Over the years I’ve heard very mixed things about the Internet and how it’s either utterly useless or God’s pathway to untold riches. Being skeptical, and having an innate curiosity about these things I experimented. I’ve did a few experiments with social media advertising etc. Here’s what I found out….
I set up multiple Twitter accounts broadcasting to around 25,000 followers with 20 automated broadcasts per day. That’s about 500,000 potential prospect contacts a day. That sounds very promising BUT out of those 500,000 messages only 2 or 3 resulted in clicks (per day) and out of those 2 or 3 clicks, none went past the broadcast page (which changed daily). So – Twitter = dead duck.
I paid a massive $25 to advertise a website on Facebook. According to Facebook I had a whole load of clickthroughs. According to my web stats, zero. So – is Facebook being totally honest?
Facebook again
I write a blog and joined a Facebook group on the topic. Every blog update gets posted to the group. Hits – maybe 40 – 100 each time. There are 10,000 group members. Not that great to be honest.
Monetization
I carry Adsense on all my blogs. The same account for each blog. The blogs get maybe 10,000 hits a month between them. Adsense revenue – maybe 5c a month. Barely worth bothering with. Occasionally I could get more but it’s incredibly rare.
AdWords
Using Google’s free $50 bribe to use AdWords, I programmed in a few dozen key words and key phrases relating to a hobby website I ran. These were different from my SEO keyphrases as there wasn’t much point in paying for hits I should have been getting free. I think it took 3 years before that $50 was used up.
SEO
While for the keyphrases used, my website was on the first page of the Google search, those keyphrases very rarely came up in the blog stats. What came up more often was referrals from other sites and from social media.
Two decades ago I was at a business conference. One business supplying farmers with heavy equipment had a speaker there. It seemed their experience of the Internet echoed mine very closely. Indeed 20 years was like yesterday. Their conclusion was that the internet was a good online catalog but that was it.
My own conclusion
AdSense is fun to have but definitely won’t make you rich. Twitter is like shouting into the wind. Nobody is going to read anything that doesn’t come from somebody famous. Facebook is all about social interactions and that stops abruptly when it comes to money. Certainly there are people on Facebook trying to sell a well-known brand of clothing but few if any make a profit. SEO doesn’t really work – it sounds grand but that’s about it. The old business supplying farmer’s equipment had it right – the internet is good only as a catalog. To make online advertising work, your brand already has to be out there with people looking for it online.
About the Author: Rhys Sage is a hard-working 50 Year old British intellectual who’s travelled the world, done a lot of wild and quite-frankly unbelievable stuff and after opportunity knocked, now lives in the USA working just as hard but smarter and for more money.