Can’t Get Rich

Sometimes Facebook makes pure liquid hatred shoot out of my eyes.

I decided to try a new type of campaign, and more importantly decided to break each ad group up so that each individual ad only targets 100-1,000 people. I submitted my first ten (identical) ads, each targeting a different group of people, and waited. Twelve hours later, they were approved. Ok, good. That means that the ad details are acceptable, right? Wrong.

I submitted ten more ads (identical to the first group with different demographics) and waited. Several hours later, they were rejected. Ok, no big deal. I made a few changes, resubmitted them, and they were approved.

At this point I was pretty sure I had the ad down solid. I submitted ten more, waited, and was a bit surprised when they were rejected. Instead of rewriting the ad again, I decided to just wait a couple of hours and resubmit the exact same ads. This time, they were approved.

Now, re-read the last paragraph six more times. That’s been the last two days for me. Time after time, the same ad groups with the exact same text are being accepted and rejected. At first I thought it had something to do with the time of day (day shift vs evening shift), but no, I had a group rejected this morning and then approved an hour ago. It’s very frustrating.

You know what this tells me? The people who reject and approve have little to no training. There are no concrete rules, only guidelines that are open to personal interpretation. It’d be nice if there was a little consistency in the whole process, but I guess that’s asking too much.

Oh well. I’m still making money.

EDIT: Hey look, I’m using Eli’s new plugin.

Related Blogs

Related Blogs on facebook ads

• Your own branded online community vs advertising on Facebook
• Users ignore Facebook advertising!
• Comment on Remove and Hide Facebook Ads by information on lorazepam
• Using Facebook to promote your artwork (2)

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Every once in awhile, it’s nice to take a closer look at your analytics page. Here are a few of the more interesting things I’ve picked out of the last month of my statistics:

Why are you still using Internet Explorer?

Look at this:

Come on people, why are you still using IE? It’s slow, it has more security vulnerabilities than any other modern browser, and it just plain sucks. Go get Firefox. Either that, or give me a good reason why anybody should still be using IE.

Not optimized for tiny screens

Here’s a shocker:

That’s from the OS page. People are visiting this site from hand-held devices. I don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified. This site must like like total crap on a screen that small. Oh well, to each his own.

Something surprising

An article I wrote six months ago seems to be ranking #2 when you search for the name of a particular online store:

Back when I wrote that article, they’d only sold 400 somethings. Six months later, they’ve sold over 10,000. Congrats guys.

Diamond in the rough

I’ll leave you guys with this keyword that’s brought two people to my site:

If that’s not a reason to try to get rich, then I don’t know what is.

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I’m a firm believer in the opinion that nearly every “make x dollars per day” ebook, forum post, and blog entry has outlived its usefulness for whoever thought it up. It makes perfect sense to me because, at least in my world, everybody is greedy and wants to wring every last drop out of their idea, and when that idea is bone dry and useless, chop it up and sell it to idiots on Digital Point.

My question is simple: If you happen to come up with some brilliant idea, when do you reveal it to others (for bragging purposes)? If you reveal your secret too quickly, you risk flooding an otherwise untapped market. I’m wondering because I think I’ve found a relatively untapped service niche, and while I’d love to tell you guys about it, I’d also love to make a ton of money. I’ve only told two other people (and you guys better keep it to yourselves), so for now, my secret is safe. I’ve been trying to come up with a list of scenarios that would allow me to share my idea, and here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

I make a hundred zillion dollars

If my idea made me more money than I needed, I’d go ahead and share it with Wickedfire (gotta love that +rep). No sense in keeping it all to myself.

If it can be duplicated thousands of times without flooding the market

Think about local search engine control and optimization. There are thousands of businesses in thousands of cities in hundreds of countries, so there’s no possible way one person can tap that entire market. If my idea had such a huge range, I wouldn’t mind sharing it.

If I’ve already got all of the good niches

My idea involves niches. As far as I know, all of the broad niches are still available. Once I snap up all of the good ones (and get them established), I’d share my idea so that people can exploit the microniches.

Greed before reputation I guess. Here’s a few reasons why I’m not sharing my as-yet-unproven genius idea yet:

• People out there can make these types of sites faster than I can.
• They can do SEO better than I can, so even if I have a good niche picked out they could overtake me in the SERPs.
• They can outsource the grunt work to a team of cheap laborers and still reap the benefits.
• Most importantly, it’s an unproven technique and I don’t want to look like an over-enthusiastic moron.

So, yeah. I’m just going to keep this one under my hat for now. If, by chance, I happen to post a technique a few months from now (with accompanying earnings screenshots), you can bet that I’ve probably milked it for all that it’s worth.

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Twitter. What a waste of time.

I really don’t get it. I also don’t get why people give it so much praise. Honestly, why would anybody think that Twitter is a good use of time? Are you really that interested in every little thing that I do? My life can’t be that interesting.

Well, regardless of how asinine I think it is, I’ve decided to give it a try. Everybody else seems to be doing it (peer pressure for the win!). So, yeah. Congratulations. Now you guys will have the ‘privilege’ of knowing what I’m doing, when I do it (assuming I update). If you’ve ever wanted to know when I shower, what I had for lunch, and who I’m ignoring at work, go ahead and follow my twitter…list? Blog? Thing.

I’ve got a great idea. Since it doesn’t seem to be enough to shove all of my personal information into Facebook, record my activities on my blog, and update Twitter every time I do something even mildly interesting, I propose that bloggers like me take it a step further. How about I wear a webcam on my head at all times? I can have a live feed going so you guys can see what I see. Watch me die repeatedly while playing Manhunt 2. Read along with me while I read my new steampunk novel. I can even put an old lens over the camera when I have my glasses off. You know, to give you the full experience.

But wait. You guys wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing while I was away from home. I suppose I could install more webcams in places that I frequently visit, or maybe I could carry a large external harddrive and dump the contents to my server when I get back. Think of it as Tivo-ing my life.

I’ll also be sure to wear a GPS locater and write up an interface using the Google Earth API so that you guys can know exactly where I am at all times. Maybe I’ll work in a few other features, like how fast I’m walking so that you can see how many calories I’ve burned.

I’m afraid that’s pretty much all I can do at this point. Maybe in a decade or so when mind/machine interfaces are more sophisticated, I’ll be able to upload a live stream of all of my deepest thoughts and dark secrets. At night, you could tune in to see if I was dreaming about anything interesting. Sounds cool, right? Well, you’re just going to have to wait.

Oh look, done with the blog post. Time to update my Twitter thing.

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