CashDuck's first month draws to a close...

This has been a GREAT first month. Due to a couple very enterprising ladies, I will be sending out more than $250 this month! If you've got more than $10 in your account, you can cashout by Paypal by 11:59PM EST tomorrow and get paid by the 25th of next month. I expect that I will be paying out early though, and may eventually change the payout date to the 20th. Also, you can cash out your feathers for prizes any time of the month, and I'll mail it within a week. (Or in the case of electronic certificates, probably that day.)

I also got the nice big box of CashDuck "business cards" - they're more like mini flyers. If you want to see it, I'll be happy to mail you a few! =) Send me an email with your address at cashduck@gmail.com and I'll send you some. They've got cute cartoon ducks and everything.

Weeding 'em out

I've gotten up to about 500 offers and I feel pretty happy about that - you would not BELIEVE the amount of crap that gets offered up. If I put up every offer that was available, there'd be over 2000 - but most of them would be crap. I put a little link on the sidebar about my philosophy for selecting offers and running the site. Basically, I don't take offers that cost a lot, look like they're going to scam you, cost more than you get paid, pay on downloading something, or involve porn. I'm really focusing on finding freebies (and those can be hard to find!) but I'd rather have fewer offers of high quality and low cost, than lots of offers which probably most people will look at and think aren't worth the time. So it is sometimes slow going in finding new networks with good offers. At this point I have applied for about 60 networks and only have offers running from seven of them!

A quick note about the prizes - You can request a prize whenever you've earned enough feathers, you don't need to wait until the end of the month or whenever. Your prize will be mailed out within a week after you request it. Also, if there's a prize you would like to see (such as a gift card to a particular place) let me know and I'll see if I can get it.

Are these not the funniest things ever...

So I need to order some real checks (all I have currently are the giant ugly business checks that National City gave me, which don't have a name or address on them) and the first time I googled looking for check printers with duck checks (duh) I found Ducks Unlimited checks. Ducks Unlimited is evidently a group that supports ducks so that there are more of them to shoot. I'm not a big fan of the group, but I couldn't find any other checks with ducks on them. And ducks are a necessity.

Today I googled again and found these:













I'm highly amused by these checks. Screw Ducks Unlimited, I'm getting me some Duck Tape. I think I'll order one box and see how nice they are, and then if I like them I'll order more. The prices are also quite reasonable for personal checks.

Continuation of story...

Of course, you know the best part of the first affiliate manager story happens AFTER I post..

Me:

If most of your offers are not incentivized then it is not worth the while to run a couple of offers since I don't know what my users will go after and then I may not make payout. Combined with NET60 payment that is not worth it. I attempted to go look at what campaigns might be incentivized but now your website is showing 0 campaigns.

Thanks for your time but I do not believe I will be running offers.

--Kira

Her:

Wow! You’re quick to give up a new business relationship.


Have a good day. We pay on net 15 btw, not sure where you are getting net 60 from.

Me:

I got it from your own site.
(url for affiliate FAQ)

When are payments made to me?
Payments are made to you 60 days after a months accrual. Meaning if you accrued $100 in January, you will be paid April 1st or thereabouts - if we have been paid in full from the Advertiser.

I don't see what benefit there is to my business if your network does not have enough offers for me to run. Not every business relationship works out. Thanks for your politeness.

I am always up front when I apply to these networks and say that I run an incentivized site - yet sites that have very few incentivizable offers approve me and then get annoyed when I don't want to run their 3 or 4 offers. At this point I estimate I have applied to approximately 50 networks, but only about ten have shown promise, and only about six are up on the site right now. Over the next week I'll be adding more as I get some questions answered about how to track.

Those crazy, overzealous affiliate managers

For most every network I sign up with, I get assigned an "affiliate manager" - a person whose job it is to ensure that I make money, because then they make money. (I think most of these people work on commission.) So some of them are pretty zealous. I'm having an interesting experience with a couple particular managers, who want to make sure that I start putting up their offers.

With one I've been emailing back and forth as she wanted to know some more about my site and I had questions for her. Then I asked her which offers were incentivizable (ie which offers am I allowed to pay you for doing) and she sent me three offers - two of which I already have from other networks and one which I don't want to run. So I replied saying I didn't plan to run those, and commented that I had tried to login and look at the offers but the link on the site was not working. Today I get an email back with, why don't you want to run these offers? (Maybe cause they aren't good?) and saying that most of their offers weren't incentivizable. That's pretty much all I need to hear, because if they only have maybe five offers that are incentivizable and none of them are all that great, there's no point in holding onto that network. Plus, they have a $100 minimum cashout and they pay NET60 (which means that they pay for a month's accrual 60 days later) which I think is unreasonable. After all this is business - I'm not going to hold up payments to my users because I haven't gotten paid, but this network holds MY payment until they get paid from their advertisers (which I can guarantee you don't pay NET60.) I think that's just bad business practice. If you don't get paid, you don't work with those people again, that's all.

