Can’t Get Rich

Rejected title - “OnlyAccount.com: Impressive enough to catch my attention.”

I almost never use social bookmarking sites. Stumbleupon traffic is too random, Digg is full of idiots, and I’ve never really used the other big ones. In any case, that’s all in the past now. One of my nice readers sent me an invite to a new service that he’s developing: OnlyAccount.com. It’s currently in closed beta, so you’ll just have to let me describe it to you (although they are accepting beta tester applications, so sign up if you’d like).

OnlyAccount is pretty simple - You create one account with them, and you let that one account manage all of your other accounts at various social bookmarking sites. After adding your accounts, you can add bookmarks, select which accounts and which services you’d like to add them to, and then let OnlyAccount do the rest. Altogether, it’s a pretty simple process.

Step 1 - Add accounts and logins

I’m actually not a member of any of the eight social bookmarking sites OnlyAccount currently supports, so I had to go and sign up for all of them. I picked one username and password, signed up for all eight sites, and then added them all to one of my OnlyAccount users. It turns out you can add multiple users to your OnlyAccount login, but for now I just used one. Anyway, after adding all of that crap I noticed that I’d mistyped my password in six out of eight of them, but thankfully the service has a mass-edit function that made it simple to fix.

Yes, I know mass-edit is a mundane feature, but you’d be surprised at the number of online services that lack it. Anyway, it makes things easier for the user.

Step 2 - Add bookmark

I decided to bookmark my podcast page. I wrote up a title, description, and provided a list of keywords. After that, I selected my user, all eight of its logins (bookmarking sites), and clicked submit.

Step 3 - Wait

All of those submissions got put into a queue where they were processed within 5 minutes. The queue is very descriptive, with status messages and errors just in case something doesn’t work. After processing, it automatically moves your entries to a separate ‘completed’ queue for record-keeping purposes. Very nice.

Basically, I like this service because it streamlines the whole process of social bookmarking. Once you’ve gotten everything signed up for and recorded in the system, it’s cake to blast out your submissions to multiple sites on multiple accounts. In my example, I only used one user and eight sites. While OnlyAccount may not be a huge time saver in that regard, just imagine if I had created ten or twenty users? Thanks to this service, I would have only had to spend a couple minutes of my time creating a bookmark while the system plowed through 80-160 submissions.

Overall, I think this service has great potential. I’d recommend checking it out if you get the chance.

Oh yeah, and don’t create 100 accounts and get it flagged as a spamming site. No need to ruin it for the rest of us.

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I came across two exceptionally clever marketing ideas today. Neither one of them are my own, but I thought I’d share anyway.

First off, a virus

One of my awesome readers sent me an interesting tip the other day - Apparently, his computer had caught a virus. No, keep reading, it gets interesting. He noticed that, when he loaded web sites with Adsense blocks, they were quickly covered up with a second advertisement. After doing a quick virus scan and finding (and curing) an infection, the graphical ads stopped and the Adsense blocks returned.

That has got to be one of the most brilliant viruses (virii?) I’ve ever heard of. You see, people tend to think of spyware and malware when giant flashing popups appear on their desktop for no particular reason, but everybody expects to see banner ads on a website, right? So, why bother purchasing ad space? Just steal it from every site on the net (with adsense code that is). By superimposing your own ads over competitors ads, you have a free advertising vehicle that will fly right under most people’s radar. My hat is off to whoever wrote such a clever bug.

Employ those bums

Brilliant? Maybe. Strange? Definitely. This guy is thinking outside of the box with a program he calls Bumvertising (yes, I know it’s been around since 2005. I just heard about it today, so sue me). Basically, he “employs” a few bums around town. They hold up his sign (in addition to their own) in exchange for food/cash/whatever. Check out his gallery to see what I mean.

I wonder how this idea worked out for him? He’s gotten all kinds of press, both positive and negative, and his forums are a mess of praise, hatred, and spam. What I’m really wondering is whether or not he’s violating any labor laws. Since he’s technically employing them, he’d have to pay minimum wage, deal with taxes, etc. I’m guessing he just took the simple route and did it all under the table.

