My 4 Hour Workweek

I don’t often write posts that relate to “current events,” but this one was interesting enough and I think has a pretty valuable lesson when it comes to making money online.  As reported in this article by TechCrunch earlier this month, Facebook will be closing its virtual gift shop on August 1st.  I was never one to purchase these virtual gifts (I guess that makes me virtually cheap?), but this gift shop had to have earned Facebook millions of dollars in “passive” income.

Facebook’s explanation for the decision to close this gift shop was odd at best, stating that they wanted to “focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day.”  The crazy thing is, people had no problem spending $1 on an icon to place on someone else’s profile.  They are pointless from my perspective, but I have no doubt that if money was being spent on them, they were providing some people (probably millions of people) with value.

Why would Facebook kill this cash cow?  Do they simply hate money, or is there something we can learn from this?  Clearly, this wasn’t standing in the way of their developmental efforts, despite what they said.

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This is part three of The Social Networking Experiment series, where I’m going to examining wide variety of social networking sites, evaluate their ability to help you succeed with your muse or business, and show you how to use them effectively.  Click here to read the introduction post for The Social Networking Experiment and click here to see all posts related to The Social Networking Experiment.

When you think of social media and social networking as a means of gaining exposure for your website or business, you think of Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc.  How many of you think of Yahoo! Answers?  Not many, I would guess.  Part of this “social networking experiment” isn’t to just say “hey, use Facebook and Twitter,” but to also uncover and profile the websites that generally don’t come to mind.

If you’ve ever done a Google search for a question, you’ve probably seen a result linking to a Yahoo! Answers page.  If you’ve briefly looked through Yahoo! Answers, you may have thought, “wow, why are there so many people so anxious to answer questions for free?”  Little did you know, Yahoo! Answers is an excellent way to drive traffic, gain exposure, and build your brand.

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This is part two of The Social Networking Experiment series, where I’m going to examine a wide variety of social networking sites, evaluate their ability to help you succeed with your muse or business, and show you how to use them effectively.  Click here to read the introduction post for The Social Networking Experiment and click here to see all posts related to The Social Networking Experiment.

There are an awful lot of social bookmarking sites that surround the internet today, but none is as unique as StumbleUpon.  As you may or may not know, StumbleUpon can be a tremendous source of traffic for your website or blog, provided you follow a few relatively simple tips (and you better believe I will discuss them in this post).

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I recently mentioned Sponsored Tweets in my massive How to Dominate Twitter post for the Social Networking Experiment, but thought it was worth taking a deeper look and writing a full review.

Sponsored Tweets is a website that essentially allows advertisers to pay for Twitter users for posting their advertisements.  Before I go into my review though, I want to discuss an inherent problem I see with Twitter advertising.

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This is a valid question that a lot of people ask (mostly those from an older generation).  Someone recently shared this video with me, and it’s pretty powerful.  I highly recommend you watch it if you are doubting viability of long term success through social networking/social media.  Even if you aren’t doubting it, watch this anyway.  It will open your eyes and hopefully cause you to take social media more seriously.

What do you think?  Is social media/networking just a fad?  Leave a comment.

This is the first part of The Social Networking Experiment series, where I’m going to examine a wide variety of social networking sites, evaluate their ability to help you succeed with your muse or business, and show you how to use them effectively.  Click here to read the introduction post for The Social Networking Experiment.

Twitter is massively popular “micro-blogging” platform that took the internet by storm in 2006.  In its early days, many people (myself included) were baffled by its purpose – after all, your Twitter messages (“tweets”) have a limit of 140 characters.  Today, you’re hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t own a Twitter account, from your 10 year-old little sister, to famous celebrities and U.S. President Barack Obama.

When something is this popular on the internet, you cannot afford to ignore it (no matter how ridiculous you might think it is).

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