Last week I wrote 4 articles about making money online (with advertising/affiliate programs), and my way to present things seems to irritate several people. First of all, I’d like to thank you people: it’s great to see you guys think using your own brains.

In this post I’m going to go step by step the comments this blog received last week. But before I continue I must mention that all the last week’s posts were auto-scheduled. I was relaxing while you guys were starting ahem… ‘bit’ heated discussion on this blog. :)

I must warn you that this entry is extra long - over 6200 words.

First the comments for 7 Tips on Making Money with Low-traffic Website

Or to put it another way, how can you tell which sites/forums have readers who will be genuinely interested in what you have to say without stabbing in the dark?

It depends. If you have an art site, then look for art (”pixel art forums” for example) forums. CGTalk.com is one very big one with lots of sub forums to check out.

I have bad experiences with text link ads. One of my sites was declined, for not having enough sites linking to it (while there are dozens). How can they tell anyway? And this site has a lot more traffic then my blog, which was accepted. But I have yet to see the first ad appear on my blog…

Read on. I’ll discuss this later.

Then comments to 10 Reasons Why Text Link Ads Is Better Program Than Google Adsense post

It sounds great and I’ve looked into it but isn’t it a sort or pyramid scheme? Also I still not clear on how you get the $25. Does the other person decide they want a link specifically on your site then?

It’s not a pyramid scheme. It’s a link selling program that offers one-tiered affiliate system.

There are three ways to make money.
#1 - Sell links. When somebody buys links to your site, you get money (50%, Text link ads takes 50%). The link is displayed on your site for one month.

#2 - The second option is to refer people to sign up as publisher. Each person who signs up as an publisher (to sell links and give referral fees) will make you $25.

#3 - The third and last option is to get people to buy links. Each link buyer that goes through your site to buy links earns you $25.

Examples: if you refer one people to publish links on their site, you earn $25. If you earn one guy to purchase link, and he purchases several links (and one from your site) you make $25 + your link price.

would be very interested in how much of that money came from referrals, vs. how much came from actual ads. You’ve been plugging your referral link a couple of times now - not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if most of your TextAds revenue does come from referrals, then I agree it’s similar to a pyramid scheme and that skews any comparison to other services such as AdSense. Again, please don’t take this as critique, but this sort of information would certainly be a factor in any decision to switch away from Google (which transfers money to me via bank, btw., not checks).

Text Link Ads is one-tiered affiliate system. AdSense has similar system (”When a user you’ve referred to AdSense first earns US$100 within 180 days, we’ll credit your AdSense account with US$100.”). For more information about their affiliate earnings, check out this.

My income from Text Link Ads has come like this:
- Links: 19% (publishing links on my site)
- Referrals: 75% (referring people to sign up)
- Link buyer referrals: 6% (referring people to buy links from TLA)

This shows how efficient the referral fee can be. I’m also going to expand the links to appear on several other sites, which will probably increase the sponsor revenue from these sources.

And what comes to that “skews away information” - sites such as stevepavlina.com and problogger.net don’t make all the money from ads alone. No, they also use affiliates to earn money. Why do you think ProBlogger has Chitika, Text Link Ads and AdBrite ‘recommended money makers’ in a prominent place? It’s because these make good money for them, and also provide good money making opportunities to those who are interested in making money. That’s exactly what I’m doing now. And I’m sure it can work for you as well.

Two questions:

1. Where can I see a textlink add on this blog? I may be blind ;-) but I don’t see any…

2. Paypal; when you get money transfered to your account there, how do you cash these, or can you transfer them to your regular bank account?

1. Exactly. This is why they are nice: they don’t look like ads (like google). My text link ads are located in the menu bar, under ’sponsors’ (near ‘become a sponsor’ link). Current advertisers are: Ventrilo Hosting and Market Online Backgammon (site URL seems to be offline…)

2. In the beginning of the month. I’ve been paid 1st and 3rd day, so it’s in the beginning of the monk. You can transfer PayPal money to your regular bank account (check details at PayPal.com to make sure it works also in your country)

I noticed Text-Link-Ads talks about Alexa rankings. That bothers me. There are a lot of people who think Alexa is spyware. Just type in “alexa spyware” into Google and look at all the hits. Whether Alexa really is or isn’t spyware isn’t the issue - the issue is that there is a public perception that Alexa is spyware.

