Monetize Pro

At a glance, the facts that you like money and other people like free stuff don’t seem to fit well together, right?  A sort of secret, though, is that people like free stuff so much they’ll sometimes try to express their gratitude.  Also, yeah, there’s the guilt factor.

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Last time, we talked about Twitter as a promotional tool, and ended with a joke about not using it to target David Letterman.  It turns out, though, that you might be better off targeting Letterman than a teenager, because new numbers indicate that Twitter isn’t popular among kids.

Note: the fresh report doesn’t challenge the idea that Twitter’s a good marketing tool.  So we’re not doing a 180.  This is just to help you refine your use of the social site.

Nielsen’s David Martin and Sue MacDonald stated, “In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25.  Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent.”

Meanwhile, 64 percent of Twitter’s users fall into the 25 to 54 age group, and 20 percent are 55 or older.

So if you want to try to make money using Twitter, just carefully consider what sort of people it is you’re trying to reach.  Martin and MacDonald wrote, “The fact remains that Twitter has grown to be a major online presence and is being driven forward by significant buzz.”

Social media is free insofar as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter don’t demand registration fees of their users.  But most people don’t have an unlimited amount of time to spend dropping links on social media sites, and so you might want to use some info posted on the Royal Pingdom blog to decide where your energy will be best spent.

“A quick look in Google Trends confirms how strong Twitter’s media presence has become in 2009,” an article states.  “The first thing you notice is the enormous boost compared to previous years (Twitter launched in 2006).  It’s like a race car accelerating.”

The post then continues, “That in itself is impressive, but it gets even more interesting when you start comparing it with other big Web properties like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and even Google and Yahoo.  And just for fun, we threw in Microsoft’s new search contender, Bing, and Microsoft itself.”

As for the results, it’s simple: Twitter beat everything with the exception of Google and Microsoft (and those have been pretty close races in recent days).

So if you’re looking to turn a social media promotion into money, consider focusing on Twitter.  Unless your target audience is David Letterman, anyway.

Are you a person who likes to micromanage by the minute?  Or perhaps you’re the type who prefers to tend to something once and then retire to the couch.  Well, pay per click campaigns are a tricky matter, and one expert has weighed in with her thoughts on what sort of approach works best.

Jen Slegg believes advertisers don’t need to start rethinking their approach a mere one or two - or even 20 or 30 - clicks into a campaign.  Instead, she suggested in a guest post on the adCenter Blog for Advertisers, “[A]im for at least 100 ad clicks before you start tweaking things around.”

Unless there’s a sort of exceptional circumstance, anyway.  Slegg says to watch out for when a product (or info about a product) gets updated, and to keep up with the competition in this case so that your ads/site don’t look outdated.

Also, watch out for related news - think a product getting featured on the “Today” show or something of that nature - and then be ready to capitalize on the fresh words and phrases that might get people to visit your site.

Which isn’t so bad, right?  Really, given the sort of results a PPC campaign can generate, it’s kind of a gift that a campaign can be successful as the result of so little work.

Get to it, then, and here’s hoping you can still spend a fair amount of time on the couch.

We stumbled upon a very funny but smart ad in google. These guys are thinking out of the box to reach their audience, very smart if you ask us! Take a look for yourself and decide! How many of the WOW players would be a virgin?

People are complaining all the time how hard it is to get their forums active. This is total crap if you ask us! If you want to succeed with your forum, you are going to succeed. People think they get new sign ups and posts while there is nothing posted yet, or something to discuss. Why would you think people will sign up and post in an empty forum? very odd thoughts if you ask us!

How should you start a forum? There are a few points that are extremely important to kick off a forum and getting new members! The first one is be dedicated as an admin. You should be the top poster in the beginning and create new topics to discuss. This should not be 10 new threads or something, but better make that a few hundred!

After you made a good amount of topics you can start promoting your forum! Get on relevant forums and get the word out about your forum. If people are browsing your forum and it has good and interesting topics on it (which you created before) people will join and even better, post!

If you succeeded to get around 100 members and they are posting on your topics, don’t stop! Reply again to them and create even more new topics. Create a community! A very good tactic is also to start contests! Some people will say: “people will only join because of the contest”. This is wrong, if you are running the contest for like 2 weeks, you have 2 weeks time to convince the people to stay at your forum! And they will stay if they feel accepted and there is a good community.

In the past we started a few forums as well and they succeeded, sold for good dollars! Recently we acquired a new technology forum and are trying to make this one an active place to be and make some good money from it!

The final words for getting a forum active: Don’t give up and be active!