments over at his blog. He runs a couple of other blogs outside of his personal one, My New Choice, which is about being financially responsible, and Dad Balance, which is about working dads finding a healthy balance between their careers and family life. That’s quite a bit on one persons plate for blogs that are always up-to-date.

Derek and I both started our personal blogs in March 2007, among others, but he is the only one that I has been keeping it up on a continuous basis. As a blogger, posting new content in a fairly defined pattern is important to grow your blog and gain trust among readers…Derek is making sure of that. The thing that I like about Derek’s blog is his interesting writing style and his choice of post topics. I will normally read his posts and get into whatever he’s writing, to me that makes somebody a good writer. In fact, that’s why I’ve posted comments from time to time, not just because I’m being nice, but because I feel impelled to.

So what does Derek write about? He generally covers a broad range of topics, from what pisses him off to advice for other bloggers. I could definitely say that we sort of have a similar theme in terms of content…we write about business, but then there is also our personal sides that are very apparent to the posts.

I highly recommend giving Derek’s blog a shot for a few posts and see if you like it. Make sure to subscribe to his RSS feed, and don’t forget to subscribe to mine Here’s a few posts you can start off reading:

• How to avoid airport problems
• How to improve public bathrooms
• Why I will never spend another penny at Best Buy
• Stop the insanity : Anti-Croc Movement
• A-List bloggers making excuses for BlogRush
• 12 blogging tips to improve my blog

How Can You Become Blog Of The Month?

Don’t ask to become it!  I will choose blog of the month on my own, but you can post comments and interact here to get on my radar.  I would say that could definitely increase your chances of being featured.

Last month I launched my first true affiliate marketing project, Carbon Fiber Gear. Over that past month I’ve generated 26 sales from eBay and 1 sale from Amazon, which has made me about $50.

In the back of my head I was pretty sure that the majority of sales were going to be for carbon fiber wallets (which I have been promoting pretty pro actively) or something else carbon fiber…but I was very wrong. Of the 26 eBay sales, here’s what was purchased:

• 8 carbon fiber wallets
• 8 coins (same user)
• 1 camera flash kit
• 1 dell laptop battery
• 1 electric guitar
• 1 greddy side-mount intercooler
• 1 harry potter action figure
• 1 motorola jesus faceplate
• 1 mustang wheel adapter plate
• 1 planet earth dvd
• 1 motorola portugal flag faceplate
• 1 turbo charger warning sticker

As you can see here the majority of my commissions have actually come from stuff that has nothing to do with carbon fiber…I’m just the gateway for the user to get to eBay.  On top of that, it’s interesting to look at the breakdown of the amount of time it took for the user to buy something from the day they clicked the affiliate link:

• 17/26 (65%) purchased the same day
• 2/26 (7%) purchased after 1 day
• 3/26 (11%) purchased after 2 days
• 1/26 (4%) purchased after 4 days
• 1/26 (4%) purchased after 5 days
• 2/26 (7%) purchased after 7 days

This is where we can really see the power of the cookie drop.  35% of the purchases weren’t made on the same day, but because a cookie was dropped I still generated revenue from that user.  I’ll definitely be watching similar stats to this over time (hopefully with a lot more data to work with), so we’ll see if the numbers stay about the same.

Last weekend I launched Carbon Fiber Gear, my first site in experimenting with affiliate marketing. For more of a background on the site, check out the post I made earlier this week. I wanted to talk about what processes I went through to get the site launched so quickly.

What First? Domain Name

When I thought of the idea to do a blog about carbon fiber, I started off looking for a domain on GoDaddy (Use coupon code OYH3 for $6.95 domain). I searched for a variety of things like carbonfibeproducts.com, carbonfiberstuff.com, etc. Using thesaurus.com I found the word gear, and gave that a shot…luckily it was available, so I picked it up right away.

I later found out that carbonfibergear.com had previously been registered, but expired back in October. It looks like it was just a placeholder, lucky me

Setup Hosting

The next step was to setup the host in order to get this new .com up and running. We have a dedicated server through my IT company, Tri Megatech, so this made it easy enough for me. I set everything up on the back end, and uploaded a clean install of Wordpress to run the site.