That said, I would definitely NOT recommend using Text-Link-Ads on any site with your company’s name associated with it (or your personal name if your personal name is strongly associated with your company). Yeah, you might make a little money, but the damage you could do to your reputation could cost you far more sales than you will make from Text-Link-Ads. People will avoid downloading your games if they percepaive an association between your company and Alexa.

While you may not even be using Alexa directly, if you are even using the data that Alexa provides (either directly or indirectly), that can be enough to turn off a lot of potential customers.

Alexa ranking is just that: only alexa ranking. Your site has Alexa ranking (okay… it can be unranked) wanted you or not, so I wouldn’t worry about that. I’ve recommend people to use their brain, and check Alexa - and that hasn’t hurt my site. This site has Alexa rank around 82000. It’s up to people to make up their opinions regarding it. It’s no way that your site could be ‘associated with Alexa’ if you use the program. As mentioned: there are many big blogs that recommend these same ads, and they remain popular. In my case, I haven’t seen any impact with this. My site has certain Alexa rank, and that’s it.

If you are still worried, remember that your readers cannot see the alexa ranking, they would need to go through the Text Link Ads site, sign up, log in, locate your site and look for the details. In fact, they don’t even have to know that you are associated with Text Link Ads. After all - it’s up to you to display only sponsored links. You don’t need to put any links to Text Link Ads. There’s no way anybody can know 100% that your site is using Text Link Ads if you want that.

We get it, we sign up and you make money. Geez. I thought this blog was about making games - not for milking your audience for referrals.

Thanks for the opinion. This site is about being a game producer and game development. I’ve written 8 posts (out of 259) about making money online - and I will write more. I will continue provide also the practical marketing tips and information about how to get more sales. Making games is one part of the business, but the (perhaps harder part) is to actually make money. Most developers don’t even finish their big game, and many games sell little or nothing. I strongly believe that if indie game producer knows only how to program and manage projects, but lacks the information on how to make money, how to sell and market (their site, game, themselves) they will not succeed in self-publishing their games in the net. If they find somebody else to sell their game, that’s fine - but if they want to learn about how to make money, then I recommend checking out what people say about making money.

I don’t believe in ‘milking my audience’. I believe in giving the best possible opportunities, ideas, benefits and value for the readers. I also believe that short-term money making deals won’t do you any good in a long term. It seems that some people have tried Text Link Ads, got dismal results, and then got back to tell how they couldn’t make money. When I signed up for the link ad program, I was looking for opportunity. Somebody made $25 referral fee from it (might have been problogger.net, might have been somebody else). I expected nothing from the program. I was experimenting. I didn’t care if somebody made $25. Why would I? It wouldn’t be away from me. I didn’t think about what I would be losing. I was looking for alternative for Google AdSense and focused on what I could gain. I sold the first link. I decided to put the sponsor links in better slot and made a better TLA description. I wrote about my experiences (I didn’t even know that I made $150 from referrals so fast) and more people noticed the program and signed up. In the meantime, I managed to sell more links, get more referrals, and even saw my first client referral ($25 for referring somebody to buy links). I was on holiday when this happened, and I’m earned over $400 while being on vacation. I’ve spent very little time to do anything about it, and it sure has done better than my Google AdSense. If you have bad experiences, if you think I’m making money at your expense, if you think people are dishonest and mean and everybody is against you, then tough. I believe we people get what we give. If you start think about giving first, then the ‘get’ part will naturally come.

What can I say? Text Link Ads is an ad program that sells links to your site, and you can make money with it. If you have a site that’s cluttered with ads and site description “Very good game site” no wonder if you get any sales.

I have to disagree. Text link ads is a linking scheme, mainly set up to fool search engines into thinking you have better link popularity than you really do. Google has also threatened that any site with paid text links without nofollow will probably suffer a penalty. Also take a look at the source for their homepage. I dont know if they\’ve removed it, but a few weeks ago there dozens of hidden links on it, again to fool the SE\’s.

You can add ‘nofollow’ in the link if you want. You can fully control on how they appear. And the links you sell point to other sites, and they point only for one month. It’s similar to banner ads: they point to some site (with image link) for one month’s period.

