GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 22 - October 2012

You first signed up for a GPWA account in 2008, but it was three years before you made your first post. You have been much more active in recent months. What prompted you to start posting in the forums on a more regular basis? I had a different username when I signed up and later had it changed to this one, so some posts must have gone unnoticed, but you’re right, I wasn’t very active in the beginning. I guess I didn’t really have that much to say until I entered the international market with my odds comparison site. My site was running fine, no problems whatsoever, and I didn’t yet have the experience to give advice to other members. So I was just quiet, but I was reading the forum when my schedule allowed me to. You can compare me to a child who didn’t speak until the age of 10, and when the parents asked him why, the boy said, “I had no objections.” What do you like about the industry? Freedom. I can manage my time according to current priorities in life and I don’t need to worry about getting fired if I don’t show up for work. I can wake up early or work all night. I don’t need to make excuses. I can even spend my time traveling around the world in a yacht if I have a laptop connected to the Internet. To do: Earn money, buy a yacht. If you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be? I wouldn’t change anything about this industry. What I do dislike about the Internet in general, though, is that it’s based on poor code. For example, there is a way to use JAR to compress all website images into a single small file, and, upon image request, extract only the requested image(s) from it. The speed improvements are amazing. However, this doesn’t work across all browsers, so we’re stuck with the current options, which aren’t good enough. I also very much dislike CSS and the difficulties of cross-browser development. The whole thing could be easy if certain people were smarter. What surprised you most about the industry? Nothing. I don’t get surprised. You’d have to levitate if you want me to raise an eyebrow. Everything in life is normal; it’s just a question of whether you’ve seen it before or not. What do your family and friends think of your work as an affiliate? My family and I are very close and we’ve seen some hard times during and after the war, so we know how crazy life is and how important it is to be supportive of each other. We’re all in the same boat here, and that’s how it should be. Friends are supportive and benevolent although they don’t really understand what I’m doing. People in the neighborhood are very confused, though. They must think I’m unemployed because I’m always around – I never go to work and never come back from work. How long do you give yourself for answering e-mail? What e-mail tips can you offer? Important mail gets answered as soon as I read it. My advice would be to use Thunderbird or something to automatically sort the incoming mail into appropriate folders. It facilitates everything. But in the end there’s no easy way; if you get 30 important e-mails you have to answer all of them. The best thing to do is to never procrastinate. When you see something worth doing, do it right away and do it well. How do you manage your “to-do” lists? Do you use any special software to help you out? There’s a trick I developed while rushing to meet newspaper deadlines. Put all tasks on paper, and attach a realistic expected time of execution to each task. As you move down the list, write down the actual time it took you to complete each task. This makes you work fast as you’re trying to beat the clock, which in turn also keeps you fully focused. How much time does it take to keep your sites updated? Not much. Content is either produced automatically or by the visitors, so I have time to focus on code development and promotion. And that’s a different kettle of fish. It’s a never-ending story and I always need more time. You offered the opinion recently that all “unlimited” hosting plans aren’t any good because the server is being shared with hundreds of other people who also have “unlimited” plans. What’s a better way to go? Most affiliate websites are designed with CMS systems, which are notoriously slow because they’re poorly coded and rely heavily on MySQL databases. And it’s a race to catch the visitor: you have a maximum of two or three seconds of his patience, with anything above 0.7 seconds not being perceived as an instant response. A reduction of loading speed by one second can improve your conversion rate by 10 percent, or even more than that, and Google also gives a better rank to fast sites. You can achieve speed by improving your code, but in most cases the server is the bottleneck, and the “unlimited” ones are very slow. Get yourself a dedicated server if you mean business. We’re not hosting blogs about goldfish here, we’re making money, so most of us can afford a more expensive server. How much time do you devote to SEO and/or social networking in order to drive more traffic to your site? At this point, SEO is my main focus so I’m spending a lot of time on that. I believe organic traffic is king. It’s free, and the visitor is already motivated, though the key thing here is to actually give the visitor what he searched for, otherwise the visitor stats may be misleading and you’ll suffer from a low conversion rate. My goal is to have quality content and rank high with it on search engines; it’s a winning combination. Both of my websites have GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES Dan with his wife, Snježana, and their dog, Zara GPWA Affiliate Interview Series