Came across this video today on Tech Crunch. The post itself is a few days old. I had a strikingly similar idea a few years ago but did not take the proper steps to execute the idea. I did how ever send a synopsis to a Marketing Experiments Back-of-a-Napkin Business Plan contest and was one of the finalists.

Sweet - I hit the $200 and over 200 friends mark today. It should be interesting to see over time if they stay parallel.

I have been busy plugging away on my marketing strategy for this website and should see a huge spike in traffic soon. I would like to point out that one aspect of my marketing that will only take effect over time but will probably be the most profitable. When it boils right down to it there is not quick scheme just work your ass off and follow your vision. I am sure most bloggers follow this path!

By the end of this month I will have a clear idea of what works and what does not work. From there I will be able unleash my marketing into the wild web even further then now. It should be an interesting month!

P.S. - Anyone look at my Alexa Graph?

When a cow moos what kind of effect does it have?

Well it produces about $55 in sales, 12 comments on my blog, three other blogs writing a similar blog post and and over 22 new friends.

This was the work of John Cow and his latest review of The Social Millionaire.

To be honest I am amazed at the review! It was well written and gave some ideas on how I would like future reviewers to engage their audience with their review. Although I did not see a full return on investment in terms of dollars; I did however earn it in knowledge and other metrics.

One thing I learned came from a blog post today about ‘Getting The Most Out Of Your Review’. While I did share a link on Facebook, stumbled and dugg my review I felt I should have spent more time driving traffic to his article through my existing clients. I still can and will promote traffic to his review just to get more eyeballs on his website and my website. Isn’t this social web traffic a wonderful thing?

My last post was geared towards how Web 2.0 Makes the world a better place. Today I saw a video posted on TechCrunch of Chris Anderson the editor and chief of Wired Magazine that I felt I should share.

This blogging job is a lot harder than I thought so I give props to John Chow, Shoe Money and Michael Arrington who make it look so easy!

While I was running tonight I was trying to think of an interesting blog topic. This is what I came up with: Web 2.0, Making The World a Better Place?

Early entrepreneurs were involved in creating businesses that could create profits right away. Entrepreneurs like K. C. Irving and Sam Walton knew they had to create a business where there would be some return in investment quickly. Most people would agree this is the foundation of business, start a company that can make you lots of money.

When the internet first was born entrepreneurs were trying to gage how they could bring existing bricks and mortar companies to the online world. This created some of the most valuable internet companies like Amazon and eBay. Then came along a company called Google. They did not have any real plans of monetizing their service but they knew money would help them create a central place for the worlds information.

Investors and Venture Capitalists now realize how big of behemoth Google has become after their IPO. Investors try to focus on these services that have no real current monetization model in the hopes they eventually find one.

Investors do not want to miss out on another Google hence why Facebook is so highly valued and easily got funding. They are having current troubles monetizing though.

This began the real Web 2.o funding as I call it. Build a service that tailors to people then find a way to monetize it. Be people-centric not money-centric. Unfortunately a lot of entrepreneurs have problems monetizing their service once they have become popular with the ease of viral marketing in the Web 2.0 world.

Since the web is all about being people-centric now with no censorship (except in China and Australia) people can see the media in an unbiased or really biased opinion. They are now able to engage in comments and give their thoughts about news or articles. It has enabled Wikipedia to have some of the most updated Wikis on anything and monitored by anyone. So when your university professor tells you not to use Wikipedia for that reason be sure to mention to him that before Wikipedia anyone could write a book and have anyone from a publishing company read it and publish it. Don’t you think having millions of people reading and reviewing does a much better job? This in my opinion is why Web 2.0 helps make the world a better place.

The companies who will really cash out in the next 5 to 10 years are the ones who have spent the last 5 to 10 years acquiring a huge amount of users. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are among them, as the world embraces Web 3.0 (semantic web) and OpenID.

Now services will be built around OpenID and the privacy of the users will rest in these big companies hands.

