If you haven’t started using Myspace’s new PPC platform yet, check it out here. I heard about it a couple days ago from Ads 4 Dough. I’ve barely even looked at A4D’s offers yet but the fact that they stay on top of shit and tell their affiliates about stuff like this already makes it worth it to sign up with them, so I’d definitely recommend doing that too.

Myspace > Facebook. Why?

• More users. That means more people seeing your ads. It also means better targeting and more niches to market to.
• More relaxed. If you’ve ever ran ads on Facebook you know that it’s run by a bunch of dipshits who have no idea what they’re doing. News flash: if you deny 90% of people trying to buy ads (and legit ads at that), you make 90% less money than you would have if you had approved them. Somehow Facebook doesn’t seem to understand this and they deny everyone for everything. Myspace lets you do whatever the fuuuuuuck you want.
• Better usability. The interface is amazing, very easy to use and very user-friendly. It took me about 10 seconds to learn everything there is to know about it.
• Better ads. You can design your own 300×250 and/or 768×90 (something like that) ad images. No stupid 110×80 little squares where you can’t see shit.
• Everything. Everything is just better. The only downside is it takes a VERY LONG TIME to get ads approved. Also Myspace users are a lot more likely to sign up for stupid shit, and a lot more likely to buy stupid shit, so conversions should be a lot higher. If you’ve tried some things that weren’t profitable on Facebook on Adwords, try them on Myspace and they might be.

Keep in mind that while Myspace is mainly kids, you don’t need to pick offers that are only targeted at kids. You can target any demographic you want, there’s so many people on Myspace it really doesn’t matter. In fact I’d recommend doing that, since it’s a social network you can target more specific demographics and niches than with something like Adwords. Try it out and see what you think, I’m interested to hear what you all think about it.

So as ya’ll know I haven’t been posting as much because I’ve been working on my Myspace layout site. I already have a shitload of layouts and stuff and I’ve already paid for everything, just waiting for the CMS (content management script - like the platform it runs on) and the design to be finished. Found an ultra badass graphic designer to do it and it’s gonna look about 1000000 times better than all the other layout sites on the net. It actually isn’t gonna take as much time as I thought it would to maintain it so I’m planning on starting another thing at the same time, I’ll have all my time right now to set it up and then it’ll be up and running by the time the Myspace site is done. I brainstormed a few ideas, my thought process when analyzing new ideas is something like - amount of initial investment, growth/scaling potential (how big it could grow - if you’re looking at a 50% return but it could only operate on a very small scale, its still a waste of time), profit expectations, how much time it’ll take to manage it (I usually disregard setup time because everything takes a long ass time to set up, the amount of time it takes to run it once it’s already up is what’s more important), marketing strategies and target markets as well as if I have experience with these markets. Here are some of my ideas:

