Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview #19: Introducing Collin De Ruyck
Welcome to Week #19 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!
This week I interview Collin De Ruyck. While Collin is a newcomer to the affiliate marketing space he blogs at www.feedflare.ca and was one of the most outspoken finalists from the online reality show Top Affiliate Challenge.
Find out what Collin liked and disliked about TAC and see what his future holds. Read on to learn more about Collin De Ruyck.
Here are the rules…
The Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series will feature an original up-close interview with an affiliate marketer every Friday. Priority will be given to Pepperjam Network affiliates, but that is not a requirement to share your story. If you’d be interested in being interviewed please submit your request here – please make sure to tell us why you think your story is especially entertaining or educational and worth sharing with our readers.
As the series progresses we will do our best to ask questions that both entertain and educate! We encourage you to comment on each of the interviews, as well as ask follow-up questions of the interviewee.
Lastly, if you are a blogger or just someone with a network of likeminded affiliate marketing friends, we encourage you to share our interviews series with anyone who you think may benefit. Also, since you won’t want to miss an interview once it’s published I encourage you to join the Feedburner Pepperjam Network RSS Feed, which is located at the top of this page or by clicking here.
Well…let’s get on to the interview!
Meet the Affiliates: Interview #19
Collin De Ruyck
Blogger and Affiliate Marketer
www.feedflare.ca
Question #1
KRIS: Where do you live? Are you married? Any children? Animals?
COLLIN: I currently live in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada with my fiancée Andrea and my son Devin who just turned 8. We have 2 cats and just recently got ourselves a Golden Retriever puppy who we proudly call Ginger.
Question #2
KRIS: You were a contestant and finalist on Thor Shrock’s Top Affiliate Challenge. Tell us about your most positive and most horrifying experience…
COLLIN: My most positive experience being a finalist on TAC would have to be everyone who I met while on the show, including the production staff. For the most part you really can’t tell who people are by their blogs or what their profile says about them in places like MyBlogLog. You really need to meet them face to face and have conversations with them outside of affiliate marketing or business related topics. Everyone I met on the show I consider to be a life long friend as we will always have something in common that only 12 of us will ever have and that’s we were all contestants on the first Top Affiliate Challenge. That’s something only 12 of us can ever say.
As far as meeting some of my idols or the people I look up to online it was amazing. I was lucky and spent a lot of time with John Chow being on his team and all and I was really impressed with him. What impressed me the most was seeing John in his own element and that’s blogging. I watched him build a blog for the host of TAC, Monica, and he also helped me set up a blog I am using as an affiliate site, and the whole time he was doing it he was smiling. It really was like seeing a kid in a candy store. To date the most inspirational thing that was ever said to me in my life came from John Chow. We were standing outside of the hotel chatting and I was talking about the site I started building after I was off the show. His exact words to me were “Once that site takes off your going to make a lot of money off of it, and when it does you should sell your home in Winnipeg and move to Vancouver” for a guy like me trying to find my way online hearing something like that from a guy like him with all his accomplishments it was truly inspiring and it will be something I never will forget.
As far as my most horrifying experience I guess I would have to say it was after team XY7 joined up with team Tool Barn. The next day we were again up for elimination and the numbers were against the original team members of XY7. Jason Henderson was pulling his original team members out of our team room one by one so I thought I was for sure going to be voted out. That was the day Jonathan Van Clute gave me the immunity ring. LMAO, man was I panicking before I got that ring, after that happened my plan to get rid of Jason worked out perfectly.
Question #3
KRIS: Tell us what you liked most about Top Affiliate Challenge and what you would have changed about the show…
COLLIN: What I liked the most about TAC was all the different levels of expertise everyone was at. There was so much knowledge there in that hotel it was scary and almost every area was fully covered regarding affiliate marketing. If there was a question that someone didn’t know the answer too all they had to do was turn there head and someone else was giving it to them. It was because of the people who were there, in t hat hotel, I was able to come home and know exactly what direction I wanted to go in with affiliate marketing first and it is what I am doing now.
