David Pitlyuk

Carbon Fiber Gear originally started out as an experiment for myself in affiliate marketing.  The idea was to highlight carbon fiber parts and products, some that utilized affiliate links, and others that did not.  Through the time that I’ve had the site launched, I’ve taken it into a few different directions.

Originally it was just a blog, powered by Wordpress, using a free template.  I then later launched an eBay store on the blog utilizing the phpBay script.  Afterwards I created a custom design, and converted the phpBans script into BANS.  Now I’ve hired my first contributing writer, and the site is really starting to progress into its own real brand.

In the past I hadn’t really taken advertising too seriously on the site.  I had run some AdSense, and it brought a few dollars here and there.  I wanted to start selling some real advertising, so I had to setup a plan.

At first I created a 300×250 spot on the top left sidebar, and wanted to offer it up for $150/month.  The spot was to be exclusive, so one advertiser would fill it, and would run on 100% of the impressions for the month.  A couple of days ago, I decided to change that 300×250 spot to 2-4 125×125 spots that will cost $25/month each.

This will allow me to sell a variety of spots and not count on just one advertiser.  I also will only be accepting month to month contracts as opposed to multi-month contracts at a discounted rate because the site is growing fairly quickly…and $25/month is more like an introductory price to get advertisers in the door.

Once I had everything setup, I wrote up an advertising page with information advertisers would need.  All of the advertising is served using Google Ad Manager for tracking and trafficking purposes.  Google Ad Manager is fairly complex, but once you understand the system it’s very nice.  Shoemoney has praised it as well.

While I don’t expect advertisers to come knocking on the door, I suspect if I actually go out and try to sell the spots I wouldn’t have too much of a problem considering the low cost, amount of traffic, and very targeted carbon fiber niche.  I’m still not very driven to work on the advertising at this point in time, but the opportunity is now out there.  I suspect this will be a big part of Carbon Fiber Gear in the future, and I will continue to create new opportunities as the demand progresses.

As you may know, I’ve been pretty busy on a few new designs (This blog, Carbon Fiber Gear, and dpitMedia). All of these designs were custom created from the ground up by yours truly. Many many hours of work is spent on these designs, so it’s always nice to get any sort of recognition for the work. All three sites were just featured on a couple of design showcases:

We Love WP

We Love WP is a showcase site that features the best Wordpress powered sites on the net. They recently featured both this blog and Carbon Fiber Gear!

One Page Love

One Page Love is another showcase site, but specifically features sites that are only one page. dpitMedia was a perfect site to fit that need.

A buddy of mine owns FullSingle, which is the same idea other than the fact that they only feature one site at a time (although you can see the archive of sites)…except he hasn’t added yet

I’ve been wanting to create some sort of umbrella/holding company for a while. The idea is to essentially have one company that is the main company for all of the sites that I do. This is beneficial for tax purposes, and just ease when launching new sites that are making money in similar ways.

Finally, with inspiration from Derek Semmler launching his own similar company (Red Staple Media), I decided to just do it. Low and behold, dpitMedia was launched. I did a pretty simple one-page design for the business that highlights some of the public projects that I have (this blog included). Although the site looks pretty simple, it was a huge pain getting it to look the way I wanted. A huge thanks goes out to these three guys for helping me figure out how to get the code looking the right way in order to work:

• Mubs from Suffolk Software. Mubs has a ton of really cool web projects. Most recently sites like ShouldRedesign.com which is like a hot or not for websites and MyTimeZoneIs.com which is a cool application that allows you to share what time zone you are in.
• Tom Lauck from Deseloper.org. I found Tom when he started following me on Twitter. Tom is a designer and developer, and his Deseloper blog has some really great posts if you dig through it.
• David Blanchet from ClimaxDesigns. You may know David’s work through sites of his such as LogoPond and StandardsReboot. ClimaxDesigns is his web design/development company, and they do some really great work. Check out his site for some examples.