• Dating blog: A blog about dating advice and how to hook up with hot girls, stuff like that. I’m in my junior year of college (yup pretty young if you didn’t already know) and I’ve dated so many girls, done pretty much everything, had threesomes, picked up girls on Myspace, all that shit and I’m pretty well qualified to give advice about it and tell other guys how to do shit. The market for shit like this is huge and people are paying big bucks for dating gurus and all that bullshit so I think a free-to-read blog about it would be a hit. I could have some guest posts from hot girls I know and shit like that, lots of possibilities.
• Animal video blog: Basically a video blog version of Cute Overload. Funny/cute videos of animals/pets mainly cats/dogs/rabbits stuff like that. Again the market for this stuff is huge, if I remember correctly Cute Overload became a million dollar site in less than a year and other sites like Lolcats and all that stuff are really popular. And I have two cats that are always doing goofy ass poses like sleeping on their backs and stuff like that lol.
• Model site: Something along the lines of Babe BLVD, it’s a site where you pay ~$30 a month to be a member, and they have about 30 site models who post their pictures/videos/bios/interviews on the site for members to look at. I was thinking about doing the same thing but with all college girls and organizing them by school (only problem is I’m not sure if even just writing the name of the school is a copyright violation, anyone know? like if I were to have categories listed as “Harvard” “USC” and then like 5 girls for each school for example). Scaling would be ridiculous, 1000 members = $30k a month and it would probably have a lot more than 1000 members.
• Facebook Babes site: I actually did this before, it was a blog where we just posted pictures of hot girls from Facebook/Myspace, it was extremely easy to maintain, could spend an hour on it and have 5-10 new posts every day. The first day it went up it had thousands of views with no paid advertising. Obviously the market for this is HUGE (every straight guy in the world lol) and there’s lots of promotion possibilities. The problem with the last site was that anyone could register as an author and post pics, and a bunch of girls got mad because their pics were being posted without them knowing. I don’t really understand why they’re mad because after all it just meant that they were hot, but we shut it down after awhile because of privacy violations and shit. I think if it did go up again we could just approve all the authors and ask girls before posting their pics. or get a paki host and do whatever we want
• Lottery site: You pay $10 a month to be a member of the site and every week there are raffles for items like laptops, ipods, etc. there are also raffles for insane shit like tickets to Playboy mansion parties, win a date with a supermodel, have Lil Wayne come to your bday party, shit like that (and yeah I can actually get ahold of those things I’m not just talking outta my ass lol). Initial investment would be larger than the other sites but still not too big (I don’t know how much it would cost to set up the CMS, maybe a couple thousand?). So once you’re a member you buy as many raffle tickets as you want and we have a counter under each item (multiple items are up for raffle at the same time) telling you how many tickets for that item have already been bought. Tickets would be $1 or something. I’d probably also make it so you just buy credits and then use the credits as your raffle tickets (that way people will buy more than just 1 ticket at a time, they’ll buy a pack of credits and maybe not use them all, so I make more money).

My favorite (by far) ideas are the dating blog and the Facebook babes blog. Initial investment is very small, easy to set up, easy to promote and I’m already familiar with the markets, and easy to maintain. The dating blog would probably be my favorite idea if ya’ll think the market for it is as big as the market for the Facebook babes site, because it would be so easy to write a post a day rather than looking for hot girls and/or paying people to look for them. could also possibly combine the ideas like a Facebook babes / dating advice all in one, who knows lol. I’d really like to hear your feedback, ideas, suggestions, or even entirely new ideas if you have any. I’m looking to do this asap so I can buy the 09 SL65 the day it appears lol. So hit me with some feedback!

UPDATE: Just wanted to know what you all thought about these last few posts. My traffic has actually been going up but comments have been going way down. Let me know what posts you like and don’t like and I’ll be able to write more about some of the more popular topics. Thanks.

I’ve said this many many many times and I’m saying it again: the DESIGN and IMAGE of your site/product is almost as important, if not more important, than the actual quality of the site/product. If you see a website that looks unprofessional, you’re likely to assume the company is unprofessional and that their product is poor quality. This is especially true for “make money online” blogs and landing pages offering products related to making money - if you can’t even afford a few hundred dollars for a decent site design, why would anyone believe that you can show them how to make money? It doesn’t make any sense.

I’ve received lots of emails asking who does my designs, namely for this site (Stak Loaded) and the Lambo Sweepstakes project I launched a while back. I designed Stak Loaded myself, based it off the designs of a couple other blogs that I liked but for the most part I did all the Photoshopping and coding myself. I don’t really have time to do designs for other people but if you have a $1000+ budget and would like me to do something for you, send me an email. Other than that, I’d recommend looking around at graphic design forums and just Googling “blog designer” or “graphic designer” and checking people out. I WOULDN’T recommend posting projects on DP, Get a Free Lancer, or any of those sites, because 99% of the people who contact you are just bullshitters who don’t know the first thing about creating effective designs. It’s always better to seek people out yourself rather than have them come to you.

