Myspacepros seller survey review
A few weeks ago I conducted a seller review survey at the webmaster forum myspacepros.com asking sellers about their main grievances on myspacepros. There were a total of 47 votes. Here are the results:
| None. Everything is fine |    |
4 | 8.70% |
| Prices keep falling |    |
12 | 26.09% |
| Not enough buyers |    |
16 | 34.78% |
| People keep stealing stuff |    |
2 | 4.35% |
| Too many scammers/ripped off |    |
4 | 8.70% |
| Lack of originality |    |
8 | 17.39% |
Over 60% of people complained about ‘prices falling too much’ and ‘not enough buyers’ while the other choices got significantly fewer votes.
The polarized results of this survey don’t surprise me in the least. The results are reflective of the economics of supply and demand, as well as the increasingly difficulty of monetizing the internet which I go into more detail in my article Making Money Online Generally Sucks.
In terms of economics as supply increases there has to be sufficient demand for the supply or prices will fall. Therefore, when you have too little demand or too much supply prices will fall. This is inextricably tired into the results of the survey. We can conclude that on myspacepros there are too many sellers, but not enough buyers to compensate for the glut. In order to reduce inventory, prices have to fall to make the offers more compelling to buyers. In a fiercely competitive marketplace with perfect competition marginal costs equal marginal revenue. What this means is at best competing sellers can expect to break even.
But it gets worse. To create graphics to sell on the myspacepros marketplace requires time which is an opportunity cost. Other opportunity costs include negotiating with buyers, processing payments, and sleuthing competitors. But there is also an upfront cost of five dollars per marketplace listing as well as upfront costs for graphics software.
In summary, sellers are finding it increasingly difficult to recoup their opportunity and upfront costs in the marketplace due to excessive supply and insufficient demand, as the survey results indicate.
Evade Google by buying an established website
If you’re planning to launch a new website I highly recommend investing in an established website and then improving on that site. Although such a purchase will cost a lot more than simply registering a domain name and hosting, there are numerous advantages to buying out an established site that makes it worth the price.
The number one reason why you should buy an older site is for the invaluable SEO benefits. Google applies tons of penalties and filters to new sites, but by purchasing an established site you can evade some of these penalties.
New domains are subject to link aging filters and sandboxes and as a result of these filters SEO doesn’t work well on newer sites. Inbound links don’t improve rankings due to the aging filters. Newer sites also don’t have Pagerank which may make it more difficult to convince people to trade links with you.
When buying an established site make sure:
1. The domain is at least six months old so that the site should at least be out of the google sandbox. Unsurprisingly, older domains are better but more expensive.
2. The site is in google by performing site:domain.com and site:www.domain.com search
If no search results show up the site is either banned or un-indexed. Avoid at all costs.
3. Perform a search for its domain name with the domain extension at the end.
If the site passes the previous test but doesn’t rank for its own domain name it has a penalty and should be avoided.
4. Ask the owner if the site ranks for moderately competitive keywords. if the site ranks then the site is ‘clean’ and devoid of penalties. Unless the site actually ranks you have no way of knowing for sure if you are buying a clean, non-penalized site.
5. DON’T change the theme of the site to save money. If you buy a dog grooming site DON’T convert it into a legal site. Google will notice since it is too obvious. The site will eventually get a penalty and p00f your investment wasted.
6. A grey pagerank toolbar or PR 0 is to be avoided.
7. After you buy the site be prepared to make improvements. Perform more SEO by getting some inbound links, do link exchanges. Add new content, etc.
If you follow these steps you should have a major leg up when starting a new site. however, be prepared to pay up. A good site will cost between $1,000-4,000 but it is worth it.
Paypopup Review
If you’re trying to monetize your website I highly recommend paypopup.com. For the past five months I have used paypopup on my myspace resource site www.myspace-resource.info as well as other sites, with great success.
Advantages of paypopup:
1. Many different ad formats. The available ad formats are banners, pop-unders, in-page banners, and Interstitials. However, to apply for banner advertising you must be a paypopup member for several months. Popunder ads are available to any site upon joining. I recommend the pop-unders over the other formats.
2. Anyone can join. Unlike other advertising companies paypopup will let anyone in provided your site doesn’t violate the TOS of paypopup
3. Instant approval. You can start displaying ads as soon as you join. There is waiting.
4. Very consistent payment. I have NEVER missed a payment. Nor have I had any payments deducted though the auditing. They pay twice a month provided that you earn over $100.
5. Excellent support. My questions are answered by paypopup staff within 24 hours.
Downsides:
1. The ads are somewhat intrusive. I don’t recommend paypopup ads for a business related site, forum or a blog where the ads may turn off people. Instead I recommend paypopup for sites that have LOTS of traffic and for a younger demographic. I don’t recommend the Interstitials since they may frustrate and annoy users.
2. Low CPM. Unless your site targets a low CPM audience such as teens or young adult I don’t recommend paypopup. You can make more money with adsense or affiliate programs.
Paypopup works best for high traffic myspace arcade, wallpaper, music, teen, entertainment type sites.
Overall, if your site meets the criteria above I highly recommend giving paypopup a try. I have been a member for over five months and have had no complaints.
Interesting Myspace Hacks
For the past year myspace has been combating spammers and SEO by converting all links into msplink format. For example if you post a comment for a friend and link to google instead of the html code showing http://google.com the link will be converted into a complicated strong of characters.
Anyway, to get around this simply use this code in the link below:
That way your comments and links will be redirected to your site while bypassing myspace links. Also you get SEO benefits from the links.
Second, if you want to turn you myspace profile into a huge invisible link use this code:
That way whenever someone clicks on your profile they will be taken to your site because your entire profile is covered with an invisible giant image link. No one can see it. Pretty cool, huh?
I have used these methods to drive small amounts of traffic form myspace profiles to my site as well as index sites though myspace. There is no need to pay for PR links when you can just drop your links on myspace profiles instead for free.