Warning! Bux.to has turned into a horrible PTC with payment delays of more than 6 months, a lame staff and forum mods that defeat Bux.to with their life although they even have not a received a single payment yet. I’m not the only one who didn’t get paid by them, thousands of users are complaining about this mess. The Bux.to staff are the most unprofessional people I’ve ever seen online for a long time (or maybe they are the best scammers I’ve seen, who knows…). I DON’T recommend joining them, there are way better PTCs on the market that even pay instantly, like NeoBux for example. There I already earned over $2,000 and got paid more than 10 times!

It was a long time ago since I’ve last written a post about the famous Bux.to. Well I had my reasons for that. To be honest, I was really pissed off about Bux.to with all their delays and empty promises (and I’m still pissed off right now). Since months they promised to release their so called “new script”, also known as Bux Reload, to speed up payments for all their members. But besides a short beta test phase nothing special happend until know. People get more and more annoyed about Bux.to and many of them stop clicking on ads and don’t purchase new referrals. Honestly, they are months behind their normal payment schedule…

Yesterday Alt3rtnativ3, the programmer behind the current and future Bux.to script, has made a very promising announcement. He told us that, according to the Bux.to staff, the current payment backlog will be gone within 4 weeks, meaning until early August. They will handle all open payments until they are in their normal payment schedule where you get paid after 60 business days if you’re a standard member and after 30 days if you’re premium.

So far so good, but I’ve heard way too many empty promises lately. So at the moment I’m a bit in doubt if they will really fix their payment problems in such a short time (or at all). I mean, why didn’t they do that earlier? Some people arque that this is because Paypal is about to unfreeze the Bux.to account or simply said, that they didn’t had the money until now and weren’t able to pay their members in time.  Well I personally don’t know for sure. For me it looks like something strange is going on behind the scenes, but I very much appreciate if they ARE fixing their problems. Let’s see…

Bye,
Querblogger

PS: NeoBux is getting better and better. I love that PTC! On what I see, it will be THE big competitor for Bux.to in the future. I mean instant payments, renting referrals, script changes within hours, extremely nice support, Paypal integration on the way…features Bux.to can’t provide right now.

The last days I thought about what would be better and easier to market, a niche product with small competition and less traffic or a popular item with lots of competitors and a whole bunch of traffic?

Well I haven’t got the excact answer for that yet, but so far I’ve already found some advantages and also disadvantages from both affiliate marketing methods. First, and before I’ve read some very interesting threads on the Warriorforum and other sites, I thought that going niche would be the ideal way for promoting products as an affiliate and making some good money from it. Indeed, niche marketing really works. I’ve already made some sales from my personal Clickbank niche test site that I created some months ago. But is it the “holy grail” of affiliate marketing?

A good question if you ask me. Although niche marketing has many benefits like having fewer competitors and an easy search engine domination with your choosen keywords, there are still some major disadvantages. The worst of all is traffic, simply as that. A niche market is, you may quess it, tailormade to a small group of people that are interested in a particular topic. Therefore potential traffic to a niche site is usually small too. Less traffic means few sales means less money. But doesn’t one want to make more money from affiliate marketing? What about choosing a more competitive “niche” with more traffic, more sales, more money to make?

You know what I want to say? No? Ok, let me explain. What would be better, to get a big piece of a small cake or to get a small piece of a (really) big cake? I would rather choose the smaller piece, not because I’m not that hungry…

Establishing you affiliate business, the small piece of cake, in a highly competitive market, the really huge cake itself, has some benfits too. Although you have a lot of competitors you also have the chance to grasp a certain percentage of the high traffic that swirls around a popular product. You don’t necessarily have to get to the first search engine results for your particular keyword in order to get some of that traffic. Even if your affiliate site is ranked at the 5th or even 10th position, it will probably bring you enough traffic, depending on how hot the product/service is that you’r about to promote. Maybe even more traffci than from a tiny niche site.

So what’s the difference between creating a niche site that you have to get ranked on the topmost search results in order to get some traffic and creating a site in a competitive market with a ranking far behind the first sites but with a lot of traffic? I personally think, and that’s also the reason of this post and my thoughts, it’s the work involved in creating an affiliate site and driving traffic to it. What would be easier, to maintain a number one position in the SERPs or say position number 50? Sure, the second position.

To sum up my thoughts, I think going for a popular product or service should be easier to make money with than creating a niche site. First, a popular item means traffic, a lot of traffic. Second, you wouldn’t have to maintain a #1 position in the search results, hence less SEO work. Third, you have a lot of competitors that have choosen many longtail keywords that you can “spy out” (hehe, evil evil) and choose for your own site (which should be a bit better optimized than your competitor’s one).

Now my question, what do YOU think about it? Is niche marketing the fantastic affiliate marketing money maker or is it going after a popular product and so to say being a “parasite” that subsists from the huge traffic such a product has created?

As I already said at the beginning, I don’t have a correct answer yet, althoug I’ve read some other people’s thought about going broad is far better than niche marketing. Just want to know what you think about it.

So long,
Querblogger

Time is running and already 9 month are gone since I started the Making Money Experiment. I’m still happy with my money making progress and I’m currently working on even more projects that will hopefully bring me even more cash.

Because I’m currently heavily involved in creating a new website, this report should only be a very short one (also because not to bore you all)!

The best money makers for June 2008 were as follows:

1. $100.00 from Bux.to (also I won’t see this money anytime soon because of many delays)
2. $38.50 from Selling Links on my blog (no details or links about it, sorry)
3. $37.00 from Affiliate Sales (thanks to my niche site)
4. $13.44 from NeoBux, an amazing new PTC. They pay within seconds!
5. $10.67 from My Homepages Friends, a nice Get-Paid-To-Search service
6. $03.22 from Speedyads, contextual ads like Google Adsense
7. $02.94 from different other sources like Triond and such

That will give me a total of $205.77 for the month of June, not as much as last month but still very nice!

My blog is still ranked with a Pagerank of 2 and my Alexa rating has levelled of at around 183,000. At the moment I get an average of around 120 unique visitors per day, the last days even more than 150.

July will be a month full of work for me. As you may have noticed, me and Tiberius have stopped our project called Shrtnd.com because it wasn’t really worth it. I’m now working on creating a completely different website at this domain and you may already guess what it is about, no?

Ok, should be all for now. Thanks to all my readers, subscribers and especially the many commentors on my blog posts!

See ya,
Querblogger