You may agree or disagree with my post but I would love to hear your points so please comment.

Jonathan Volk, a friend of mine from my early internet marketing days, wrote a review about The Social Millionaire for me. I am extremely happy with the review and he helped bring the total sales up to $106.05 up from $46.05 just a few days ago.

There was one part of the review that stuck out:

“All in all, I think Pat has a pretty great idea if he can back up his purchases with actual traffic from social networks. Only time will tell if it catches on.”

At the moment I have 121 friends. These are people who have stumbled onto this website and requested we be friends on their social network of choice whether it is MySpace, Facebook, or Bebo. As this website grows so will this number! I am not sure about the psychology behind becoming friends with me but my assumption is that side of my audience wants to be apart of an internet phenomenon.

But it begs the question how will I get those friends to return to the website and become involved (engaged in the advertisements). Simple - I engage in their social network as we are friends. I recommend links, update my picture, anything that will click into that user’s mind “I wonder how The Social Millionaire is doing?”.

You may notice on the right of this blog I have added two non-profit widgets to help bring in some traffic to this website.

The widgets are Entrecard and Spottt. These two widgets were not apart of my marketing strategy but some other bloggers were mentioning the amounts of traffic they were getting. I was intrigued so I signed up! I am starting to see a  surge of traffic from Entrecard. Not from Spottt yet because they need to approve this website.

Unfortunately the traffic from Entrecard is questionable. My statistics are showing very low readership and time spent on the website but that is besides the point. I am getting “free” traffic and even if any of those visitors convert it is worth it. Plus I earn credits which I can use to get an advertisements on websites like JohnChow and ProBlogger.

It was about two weeks ago I was talking with a friend riding in an elevator. I told him how I thought being stuck in an elevator would probably be one of my biggest fears. I mean honestly stuck in a small enclosed area for an undetermined amount of time. I am not claustrophobic either, I just think it would really suck.

Of course Murphy’s Law had to kick in while I was riding the elevator yesterday. The damn elevator stopped while I was riding the elevator by myself. The worse part of it was their is no emergency phone in the elevator and I thought everyone already left the building I was in since it was in the evening and my cell phone was almost dead. Eventually someone realized I was in the elevator and called the fire department and they were able to pry the door open and get me out. I was stuck in between two floors so I had to take a big step up.

Anyway this really relates to nothing about this website but I thought I would share it anyway

Sorry to disappoint those looking for a metaphor for “stuck in an elevator”.

As of today this website has sold a total of $46.05 of advertisements - so I wanted to do a little bit of digging to see exactly how much PayPal is taking for service fees!

For the $46.05 of advertisements I sold, PayPal took a total of $4.42.

So once I reach my goal of $1 million PayPal will take $95,982.63 in service fees based on how they have charged me so far.

I could use any provider like 2Checkout or Google Checkout and lower the fees. I use PayPal because from my research in internet marketing it converts better and they provide an excellent service. Wish Marketing Experiments would do an experiment on this.

Plus I do not mind help boosting eBay’s shares since Peter Thiel has a nice chunk of shares since he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. It is pretty cool that Peter Thiel invested $3.5 million to Aubrey de Grey’s Methuselah Mouse Prize to help combat aging. Here is Aubrey’s video from TED:

In preparation for the upcoming marketing push I have made the website a little more social. I used two places which you are probably familiar with; FeedBurner and AddThis.

That means you can now subscribe to the blog through Feedburner and bookmark this website across the many available social bookmarking websites. And - if you haven’t already please add me as a friend on one of your social networks!

The front page had a recent minor make over. There were a few things bothering me so I fixed them.

Now when you scroll over a keyword it will underline itself and turn a darker blue unlike before where it would uppercase and become bold. This change makes the website a lot smoother. The keywords on the main page appear in random order now. A friend of mine said he was tempted to buy a keyword and stick the letter A at the beginning just to get higher position!

The other change was for an automated system in the back end!

Today’s final count is: $36.05 (almost double from yesterday)