Setup The Site

Here’s where a majority of the time was spent to get the site going. Once I had a clean install of Wordpress on the server, I went out to find a clean looking, well coded theme to work off of. This is just a side project, I didn’t want to spend much money or put too much time into it until I know it will be worth it. I’ve always been a big fan of Chris Pearson’s work. For those of you that don’t know who he is, he did the design for Copyblogger, a popular blog on copywriting. Chris converted Copyblogger’s old design into a theme, which I picked up and slightly modified to look the way I needed.

I popped up Photoshop, and I already had an idea of how the logo should look. A few minutes later and with the help of a couple suggestions from Crystal, I had a nice logo design.

Another important aspect was setting the site up for SEO so that it could get picked up by Google as quickly as possible. There are a few standard things I do when setting a Wordpress site up:

1. Setup a Google Analytics account and implement it on the site in order to track stats
2. Install the all in one SEO pack plugin
3. Install the Google XML sitemaps plugin to automatically build a sitemaps file
4. Install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin in order to have my feed tracked through Feedburner
5. Install the subscribe to comments plugin so that anybody that leaves a comment can choose to get an e-mail when there are any updates
6. Install the related posts plugin to easily promote content within the site
7. Setup the site through Google Webmaster Tools

Content and Making Money

Luckily I already had some basic accounts setup to monetize the site like I had in mind. I wanted to start off with Amazon, eBay, and AdSense. I found some carbon fiber products that I wanted to write about online, and wrote a few posts so the site wouldn’t be completely blank for new visitors. I also setup a few post ideas for future posts I wanted to make in order to get things rolling.

Once that was done, the site was ready to launch!

Little Bit Of Promotion

Unique carbon fiber parts are very “diggable”, so I’m hoping that works out for me over time.  I’d like to use Digg, but I also want to wait a little bit until I have more content on the site so that I can hopefully have a higher retention rate.  I figure in about 1-2 weeks I can start trying to utilize Digg (unless the readers Digg themselves :)).  I’ve noticed a good amount of traffic already come from StumbleUpon, but this isn’t very valuable traffic…lots of people just going in and out.  I think the best traffic will be organic (aka search engines), but it will take some time before I see a buildup of that.  I’m also doing some conservative advertising using AdWords to target traffic directly to posts that I can monetize on.  We’ll see how that works out over time…I have noticed really high CTR percentages on the ads I do have (8%!).

Conclusion

Setting up a new site is pretty easy, especially once you’ve done it a lot of times!  If there is anything you think I’m missing, please let me know.  Are your new site processes pretty similar?  If anybody needs any help or has any questions, I’d be happy to do what I can, just ask.

Last week I made a post about a carbon fiber wallet that I really liked. I posted about it on a couple car forums I was a part of because it’s something I knew guys from there would be interested in as well. The posts received a good amount of comments, and was even re-posted on some other forums. The cool thing for me was that I had actually used an affiliate link to eBay, which ended up getting a couple hundred clicks and converted into 3 sales that made me a few dollars.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with eBay’s affiliate program, you make a percentage of eBay’s revenue from any sales, as well as $25-$50 if the user has to actually sign up for eBay.

I know that carbon fiber car parts are quite popular, and I’m sure there is a ton of competition in that market. The wallet got me thinking about any sites out there that specialize in non-car part carbon fiber products…such as gifts, accessories, novelty items, etc. I started my search, and I could not find anything out there.

*BING*, that’s when the light bulb turned on in my head. This was a great niche to get into, carbon fiber is popular, it’s not that cheap, and nobody is really in the market. So I started thinking about how I can try and monetize on this, and I thought of a few ways:

Build An eCommerce Store

I could try and go out there and find a variety of carbon fiber products, build an inventory and/or a list of drop shippers/suppliers and open a store. This is potentially a great idea, but it will take a good bit of money and time to get everything setup. At the same time, it’s probably also the most potentially profitable option.

Create A Store, But With Virtual Products And No Inventory

As an alternative to the above option, I was thinking about creating a store with products in it, but when you click “Buy Now” it actually takes you to a product page on something like Amazon via affiliate link.

This isn’t bad, I would basically find as many products a I can find, and really work on promoting the site to generate conversions.

Blog It

The last option I was thinking about was doing a blog about featuring cool carbon fiber products. Obviously each post can have affiliate links in it to generate conversions. The benefit to this option is that I can really optimize for SEO to generate as much organic traffic as possible. Carbon fiber has enough of a cool factor to potentially have some Digg worthy articles I can write to boost some major traffic through the site.