I’m sorry, but almost every second article in this blog is about Text Link Ads. It was much more entertaining, when it was a blog about game production, not about “making $$$ fast”. Please don’t get this wrong, I really like most of your articles, but your blog is really loosing quality…

Thank you for your comment. Out of 258 posts, there’s maybe 10 posts that mention Text Link Ads. Last week I wanted to talk about affiliates, that’s the posts dealt about affiliates, and especially with TLA.

Juuso,

You seem to be reading a lot of Steve Pavlina, which is a self help, motivational blog. Of course, it is your blog, and you can write about anything you want, but the name is Game Producer. Your posts about game sales and great interviews with game producers are the main reasons I subscribe. No offense, but all of these 7-10 quick answers to making money from your blog have little to do with being a game producer.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
GarageGames, Make It Big In Games Blog

Jeff, I don’t read Steve Pavlina. :)

Thanks for the insight. I think indie game producers should look for additional ways to earn money. More sales stats and interviews (such as Bloodrayne 2 guy’s interview) coming in the future.

And for the record… I’ve just received Jesse Smith (game producer at Firaxis) interview. It will be published in the nearly future.

I agree with garry and “reader”. I’d rather read only 2 articles the week instead of an article every day when the half of them is crap. And there have been already a lot of stupid articles here.

When I bookmarked this page some months ago (about January) I found almost every article worth reading. And very interesting. Are the times over?

Thanks. This kind of comments really help me to improve the site. The ‘old good times’ aren’t over (and you will see few stupid articles now and then ;), last week was a ‘money making posts week’. Hopefully they have helped some people to actually make money. Next weeks will be different.

oops, looks like I started an avalanch! ;-)

Hah, no problem Jake. Thanks for this. Every possibility to make poor stuff better is good.

Yes yes, its MUCH better. Still you use Adsense on your own site, now isnt that strange? Maybe if you want to come off trustworthy, you should practice what you preaches?

Yes. I use both TLA and AdSense. TLA links are located under ’sponsors’. They have been there since I started using TLA. I also use Google AdSense (and that’s why I can compare them). Thanks for the opportunity to mention this, I should have mentioned it in the posts.

I agree with a lot of the above comments. You talk about building up trust and faith in your audience but you don’t seem to be following it up with content. Your articles were very good, which is why I started visiting this blog regularly. But now they all seem to be about making money, making money, and making money. The quality of the articles has gone down and it seems like you are trying to make more money off of your readers than actually inform them with some of your better articles.

Thank you for your opinion. These comments help me to improve.

Then to answer to post: What Are Affiliate Programs?

TLA!

do you own a stake in their business juuso? :P

I dont know if i would classify them as an “affiliate” program myself.

No… I don’t own a stake in their business, but the system has made me more money than any other ad program I’ve tried, and that’s why I wanted to tell about it to people.

What has happened to this site?

Seems every blog entry is about how to make money from affiliates or ads followed by a multitude of links to websites that accept your referer id so that you can make cash from me?…

There are 258 posts in this blog, and yes, some of them contain affiliate links that will make me money.

I decided to write several entries about making money - and decided to auto-publish my entries. It was a conscious choice, and if I’d been here, I’ve probably changed the way I write. In August I wrote 4 posts about affiliates, few posts that pointed to earlier articles and several other articles.

Now, in my point-of-view: making games is fun, but making money is crucial if you want to make business. That’s the reason why I wrote several articles about affiliates and explained what kind of experience I’ve had with them.

I admit I saw your very first post about Text Link Ads and I signed up. I thought I’d add it to my website to see how it goes. Well the sad truth was that while you were enjoying the $25 from my sign up, I was seeing nothing.

I ended up emailing Text Link Ads to ask them why I had no offers for ads yet (after they had stated on their site that you will DEFINATELY get a link within the first 1-2 weeks). Their response? To change my site description text to appeal to more people. Well I was quite annoyed and just decided to leave it. A couple of days later, out of the blue I get an email saying I had a site sign up for an ad on my site! Wow, sweet I guess you have to email them to get links!

Thanks Cliff, and actually - TLA’s response had a good intention. I don’t remember how much time I took me to see the first advertiser - but when I got the first email in my mailbox - the feeling was great.

Secondly: I haven’t seem them state anywhere on their site that you will definitely get a link within the first 1-2 weeks. Could you please provide the URL of that page, because I never remember seeing that. Of course I might be wrong.

I think that 1-2 weeks could be quite good time frame. I bet one could get link at that time, if their offering is good.

