SpewMoney™

Most people seem to be of the opinion that purchasing ads at Facebook is a waste of money because Facebook people are (mostly) web savvy. I agree. The CTR is ridiculously low. But there still have to be ways to get traffic.

Other ways to get people to your site would include..

• mentioning it to your Facebook friends - personally I don’t care to annoy my real life friends, and my “fake life” friends would likely disregard it since I’m not a hot/popular female (fyi)
• “sponsoring” some witty name group (haven’t done this yet)
• paying some hot/popular female to mention your site

So I at some point added some female with an attractive profile pic to my Facebook friends, on a secondary account. Turns out I wasn’t the only person who thought she looked good. She had over 3600 friends.. I’d guess at least 1,000 were people she knew.. from her school, or local area.

I quickly realized that Miss Thang (not her real name) might be a good billboard. I got the idea when she created a group for a friend and got a boatload of folks who joined.

After a bit of messaging with her, yes - she did have Paypal, she agreed to plug one of my topical youth-relevant sites. I was unsure of what kind of money this 17 year old might have been expecting. Turns out that 40 bucks was a number that worked for her. I wanted her to mention the url in her profile, in at least a few status updates, and in a note. I gave her a subdomain (thang.pimpablingbling.com) so that I could track her traffic.

We agreed that I’d pay after she added my url to her profile and status update. She did this pretty quickly, and the traffic started to come in. It was pretty decent, I was happy with this. Then she posted a note and added a bunch of her friends’ names to it (that means the friends of her friends mentioned would see the note mentioned in her profile), and she gave it a glowing comment.

Bam, all of a sudden, Miss Thang’s recommendation was it, yo. Girls were trying to be first to mention my site.

My site’s numbers went from 10 uniques to 150 uniques to 900 uniques. Now I’m getting 250-400 uniques a day. Thanks to Miss Thang.

Pretty good way to spend $40 bucks.

So there is an easy formula to this.

1. Find those folks on Facebook with tons of friends. Imo, the younger the better. I guess it depends on the topic, but I think it would be easier to get teens and preteens to your site than college graduates.
2. Flatter without sounding like a stalker. Hey Thang, I’ve got this cool site and you’ve got lots of cool friends. Not.. baby, your booty is tight, like my site. Maybe that would work.. just make sure you aren’t creeping them out.
3. Pay them a bit of money after you start seeing traffic.
4. Rinse and repeat. You can definitely use the same friend for multiple sites. Just make sure she isn’t pimping a new site every 2 days or her friends will get bored pretty fast.

You can totally abuse this by messaging a bunch of friends at once, but I think you’ll do better by keeping it small. If you come at a person the wrong way they’ll probably reject you pretty fast. Be complimentary, and she’ll be interested in the opportunity to help a “friend” for a bit cash.

It’s probably a good idea that you have plenty of friends before you message this person. If they check out your profile with six friends, they are likely to be skeptical.

Idea: Pay someone popular to change/add your url as their middle name on Facebook?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, traffic, big pimpin’, milkshake