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.

3.  Put yourself in a box – Make sure the story can be understood or generates interst just fot he headline.  If it’s going to spread virally without a huge budget you’re going to need it to really resonate with the “right” people – you need evangelists for your story.

4.  As soon as the story is ready to leak, push and promote it as much as you can.  bloggers and social media are heavily biased twoards the bleeding edge or brand brand brand new, so as soon as the sotry breaks that’s the time to push.  Leverage the press and buzz to generate more press and buzz.

2.  Not optmizing

3.  Not enough information on website.

4.  No referncing or no links to other areas when referncing.

5.  No social media optimization or the ability to consume and share content on major social media sites

6.  too much text, not enough images or video.

7.  Only having 100% commercial content

8.  Not being niche enough

9.  Internal Pages are not structured to target any keywords so they’re invisable.

10.  Not updating often enough.

11.  No call to action

12.  No visual serpation or a a way to make the call to action stand out.

13.  Website dosen’t look good / load on common browsers and resoultuions.

14.  Site links out to blog and other stuff on different websites, no internal blogging and social media features.

3.  Reflection surfaces

4.  Overly cartoony web 2.0

5.  Drop down menus (breadcrumb is finally taking over for advanced navigation)

I reviewed your website and here is my initial analysis and observations on what I would improve.  Overall you have a lot of good information and diversity of content (blog, video, podcast, reports, and tools) that’s outstanding.  Also you have a decent page rank (4) and a number of links pointing to your site.  The main improvement your site needs is proper optimization and link building (pages setup to target specific keywords and emphasis on building links to also target those same words.) 

Although I did check out your entire list of sites, I focused most of my review on your most established website (url removed for privacy/) and separated my review into three categories:  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or things that would affect search engine rankings, design / aesthetics and usability, or how easy it is for users to find and accomplish tasks.

From an SEO standpoint

The website is missing key elements required for the search engines to understand what the page is about. Some of these are not visible to the end user (or person viewing your site), but are very important for ranking on the search engines. 

These are:

1. No header tags.
2. No keyword targeting on individual pages, each page needs to specifically target exact keyword phrases that a buyer/seller would type in.
3. The actual code uses a lot of JavaScript and code heavy ways of accomplishing functions that could be greatly reduced, decreasing load time and “text to code ratio”, which will help rankings.
4. Since you have a lot of different websites, it would be better to have them all integrated to promote one single site

From a design standpoint

1. All the sections look the same, I think the graphic design could be visually spiced up and the text itself could be laid out with some variation (headers, sub headers, block quotes, etc)

From a Usability standpoint

1. Navigation on the left hand side is very hard to scan because its small font and there are too many items under each subheading.  Changing it to 5 items per sub header and adding white space would make it a lot easier to read / scan.
2. Links go out to PDFs, different websites, and different looking pages without any warning or intuitive jump. 
3. Forms have many fields, but no option for a quick contact only field.

That’s a lot of info and I could have typed more, but although I can see a lot of potential improvements from a design and usability perspective I think your site would convert (get you business) if you got enough traffic to it. 

In order to rank on the search engine and bring targeted traffic to your site, you don’t need another blog or any other add-ons, just a solid SEO campaign.  If you wanted to address everything at once, you could rebuild around a more effective content management system, but that would cost a lot more.

At the very least I recommend.

1. A 3 month SEO campaign which would consist of optimizing all your existing content to target specific keywords and work on some link building to boost traffic levels and achieve search engine rankings.  Rankings can be achieved within 3 months (your site already has a limited presence, some links and is in a good starting position)

Then I would consider:

1.  A monthly SEO plan in order to maintain rankings and stay competitive.

Ideally or eventually

You may want to consolidate all your existing resources and websites into a newly designed SEO optimized site built from scratch on a content management system which would allow you to change all the pages / content yourself and optimize new pages / posts for specific keywords without needing a web designer.

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. 

You published a post commenting on my article and used my name in a post on your company blog first.  I’m open for positive discussion, but it’s a business blog, so rants off topic on previous blog posts infused with negativity aren’t appropriate.  I wrote what I really thought and used keywords relevant to a real position I hold.  I ALLOWED you to comment out of respect, but your recent comments have gone too far (linking to an attack article on businessweek).  I’m not attacking you, I used your personal name in the post, because the post specifically addressed you, optimization is not a black art, I target all my blog posts – that’s smart marketing. 

If you watch any of the SEO debates ( like the calcanis one in particular ) you’ll see many posts with proper names in the titles.  You’re a blogger and what you write in your business blog (mine too) is open for critique by other bloggers, but I don’t have to allow negative rants in the comments on my business blog.  If you continue attacking me on MY business blog all your comments will be removed. (I’ll put a public notice saying I did this for the record).  Nothing personal, no more pissing matches.  I wish you luck with your future endeavors and hold nothing personal against you.