As far as what I would of changed about the show I guess it would have to be the one thing I think caught Thor off guard, and that was a contestant using his own money to fund their campaigns. The second I would have seen that it would have been stopped. You can’t have 11 people basically on the same playing field and one way a head of the pack with a nice budget to work with. It just sets the stage for a lot of contestants not caring and doing there own thing. If it was my show, I would of wanted everyone focused and on the same field at all times.
Question #4
KRIS: How and when did you get involved in affiliate marketing? Please share the story with us.
COLLIN: I got interested in affiliate marketing I guess in early spring of this year. So I guess that would of been around April. After 8 months of blogging I knew I was never going to be an industry leader in the blogging world so I started to look at what affiliate marketing was all about. There is so many areas’ a person can look at for affiliate marketing. I guess before I was one TAC I was just trying to figure out what they all were and what direction I wanted to go in. Once I left TAC I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it. I have not been affiliate marketing very long but there is one thing I know well and that’s how to build a micro niche affiliate site and get it ranked on page one of Google, fast. My last one took me a week to do with over 2 million pages to compete against. So I guess you can say for now I have found my groove.
Question #5
KRIS: What projects are you currently working on?
COLLIN: The projects I am working on right now vary. For the most part I am working on building a solid producing portfolio of affiliate websites (around 20 or so). I feel for many people including myself if you don’t have the money to gamble with PPC, building affiliate sites is a very solid method of producing income and can also be a lot more stable as well, as long as you do what I am doing and that’s building enough sites covering a variety of different niches. I am doing this because if one falls out or stops producing I still have other sites to make me money. It is a time consuming task that’s for sure because as you know you have to do a lot of research before starting an affiliate site and even more so when you do it the way I do it and that’s with a blog format, that’s a lot of article writing to do, but its also a very solid way to get ranked fast. Is it ok for me to say at this point that I love Wordpress!
Most of the sites I am building are micro niche sites based around popular products or companies. But like I said above and with trying to cover a wide range of topics I have also built a few harder sites that will take a while for them to rank just because I am up against 50 million other pages instead of 2 million, but they will also bring in thousands a month as well, in time.
Currently with the tools I have to build content rich websites or blogs I am building a new affiliate site every week so with that it won’t take me to long to find out what’s working and what’s not so if there are any sites that need fine tuning, I will find out sooner then later.
I have also recently ventured into the world of Pligg sites (Digg clone sites). I have built one called Link Adore (dot com) that is for everyone to use to promote their websites and articles. It is a do follow website and I don’t look at to much as spam so mostly everyone is welcome to come by and promote their own stuff. It’s a bit of a challenge building it because it’s a completely new style of open source programming for me to work with so with all the other sites I have on the go it is taking a while to get things the way I want them. I like lots of color on my sites, that’s what I am not happy with incase your wandering. Lol
My long term project is a pair of dating sites called “Meet the Bachelor” and “Meet the Bachelorette” (dot com) and both sites are very different from most of the other dating sites online, if not all of them, and once built should be just awesome. I use to online date for about two years and with all the frustrations I had back then I know I can build a site that will be just what people would want to be a part of and what will also make the sites stand out. My cost for building them is around 10k so I am planning on using my other affiliate income to fund them. Right now I just started the blogs for both sites to help age them and get ranking. Also with being heavy into affiliate marketing I have come up with a great affiliate offer that one day Kris I will be talking to you about and hoping we can work together to get things rolling in that field. As you know, affiliate marketers know what affiliate marketers want so it will be very popular offer, I am sure of that.
Question #6
KRIS: Take us through a typical day-in-the-life of Collin De Ruyck…
COLLIN: A typical day for me is getting up around 7:30 in the morning and getting my son off to daycare. Then when I return home I grab the biggest cup of coffee I can and head down to my basement to start going over my emails. Once that is done I review traffic stats for my sites and see which ones are doing what and what keywords are driving traffic. Once I know that I then head off to some of the bigger sites I have (bigger meaning heavy competition) and write some articles for about 1 to 1.5 hours, including my person blog. After that I do some snooping around some affiliate offers and if I find an offer that I am interested in or have a base knowledge of myself I will do some keyword research and check for open domain names and make that into my next site, like I have done with a few from the peppperjam network this past week.