In the near future I’ll be registering dpitMedia as an LLC, and will be doing all of my online business under that name. In the meantime, I’m just glad that I put the effort to create the dpitMedia brand.

We all dread that check engine light flashing on the dash, don’t we? It usually means to get ready and drop some cash and get something fixed. A buddy of mine with a Ford Escape had a check engine light pop up, so he took it to the dealership to see what was wrong. He paid something like $80 just to check it out…not even fixing anything.

Sometimes a check engine light can come on for something as minor as the gas cap needing replacement. Do you really want to pay $80 just to find out you need a new $5 gas cap? Wouldn’t it be nice to find out what the problem is for free before deciding on dropping some cash? I found out that you could when my maintenance light came on my Honda Accord.

I was driving, and all of the sudden a yellow maintenance light came on the dash. I later found out that this was not the check engine light, but a “timed” warning to take the car to get serviced…aka, pay the dealership money…but more on that later.

The reason a check engine light comes on in the first place is because the cars computer is throwing an error code. The computer is known as OBD, or on-board diagnostics. On 1996 and newer cars, they use ODB-II. When you take your car in to see why the check engine light came on (or to turn it off), they simply plug a little device in called an OBD-II scanner, which allows them to do a variety of things, including clearing the CEL (check engine light) and seeing what error(s) was causing it to light up in the first place. The plug is normally located around the steering wheel column.

What you may not know is that going to your local auto parts store like Autozone or Advance Autoparts, they have an OBD-II scanner on hand as a courtesy to customers. Simply walk up to the front counter, and tell them your CEL is on, and you want to find out what codes it’s throwing. This way you can at least know what you may possibly need to fix it. Another benefit is if you don’t trust your mechanic, you can ensure exactly what’s wrong with the car.

So back to my maintenance light. Once I saw it on, I went over to my local Advance Auto Parts and asked them to read for any error codes. After checking, we both found it odd that no errors were being shown in the scanner. Luckily the employee had a Honda Civic and realized that the light was not in fact the CEL, but just the service car light. We popped open the owner’s manual (which I should have just done in the first place probably) and found that you can simply reset or turn off the light by following a couple simple steps. 15 seconds later, problem was solved.

My whole point is, you can either pay $80/hour of labor for the dealership to do the same exact thing that a local auto parts store will do for free in seconds. I didn’t know this until a friend told me, so I would assume some of you may not either.

Good luck with all of your car troubles, and I hope you learned something!

[Check engine light photo sources: crazyscientist_11, music for the eyes]

In January of this year I started a little bit of an experiment in affiliate marketing by launching a blog called Carbon Fiber Gear. The blog covers a variety of “cool” products made with or out of carbon fiber. To give you an idea, some examples I’ve written about are:

• Rob Diamond Carbon Fiber Belt Buckle
• Blackbird Rider Carbon Fiber Guitar
• Carbon Fiber & Aluminum Tissue Box
• Carbon Fiber Wallet
• Bell & Ross Carbon Fiber Watches

While the site isn’t making a ton of money, I’ve started to really see some potential in it. I have plans to further expand it out, including a possible direct store, and maybe even our own branded products…but that’s all down the line.

When I initially launched the site, I was using a pretty basic Wordpress template that anybody could use. With the new custom design launched on this blog, I really had the itch to give Carbon Fiber Gear its own unique look. On top of that, I wanted to try and tackle doing everything on my own. When I re-did this blog, I designed it myself, but then worked with Suffolk Software to code it up and integrate it into Wordpress. If anything, re-doing Carbon Fiber Gear would be a learning experience in Wordpress and HTML/CSS…and great practice…both of which are needed.

I managed to do everything from the design in Photoshop to the blog being integrated into Wordpress in about 3 days (Although I did work on it pretty much non-stop). I still have a few things on my to-do list, but the majority of everything is completed. I’m really proud of the work, and feel fairly comfortable integrating a site into Wordpress now.

