Can’t Get Rich

Man, I had a terrible day.

I sat down and tallied up last month’s PPC revenue vs costs, and the results weren’t pretty. I pretty much wiped out a lot of the success I had been enjoying, thanks to a couple of campaigns that went wrong. Pretty depressing stuff.

You know what though? It’s not all that bad. I decided to lay off on PPC for awhile and find other methods to try. Thanks to that decision, I came up with two methods that I’m going to be trying over the next week or two, and best of all they won’t cost me anything but my time.

The first method I won’t be sharing with you. Gotta keep some secrets.

The second method is publicly available. I found it here. It’s a pretty solid technique, and it’s one that I wish I’d thought of sooner. I’m pretty sure that only one person who reads my blog goes to the same University I do, so I’m going to go ahead and summarize what I’m going to be doing and how it can work for you.

If you’re too lazy to read the article I linked to, here are the basics:

1. College students like free stuff.
2. There are lots of college students.
3. Print up a bunch of flyers with tear-off sections that advertise something with your URL on it.

That’s the quick and dirty. Basically, what I’m going to do is take an affiliate offer (this one, for example), find a good domain name and setup a redirect, print that domain name on 100 tear-off flyers (example), and put them up all over campus. Best part: I’m going to be printing the flyers on university printers, which makes it absolutely free for me.

I’ll pick a new offer every other week or so and see what works. If you live near a university, consider giving this method a try. If you don’t, you still might be able to try this method on community bulletin boards (coffee shops, for example), although I doubt your flyer will receive the same amount of exposure (my school has 36,000ish students).

Moral: If one method fails, try another one.

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Ever sleep in til 2 PM and then play Starcraft for four hours (MY LIFE FOR AUIR)?

Yeah…oops. I have Wednesday’s off from work, and I typically take it easy, but not that easy. That’s not to say I completely wasted the day though.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Network with your peers. Send them the occasional email. Talk to them on AIM. You stand a chance to learn way more than you ever would have just reading their blog or forum messages. Two examples:

1. Matt and I talk on AIM almost daily. We had lunch last week. Through these conversations, Matt has increased my knowledge about incentivized marketing 1000%, and also let me in on a few of his more ingenious ideas (ideas that I will not be sharing with you guys =P).
2. Mr. Shady has spoken with me on AIM a few times, and recently revealed to me an approach to marketing that I hadn’t thought of. He told me that it’s a fairly easy market to get into, and that if I started now, I could easily make the $2,500 I need to take my trip overseas this August. I spent a few hours today doing research and setting up campaigns according to his advice, and if it comes through for me, I’ll definitely be bringing him about a thousand boxes of Pocky when I come back.

So yeah. Since I really didn’t do much today, I’d like to challenge you to do what I’ve done: Join online communities (Wickedfire, in my case), ask questions, be active, and keep asking questions. Eventually, you’ll get answers that work for you.

Oh yeah, and go do it now. No sense in waiting.

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I’m going to do it.

I’m going to create the slimeyest, most worthless network of sites the net has ever seen. Google will probably ban my adsense account. My web host will probably strangle me. I might even get sued.

Who cares, I’m curious.

I’m going to take one domain, one database, one thousand subdomains, and create the biggest mess of autoblogs ever. I’m also going to do it in a month.

(Don’t get me wrong. That one domain will probably be banned within one week. It’ll just be providing startup capital)

Yes, that’s right. By the end of May I plan on being the most morally bankrupt blogger in the world. Consider it an experiment. I plan on diving into the murky depths of theft and spamming.

I got the idea from Eli, who is a very smart person and would probably slap me soundly for crediting him with my inspiration. He has a handy little link in that article that contains a custom Wordpress setup made specifically for splogs. I’m going to take that nifty little tool and combine it with the ’strength in numbers’ theory to reach my goal of $100/day adsense earnings. I figure a thousand blogs at $0.10/day is doable.

I’ll be keeping track of my progress at the bottom of every post from now until I’m done. It’ll look something like this:

Worst site ever made: 0/1000

I’ll also be providing other status updates. Things like this:

• Received 5th legal threat
• Melted my server
• Google banned me from the Internet

I freely admit that this is the worst idea I’ve ever had. It’s also one that I haven’t tried, and I don’t (personally) know anybody else who’s tried it, so I might as well go ahead and do it.