Still, it’s an interesting idea, one that definitely got him a lot of attention.

Thinking outside of the box

I really need to work on my creativity. Right now, I’m taking a look at all of the resources I have at my disposal (a lot of time, a lot of (gullible) students, and not a lot of money), and trying to figure out how best to use them. Too bad you can’t learn how to be creative.

Oh well, maybe more Mountain Dew will help.

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When it comes to creating content sites, I’m really not your go-to guy. I don’t really like writing informative articles, and I’m not a huge fan of researching unknown topics for niche sites. That’s why I’d rather let my users create all the content for me and monetize the results. For example,

Rated image sites

I create a Hot or Not clone, add a few images, do a little free advertising on related message boards, and it basically automates itself. Just pick a niche (betta pictures for example), add a little adsense code, get a few dozen users, and you’re golden. After you have a ‘community’ established (complete with daily new images, active message boards, etc), replace the adsense with some targeted affiliate offers. After you get enough people on board, these sites run themselves.

Wikis

This one’s pretty self explanatory. Find a niche that doesn’t have its own wiki, create your own on *niche*wiki.com, and again advertise on related message boards. The know-it-alls will flock to your site (especially if they can credit themselves for their own work), and soon you’ll have a nice little reference guide. Do enough link building and you’ll probably start ranking well due to the sheer amounts of content. Adsense, etc, money.

Forums

I keep saying that forums are the best place to get your initial membership surge. Well, why not help yourself out and create you own? Then again, you’d better have a good niche, because forums have been around forever and all of the good niches are long-gone (or have been eaten up by larger forums with dedicated sub-forums). Personally, I only create forums when I already have a decent-sized user community on some other kind of site.

Let them do all the work

Build the initial framework, do some basic recruiting and linkbuilding, and let the whole thing run itself once it’s ready. Your users get a smug sense of self-importance, and you get money. Everybody wins.

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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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My conversation with Jason the other day got me thinking about the limits of what can be outsourced. As he stated in my podcast, he’s going to be getting into the Wordpress premium theme business. He also stated that he has no experience with design or coding, and that he’s going to outsource everything. Hm. I found that idea pretty interesting. Basically, the only part that he’s playing in that whole equation is branding and marketing. That got me thinking: If I wanted to save time and money, what could I outsource?

Landing page design

My first thought was landing pages. I don’t mind admitting that I’m a terrible designer, and that my landing pages generally convert worse than if I had just direct-linked to the offer. I remembered seeing a thread on Wickedfire about outsourced landing page design, and after doing a little research, I decided to order one. The guy charges a pretty penny ($55), but after seeing some examples of his work, I doubt it’ll take long for the page to pay for itself. Apparently, his services are pretty popular: His schedule was full for a week before he could squeeze me in.

Bidding way too high on my keywords, I was making $20-$30/day with this campaign. I expect that number to be much higher after deploying the new LP.

Content

I only have a handful of content sites (not counting my splogs), and I do all of my writing (or rewriting) myself. I suppose if I found a good niche I could pay someone $5-$10 per article on Wickedfire or DP, but I have yet to find said niche.

Technical stuff

I work at the Internet. Installing scripts and doing server work is sorta my thing. No need to outsource here.

Laundry

Would you believe that there’s actually a service at my university called “Dorm Moms”? You pay them a few hundred dollars per semester, and they come by and do your laundry and tidy up your room. First of all, I don’t live in the dorms, so I don’t think I’m eligible, and secondly, who the hell is that lazy? I can’t imagine anybody so busy that they can’t take two hours ever other week to do laundry.

Hey, that gives me an idea. I’ll be talking to Paul (Uberaffiliate) on my next podcast, and he makes around a million dollars a month, so maybe I’ll ask him if he does his own laundry.

“Alright, we’re talking with Paul of Uberaffiliate.com fame. Paul, let’s get down to the important issues. The world wants to know: Do super affiliates do their own laundry? What are your thoughts on that?”

Hey, it might happen. Tune in this weekend to find out.

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