A second very zealous affiliate manager called me and spent twenty minutes on the phone with me telling me how wonderful his company's offers were, and how they've been extensively tested to ensure that they get really great click rates and what not - although basically I don't care because CashDuck users are going to be evaluating whether they want to click on something based on what the offer is and whether they think it's worth their time, not how great the graphics are. He spent several minutes saying how they had great campaigns and totally unique offers, instead of those OTHER networks which just recycle other networks' offers. So I "uh huh"-ed through the whole thing (which includes a lengthy chat about how great he thought New York was and how he emailed his girlfriend when she was sitting across the room) and he set up another appointment to call me this afternoon. Well, I get an email from him with a couple of their offers (no way to put on tracking variables either, which is how I know who did what offer so they can be properly credited) and he says that he'd like to see some numbers on these by the end of the week, and THEN he can tell me how much they can pay. That's not real good for CashDuck because I need to know how much they pay before I can set a payout rate for you guys! I'm not going to get people to fill out this offer if it turns out it pays 10 cents, that's not worth it. And they don't seem to have a site where I can look at the rest of their offers either. Some of these networks are very email-list focused - it's all about cost per thousand impressions and click through rates and what have you. I think this guy might have just been trying to get some more business even though his network isn't really right for the type of site I have. (Although he did cheerily tell me he thought I "had something there" and we could maybe in the future talk about how I might use their services to get more traffic. Um, probably not.)

Schweet! Sharebuilder bonus

If you haven't heard of ShareBuilder you are out of the loop! It's basically a site that lets you buy shares of stock or mutual funds or whatever for $4 - great for long term investing where you don't really care whether the stock was 14.98 or 14.89 that day. I got a great offer up now - open an account and earn $30. The reason this is so great is because you can find ShareBuilder bonus codes all over the web for $50 free if you deposit $50. So you can buy $50 worth of something, they give you $50, and then you withdraw that $50 and leave the rest to grow, or eventually sell. Now you can make an $80 profit instead of $50. That's pretty cool. I'm going to do this myself.

I think I might start a "Kira's Favorites" section for offers that I think are pretty awesome. This would definitely qualify. Sharebuilder is a great concept. Check the "New Offers" section to find it or search for it.

Grrrr

Well, the really great network I found has turned out to be not so great. They had lots of freebie offers but I had terrible luck actually getting things to credit. Nothing would go through. Clicks were registering but not the completions. So after 2 days of not being able to get anyone on the phone, I finally got a call back from one of them and after ten minutes of me going through the offers, he says, well most of our offers are not incentivizable (ie sites that pay you for completions can't run them..) which means that they are worthless to me. The thing is that about 2/3 of the offers specifically say "cannot be incentivized" so I only ran the ones that didn't say that, thinking that was safe. Apparently they really only have a handful of offers that can be incentivized - so I pretty much am going to have to give up on this site. Which sucks cause they did have some nice things going. Oh well, I have other networks.

Having some issues...

It seems that one of the networks isn't crediting things properly. This being the weekend, I can't seem to get a hold of anyone. Hopefully things will clear up...

I'm also trying to beat the bushes and see if I can get some corporate discounts on gift cards that I offer as prizes, so for the same money I can give bigger gift certificates. So, a $10 Panera card costs me $10, and I don't think they'd give me a discount, but if I can get a corporate discount from a smaller company, maybe it would cost me $5 for a $10 gift certificate, and then for the same $10 (and thus the same number of feathers) I could give a $20 gift certificate as a prize. That would be pretty cool. I'm going with smaller companies that I've personally used and think that other people would like, but I'll see what I get..

My super silly banners

Check out my banners.. I bought some pictures of ducks (and one of a cat and one of a pig) at istockphoto.. that's also where I got the duck drawings that I'm using on the business cards and other printed stuff.


#1


#2


#3


And my favorite...

I will be drowning in custom printed supplies...

