If you haven’t heard about Tyler Cruz yet, let me give you a quick introduction. He is a fairly successful internet entrepreneur and the owner of several successful sites such as PokerForums.org and Movie-Vault.com. Earlier today, Tyler wrote on his blog that he would link back to anyone who wrote a review of his blog, no matter whether it was good, bad or ugly, as long as the review was over 200 words.
So if you want an easy link from a PR5 site, here’s your chance!
Review of TylerCruz.com
The good: Tyler is definitely doing well. He keeps his daily $ average up on his site and blogs often about his site sales, site flipping, and and domain brokering. He must be doing something right and for that reason it’s worth keeping up with his feed (its in my RSS reader). I heard about Tyler sometime last year on the SitePoint forums and browsed his sites then. There’s an interesting mix, and the most notable thing is that he’s managed to build quite large communities. He also put together a short video which, while cheesy, was also inspirational. The blog is a chronicle of his life and important events in it, so if you want to follow along and see how a ‘netpreneur lives, it can be very entertaining. In terms of usefulness, there are some worthy articles, such as this one on the Internet Poker Ban and this one on Private Ads: Building Strong Advertiser Relationships.
The bad: TylerCruz.com, the blog, is mostly news about what is going on in his life. That’s probably his goal, and it’s fine, but from a reader’s point of view, it’s hard to find the articles that provide real value. At most, his articles provide inspiration (because of the “it can be done!” factor). Most of them are along the line of these useless gems: Niche: Nitch or Neesh? or Where Are all the Women? or $11,000+ in 20 Days. Tyler’s writing style can be somewhat egotistical; there is little humility in his written thoughts. Below is an exerpt from an interview with Tyler by BuckBeingNormal:
Absolutely! So describe to us an average working day in the world of Tyler Cruz.
Okay, but you’re not going to like it. I usually wake up.. at any random time. I turn my computer on and let it boot up and stuff while I go get cleaned up. I’ll then go through a quick check-up my e-mails and forums and such. The rest of the day I’m usually playing a computer game, recently it has been Starcraft. I take breaks from playing my games to browse some blogs and forums. I’ll then take breaks to watch a movie or some TV and grab some grub. When I’m good and ready, and feel I have adequate energy, I’ll do a ‘work session’. This is usually 1-2 hours. I set my watch, put myself on Busy mode on MSN and get cracking. I’ll start by going through all my e-mails and responding to them. If I have any time left over (this actually takes quite a bit of time) I’ll get to work on my ‘todo’ list. My ‘todo’ list is a long list of things I write down in a file aptly named todo.txt which I should work on. After my 1-2 work session, that’s all the work I do for the day. I then go back to playing, eating, or watching TV or whatever it is I do.
Conclusion: While Tyler Cruz is an interesting story to follow, you can do this by glancing at his headlines in your RSS reader and clicking on the odd article here and there. This is true for most of the internet, but what can I say, it’s this competition the breeds the truly excellent content that is out there.
Since the topic of this post is SEO, it is appropriate that I start with a disclaimer. I am not an SEO expert. I’m not sure I would even qualify as an SEO amateur. I mean, I’ve read some articles and tweaked some titles, headers, internal links, and meta tags, but for the most part, Wordpress, and all the awesome people on my blogrolls, do my SEO work for me.
