triplefault
Newbie
- Nov 1, 2011
- 9
- 1
Hi BHW,
I think someone somewhere once said something like "It's not what you say that defines you, but what you do!" So let me tell (26 words in, and I already failed!) you what I did.
In search of a fun project this weekend I decided to try some internet marketing. As a total newbie I quickly stumbled over BHW and started trawling for ideas. As I did not want the project to be a money sink I set myself the simple goal of not spending any money on it (for hosting, SEO tools, etc.). The old Twitter+Adf ly route seemed to be a good place to start.
The usual twitter 'n adf ly combo seems to be done with a (random?) RSS feed directly connected to a twitter account. However, I would like to give the targets a reason to click on my links by providing quality content. For this I would need to screen the links manually before posting and provide an enticing message to accompany the adf ly link.
I decided to center the theme around funny pictures and gifs, since I have spend far too much time ogling lolcats on reddit lately. Hey, why not make my procrastination work for me this time?
I signed up for adf ly and twitter, shortened my first link and posted it. I was finally on my way to become the next overnight millionaire.
The tedious work required for continued operation was immediately evident and I started writing a utility script. Initially this script would just take a full link as input and output a shortened adf ly link, which I could manually paste into twitter. Next, I made it post directly to Twitter (perl have an awesome Twitter module on CPAN, BTW!).
To stay below the radar, I made it queue messages to post later. To stay on the safe side (and because I have a limited amount of links) it will only post one message per hour.
Having an auto-twitter agent is of course no good if no one is listening. To gain followers I found some "seed accounts" within my account's theme (comedy). I made my script list the followers of these accounts and follow them. A good portion of these then follow me back. Again, to stay under the radar, I only "bait" around two or five followers every three hours.
To ease the link discovery and post creation I also made a simple feed reader with integrated post creator.
This is largely where my introductory IM project is now. In excess of 50 hours spent coding and thinking, 759 lines of perl, ~60 Twitter followers, but best of all: Adf ly total "6 views, $0.01004 earned". Aww yeah!
Possible future improvements:
This is probably it for now for this project. The labor required (manually screening links) is just too big. Besides, I have already decided on my next weekend project: A cheapskate hacker's approach to auto-blogging. I'll keep you posted!
So, this is me saying "Hi!" to all of BHW.
I think someone somewhere once said something like "It's not what you say that defines you, but what you do!" So let me tell (26 words in, and I already failed!) you what I did.
In search of a fun project this weekend I decided to try some internet marketing. As a total newbie I quickly stumbled over BHW and started trawling for ideas. As I did not want the project to be a money sink I set myself the simple goal of not spending any money on it (for hosting, SEO tools, etc.). The old Twitter+Adf ly route seemed to be a good place to start.
The usual twitter 'n adf ly combo seems to be done with a (random?) RSS feed directly connected to a twitter account. However, I would like to give the targets a reason to click on my links by providing quality content. For this I would need to screen the links manually before posting and provide an enticing message to accompany the adf ly link.
I decided to center the theme around funny pictures and gifs, since I have spend far too much time ogling lolcats on reddit lately. Hey, why not make my procrastination work for me this time?
I signed up for adf ly and twitter, shortened my first link and posted it. I was finally on my way to become the next overnight millionaire.
The tedious work required for continued operation was immediately evident and I started writing a utility script. Initially this script would just take a full link as input and output a shortened adf ly link, which I could manually paste into twitter. Next, I made it post directly to Twitter (perl have an awesome Twitter module on CPAN, BTW!).
To stay below the radar, I made it queue messages to post later. To stay on the safe side (and because I have a limited amount of links) it will only post one message per hour.
Having an auto-twitter agent is of course no good if no one is listening. To gain followers I found some "seed accounts" within my account's theme (comedy). I made my script list the followers of these accounts and follow them. A good portion of these then follow me back. Again, to stay under the radar, I only "bait" around two or five followers every three hours.
To ease the link discovery and post creation I also made a simple feed reader with integrated post creator.
This is largely where my introductory IM project is now. In excess of 50 hours spent coding and thinking, 759 lines of perl, ~60 Twitter followers, but best of all: Adf ly total "6 views, $0.01004 earned". Aww yeah!
Possible future improvements:
- Avoid some manual screening labor by rating links based on f. ex. comments and up votes (like on reddit).
- Increase exposure by utilizing Twitters hash tags.
This is probably it for now for this project. The labor required (manually screening links) is just too big. Besides, I have already decided on my next weekend project: A cheapskate hacker's approach to auto-blogging. I'll keep you posted!
So, this is me saying "Hi!" to all of BHW.
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