is facebook good for making money?

I don't ordinarily talk about business, but I think this is an interesting subject.

Is Facebook good for making money? Nope.

The best part about using a Facebook fan page is social interaction and discussion. In my experience the discussion threads there are top drawer. The problem is that even as good as social is on FB, it's a dead duck if you want to actually sell anything. It doesn't matter whether it's tangible physical products (as in things you can touch) or intangible virtual products (like eBooks).

Big crowds do not translate to sales on FB no matter how high your fan count is. FB is also not good as a product launch point. Your FB crowd won't be interested and will probably un-like you, or keep the like but purposely filter everything you post off their wall. On top of that, FB has some fairly strict rules when it comes to promoting things you'd want to sell. If you buy ads from them to promote stuff, then sure, they don't have a problem with that because they made money off you. But if you post status updates promoting stuff, that can get you into hot water and you can lose your page.

By and large, the three best resources for product promotion are still email, blogs and YouTube.

Some say email is obsolete. Yeah, well tell that to any internet business guy who has a successful email newsletter. He'll tell you different. Newsletters still to this day command a very "sticky" audience. They work.

Blogs work simply for the reason they're not social networks, and people appreciate having a destination to go to that reflects the personality of the person or business authoring it. I know people to this day that never read my Twitter or Facebook and always come here to read up on what I'm doing. And as far as the must-have-a-dot-com thing is concerned, that's nonsense. What matters more is what happens when people search for you on Google. If by your name or business name your site shows up, they'll find you. Doesn't matter if you have a dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, dot-egg, dot-muffin, dot-whatever. You'll be found.

In fact, Google monitors my blog often enough to the point where on a search, the search result will state when I last updated, like this:

Incidentally, blogs which are inundated with scripting crap cause Google not to show the last-posted-time. As long as your design is simple, Goog will work with your blog easily.

Then there's the YouTube thing that I just wrote about in my last bloggo.

People do search YouTube for products and people all the time. There are even some who will go to YouTube first instead of Google itself.

It is true you really have to hammer at YouTube to make it work for you. All this means is to post videos often.

A mistake I see a lot of people make when it comes to YouTube is they put way, way too much effort into form and not function. All you have to do is plop your ass in front of your computer, make sure what's behind you doesn't look like a dump, record, save, publish, done. That's it. You don't need "a set" because this is not broadcast television. This is internet video, and at the end of the day, nobody cares whether you published in 240p 4:3 or 1080p 16:9 HD. Or said another way, a turd in 1080p is still a turd.

Anyway, I post one video a week on average, and I need to ramp that up to 2. That's in the works along with some other stuff I have planned to go along with the videos.

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it only took 5 years

Today I login to my YouTube account, check the settings to see if my copyright strike from 5 years ago is still there, and...

...the strike is finally gone. I originally had 2 strikes. One was removed a year (maybe 2 by now) ago, but that other one from 2007 just stuck there and would not go away.

There were 2 things I couldn't do with that strike there. The first is that I couldn't apply to be a partner, and the second that the ability to post "unlisted" videos isn't available to anyone with a strike. Otherwise I have a fully-loaded channel, meaning it's allowed for me to post videos over 15 minutes and I have the monetization option.

Originally I wanted a YouTube partnership for monetization, but I already have that and it's something that basically doesn't work very well because there are far too many restrictions. However, what I am interested in are YouTube Rentals. There are materials I can make that would work very well there.

But.. and you knew this was coming.. I've hit a snag.

The YouTube site states I must have approved monetized videos in order to apply to be a partner. Well, I do, yet the system still "thinks" I don't. Weird. I'm going to give the system a few days to play catch-up with my existing monetized videos, and hopefully that will cure that ill. If not, I'll have to dive into the dreaded YouTube support forums.

On the immediate plus side, I finally have the ability to post unlisted videos again. An unlisted video is for all intents and purposes semi-private. It's not publicly searchable on the YouTube site, nor is it private to where only certain people can view it. Unlisted is literally "whoever has the link can view the video" - and I do like having that option because there may be a few instances where I can use it. For example I could post Facebook-only videos that way via YouTube.

Anyway, it's nice that last strike is finally frickin' gone.

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Songwriting: Drum Machines (or Screw the Computer)

By next week (or late this week if it arrives early), I'll be in possession of a used (at a really good price I might add) BOSS Dr. Rhythm DR-3. That's a drum machine. I bought it for two reasons. First, my old Ensoniq SQ-1 Plus workstation synthesizer, which is over 20 years old, is wearing out. Second, I can't stand composing anything on the computer.

There is a distinct difference between recording and composing.

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