I have some really interesting articles I plan on writing for this blog in terms of the entire process behind re-doing Carbon Fiber Gear. For those of you interested in what it takes, it will be a must read. In the meantime, I’d like to give a thanks to these two people:

• Mubs from Suffolk Software - Mubs was extremely helpful in answering a few questions here and there when I was stuck on either some stupid CSS quirk or trying to get something to work correctly with Wordpress. I was also able to recycle some code that he had done to create the theme on this blog…which saved me a ton of time/work myself. An example of this is the comments section on a post, that was restyled and rehashed on Carbon Fiber Gear from this blog.
• Collis Ta’eed from Eden.cc - Collis has been on fire lately in the web scene. He owns quite a few sites that you may know of: PSDTuts, NetTuts, FlashDen, AudioJungle, and FreelanceSwitch. While he didn’t directly help me, he (and his work) has been a huge source of inspiration. Enough of it is visible in the site that it definitely deserves some props.

In the background I’ve been working on a new brand of company to work as a sort of umbrella company for my endeavors. The name of this company is dPit Media. To start things off, I’m trying to come up with a few logo concepts, and it’s always good to take a look at what’s out there for a source of inspiration.

I went out there and found as many companies as I could find with the word “media” in their name. Out of the hundreds that I looked at, I picked out the best 69 logos. I think that having the name “media” in a company brand is fairly common, so I think this will be a great resource for others.

Stay tuned to the blog (or feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed) for updates regarding my own logo for dPitMedia.

24/7 Real Media

1105 Media

Adconion Media Group

Ariamedia

Ashweb Media

b5 Media

Backbeat Media

Blaze New Media

Blueprint Media

Bootcamp Media

Breeze Media

Casale Media

Church Media

Churchplant Media

Congruent Media

Digicog Media

Dunamis Media

E8 Media

Ecstatic Media

Edvens Media

Evolving Media

Federated Media

Fling Media

Glacier Media

Glam Media

Go Media

Greentech Media

Gunpowder Media

Hyperx Media

Idearc Media

Imagex Media

Immersive Media

Jello Media

Logicbomb Media

LS Media

Manticore Media

Maxgen Media

Media72

Media Crumb

Media Inspiration

Medianomaly

Media Temple

Medicon Media

Millennial Media

Mindset Media

New Brand Media

Premiere Media

Primal Media - Concept for PrimalMedia.com

Redux Media

Resolution Media

Respiro Media

Resurgent Media

Right Media

Sabotage Media

Shock Media

Simplify Media

Sling Media

Split Media

Spring Media

Third Screen Media

Trademark Media

CMP - United Business Media

ValueClick Media

Vibrant Media

Virgin Media

Visicom Media

Volo Media

Yojo Media

Yul Media

If your “media” company wasn’t in here, but you think it should have made the list, feel free to comment below with a link and I’ll check it out. If I find enough more, maybe I’ll do a part two. Also, between the time of writing this and when it actually went live, I’ve come up with my logo for dpitMedia. I’m going for a retro sort of theme, so let me know what you think:

For a long, long, long, long time I’ve been talking about doing a new custom design for this blog.  It was one of my 2008 goals to finish and launch this design, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally here!  If you’re reading this from the RSS feed, come on by and check it out.

This new design was built entirely from the ground up, so there was no modifying a theme, and there is nothing else like it out there.  I’m still using Wordpress as the software that runs everything in the background.  I was the one that designed the site, and had a developer code up the site and integrate it into Wordpress (Thanks Mubs!).  Let me give you a complete walkthrough:

Featured And Standard Blog Mode

You’ll see on the homepage that there are two blogging modes, featured and standard.  By default you come to the site seeing featured blog mode.  This is simply the headline for the post, and a quick little intro paragraph about it.  At the top of the page the most recent post is featured.

If you go to standard blog mode, you’ll see that it’s just like a regular blog, and shows the full versions of the last 10 posts.