Thirdly: Their response contains a seed of truth, in fact. I’m quite sure they could have given you a better response, but that’s not the point.

The point is: if your site description is something like “Blog about indie game production, online business and marketing, and music.” it’s no wonder you see nobody advertising on your site.

Here’s a tip on how to make your description better:
- Describe who your readers are. Be specific. For example: “PC game players”
- Describe their gender, age, income and geographic location. Put “15-45 male, with $200-300 to spare monthly, living in Europe, Northern America, Speak mainly English”
- Put page ranks, visitor counts: “Site has Google PageRank 4, gets 100 unique visitors each day (according to AwStat, July 2006). Got 3000 unique visitors in July”
- If you have a blog, put a description that “Each link will be mentioned in the blog which gives you a permanent link to your site”
- If you have a newsletter, add for example “Each sponsor will be mentioned in newsletter that has 700 subscribers”
- Don’t lie about your site stats: it just do you any good in a long run. In fact, the worst things is that you might get sued.
- Think about the advertiser: what would you want to see if you would be looking for ads to buy. This is crucial. What would make you buy link ad from some site?

I’m expanding my site’s (and adding several other sites to the program) descriptions to look better. And yes, I’m using these guidelines.

Cliff: you say “Text link ads” is bad, yet your website recommends it! To me, it looks like you are not using any of the rules for making money with affiliates. First: you have several ad programs going on - are they targeted? Or are you just hoping someone to come and click ads and make money for you? Don’t have several poor affiliates, have only few good. The reason I’m suggesting TLA is that it is a good program, and you can make money with it. I have personal experience, and I know that with some effort, you can make money with it as well. Maybe your site has too many other ads (which can scare away potential sponsors) or perhaps your site description is too short. There are plenty of ways to improve. In my case it looks like the advertisers liked the site and price enough to buy link ads.

I’m 100% sure you can make money with it, if you are prepared to think about how to improve your offering.

However that is beside the point. The reason I bookmarked your blog was because I work in the Games industry and at the time you had some great articles with some common experiences.

Now it feels like you are stuck on earning referal cash so each blog entry is related to making money with your website, your blog, your games, etc, instead of actually what your site Sub line is - “Daily ideas, hints, and inspiration to new and aspiring game producers - from a game producer. ”

Come back to earth or you may end up out in space with your cash floating around you and nobody else within a million miles.

Great to hear you liked some of the content. Now, in my opinion affiliates are part of the game business. I’m quite sure that you agree with this. If I show people how I’m making money with affiliates, in my point-of-view, that’s good. I understand that I was pushing too many entries about the same topic too many times. That was my mistake. I personally think that these articles about affiliates are good, and will provide you value - but I was showing too many in too short period. Good thing is that you don’t need to use TLA or Plimus or any other affiliate programs. I’m simply saying that I’m using them, and for example my online multiplayer games portal has already made some money even before it was officially launched. Reason? It has offered good value to some right people. ProBlogger, Steve Pavlina, Entrepreneurs Journey are all making money with affiliates. Game Tunnel and similar sites are also making money with affiliates. Game portals are making money with ads. It’s definitely part of the business.

I will mention affiliates and making money online in the future, but I try to improve the way I put it. Hopefully you readers can handle this, and good thing is: every time you see a post, you can always stop reading.

To me it seems as if Juuso prepared a series of articles and went on a holiday. ;-)
The articles might be auto-published now and he might not even be aware of what he did.

During the past months I read your blog almost daily, but as many other readers say: Those permanent “Hey earn some 200 bucks via Text-Whatever-Ads”-articles keep annoying me. There have been 5 such articles within the last 4 weeks, with another one coming up tomorrow. If the situation doesn’t roll back to “normality” I think I will stop visiting this site.

Perhaps I can give you an advice, perhaps you should publish this as an upcoming article:

Fake article: If you have not enough stuff to write about - have a break
Sooner or later your blog might get to the point when it’s getting harder every day to find something interesting to write about. If you have set yourself under the pressure of publishing a new article every single day, you might end up writing useless stuff. Your readers might get the feeling that they’ve just wasted their time reading it.
So if you’re lacking ideas - don’t make a mistake and publish repetative or similar articles over and over again. Don’t publish too many offtopic articles, and most important: Don’t sell away the quality of your blog for some extra 25 bucks you might earn.
How to enhance the quality of your blog:
- publish articles strictly following your blog’s topic only
- keep your articles free from advertising. Never mix up content and ads.
- get advice of some good friends / trustworthy readers if you’re not sure whether your article meets your blog’s topic
- do not publish for the sake of publishing. Publish once a week if there’s nothing new of interest, or publish four times a day if you really come across some important things to say

Thanks for reading.
In hope of some really interesting new articles, sales stats and interviews coming up soon - Jan.

