Teen Internet Marketer

I’m thinking of ordering custom tees for Teen Business Forum. I think that a black tee with the TBF logo would look pretty cool.

I’m just trying to decide: How many tees should I order? I’m thinking of using Custom Ink. They seem to have good customer satisfaction, prices, and selection. I’ll let you guys know how my experience goes.

Anyhow, bulk ordering tees for TBF will save me money in the long run, but I’m not sure where I should “cut off” and stop ordering tees. What is a good number to order before FBLA Nationals? I should decide in a week or two so I can order and still get them before FBLA.

If you guys have any comments, please let me know! Thanks ^_^

Google’s SERPs have updated recently, negitavely affecting my main site, Krazy Letter, in one of its most competitive keywords.

Traffic has halved, and earnings have gone to 1/5 of the original daily earnings. This is not very good, as Krazy Letter is my main cash chow.

What does this mean? Reliance on Google for traffic is *stupid*. Google has given me plenty of traffic for the past two years, and I have profited immensely off of it. However, all good things come to an end, and being blasted from #10 for a popular term to nowhere is kinda depressing.

Hopefully Google restores my ranking - It has been known to randomly derank, de-PR, or otherwise ostracize a website for no reason for short time periods. In case it does not, at least I have a significant amount of earned cash stored in the bank - I can always start on other things.

On the other hand…Google Adsense has given me 2x the CPM for the past few days - maybe they’re trying to compensate for this? Oh well - I mostly use Adbrite to monetize Krazy Letter…

I’ve acquired Anime-Store.com last weekend.

I’ve figured that it’s about time for me to try to enter the Affiliate Marketing market. I haven’t tried it before, but it sounds like a lucrative opportunity - too many websites are monetized by Adsense and other CPC ads right now.

What do you guys think? Should I try to enter the affiliate market? Dropship? Anime-store’s name has a lot of possibilities.

PS: Sorry about the short posts - Prom is today so I’m kind of strapped on time.

After monitoring my Facebook stats for the past few days, I’ve been annoyed day after day. Remember my posts about Facebook Conversions and advertising on Facebook? Well, it seems like Facebook gave me a “Trial” of their advertising service. My $0.20 CPC bid got me through for the first two days -  but my ad started showing less and less. My impressions went from 10,000 to 3,000 to 2,000 to 1,500 daily. Consequently, my click count went from 11 to 5 and stabilized at 2 per day.

I think I’m going to up my bid to $0.25/CPC. This annoys me though - I thought that I had a good thing going, and Facebook just slams me in the face.

At least I got my one registration from that “free trial”…

On April 19, 2008, Facebook passed Myspace’s traffic rankings. What does this mean?

The web is a extremely fluctuating place - and there is room for new things. I know from experience that many teens have been moving off Myspace. Why? Here are the reasons that I moved off of Myspace:

• Too many ads!
• Disgusting layout - navigation was horrible in Myspace
• Badly coded layouts in Myspace caused my computer to bog down
• The Myspace music player automatically blasted music whenever I visited someone’s page - not to mention the sparkling background which alternated between red and blue
• Too many corporate entities - it was hard to separate people from corporations in your “Friends” - you could not be a “fan” of something

Why did I move to Facebook? What “wow”ed me about Facebook?

• The news feed
• The applications - and the money to be made via applications
• The consistency of layout - and lack of obtrusive advertising
• Photo tagging  (yes, Myspace has this now)
• A cleaner image

Facebook is overtaking Myspace - because of Myspace’s failure to adapt to new technologies - like applications, photo tagging, etc. Do you have any experiences with Myspace and Facebook? Tell me what you think: does Myspace deserve to be knocked off its #1 position? Why has Myspace been spammed up, but not Facebook?

Teen Business Forum is undergoing a redesign! Lewis, of ShockMedia, finally contacted me with the design that he promised me. I’ve contacted Gary Rae of PSD to VB to code it.

Why change the skin of Teen Business Forum? I just changed the skin a few weeks ago after I acquired it. Well, the free skin has some problems: it looks pretty old-age, being a bit narrow. While talking with Mizko of Meskos, I decided that Teen Business Forum needed a sleeker and more professional look. Thus, I decided to get the design coded.

So how can you relate that to your site? Well, despite what people say, looks matter. The cliche saying is: “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but as a webmaster, you should work in the real world. Honestly, people decide whether or not to stay on the website due to its layout and design, and they often decide within the first few seconds of landing on your webpage. Even if the content is the best in the world, the design of a website greatly affects a person’s decision of whether or not to stay on the website.

Why does this happen? I believe that spammers are to blame. Because Google, Yahoo, and MSN’s SERPS have been manipulated with in the past, people have developed quick ways to easily identify a “bad” or spammy site. Things that turn people off? Bad design, too many ads, misspelled content, and so on so forth.

Sure, “don’t judge a book by a cover” - that’s always a good insight. Unfortunately, many people do so - and webmasters should realize that.

I finally got a Facebook conversion! 16 clicks and $2.70 later, I’ve gotten a registration at Teen Business Forum. That’s not bad. I will keep track of the conversion rate - if it averages pretty well, in a week or so I’ll up my bid to $0.25 or $0.30/CPC. That should get me a lot more impressions, and thus, clicks, and users.

Mizko of Meskos Forum Development Blog has just met djbob of Helio Host on Invisionize Forums.

What a small world! Apparently, djbob had just visited Meskos from my blogroll, when he saw Mizko’s thread in Invisionize. Definitely a crazy coincidence. What are the chances that djbob would click on the link in my blogroll, and then see the forum topic about Meskos at the same time? I didn’t even know that djbob visited my site other than when I spammed his IM with links to my new posts.

Has anyone had other crazy experiences in the past? Share them via a comment ^_^

About Meskos: Meskos is a great blog about how to grow your forums - I read it daily via Firefox’s live bookmarks. I highly recommend the site. Mizko used to run admin-chat forums; however, he does not run a forum at the moment.

About HelioHost: Helio host is a great free webhost - it’s one of the highest rated webhosts on free-webhosts.com - it would have a higher ranking if it was listed as “not requiring ads”. Heliohost in fact, does *not* require ads on their free accounts, and they allow proxies to be hosted. In spite of recent uptime problems, djbob has managed Helio Host extremely well. I would recommend Helio Host. djbob of Helio Host has made a wager with me regarding Krazyness.

I have to give it to Sentient Youth Forums - the topics on the site are generating high-paying adverts! Thank you myncknm, Purrflicta, and djbob for helping contribute so much on the site.

In contrast, I am happy about this because Krazy Letter Forums hasn’t been doing well in Google Adsense recently. I’ve been getting a very low CPC from the current traffic. Thus, I’m happy to see that Sentient Youth has not fallen in the same trap. $0.73/click! That’s a pretty nice niche - whatever the topic was about.

I’ve begun an ad campaign for Teen Business Forum on Facebook. Targeted to 13-24 year olds, it’s an ad for TBF. However, Facebook ads have *ridiculous* CPC rates: $0.70-0.90/click was recommended to me.

I’ve set my CPC rates to $0.20 - this *should* result in a more reasonable $2 or so per member - counting on a 10% signup rate. If Facebook ads convert very well, I’d up my CPC, but I doubt that they’d convert much better than well-targeted Google Ad.

If you use Facebook, I have a question for you: how many times have you clicked on their ads? I know that I haven’t clicked on any of their ads *once*. If you have, how effective were the ads?

Advertising my sites via PPC is new to me - I haven’t really spent money on ads for a website before TBF. I know that forums don’t really make money, so I’m basically throwing my money into into a time sink. Why am I doing this? Does anyone have suggestions?