I decided to do the blogging route, with a potential in eCommerce. The blogging route allows me to build the site over time, and become the trusted source for carbon fiber products. As I analyze which posts are generating the most interest in a product, I can consider actually having an inventory of that product and selling it directly to increase the amount of money I can pull in. First things first though, build the site up, generate traffic, and make some money through affiliate links.

On that note, I’m pleased to announce Carbon Fiber Gear dot com!  I’ve already posted a few cool carbon fiber products on there, so feel free to check it out, post some comments, and help get things going :)  I’ll make a post later this week about the process behind actually getting the site setup and launched so quickly, so look for that.  This is really my first opportunity to do any sort of affiliate marketing, so I expect this to be quite a learning experience.   If you have any suggestions or feedback, please share!

Traffic

Traffic has definitely been on the decline for this blog, and this month was no different. I’m still getting a decent amount, but it has been going down. I’m not very concerned about this because I know things I can do to increase traffic, and much of it is coming from Google Images in the first place. I need to work on getting more non-Google traffic. Take a look at the number of uniques and pageviews over the course of this blog life:

We can see that over time the traffic has been decreasing, but there will always be ups and downs.  I’ve been talking about a new design forever, and things keep coming up that delays that.  I really want to put an emphasis on building traffic, but I’m also half tempted to wait on going full force until I’m ready with the new look.  I also understand that design is not everything, but it’s a personal decision I am making.  I’m now hoping to have it launched between the end of January/beginning of February.  Or maybe I’ll try and get it launched for the new year, but that would deviate from a plan I have.  We’ll see, stay tuned

Monetization

Last month I mentioned that I had something unique and unexpected that brought in some revenue for the blog. I had a request for a company that wanted to purchase the rights to an image in order to use it as a backdrop for a trade show booth. I totally did not expect anything like that, and I ended up selling the rights for $300. It may have been the easiest $300 I’ve ever made. On top of that, I did my first private ad sale (and you’ll see more of that in November), for a big increase in revenue:

Text Link Ads: $6.92
Kontera: Kontera was removed from the site for now, so I will no longer be pulling money in from this.
AdSense: $11.74
Private Ad Sales: $225

Total: $243.66

Not much new going on here besides the $225 in private ad sales that I mentioned last month.  Until I start increasing the percentage of traffic away from Google Images, I can’t see these numbers growing too rapidly.  AdSense was only located on the homepage and the bottom of each post.  I just added a 468×60 bar to the top of single post pages, so I do see those numbers increasing this month.
RSS Subscribers

RSS subscribers have remained steady, so there is no major news to report here.  In the charts we can see two days of downtime from Feedburner.  We can also see a slight dip in the middle of the month, and then a slight jump back up to the 100 level.

Search Engine Goodness

The last two months have shown a good 20% decrease in search engine traffic.  This month it dropped some more, but only 6%.  Is this a sign of some leveling off?

Lets take a look and see which keywords were used most to find my blog last month:

1. e92 m3
2. virginia mansions
3. texas de brazil coupon
4. chima steakhouse tysons corner
5. mansions in virginia
6. blog title ideas
7. chima tysons corner
8. www.davidpitlyck.com
9. best corporate websites
10. chima tysons
11. northern virginia mansions

That’s the 2nd time #8 davidpitlyck.com made the list.  For those of you that don’t know, you can just go to DavePit.com if you don’t want to worry about trying to spell my name   e92 m3 continues to top the list.

Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in November:

1. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
2. April (Month)
3. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs:H-O
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. Cars (Category)
6. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
7. Off Topic (Category)
8. Picture gallery of mansions in Northern Virginia Part 1
9. New Virginia Civil Fee For Traffic Tickets Is Nuts
10. A Raunchy Dora The Explorer

Top Referrals

Here’s a list of the top referrals that do not include search engines:

1. StumbleUpon
2. tnmedia.nl
3. Nevblog
4. Naver
5. Technorati
6. Delicious
7. Facebook
8. Smashing Magazine
9. Sanalkurs.net
10. TimeForBlogging