Jan, thanks for the very insightful comment.

As you probably noticed: the last week was mostly about affiliates & making money online, and no - it’s not my intention to keep writing about that and only that. Things will ‘roll back to normal’, but I will write about affiliates in the future as well - hopefully with improved way.

I’m honestly surprised that you put ‘if you lack ideas’ comment. I’ve carefully picked every post that I did last week, and some took more time than others to write. And I have a list of post ideas, that contains maybe 100 of ideas about what to write, I have 10ish ‘ask game producer’ questions to answer, I also have 20-30 drafts waiting to be published. The reason I wrote the posts was simply this: I wanted to help people. I wanted to help people to understand that affiliates can bring you extra money. Affiliates can make you money when you sleep. My online gaming portal is almost totally passive income: it works using affiliates, and is game related. I’m 100% sure that you could find similar opportunities, if you just would look deeper.

Anyway Jan - thanks for the good comments. I hope to see you here again.

Now to the golden rules post: 3 Golden Rules on How to Make Money With Affiliate Programs

good job selling out dude, i bet you’re just raking in the cash now

Hmm… this might sounds strange, but yes… I’ve already made decent money with affiliates. I apologize if it seems bad to you, but affiliates are part of the business.

Ahem, I don’t really see you doing this. It seems to me, and to others that earning money from us as visitors is more important to you than providing decent GameProducer content. More fool you! How are you going to earn money from adverts when nobody comes to your site?

Thanks for the comments.

On the subject of Game production…. Wassup with the secret game project? I remember that this was going to be released in April/May 2006 - seems you missed your deadline.

Edoiki is doing fine. I missed deadline. I’ve been on holiday and came back to work today. I’m bit afraid that we would need a programmer to get the game going faster. That has been my worry since Arex left the team. I hoped to get the game done before my holiday, but the deadline was missed. The art is also coming bit late, and so is the programming side but I want to make sure the game has the quality it needs before publishing. It has missed deadlines, but it’s coming along nicely.

Perhaps you’d be better off sharing your thoughts on your own game production, the trials and tribulations. How many games have you actually completed and released? What was your involvement? were you the producer?

Yes, that’s my intention - thanks for the reminder though.

I’m not making a living from my company and from game business at the moment, but I have produced and co-produced several games and participated in publishing other people’s games. I have done game design, game testing, interface design, customer service, website design, promotion and marketing for Geom puzzle/match game when it was produced and post produced. At the moment I have no connections with this game any more. I was also working with launch of Indiepath’s game publishing portal. The first published game, Hightailed was produced almost alone. Tim from Indiepath did the music (and helped with testing and ideas. He also did some marketing and promotion work) and DogzerX made the 3D art. I planned, programmed, designed, marketed, promoted and designed the game, and also planned, designed and coded the website. Hightailed has got featured for example at PCZone’s April 2005 issue.

After working part-time with game portal at Indiepath I decided that it was going on to a direction I didn’t want to participate with (casual games). I decided to focus on multiplayer gaming, and that’s when I launched a Finnish company Polycount Productions and the recently opened CelticHill.com. Both of these site focus on multiplayer gaming.

Juuso stop this! You must focus! This is GAMEPRODUCER.NET site, and we are here to read about Game Production. instead we get mix of webmastering tips, affiliate programs pimping and Pavlinish stuff. If we want to read about this topics, we can go to other sites/blogs which are FOCUSED on webmastering, affiliate programs and personal development. You MUST focus, or you will start losing readers :(

You have a point here. I must focus, that’s true. I think Rampant Games put it quite nicely:

Well, if your focus is on being an indie game producer… then this is all part of the job. Indies don’t enjoy such narrow specialization as mainstream, larger-budget producers.