OK, I just bought a whole crapload of stuff from VistaPrint for CashDuck. I had put together a business card that I liked, and it was VERY reasonable (about $25 for 500 color printed back and front, glossy) but I left it in the cart for a few days and apparently the offer expired. However, VistaPrint kept sending me emails about free stuff. So I ended up creating a new account in order to get a not-quite-as-reasonable business card printing (and I see now that I accidentally ordered 1000 cards, not 500 - price is still good though) without the glossy for $43 including shipping. The thing that really annoys me is that they charge you $5 per uploaded image, but I don't see how it matters to them one way or another. Probably they figure most people will want to use their own logo and thus will have to pay for it. So for the business cards, I had to pay $3.74 for the first uploaded image (the front of the card) and $4.99 for the image on the back.

Then I used the cashduck account with VistaPrint to order a bunch of free stuff - one order contained 100 postcards, a rubber stamp, 10 flower notecards, one notepad, 25 business card magnets, and a roll of return address labels for $23 ($13 shipping plus a $5 fee for the uploaded image on the magnets, and $5 for the magnets themselves.) I noticed that in my "portfolio" all of the items were still showing as a cost of free, so I put in another order for postcards, notecards, a notepad, and another set of business card magnets for $10 (no charge for the magnets this time, the cost is from shipping.) I don't recall the magnets having a charge other than the image charge on the first order, but it's still pretty reasonable considering I am getting a bunch of other stuff.

So my total haul, for $76:

1000 color front and back business cards
20 flower notecards
2 duck notepads
50 business card magnets
Rubber stamp
Roll of address labels
200 postcards (half duck, half flowers)

I should not need any more of this crap for YEARS (except maybe the business cards.) The notecards and flower postcards are really for me, not for the business.

I think VistaPrint was reasonably easy to use and the stuff really isn't that expensive, it just pisses me off when I get an offer and when I come back it isn't valid anymore, and I have to jump through hoops to get a price even close to what they offered the first time.

Found a GREAT advertiser site

This is pretty exciting, I got approved for an affiliate account with a GREAT site which has a lot of good offers (free ones, free trials, etc) so that's pretty cool. You have to be individually approved by each merchant, however, so I imagine some of them won't be approved.. Still a good development.

Signing up for advertiser sites has been a little discouraging because many of them take MONTHS to pay - they pay 60 days after the end of the month in which you earned the minimum payout. So if I earned $100 between now and September 31st, I wouldn't get paid until December 1st. Which is really unacceptably long. So I'll see what else I can do - I'm still waiting to hear from the BIG network I applied with, which pays after 2 weeks (which would be great!) I have money set aside so I can pay people before I start to get paid, but a potential three month lag between earning and paying is just too long.

First approval for an affiliate network!

I joined my first affiliate network, and although a lot of the offers are shopping-based, I did find some that I think will be appropriate. I really only want to put up offers where the user will make more money than they put in, so I'm not picking up any that offer rewards based on the percentage of the sale.

I picked out about 30 offers and will be adding them tonight.. hopefully I will begin hearing from other places soon. Some I will have to wait to apply to until I get more traffic, but I think for now going slow on it is OK.

OK, now I feel dumb...

Yesterday I was annoyed because I entered the first offer and nothing showed up on the offers page. I moved it around, nothing happened.

Then today when I looked at the page again, I noticed that the option to select how many people could fill out this offer was set to zero. Oops. I set it to 100, and magically it appears. So everything does work after all, except my brain. ;)

Yaaay for editing my site!

I bought the ShiftCode package today and now I will spend the next couple of weeks entering offers and making the site look good. This may take a while. =)

Things I would like to do

I have a lot of ideas about how I would like to run CashDuck. Principally I want it to be easy for people to use, and to offer people as much help as possible when they use the site. I also want people to feel like it is fun to use and they get more out of it than just money. So I am going to institute a point system so that when you complete offers, you also get points that you can redeem for various things. I think at first I am going to offer movie ticket vouchers or something like that, so that users can get something fun as well and treat themselves. The most important thing is that prizes are easy to mail! I'm also thinking about offering gift cards for Panera or some other place to eat as a points prize.

Getting set up

I'm trying to do everything totally by the book with this business so that come tax time it will be very easy to tell what is mine and what is CashDuck's - with a sole proprietorship run out of your house it can get a little messy sometimes. ;) So I set up a business checking account with National City (the lady asked me why and I said because they were open on Saturdays) and a business PayPal account, and I want to make sure I pay for everything business-related out of one of those two accounts. That way it will be a lot easier to determine what the profit or loss was for tax purposes.

This is what I have covered so far:

Business checking
Business PayPal
Bought the domain
Have money on the way to fund the website creation

What I need to do:
Actually buy the website software and sign up for affiliate networks
Buy business cards (they're cute and don't look like regular business cards!)
Customize website so it looks good
Buy checks (with ducks, duh)
Go out and find users!