Marketing gurus say that a business should be on MySpace and/or Facebook. But none of them tell you what you’re supposed to do there. Make ads? Just hang out and try to make “friends”? Visit other people’s pages and pimp products? Do you create a page for the business, or for yourself, or both? Why would anybody care? I really have no clue.
Which site is more important? As I understand it, MySpace is for children and Facebook is for networking yuppies. Both of those impressions are probably entirely wrong, but since they’re interchangeable in my mind, I’m just going to use “MyFace” to mean both of them.
Almost a year ago I created a page at something called Squidoo. Google Analytics says that it has sent me two visitors. Neither one bought anything. I have a feeling that MyFace would go about the same way. I’m not at all sociable. I don’t even use IM.
Message boards, OTOH, have been a great source of traffic for me. The Turnkey Web Tools tech support forum is my #8 referrer. Before it went indefinitely offline, my erstwhile favorite hangout, Octopus Overlords (at this writing, it's still down after nearly two months), ranked just below this blog as a source of traffic. As long as I have my URLs in my signature, every message board that I visit sends me at least a few clicks – 115 visits altogether in April. The prodigious amount of time that I “waste” posting on message boards is more productive than it might appear.
Would MyFace turn out the same way? I imagine that you have to pour a lot of time into these networking sites to get any results at all. You might even have to interact with (shudder) actual humans. Still, I do have the time to pour. I only need to know what my objective is supposed to be.
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Speaking of time…Memorial Day ushers in my “summer hours”. That mostly means that I ship orders within 48 hours rather than 24, cutting my parcel runs in half. With business at its low ebb, Curio City goes into maintenance mode and personal chores come forward. I need to plant the veggie garden, deal with some minor car problems, paint our new back porch, re-mount my weather station sensors, do a little simple landscaping, install a rain barrel, hire a carpenter to fix the squirrel hole, etc. – there’s always something. The freedom to tend to one’s personal chores is one of the great benefits of being self-employed. I won’t make any progress toward my macro goals, it’s true, but I’m not making much progress there anyway. I’m sick of banging my head against the same old intractable obstacles.
Business sucked last week, btw, although not quite as badly as expected. Traffic and paid clicks both remain robust. People appear to be shopping, but not buying.
Coming Attractions:
- Running with the Big Dogs
- The Zombie Store
- Where Traffic Comes From
- Legal Extortion
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