I came into “indie game development after six years of being a mainstream game programmer (and a couple of years as a “lapsed” game developer working on business software) knowing very little about how much MORE there was to the job than I’d ever suspected. Making the game was really only 50% of the job.This is NOT AN EXAGGERATION. The price of wearing the “top dog” hat means that in addition to being the principle developer and managing my small team of volunteers and outside contracts, I also had to handle marketing, business relationships, business development, sales, contracts with other portals / sales channels, bids for specialized versions of the game, website development… the works.

And I handled all the expenses out of my own pocket (the proverbial shoestring budget), so I didn’t have to worry about seeking additional funding.

So from my perspective, it’s all part of the job. But it does vary with the size of your organization.

I agree that I need to work the way I present my experiences. Thanks Mariusz and Jay for your comments.

Jay: I absolutely agree - if you are in indie game development, you must be prepared to be one man orchestra. But it also means, that your time is even more valuable, and you must spend it wisely. In the beginning reading this site was good investment. But now? What we get?
1) Echos of Steve Pavlina`s articles,
2) Affiliate programs pimping,
3) Subjective opinions without any hard data,
4) Advices on “how to get rich or die trying”,
5) Lots of short posts, which look like spam, not information.

I’m writing this because I’m concerned. I think that this site might be VERY usefull and informative, but Juuso MUST put quality over quantity. Right now I - like probably many readers - struggle with rising urge to delete this feed. It is truism, but in internet competition is one click away, and nobody should forget about this.

Mariuz.

Hopefully reading this far was not a waste of time. But one thing: I’m not echoing (consciously) Steve’s articles - I don’t read his blog. One could say is echoing mine! ;) I’m reading lots of literacy that (such as Game Producer’s Handbook etc.) and yes - I’m sure these books affect on my thinking. Anyway, what comes to the other points:

2) Yes, I mention affiliate programs. Why? They can make you money. Of course one can shout (I’m not saying you are doing this) about how affiliate business is crooky and how things are bad… but the bottom line is: it’s part of the business. Liked you or not. Affiliates can provide more value to your clients, and thus help the developers and publishers make more money. Affiliate business is no more crooky than portal or publisher business. Affiliates give links and guide people to products that aren’t hosted by them, while publishers provide links and products that are published by them. Technically it’s very similar.

3) Subjective opinions without any hard data? I agree that my points are subjective, and what I’m trying to do here is to get you guys thinking. I have provided data that affiliates can make money for you. I’ve given you the amount of money I’m done using some affiliate programs. To me - this kind of data is the best one can get. And yes - my opinions are my opinions. What I’d like you to do is to take what you need, and leave the rest. I’m not going to give you right or wrong answers. I’m going to give you my answer. The way I see things. I give my opinion from my past experience and references I have and what others have taught me. Now, if affiliates don’t make you money, or whether you use DirectX10 when I say you shouldn’t, or whether you code your game from scratch or not - that really isn’t the point. The point is that I can give you another point-of-view. Something you might not even think about. Sometimes my points can be totally different from you, and sometimes they might resonate well. All the data in the world cannot beat experimenting. For example, why I started online games portal? I saw from my previous experience that affiliates could sell. I checked out google and looked for competition, and tried to see what others have done bad and what I could do better. And then I put the site online. I’m experimenting. If the site turns out to be a gold mine, then great: I’ve provided value for players, developers and to myself. If it turns out badly, great: now I know one more thing how not to make online business. It’s about testing: don’t just believe me (or Steve Pavlina or trees), test it.

4) I’ll improve my way to write. Thanks for your comments.

5) Thanks for this point. I’ve been aware that some of my posts are very short. It’s in my interest to start writing longer posts (and by the way, this post should be a good start)

Final words
Thank you guys. Especially I’d like to thank Jake Birkett (for beginning the snowball effect), Philipp (for good questions), Scurvy Lobster (for few more good questions), Concerned (for giving me opportunity to tell more details), garry (for good points) Mariuz_H (several good comments), Logan (for giving me another opportunity to tell more details), reader (for good feedback), Jeff Tunnell (for his professional opinion), Zonque (for very good point), anonymous (for good point), Kaf (for good question), Dark Moon (for giving me opportunity to give better information), Aymes (for nice insight), Cliff Cawley (for opportunity to answer several points), Jan (for constructive criticism), skrode (for great comment :), Devils Advocate (for being devil’s advocate… in a positive way) and also for Jay Barnson (for backing me up).

Thank you readers.