MON(FX)

Blogger Profile: TimothySykes.com

Every Saturday, I’ll be doing a profile on a blogger who has successfully monetized his site.  This week, we’ll take a look at TimothySykes.com, written by short-selling wise-guy Timothy Sykes.

Who is Timothy Sykes?

Timothy Sykes is a stock-trading whiz kid who was able to turn his Bar Mitzvah money of $12,415 into $1.65 million over his college career.  After his wall street success, he founded and managed the #1 short-bias hedge fund in America before suffering a 35% loss over two years and closing the fund.

That didn’t stop Tim however, and he wrote a book detailing his journey into managing the hedge fund and the lessons he learned from losing so much money.  He also started a blog, TimothySykes.com, with the goal of documenting the step by step process of turning another $12,000 into millions.  His goal is to make all trades public knowledge and show the world that you can make a lot of money short-selling very cheap stocks (something that is usually considered high risk, low return).

What’s unique about this blog is that he has made all of his trades completely transparent, so anyone can benefit off of his stock picks (if you are able to get them in time).  Aside from his daily posts on what he buys and sells, he also has a section of his site called TIM, or Transparent Investment Management, in which he details his monthly trades and percentage gains/losses for the world to see.

Profitability: How much is Timothy Sykes making from his site?

A couple of days ago Tim posted a response to John Chow’s claims of making $40,000 a month from his blog by claiming he (Tim) has made $45,000 in the past month!  He also breaks down his profits and not surprisingly, the most profitable aspects of his site are his unique TIMalerts system and his Penny Stocking DVD he offers as bundle with it.

TIMalerts is essentially a private listserv on which Tim sends out his daily stock picks to paid members early each morning.  He charges $30 a month for this service and offers a discount when a year is purchased with his DVD crash course on short-selling, Penny Stocking.  Readers who are convinced that his TIMalerts service will make them money (and rightfully so, the guy has been very accurate so far) are likely coughing up $495 for a full year of TIMalerts and for his DVD.  This guy knows how to market himself!

Tim is also making a lot of money (more than $5k this past month) from advertising on his blog.  Examining his site reveals he has set up many designated ad zones and rotates ads for each of these slots.  He charges a monthly fee for the ads ranging from $100-$700 a month depending on ad size and location.  Advertising is managed through the creative agency that produce the TimothySykes website, Pallian Creative.

Here are some useful posts if you’re interested in learning about what TimothySykes.com offers to it’s readership:

• How To Short Sell aka What Is Short Selling
• 10 Questions for Tim Sykes
• On Making Trading Mistakes And The Pressure To Perform
• 37 Key Points Of My Successful Trading Philosophy
• Hey, I May Be Stupid, But I’ve Got A Great Strategy, aka Anyone Can Do This!

If you’d like to have your profitable blog profiled, please contact me and I will try to get to it as soon as possible.  It’s completely free to have your blog profiled - the only requirement is that it be profitable.

Stay tuned for another Blogger Profile next Saturday!