Branding Yourself: A Journal

JahRuhle

JahRuhle

New member
Jan 8, 2010
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Ok so heres the deal. I've had some decent success with ppc, and other seo sites that I could care less about, however, it's time to start a solid website. Something that I really care about. About a month ago me and my buddy started http://VibeBoss.com and it has really taken off quickly. This journal will follow my endeavors of trying to turn a passion of mine(music) into $$$. Hopefully, through this journal some of you lazy nubs out there will get inspired and start working on something you're passionate about, whether its history, politics, beer, or pr0n :tongue2:

So to catch you up on the past month, this is what I have done.

created an FB group/twitter pretty immediately

purchased a 1000 fans from pstation, to make our facebook fan page look like it has SOME authority.

started using tweetattacks to auto follow/unfollow our targetted demo. (Awesome software by the way, the free version lets you autofollow/unfollow people. I purchased the 60$ version so that I could add a vip list.)

started advertising on facebook last week and it's going really well, gaining about 500 extremely targetted fans/day for the last 4 days.

was paying about 3 cents a click, than changed the ad from CPC to CPM and it dropped to about 1/3 cents a click... yes 1/3 cents/click... 1800 clicks for 6$. Needless to say the demo is drying up quickly so we need to start researching some other demos to target that would be interested in "liking" our fan page.

currently gaining about 70 twitter followers/day. However, as we get more followers, the % of people that follow us back is increasing.

Getting great feedback from visitors. Gotten a couple haters. Fuck Em.

currently at about 3600 facebook fans, and about 800 twitter followers.

Not making much $$$ yet, but don't really care right now. Mainly concerned with growing our sites brand to epic proportions.

Applied to indieclicks.com affiliate program, still waiting for a response.(from what I can tell they are like adsense but with ads that target hipsters.)

Got accepted to Juno downloads affiliate program, now we get commission on every song purchased through our site.

just using a 300 adsense ad for now, getting about 1$ a day for the time being.

spending about 10$/day on FB ads

making sure I stumble/digg/as many social bookmarks as I can, for each post

last monday hit 6000 views in one day, but cooled down since than, only getting about 3000-4000 now.

Will update whenever anything exciting happens
 


Wow, your ctr on FB is absolutely sick! I agree than CPM is the way to go when fishing for fans. What do your creatives look like?
 
Atlasj said:
Wow, your ctr on FB is absolutely sick! I agree than CPM is the way to go when fishing for fans. What do your creatives look like?
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I target specific producers and use a recognizable image of them, mentioning the name of the producer in the title. Obviously the strategy will differ with different niches, but if you choose a niche that you are passionate/knowledgeable about, you should be able to find a good target audience pretty easily. Be creative!
 
JahRuhle said:
I target specific producers and use a recognizable image of them, mentioning the name of the producer in the title. Obviously the strategy will differ with different niches, but if you choose a niche that you are passionate/knowledgeable about, you should be able to find a good target audience pretty easily. Be creative!
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Great strategy, thanks for sharing!
 
Ok its been a little since the first post but here is what has happened in the past 18 days since the first post.

currently at about 4100 facebook fans and around 1600 twitter followers (Twitter Marketing Software that Breaks the Limits - TweetAttacks is TITZ for getting free/targetted followers)

We stopped advertising on FB cause we dried up our demo really quick and havent found another really good option to target again yet

getting a solid 1000-1200 visits a day and like 3000-4000 page views.

making around 1$ a day from adsense

its been 23 days since we sent in our application to IndieClick | Home and no response yet :-(

started sending traffic to junodownload.com where you can buy the music we post on our blog, however, have only earned 6 cents from over 1000 clicks... starting to realize that we will likely not be depending heavily on juno for affiliate incomes.

Ok now it gets kind of interesting:

got an email from an app developer that wants us to promote his music app on our blog, and he offered to pay us 250$.

After a couple of e-mails, he hasnt mentioned the money he offered to pay us so I am not sure how to bring it up in a professional way. Any tips?

Also, I am having trouble learning how to really drive traffic from twitter. We are getting more targetted followers every day, and updating twitter with every post that we make on the site, however, the traffic remains the same. I can't figure out how to get more traffic from it. Any tweet pros got any tips?
 
JahRuhle said:
Ok its been a little since the first post but here is what has happened in the past 18 days since the first post.

currently at about 4100 facebook fans and around 1600 twitter followers (Twitter Marketing Software that Breaks the Limits - TweetAttacks is TITZ for getting free/targetted followers)

We stopped advertising on FB cause we dried up our demo really quick and havent found another really good option to target again yet

getting a solid 1000-1200 visits a day and like 3000-4000 page views.

making around 1$ a day from adsense

its been 23 days since we sent in our application to IndieClick | Home and no response yet :-(

started sending traffic to junodownload.com where you can buy the music we post on our blog, however, have only earned 6 cents from over 1000 clicks... starting to realize that we will likely not be depending heavily on juno for affiliate incomes.

