I recently signed up for yet another social networking account through one of our clients sub accounts called Yuwie.  In addition to all the standard features of making friends and sharing photos this one had a nice catch.  It pays you.  That’s right it pays you for being social, so I decided to try it out and note my thoughts at different points in the setup process.  It’s bit of a rant, but may hold some interesting observations on this up and coming social network.

To begin this adventure, I went to the site via an affiliate link (http://r.yuwie.com/anthonym ) and proceeded to watch a video giving a nice pitch on how you get paid to do social networking.  It was simply, but decently convincing (Can you really get paid for playing around on the Internet, Yes).  That one make me smile, even though statistically I’m unlikely to make very much money, but you never know, if I got popular enough (hence the draw).

I clicked next to get more info. And then they went right to getting paid.  Very cool that they cut right through the BS.  I love the fact that it blows the whistle on how social networking could really pay it’s own users.  The revenue sharing rate seems to change, but that is fair as long as they don’t drop it too much.  Since it’s based on pageviews it’s not bad.  If you can get a lot of different friends and lots of video, blogs, layouts, pictures.  You can get like 40 pageviews from one person.  I love that it includes your own page view updates on the control panel.  That’s cool.  I hope they develop a little niche.

The video also went on about 10 levels of payouts.  I’m always suspicious about MLM, but it seems interesting enough for me to keep going and I’m like the skeptic of all skeptics.  The site did seem to have all the full features that any myspace or equivalent site would have minus ofcourse the cutting edge things like open social, but hey they’re paying right?
One of our new clients is Anthony Martins, a stuntman / actor who was really excited about Yuwie and building out his paid social networking site.  It seems that since they do give you continued percentages based on your friends.  It seems a bit crazy, but you may actually be able to make some real money if the site catches, that is if you’re popular enough.

Anthony Martins wanted to drive traffic to his Yuwie sign up id and build friends / expand his network, Our marketing solution for him was to launch new super blog at popularitypays.info and start promoting him on the other social networks and community sites.  Popularitypays.info is going to be a guide to getting gmore popular on those sites, his personal experiences with it, and how he and you can make money with Yuwie.  I’m all for writing a bit about Anthony and Yuwie (and not just because he’s my client and I just signed up for Yuwie personally), but the whole SEO (seach engine optimization) world has been eying the idea of revenue sharing (youtube has revenue sharing, but only with select partners).

Pronet advertising already ran an interesting blog article on it and I was aware of this site before I met Anthony.  Well I signed up, and I hope you will too, even if it’s just to check it out and see if it’s developed to the point where you want to use it.

Getting something on paper is must before I start any of my real work, but we’ll have to meet in person and hammer out the details.  Step 1, you need to show me the script and give me timelines of when you’ll be finished etc.  I’ll take those and write something up giving the details of our arrangement, including the financial pay offs for you and the distribution of the film.  I need to know how much money you want within the first 3 months.  After the viral campaign starts really kicking in I’ll be able to send you a check for a few thousand dollars per month (from the online advertising revenue etc). The first few months will be a bit bleakers until the word really starts spiraling through the blogosphere and I can get the viewers in the range of 100,000 per week.  I’m going to try to pre-sell some advertising in the movie itself before the release. 

1. Create “link bait” or  something ( web tool, service, guide, set of articles) valuable enough to  and encourages hundreds of other websites to link to you voluntarily.
2. Publish a large amount of updated information (if you updated your blog daily for a long enough period of time you would have published enough information to obtain the required number of links with regular SEO efforts.)

Doing that will involve a lot of work and creativity.  If anyone reading this is interested I can help with a plan of attack if you’re willing to be that aggressive with your SEO efforts.