I think the featured mode is more unique and looks cleaner, but I know that some people will still prefer your standard blog, which is why I decided to offer both.

Single Post Page

I spent a lot of time making a regular post page look good and work effectively.  At the top of each post page you’ll find the “featured” box which just shows you the headline, a big featured image related to the post, a quick intro, the author, how many comments, what categories it falls in, and the ability to promote the post through a variety of social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

At the bottom of each post is where I really spent most of my time.  The first box you’ll find under a post is the “Save/Promote This Post” box.  This is simply a box with some social media buttons, as well as a Digg button on the right which shows how many Diggs the post has.

Below that box you’ll find the “Related Posts/Subscribe” box.  This is a clean format which provides up to 5 related posts to the one you’re reading, as well as a few links to subscribe to the sites RSS feed.  I hope this helps out with increasing the number of RSS subscribers.  If you haven’t already subscribed to my feed, make sure to do so.

Below that box you’ll find the comments section.  I really cleaned this up a lot.  FIrst of all, comments and trackbacks are now separated (you’ll find trackbacks at the bottom of the page).  Each comment is now in a separate alternating color comment box to make things much more readable.  Each post also cleanly shows the name of the commenter (linked to their website), the date, and their avatar.  The avatar information is being pulled in from Gravatar, which is a site that allows you to create an account and show your avatar at many sites, linked by your e-mail address.  Wordpress 2.5+ has Gravatar functionality built into it, and I think we’ll see more and more sites supporting it, as well as more and more commenters using it.  If you haven’t added your Gravatar yet, head over there and open a free account.

Another cool thing I can do is utilize a “promote” feature.  If I’m writing a post in Wordpress, I can add a custom field called promote, which will automatically add some code next to the headline of a post.  Right now it will make a StumbleUpon badge appear, but that can be changed to whatever I want.  This will hopefully increase social media submissions on posts that are really worth it.

Sidebar

On the sidebar I’ve cleanly made sections to show the categories of the site, a few my recent posts, as well as 5 of my most recent Twitter updates.  I’m hoping the usage of the Twitter updates will increase my followers.  Feel free to follow me on Twitter if you aren’t doing so already.

Advertising

This is something that will most likely be tweaked over time, but I’ve built in advertising in a pretty effective way.  First off I want to note that all my ad serving is being done by Google Ad Manager.  Ad Manager is a pretty powerful FREE ad server, it’s still in beta, so you’ll need an invite to use it.  I come from a background using Doubleclick as an ad server, as well as having used OpenAds, so it may be a little complex to use for some at first, but I felt right at home.

So my concept in advertising right now is when I’m ready to sell an exclusive “package deal” to an advertiser
.  What I mean by that is basically a site takeover, one advertiser would get all of the ad spots on the site for a premium price for a set amount of time.  This will allow an advertiser to get very effective advertising.  There are three set spots for an advertisement on a page right now.

There is a top small banner in the red bar, a 250×250 in the top of the sidebar, and a long thin banner either after the third post on the homepage, or between the save/promote box and related posts box on a single post page.  An advertiser would be able to get all three spots, as well as a link in the RSS feed at a flat monthly rate.  The spot would be exclusive to that advertiser and no other ads will be run.

I will likely be slightly changing around the sizes and/or positioning of the ads for something for effective (or to meet IAB guidelines).  When the blog is generating more traffic, I would change the format to include more ads, and not provide exclusive deals.  If you’re interested in doing an exclusive takeover for a month, contact me.

Bugs

There are a few bugs here and there (Mostly IE6 stuff) that I already know about, and will work on fixing over the next couple weeks.  If you happen to find something, please make sure and let me know.

Suggestions/Feedback

I really hope you guys like the new design.  I put a lot of time and work into launching this, and I hope it will be better overall for the growth of this blog.  If you have any suggestions or feedback, I’m all ears.  You can either contact me directly or post a comment below.