Ok now it gets kind of interesting:

got an email from an app developer that wants us to promote his music app on our blog, and he offered to pay us 250$.

After a couple of e-mails, he hasnt mentioned the money he offered to pay us so I am not sure how to bring it up in a professional way. Any tips?

Also, I am having trouble learning how to really drive traffic from twitter. We are getting more targetted followers every day, and updating twitter with every post that we make on the site, however, the traffic remains the same. I can't figure out how to get more traffic from it. Any tweet pros got any tips?
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In my experience, Twitter traffic comes from when you add someone new to follow. It's a lot of work to keep a large Twitter account following hanging onto your every Tweet.

A couple other observations about your site:

-header is centered, content is not

-might have better luck with text adcents blocks. I notice you're only using one display block, and it's on the rh side. Try using inline lh text blocks to bump up the ctr. My adsense placements are mostly informed by looking at the better spam domains. (ie, hubpages)

-not really a ton of branding. I know you're trying to build some brand recognition here and drive repeat traffic, but the main element of branding is just your header, and a couple mentions of yourself in the third person as the 'boss.' I would consider installing a more complex theme and branding headers in the sidebar, area in posts, etc.

-consider a page view setting with just links to mp3s. I bet you could drive a ton of both seo and link-share traffic by settings up a page with permalinks to all your featured music a la the tumblr archive.

-different fb widget. you've got a ton of fans on fb and that's great social proof, but the fb widget you're using doesn't show off all those fans. I'd swap it for a box with photos and stats of all your fb fans.

I hope that's useful feedback for you, keep us posted on your success!
 
Atlasj said:
In my experience, Twitter traffic comes from when you add someone new to follow. It's a lot of work to keep a large Twitter account following hanging onto your every Tweet.

A couple other observations about your site:

-header is centered, content is not

-might have better luck with text adcents blocks. I notice you're only using one display block, and it's on the rh side. Try using inline lh text blocks to bump up the ctr. My adsense placements are mostly informed by looking at the better spam domains. (ie, hubpages)

-not really a ton of branding. I know you're trying to build some brand recognition here and drive repeat traffic, but the main element of branding is just your header, and a couple mentions of yourself in the third person as the 'boss.' I would consider installing a more complex theme and branding headers in the sidebar, area in posts, etc.

-consider a page view setting with just links to mp3s. I bet you could drive a ton of both seo and link-share traffic by settings up a page with permalinks to all your featured music a la the tumblr archive.

-different fb widget. you've got a ton of fans on fb and that's great social proof, but the fb widget you're using doesn't show off all those fans. I'd swap it for a box with photos and stats of all your fb fans.

I hope that's useful feedback for you, keep us posted on your success!
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thanks for the feedback mate. My html/css knowledge is pretttttty limited. I completely redesigned the theme when we first started and it took forever, so that is why there are probably alot of errors with alignment etc. I'll try out using text ads, on some of my other sites text ads blow ballz but it won't hurt to try.
Ill look into getting a more visible facebook widget.
 
new wordpress template? Rather than changing it all up yourself, just find one that is already close to what you want. The black and yellow is hell to read.
 
aphexasdf.jpg
 
gseki said:
^This. DOPE TRACKS. + rep. Any updates?
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What colors would u guys suggest while still being able to keep the vibe of the site the same. Me and my buddy both like the gold, so we wouldn't want to change it much, but maybe something more gold and less yellow?

we are pretty much on auto pilot right now, running tweet attacks every day and were up to almost 2000 followers on twitter.

We had a dude offer us 250$ if we would host a channel on his iphone app and still waiting for payment. Once we recieve payment we will start advertising our facebook fan page again.

Been reaaaallly caught up on other projects so havent had too much time to market the site, just been having my friend doing a daily post.

bought senuke about a week ago and its AMAZING... i tried it out when i first started this whole internet marketing game and it confused the shit outta me, but now that I am a little more knowledgeable on SEOz I am really starting to get the hang of it.

Working on ranking our site for a couple pretty low competition keywords thatll bring a flood of traffic to the site. Will update later with the progress on this.

I do have a question.... and its *KIND OF DUMB*....:( a couple people have asked me where our rss feed is so they could subscribe and I told them vibeboss.com/rss and it wasn't what they were looking for. I don't really know what they mean... yes i know its a stupid question...

btw thanks for the compliment, glad u like the music ;)
 
hmmm. Well, if you want to keep the color, you might want to change the layout. Those borders are making shit crazy to read. My $ 0.02.
 
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