Archives for December 2007

The best parties? Internet ballers? Champagne?

Since these are all terms synonymous with the lifestyle im accustomed to living then I am definitely off to a good start! So who am I you may be asking? In case you cant read, or are mildly dyslexic, my name is Lorne Fade, and I’m just your regular run of the mill 23 year old college student with aspirations of the highest degree. In terms of affiliate marketing, I have been in the industry for awhile now, whipping up ingenious ways to earn a buck online, and doing pretty well considering I haven’t worked a real 9-5 job in 6+ years.

I might not always use the most “white-hat” methodologies to get my traffic and rankings, however I try to stay within the realm of “staying out of jail”, so lets call it greyhat. I have dabbled in the poker industry with a few sites, buying and flipping pokeraffiliated.com last year for a very modest ROI.

Currently I am looking into promoting an up and coming poker site pokerspace.com. While the poker affiliate industry is as lucrative as ever, I decided to part ways with it back when there was the gambling ban online in the US.

I think I would be the perfect choice for this trip for a multitude of reasons. First off I have extensive experience in the industry, and maybe you guys can convince me to come back to casino/poker affiliation. Secondly, I not only know my way around a party, but I AM the party. If you need the life of the party look no further, put some liquor in me and I’m good to go…

So strap on your boots Jeremy and Greg, and get ready to party like a rockstar! And on a totally unrelated note, I’ve never been overseas in my 23 young years and would really love the opportunity to not only see the sights, but to hang with some of the top dogs in the industry, it would be the chance of a lifetime. I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen… Thanks for considering my entry guys, and best of luck to everyone else.

But hey aren’t bots against facebook TOS?!
Simple answer. Who cares?

So the other day I felt like spending some money on some *nearly* useless products, and after having no luck with the free “facebook bot” I opted for the more user friendly version of the same thing, and after some digging, I found a nice little bot called Facebook Tools. After $70 deduction to my paypal account and about 4 emails to the supposed owner of the bot, I finally was given a download link that worked, and was able to activate the bot. (online activation, so cracking is gonna be tough, but not impossible :P)

So I went to work, made a bunch of accounts the old fashioned way (hot girl, a few scandalous pics, and a whole lot of way too friendly “about me” information) After pumping out a few accounts I thought I’d give facebook tools a run for its money.

I ran the friend adder successfully for about an hour on my verified account.. but wait m getting ahead of myself here. I had to “borrow” a cell phone just to get that account verified, so I could bypass the annoying captcha process facebook has instilled upon us. Which presents a totally different challenge in that I will need to find a method for bypassing the captcha OR a way in which to verify the accounts without dropping more money on unneeded cellular numbers.

A friend suggested that skype has a service where I can get numbers for $20, so we will have to do some research and see if that would be a worthwhile investment. Anyway back to the bot, I setup a neat little app on my (hot chick) facebook account entitled My Web Embed, which worked wonderfully in the implementation of my affiliate links, and I was up and running.

I put together a nice list of offers with the infamous “more profile pictures” and started up the bot. I ran the friend adder after scraping some FB id’s from a group dedicated to hot women (and shallow men, just the kind im going after :P) I’m going to leave it adding overnight and hopefully in the morning we will see some progress in the dollars department. (I didn’t want to run the adder without a 10 second delay between add’s to minimize bot-like suspicion…even though this probably doesn’t even matter)

After about half an hour of running the bot, I had sent out around 500 friend requests, and was already starting to see some clicks on my affiliate links, and actually made $18, which is a pretty good start.

The thing about facebook is that a lot of the users actually screen their friends, so its hard to filter out the more intelligible users. Your inbox may start to look this way:

This is probably not a problem, as long as these users don’t start to flag your accounts, and as long as you keep your friend requests to a decent number (probably 70 a day), you should be able to minimize suspicion and therefore increase your earnings. After some deeper digging I found that I only actually sent out about 80 of those requests successfully after which this message began to appear:

Okay, well folks, the cat is out of the bag, and if you haven’t already heard, the new Google Adwords is facebook ads. So how the hell are you supposed to use facebook to make money you ask? The answer is simple.

First and foremost you need to decide on something you wish to advertise. Think about the facebook demographics, who uses it the most.. and you should come up with both males and females ages 19-25, with the dominant group being the females. Now in order to cash in off of these pretty women, you need to think OUTSIDE THE BOX!

Ive been testing ad campaigns for several weeks, tweaking and testing and getting my cpr % up slowly and diligently, and with limited success I realized what was wrong… I was using the wrong image. I’ve come to find that the text you use has little to no effect whatsoever on whether or not the ad gets clicked, it simply comes down to the image, and the title to some degree, but not nearly as much as the image.

Heres an image I’ve been playing with and seeing some pretty decent results:

Now as you can see, there is pretty much NO text below the image, and I feel that makes it stand out more so than other ads. I’ve decided not to discuss numbers simply because I haven’t really invested big yet, but my ROI is well above 200% which is more than lucrative.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I was promoting a dating ad, but that is bottom of the barrel in terms of advertising… dating is becoming more and more saturated and im actually noticing my clicks dropping daily, despite the constant tweaking and testing I’ve been doing. So what ever will I do?!

Remember how I was talking about how the majority of users are women ages 19-25… What do women in that demographic want? I know your not Mel Gibson and you can’t read their mind, but if you can think logically and come up with some ideas (make-up, designer purses…?) as to what they MIGHT want, you will be well on your way to baking that cake as fast as you can!

And remember above all, hard work pays off… I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen!! Now get out there and make some dough!