After that is all done, I pick up my son from daycare, make supper and watch TV with my family. Then when they all go to bed I come back down to the basement and do interviews, lol just kidding. I do more research for the next day so I kind of have a plan of things to do for any new sites I have on the go.
Question #7
KRIS: If you could be a celebrity who would you be and why?
COLLIN: I would have to say Will Smith. I think he is a very talented guy with a great out look on life. And lots of money too J
Question #8
KRIS: Please share with us your most lucrative money making tools…
COLLIN: Right now the best tool I have for making money is a fairly new tool. I don’t even think it is for sale to the public yet. The tool I call my money maker is Market Samurai. It is an amazing research tool for building websites. All the features are great with this tool but one of the best which is going to be free for everyone to use is the keyword research portion of it. You can take a single keyword and find micro niche phrases based around it and find out how many searches a day there is for what ever it is you find out, what your competition is for that term, which sites are ranked for that term and how many links they have and what there PR is, how many people searching for that term are willing to spend money and what the percentage is that spends money, what the average cost in Adwords is for clicks on that term, find articles you can re-write based around that term and also find do follow blogs you can leave comments on that use the same keyword or phrase. Kris, by all means this is by far the best tool I have come across and seen to date.
It’s because of this tool that I was able to find niche keyword phrases for site I built and get ranked on page one of Google for brood, phrase match and exact searches. Great tool for anyone to use and like I said above, the keyword research portion of this tool will always be free to use so anyone can benefit from it.
Question #9
KRIS: Please share with us your favorite online educational resources (i.e. blogs)….
COLLIN: I would have to say that John Chow’s blog has been one of my favorites for a while. I also read Ian Fernando.com, Collin Lahay.com, Shoemoney, Zac Johnson and a few others when I have time. Sometimes I can’t even get to those few blogs during the course of a day but they are honest blogs with solid information.
Question #10
KRIS: What is the most challenging obstacle you’ve ever had to overcome? Share with us the story…
COLLIN: Ok I will try and make this fast. In 2003 I started my own plumbing business. Things were going good then I found out that my wife at the time was having an affair. Needless to say things ended and not in a nice way. When the devoice proceedings started I had to have a surgery on my left thumb because of an injury a year prior. All this went down over the holiday season. My business was dyeing because I could not work and my emotions were in over drive because of my home life. It turned out I needed to have 2 surgeries on my hand so I ended up being off work for about 10 months or so with hardly any income coming in at all. I had living with me my x’s son and my own son. Kris, at the time I was lucky if I was eating every 2 days, the kids ate well but not me. After 10 months I had to find something to do for work as the workers compensation I had was not paying me and the bills I had from my business hit a high of around 45k.
I found a job and started working only to find out that the injury to my hand had some heavy nerve damage and that I would have to start working in an office doing estimating. My divorce, which was a nasty one because my x turned to drugs for a while, took three years to end. In 2006 I got full custody of my son and almost at the same time I was able to pay back the 45k I was in the whole. That three year period was hell for me but I can proudly say I have turned things around and am moving forward with a very positive outlook on everything I do.
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Next on deck for Meet the Affiliates: TBD
This TBD exclusive interview will be published here on the Pepperjam Network Blog next Friday, September 26, 2008. Make sure you don’t miss it! Click Here to subscribe to the PJN Blog and have each interview delivered to your e-mail box.
___________________________________ Read Previous “Meet the Affiliates” Interviews:Week #1 – Sam Harrelson
Week #2 – Scott Hazard
Week #3 – Rosalind Gardner
Week #4 – Colin McDougal
Week #5 – Zac Johnson
Week #6 – Harrison Gevirtz
Week #7 – “Uber Affiliate” Paul Bourque
Week #8 – John Chow
Week #9 – Scott Jangro
Week #10 – Darren Rowse
Week #11 – Carsten Combrowski
Week #12 – Thor Schrock
Week #13 – Garry Conn
Week #14 – Ron Passfield
Week #15 – David Adams
Week #16 – Marcus Tandler
Week #17 – Bob Jones
Week #18 – Anik Singal
