Personal Blog of Carl Pei

It’s this time of month when all payments start rolling in. On the 20th of February, I started trying a new PPC (pay-per-click) advertising platform called Chitika.

During the first few days, it went great. I was getting $5, $6 and even $8 days - in addition to AdSense, which did not see any change. Unfortunately, the amount of advertisers for the term “Meizu” was limited to Amazon only, so gradually the CPC (cost-per-click) was falling until I was having mere $1 days. I tried with better implementation and advertising other products, and my earnings rose a bit.

I also understand that forums do not pay well with PPC advertising systems, and have therefore begun work on a blog that will be able to promote higher paying tech products for Chitika.

The best thing with Chitika has got to be the support! I have Ryan from Chitika on my MSN list and he is always ready to chat and answer questions regarding Chitika, even with me who no doubt is a very small publisher. This gives a very personal feeling, unlike Google who will ban you from AdSense and send you automated email correspondence.

Despite a pretty difficult month, I still managed to get paid today. This is much due to Chitika’s low payment threshold of $10 USD. My February earnings on Chitika was $34.05 (not too bad for 8 days), which was paid to me today via PayPal. In April, I will work hard on my upcoming gadget blog to see what Chitika can bring.

So if you have a tech related website and haven’t already signed up for Chitika, I can honestly recommend it.

A week ago, during the world’s largest electronics fair, CeBIT in Hannover Germany, Charbax interviewed the Meizu representatives. Charbax is a great video blogger covering many events and fairs, he can be found at www.cebitvideo.com. The best thing is, when Charbax asked if their chief designer had heard of my site Meizu Me, he said that he knows Meizu Me very well and visits every day! It made my day - no, it made my week/month/year! See the interview below, the best part comes when there’s 2:18 minutes left of the video.

History

Meizu is a Chinese manufacturer of digital audio players. In 2006, they released a product called the Meizu Mini Player which caused a storm of interest on the internet. Around Q3 2006, I got myself two of these players on a trip to China and quickly fell in love. They were different from other Chinese products, actually using name brand components from Samsung, Toshiba and Phillips. This difference was reflected in the price too.

I quickly noticed international interest, the very small amount of people outside China who had managed to get their hands on these players started noticing problems. Meizu has an English support forum, but it was very slow for international traffic. Also, when I saw titles such as “Hey guy! MEIZU M6 mini player is coming!!” I had to do something. There was clearly demand for something better.

Not long after, I borrowed some web space from a friend, got a free redirected domain and installed the free phpBB forums and called the website Meizu Me. After a while things went pretty well and I purchased the domain “meizume.com”. Not long after, the friend got banned from his web host and my site was down. We had just hit the 1000-member mark. I didn’t have any backup, that night I didn’t sleep well. The next day, I excused myself from school, bought a hosting package from the same web host that banned him, Host Monster and got the site online again. I had no backup. Starting from scratch, many members left or lost interest and stopped visiting.

Sometime here, Meizu made a deal with French memory giant Dane-Elec to distribute their products in Europe and North America. Shortly after, Meizu products were showing up in large European chains such as Media Markt. Needless to say, things went up from there on.

Today, Meizu Me receives around 2200 unique hits daily, around 30% of them from France. It has become more or less the definite source for Meizu information and discussion.

Wow! Today I finally found my AdSense money in my bank account. I started with AdSense at the end of August 2006, now we’re around the end of March 2007 which means it has taken me seven months to get my first pay. Seven months is a very long time, during which I wanted to give up several times.

Luckily, those times are past. Today, I already have enough March earnings for a payout at the end of next month. Hopefully, this development will continue and I will get monthly payments from now on.

Although it wasn’t much money, this experience has taught me to really respect the money I earn. Before, when I got paid via PayPal, I felt that it was fake (virtual) money and somehow managed to spend a lot within short periods of time. But this first AdSense payment is consisted of my slow and painful seven months of blood sweat and tears, drop by drop that slowly turned into something great. Now, I’ve learned to respect my money, no matter the source or location where it is stored.

You can not impose equality between the turtle and the hare by giving the turtle a motor and nailing the hare’s feet. The only way to create equality between them is to value the turtle’s slow and the hare’s speed equaly.

This was a piece of text found in the opinion section of today’s newspaper and sums up my thoughts and standpoint on feminism perfectly. The best part was that it was written by a woman, it is safe to know that not all of them are blinded by feminism.

The mini-site about Meizu Music Card got ranked by Google today, and surprisingly, at the top!

• It is number 2 for the term “meizu m3″.
• It is number 2 for the term “meizu m3 music card”.
• Number 9 for “meizu music card me”.

I like what I’m seeing so far, but I really want to be well-ranked for the terms “meizu music card” and “meizu musiccard” too. All in all, considering the time taken this is a very satisfactory result.