Something that has always bothered me about Wordpress are the automated thumbnails. They are way too tiny, and I still want to have clickable images that look normal when I post them. By default Wordpress will make a thumbail 128 pixels wide:

I like to make my images 500 pixels wide for this blog, but it would be nice if I can choose to upload some bigger pictures, and allow you guys to click the 500 pixel version to see the larger version by default. Luckily I found Baron’s Blog that shows just how to do this. It’s pretty easy, it just requires modifying one file in Wordpress:

Login to your site via FTP and go into your wp-admin/includes folder. You’ll see a file called image.php. Download that and open it up in any text editor. Around line 153 you’ll see a line like this:

$max_side = apply_filters( ‘wp_thumbnail_max_side_length’, 128, $attachment_id, $file );

Simply change the 128 to whatever number you want your thumbnails to be and re-upload.  I changed mine to 500:

$max_side = apply_filters( ‘wp_thumbnail_max_side_length’, 500, $attachment_id, $file );

That’s it, so now when I upload my 640×480 picture, it will make a 500 pixel thumbnail that will click through to the full 640×480 picture:

I’m sure there are better image management solutions via plugins, but this suits my needs for now.

There are a ton of people that are celebrity obsessed. That’s why sites like TMZ and PerezHilton are so popular. Celebrities are usually the forefront of the latest fashion trends, and companies can sometimes launch a product with huge success just by having celebrity backing. It’s the reason why gift bags at big events are worth tens of thousands of dollars…companies want to get their products in the hands of celebrities.

So where am I going with this? I’m sure you’ve seen the major trend lately with higher end purses. From Coach to Louis Vitton, women everywhere are eating these bags up…and it doesn’t come at a cheap price. These bags range from hundreds of dollars to thousands, and you see them everywhere (many times they are knockoffs).

With such a huge market of women wanting these high-end bags, what can you do to monetize on that? A couple of internet companies have thought of a great way, and it looks like they are raking in the big bucks for doing so. They are renting out these bags to women using various payment models. The concept is why buy a $2,000 bag just to have it sit in the closet a month later because you wanted to get the next best thing. You can simply rent the bag for a fraction of the cost, and when you’re done, return it for a new one. This way you don’t have a ton of bags taking up closet space and being a waste of money.

Two companies that were profiled in a USA Today article are doing this, Bag Borrow or Steal, and From Bags To Riches.

Bag Borrow or Steal

BBOS was launched in 2004, carrys over 3,000 bag styles, has 450,000 members, and rents out tens of thousands of bags per month. Their payment model is based on a membership fee which ranges from $5-$10/month. Members pay less for a bag, which ranges from $6/week-$275/month + $10 for insurance and $10 for shippping. I’m assuming the 450,000 members aren’t 100% active, but lets say half of them are, and those half are paying the bottom line $5/month membership fee. This means BBOS is pulling in $1,125,000/month or $13.5M/year in membership alone at a very conservative lowball estimate. If they are also renting “tens of thousands” of bags per month, lets estimate the minimum at 20,000 at a very conservative $40/month. That’s $800,000/month or $9.6M/year. Add $10 for insurance to get another $200k/month or $2.4M/year to the bottom line. Add the same number for shipping as well.

All of this put together equals out to a conservative estimate of gross sales being $2,325,000/month or $27.9M/year. I would say that’s not too shabby at all. I’m sure that they also reduce their expenses a ton by reselling the bags after they are completely outdated, or too worn out to keep renting.

One thing to keep in mind is that BBOS also rents out other high-end products such as jewelry, so this may skew the numbers somewhat (which is why I tried to do a conservative estimate).

From Bags To Riches

FBTR was launched in 2005, and is quite a bit smaller than BBOS. They use a different model where you just pay a monthly fee to rent a bag, from $35-$300/month. Standard shipping and insurance up to $100 is free. Of course, they recommend paying the $40 for full insurance coverage. They carry 350-500 different bag styles, and rent out “thousands” a month. Lets work the numbers. We’ll say 2,000 renters a month paying 25% of the $35-$300/month fee ($101), which equals out to $202,000/month or $2,424,000/year. We’ll say that 15% of the 2,000 convert for the insurance for $12,000/month or $144,000/year. Obviously much smaller then BBOS, but still a lot of money, and growing I’m sure.

I think these are great examples of ways to monetize on a trend.