I’ve tried the advertising-only website before with FancyBlog.com, but the income wasn’t worth the effort and interest waned and invariably so did the site. I see more potential on this new advertising-only site, and hopefully it can become pretty big if I play my cards right.
The new site is called FacebookProfile.com, which is a Facebook tips/tricks/fan site.
Facebook is a social networking site with massive popularity amongst the college population. It’s clean, fast and constantly adding new features. Noah from OkDork works at Facebook and is always ranting about “How awsome my job is” and “How cool it is to work at Facebook” all the time.
I didn’t want the site to look like a blog, but I love the functionality of blogs. So to make posting easier, I used WordPress, but created a custom design theme that imitates the Facebook design:
This way when people stumble upon the page via search engine or link, they know for sure it’s a Facebook-related website…without even reading a word. Since search engine traffic is already rising quickly (even after only a few days of being online), this is important.
To create the site I:
- Installed a regular WordPress system on the FacebookProfile.com domain.
- I literally took a screenshot of my actual Facebook profile from the internet, then Photoshopped it to include the WordPress blogging elements (Pages, Categories, RSS Feed etc.)
- Started writing a few posts just to keep some content on the site for the programmer.
- I then found a WordPress designer through RentACoder who could retool the website to look like my Photoshopped rendition of the webpage. This cost me $220. I probably could have got this done cheaper, but I paid more to get someone who could do the project quickly, had a high ranking on past projects and prior experience with WordPress.
The idea for this project came randomly while I was searching for domain names for a different project. I also remember reading about a whole cottage industry that revolves around MySpace custom templates, images, text and media add-ons….and thought Facebook might eventually move somewhat in this direction.
I’m still working on bugs, such as how to prevent WordPress from auto-formatting my Facebook ASCII Art text….but those are just small hurdles. The site has already been getting 50-100 unique hits a day, which is not bad for a non-advertised site which has been up for 7 days.
So FacebookProfile.com has officially been launched….not much content as of yet, but more to come!