Lambo Sweepstakes [screenshot] was designed by Umar Salman. I’m a very picky dude and it literally took me months to find a designer I liked, but as soon as I saw his portfolio I contacted him, paid him the next day, and the design was finished within a week. I highly recommend him and I’ll definitely be working with him on future projects. If you have a $1500+ budget and would like to work with Umar, email him here and tell him you liked his work on Lambo Sweepstakes (Lambo Sweepstakes, not Stak Loaded!) and he’ll reply almost instantly.

If anyone knows of any other good web/graphic designers, please post them up in the comments so I can check them out!

A lot of Facebook groups related to making money, affiliate marketing, network building, etc have been popping up lately, and judging by the number of group invitations I get, every time someone creates a new group they go through the member list of every other group and invite every single person they see. Facebook is a great tool for networking as well as keeping in touch with people, but it’s getting harder and harder to filter through all the bullshit. Every other Facebook group looks like a copy and paste of a poorly written landing page offering something like “join my group and I’ll teach you how to make $100k a month!” Hopefully no one here has been sucked into any of these ridiculous scams.

Facebook groups are actually a very good way to build a network because people are a lot more prone to accept a group invitation than they are to join a mailing list, and groups work in essentially the same way as lists because they give you the ability to post updates and message all of the members whenever you want. If anyone here has or is planning on starting a Facebook group (I’m talking about something for the purposes of networking or making money, not a “class of 08 rocks!” group), here’s a couple tips for maximizing your ROI:

• Don’t send millions of messages a day. I joined about 15 groups and left all but 3 of them because a lot of them were sending out multiple messages every single day, and they were all spam messages reiterating the same information and sending me to poorly designed landing pages for shitty products. Send mass messages 2 or 3 times a week at the most, or people will get fed up with them and leave, and you’ve just turned away a potential lead. If you have small updates you’d like to share, just update your page to add the new information, and save the mass messaging for really important news.
• Make it believable. I’ve talked about this before and now I’m talking about it again. If you want people to believe you actually know what you’re talking about, you need to show some credentials. A good example of what NOT to do is 100k Dream Team. I saw someone advertising this on Facebook and since the girl posting it looked pretty hot, I clicked it to see what it was, and I was greeted with the most ridiculous bullshit I’d ever seen in my life. She makes $100k a month, yet for some reason she decided not to hire a professional designer and instead to design the entire site herself in Microsoft Paint. And I’m sure that yellow Lambo actually belongs to her and she didn’t just steal the picture from Google Images. Let’s be serious - if you want people to believe you’re making money, at least make yourself reasonably believable.
• Don’t steal. At least half of the groups that I left due to spam messaging were actually copying each other’s messages and sending them to their own groups. I received the exact same message multiple times, just from different people. Even if I were interested in their bullshit, there would have been no point staying in more than one of the groups if they’re just going to repeat the same information. That’s another problem I see with a lot of these “make money online” blogs - all their topics have already been discussed hundreds of times and they don’t have any fresh info or even an original take on old info. Come on now.

Another thing you need to know is that the Facebook Continue Reading »

I decided to try out some Entrecard advertising a few days ago to see how it performed. Up until then, I’d just been letting it sit in the sidebar and build up credits and I hadn’t even logged into my account in at least a week or so. I decided I wanted to advertise on John Chow’s site, seeing as thousands of people visit it every day I thought it would be a good investment. The cost of advertising on his site at the time was 2048 credits, and I was a little short so I bought some on eBay for $5 or so (who has time to actually drop their own cards??). I took out an ad on his site, let it sit for a day and checked that stats to see how many clicks it had generated: 53. Really? I guess it’s not THAT bad, seeing as CTR’s for these types of ads are always gonna be pretty low, but seriously it really seems like a waste of time.

If you’re one of those people who loves dropping cards, I’d like to hear from you as to how much traffic you’ve actually generated through Entrecard. To me, it seems like a waste of time, as the largest number of clicks I’ve received from any single widget has been just over 100. You might say “well I drop cards all day and don’t buy credits like you did so it doesn’t cost me anything,” but it actually does cost you something: your Continue Reading »