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About a block from where I work, there’s a coffee shop that makes the best quesadillas in town. I go down there two or three times a week to grab dinner. Unfortunately, it seems like every time I walk in, there’s some horrible local emo-pop band in there hell-bent on wrecking my eardrums. They always have overpriced Cafepress shirts, they always have flyers advertising their Myspace page, and they always suck.

Thanks digital distribution

The one that was playing last night even tried to charge me $2 to get in. I told him to piss off and that I was there for the food, not the band (tech support puts me in a bad mood). I ended up having to use a combination of sign language, writing, and pointing at the menu to communicate with the barista, since the band was so loud. After I placed my order, I had a good ten minutes to witness a terrible assault on my senses and enumerate their many issues. If you’re a part of, or have ever wanted to make your own band, pay attention:

The venue is everything

The coffee shop I was in is about the size and shape of a shoebox. Shoeboxes don’t have good acoustics (only slightly better than a two-dimensional shape). The band, of course, compensated for this by turning up the volume to glass-shatteringly high levels.

The singer is probably holding you back

I have to admit that the drummer, guitarist, and bassist were all pretty good. The vocalist, on the other hand, was too loud, off beat, and tone deaf. Ruined the whole experience.

Make sure your equipment is working before going live

Apparently there were two guitarists, but one was having technical issues. For three songs.

Don’t send mixed signals

You have depressing, emo clothes and haircuts. Your backdrop is black. Your hair has been dyed black. Your logo is a skull (on a black background). Why are you dancing around like monkeys and singing about how life is great and you’ll never give up?

Don’t quit your day job

If you’re performing in a coffee shop to 13 people, you’re probably not very good.  Fire your singer and stay in school.

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I’m a big fan of Betta fish. I keep them as pets, I’m fairly knowledgeable about them, and someday I’d like to breed them. Up until recently, I’d never really thought about using my hobby for niche website development.

Then, last night, my Betta died. He’d been fighting some mystery illness for nearly a week, and even though I used every treatment method I could think of, it didn’t help. At this point, I’m pretty sure it was a bacterial infection that resulted in kidney failure, although with the symptoms he had, I can’t be 100% sure. Anyway, after he died, I did all kinds of searching on Google to find a cure in case the problem came up in a future pet.

What I found was…interesting. I’m not talking about the disease, I’m talking about the niche. There are a lot of Betta lovers out there, and very few sites dedicated to them. A little more research revealed that most Betta fans like showing off their Bettas. At this point, wheels were turning in my head. How could I capitalize on an untapped niche, specifically one whose members love sharing pictures? My mind immediately went to Hot or Not, or more generally, rated image sites. People love those things, right? I did a little digging and came up with a free PHP script that was basically a Hot or Not clone. After many hours battling with the poorly-documented installation manual, I managed to get a new site off the ground: RateMyBetta.org. .com is parked and .net is taken. This is why I hate domain parking.

Anyway, with my site working, I needed traffic. I announced my new site on a couple of forums that I regularly visit, and sent an email off to the owner of a hugely popular Betta site (and it bounced. Upon closer inspection, I found that the site is seven years old, and hasn’t been updated in who knows how long). More searching dug up a rather large forum dedicated to Bettas, so I joined and made my announcement there as well. As I type this, I’m getting a new member every ten minutes or so, so I’d say that last idea was a good one.

My number one priority right now is attracting new members. After that, link building. I won’t be happy until that site ranks well for keywords like “betta pictures” and “betta information”. The script I’m using is very flexible, allowing for lots of user-generated content. It comes with built-in forum functionality as well as giving each user a ‘mini-blog’. With enough time, I think this site could become very big in the Betta niche.

Of course, that leaves one big question: How to monetize? Right now, I’m not even thinking about it. I genuinely enjoy Bettas, so I’m not going to try to squeeze money out of the site yet (those adsense ads up top were built in to the template, so I’m just leaving them). Who know though: In a few months this site could end up working very well for me.

Hooray for untapped niches.

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