Facebook Dumped Me (and my project) on Valentines Day
Facebook rejected me.
I thought we were friends. I though we were going to work together to make my luvbritney.com project successful. I turns out I was entirely wrong. Although we had a good run, things were just going to well. I thought everything was fine and then BAM! I get dumped. On Valentines Day!
Ok so things weren’t as bad as it seems. It’s just that Facebook decided that it didn’t want to run my ad for the Britney search engine anymore. Which I guess is fine considering that my $100 advertising credit would have probably run out tomorrow. I am just nervous because now I have to see if all of the advertising work I have done over the past week has been successful.
So now after coming back from a huge Valentines Day dinner, and being filled with wine, beer, rum and grappa, I have to somehow discuss the successes of my Luv Britney project. So here we go:
The Redesign:
I was looking through my Google Analytics stats to get some information about the people that come to my site. One of the firs things I noticed was that most of the users were viewing on a 1024×768 resolution. I decided to check out the site in that resolution and found that the site looked horrible. I decided that today I would revamp that site and make it look nicer in a lower resolution. I also had a few suggestions from the comment section of the previous post about this project.
apps: suggested quite a few items which I will prolly implement once the site takes off. I did add the share on Friend Feed button, as suggested, and instead of adding the iLike widget I added an Amazon widget that plays Britney songs and has the option to purchase the music.
Ren B.: Suggested that I add a Shoutbox, which I have added. I was quite surprised to see that people had actually used this function. I though I was going to have to make up a bunch of fake shouts to get things rolling. I turns out that I was wrong!
Another worry that I had had was when I checked my stats to see how many search queires had been done. Around 3:00 today there was only 3 queries done. According to my Analytics stats I was getting a lot more hits than what Facebook was sending my way. But the 3 queries had me worried. I though maybe all my stats were wrong and now that Facebook had cut me off, I would be getting no traffic at all. I checked the queries this evening and found that they are still on track. Hopefully when I check the Analytics stats tomorrow I will find that I am still getting a lot of traffic.
I will keep my fingers crossed while I sleep.
I am sure I have a lot more details to cover here, but most have been forgotten considered the “booze factor.” Tomorrow I should be able to share more details, or at least I can cover more in the comments section. So if anyone has any ideas for improvements, or questions about the site or the progress thus far please let me know and leave a comment below!
Facebook Advertising Day 2 Results for the LuvBritney.com Project
I just wanted to give a quick update as the to luvbritney.com project.
The main site was completed on Feb 7th, but I have been adding bits and pieces here and there as the need for improvements arrives. My first task was to promote the site on Facebook. As I said in my previous post I felt this was the best avenue as I could specifically target Britney fans.
I did a quick search on Google to see if I could find any coupon codes for Facebook advertising. I figured I may as well get as much free advertising as I could, that way if this thing bombs I can at least say it didn’t cost me anything. My only experience with Facebook advertising is with affiliate marketing which in the past has not performed all that well. If you do do any advertising on Facebook I suggest you do a bit of searching for coupon codes. Most that you find will only work for new advertising accounts (which I did not have), but I did find a Visa Business App that gives $100 of free advertising if you sign up. So I did!
After the campaign was set up I started getting a large amount of hits (thank goodness for the credit), and I realized that these people were just cheeking out the site and then moving on. I needed to find a way to keep them on the site, coming back, and sharing it with their friends.
So this is what I did:
- I made a “make luvbritney.com your ho me page” button
- I made a “share this site on Facebook” button
I figured that the Share on Facebook button would work well considering most of my visitors will be coming from Facebook. Another factor I realized I need to consider was that I wanted to be able to sell some advertising space on the site at some point. With the current design there wasn’t really any space set aside for ads. As well I don’t want to suddenly change the design when I started to take on ads, as this will most likely make me lose a few viewers. I added the homepage and Facebook button on a newly created sidebar area. This way, when I start to sell ads, there was already “junk” in the sidebar that the average user would be used to.
I figure with the free advertising credits combined with people sharing the site on Facebook, traffic should get off to a really good start. So far after two days of being live I have had:
Unique Visits: 354
Visits from FB advertising: 324
Organic Visits from FB (not advertising):30
# of People that have clicked on the “Make this your homepage button”: 119
# of People that have clicked on the “Share on Facebook button”:6
The stat that I am super stoked about is the number of people that have made the site their hompage- 119. I think this will be an important number when selling advertising on the site. I have a bit more tweaking that I need to do this evening, so I will report backi either tomorrow or the next as to how I am progressing.
In the meantime please feel free to share your feedback on this project, or any ideas that you may have. Most importantly: Do you think this will work as a money making site?
If Facebooked the S#!t Out of Britney
This whole trying to make money and actually doing projects is tough!
I spent last night converting my mock up for the Britney Spears Search Engine to an actual website. As far as turning a mock up into a site, it was pretty easy to do. The main trouble was adding in the search functionality and positioning the search bar exactly where I wanted it, and making sure it looked good in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Ya know standard boring web guy stuff.
This evening I have taken care of my primary promotion method: Facebook. I figured that Facebook was the best place to promote the site, as I can specifically target people who are fans of Britney Spears. I could have used Adwords or YPN with similar effect, but I felt that Facebook was the best avenue to test on. The fact that I also added a few Social Bookmarking tools to the search page which will hopefully get used by the Facebook users. I may also spend a little bit of time on Twitter promoting the site, but I spend so little time on Twitter that I may need to research a few effective Twitter promotional tactics.
I will give it a few days and see what becomes of it.
If it does end up being semi-profitable then I will put together some instructions and make a web template for those that want to replicate this search engine.
As I am working on this project I keep thinking about the next project that I should do. I spent a bit of time this evening with my list of projects in front of me. I shouldn;t do that as I always end up never completed my current project before going onto the next. I guess since the main parts of the luvbritney.com project has been completed I can move onto the next.
Of course it would be cool to get some feedback. What do you think of the luvbritney.com site? What do you think it needs? (if anything)