On April 1st eBay moved off of Commission Junction, and onto their own platform for managing their affiliate program. Their new platform goes by the name of “eBay Partner Network” (EPN). This was potentially a great move by eBay, offering more direct support, better reporting, better tools, more customized administration, etc.

Now it’s 15 days into the new program, and from what I’ve seen, there are some potentially major problems going on with the program in the name of revenue earned by its affiliates.

Revenue Issues

The biggest issue seems to be the amount of revenue generated as compared to the previous CJ program. My own personal experience shows the same issue. I normally generate at least 1 transaction per day, and average about $2-$5+ per day. I converted my links over to the new program on April 1st, I didn’t see my first transaction until April 10th. It’s now April 15th, and I’ve generated 6 transactions for a total of $6.80 or a $2.27 EPC. On Commission Junction I would generate about $10-$15 EPC. So we’re talking about a pretty drastic difference here. I don’t want to come to any conclusions based on my experience just yet as I’d like to wait it out until the end of the month. Expect an update to this from my end come early May.

This seems to be quite a bigger issue, and eBay seems to be somewhat ignoring it. If you take a look at their partner network forum, it just has a ton of posts with people complaining that their revenue is way lower than what it was on CJ. One thread with the title “Has anybody seen and commissions or leads yet?” has 237 posts (at the time of this writing). eBay representatives have responded, basically saying that there is no problem, but they will continually monitor everything to make sure nothing is wrong.

I don’t like to use myself as an example for the issue since I really don’t do that much in affiliate sales just yet, but I’m happy to use others to prove a point:

Username flyinglotta: This user is one of the bigger affiliates posting on the forums, that was doing about $500/day when the program was on Commission Junction. He is now seeing a 50% drop, doing about $250/day, a loss of close to $8,000/month. You would think that an affiliate generating this much would be able to get some sort of personal support from eBay, but he can’t even get a direct e-mail address or phone number to get help. He’s forced to wait on public answers on the forum from representatives that probably need to have a lawyer go over any response they give before they post it.

My other concern in this realm is that there is no third party anymore. What I mean by this is that there is no company overlooking to make sure commissions are accurately paid out and tracked for. Essentially an auditor. eBay could realistically just do whatever they want and pay whatever they want, and nobody could really argue with that. Commission Junction was the third party before.

Contact Issues

There are all sorts of stories similar to this not only on the eBay forums, but also on other forums. One of the arguments eBay is using is that there are thousands of affiliates, and relative to that number, not enough seem to be contacting them with issues to make it an issue. The other side of this story is that not everybody is complaining on their forums, and there is not exactly an obvious way to contact eBay.

The forum link is only on the dashboard homepage. Not everybody wants to post publicly. There is no “Contact” link of any kind in the admin section…making it a bit hard for somebody to complain. The only thing that I have found to contact eBay directly was to go into the help section, click a category, which will also have a link to contact them if it doesn’t answer your question. I did this earlier this month, only to receive a canned response that didn’t answer my question, and was obviously outsourced and not somebody directly working in the program.

Report Issues

I think there is a lot of room for improvement on the reports that eBay offers. Now that everything is in-house, reporting capabilities should be way better in terms of tracking where links are coming from, what is being bid on, where they clicked to bid, etc. I don’t want to get into this right now because eBay seems to be working to continually improve the program, and I have a feeling this will be worked in the future as there are now more affiliates to give feedback.

Are There Really Issues?

I think this is the question of the day. I think there are generally enough complaints from people that literally have switched over and are seeing lower numbers after the switch to say that there is a problem. At this point in time, it’s less about the affiliates like me who think there are issues as I don’t do high enough numbers to make an example…but some of the bigger guys seeing a difference and complaining should say something is up. I think for the smaller guys, we should give it the full month before starting to really complain there is an issue.

For now, those of you having issues, please respond to this post with a comment (there is no need to register, so it’s easy to post) and give a little background on the issue you’re having. The most important information you should post is the following:

When did you change your links to the new program?
What were you averaging per day in February and March 2007?
What was your EPC for Feb and Mar 2007?
What kind of results comparatively have you been seeing in the new program?

