That is where the money is.
Saturday, October 27th, 2007I am making this entry in reply to this thread on this message board. The young lady was asking about how she can promote her site using social media.
I always end up in trouble, even when I am trying to be good 
Excellent post by benjarriola Social Media Optimization Should Not Work Like A Link Farm, I wish i had a way with words like he does 
Problem is people think that numbers (as in higher traffic) = more $$$$
This is not really true. I have had like 10K+ unique IP on a website in a day and only make like $10. (me and a friend gamed a social book marking side so we where on front page for like 32 hours).
On the other side of the coin I have had only 250 unique IP, these have converted at like 1:20 and lets just say i make a lot of $$$.
I forgot about yahoo answers and other Q&A services. Thanx for reminding me.
Also remember that spam is spam when the person you are giving it to is not intrested in what you are offering. Whether you submit the entries by hand or using automated methods, it still holds true.
A couple of months back I had the pleasure of working with a guy promoting male enhancement products. (automatically you think spam).
For starters he wrote amazing copy, not using fancy english etc. The best person i can compare his writing to is “Mark Twain”, he was formally a newspaper journalist, so he is very discriptive/captivating with his words, while never using fancy words.
The he make sure that he only promotes his site in places where there are people who may be intrested in such products. So he did not social bookmark on a site that deals with womans issues :). Using the yahoo Q&A example he would only promote in places where there might be men with such problem :).
Amazingly enuff he was having conversions of 1:20.
I am not sure if i mentioned this before on this board, but 25%+ of your time should be spent on research. As in randomly choosing a niche seeing what they are up to, how are they promoting etc.
In USA there was a famous bank robber, called willie sutton. He had robbed over 75+ banks, escaped from jail countless times etc. When he was old a newspaper journalist interviewed him and asked “Why did you rob bank ?”. Willie looked at the journalist, kinda perplexed, what type of stupid question is this, then replied “That is where the money is”. And so on the net follow where the money is.
And so when you do your research follow where the money is. On the net the money is in 4 major areas
- adult oriented sites
- pharmacy / medical sites
- gambling / casino (less so since new laws in USA about online gambling)
- finance areas, check out payday loans etc
Of primary intrest is adult sites and pharmacy. In both of these markets the competition is cut throat. There is no such thing is whitehat/blackhat, the only rule there is you get traffic legally and make it convert into sales. Also adult is ussually 5 years ahead of anyone else in the net game. The adult industry was doing what is called web 2.0, social media presentation, marketing with blogs etc, 3-5 years ago. They where doing web 2.0 before it even had a name.
Ironically 3+ years ago while the adult industry was pioneering the concept of adult blogs as a marketing tool, the so called experts where saying that blogs from a marketing perspective where useless. That there was no way to monetize blogs etc.
In all of the above industries, competition is brutal, if you buy PPC words in these area, you are looking at $2-3 per click. So you do not have the luxary of wasting users.
Right now adult is pioneering flash animated ads, little games which you can play. Also they are working on flash chat boxes, flash video ads etc. I am guessing that 3 years from now the rest of the net may clue in.
The key is not doing the same crap what others are doing today, but to think of new origional ideas. (Or sometimes taking old ideas, and putting a new spin on them).