Maybe if enough people respond and comment, and compile it one place, we can take it to eBay and make some changes.

Surprisingly I searched in Google last night and found that two of my sites (including this blog) now have the coveted sitelinks:

I think Google could have done a better job with the links, but I’ll take what I can get I wonder how they decide what goes in there. I could have sworn reading somewhere that you can adjust or suggest the links in Webmaster Tools, but I only see the option to block a link:

I also surprisingly realized that my page rank for this blog went away completely. I’m assuming Google penalized me for selling Text Link Ads on the sidebar. With my new design, I’ll be removing TLA, and will only be running text links that have a rel=nofollow. Hopefully Google will unpenalize (sp?) me then. Even though I have no page rank, it hasn’t really affected my traffic from Google. Here’s a chart of the past 30 days of Google (excluding Google Images) traffic:

I’ve recently been doing a lot of stuff to try and make money using the eBay affiliate program through Commission Junction. While I’m glad I’m really just in the beginning of using the program, it’s still going to be a huge pain. Since eBay is moving off of CJ, all of the affiliate links need to be updated. Imagine those with thousands of blog posts…starting May 1st, 2008, those old links won’t make money anymore unless they are updated.

There will be a couple of big benefits from all this though:

• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs
• eBay will be offering a 5% bonus for all traffic (through the new network) in April. For those that can migrate quickly, they will see the benefits

The last three could potentially be really good if eBay does it right. I’m always up for new, targeted banners if it can be tied into content better and can be more effective. I’m interested in seeing what they mean by new landing page optimization. Geo-targeting capabilities may be something really big that I’ll be able to use for an upcoming project I’m working on. One of the biggest things is more detailed reporting. I’ve always said that the reporting was too limited by Commission Junction, and hopefully eBay can make this right. Reporting can do a ton for a publisher to better optimize how they promote the affiliate network, which makes more money for eBay and the publisher.

Overall it seems like it will be a good thing, but a huge pain in the ass. If there is any way they can make old CJ links still work, they should do that. I don’t see how that wouldn’t be possible since the old links use the rover.ebay.com domain…it’s not like it’s a commission junction domain, it’s on their own domain! Just make the new ones a different non-rover.ebay.com and if there are some sort of less reporting or features from the old links, they’ll be able to separate them.

My other concern is auditing. Currently, Commission Junction is the middle-man…the third party to verify reporting and data is correct. I hope there is something in place to ensure everything is accurate.

You’ll be able to start migrating April 1st, 2008, and should be done by May 1st, 2008. Here’s the full e-mail I got:

Dear David Pitlyuk:

We are excited to announce eBay’s new global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we’ve decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience for eBay affiliates.

All the great tools and benefits of working with the eBay program will remain the same – access to the Editor Kit and affiliate API, the flexible destination tool, the great payout structure. In addition, the eBay partner network will provide several new features:

• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay’s programs

The eBay Partner Network and Commission Junction will run in parallel for one month through this process, so please plan to complete your migration by May 1st, 2008.

You can receive an additional 5% bonus for all traffic tracked through eBay Partner Network in April 2008 (bonus applicable to traffic sent to Half.com and US, UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, India and Spain eBay sites). The sooner you migrate, the more you’ll earn! Just:

• Register with eBay Partner Network on April 1, 2008
• Confirm your registration, and obtain your new identifiers
• Update your links with your new identifiers.
• Reminder: Please plan to complete migration by May 1, 2008.

You will receive more information and step by step directions for the transition on April 1st. A special help desk to answer your questions about migration will also be available starting April 1st. You can find more details, including a list of programs that will be affected, at http://affiliates.ebay.com.

Thanks for being a valued partner. We’re excited for a successful transition, and the opportunity to grow your business through even more innovations, information and communication moving forward!

Sincerely,
eBay’s Affiliates Managers