Techcrunch is ranked at #468 at the time of writing according to Alexa. They have been going for only a year or two, have over 150,000 feed subscribers (according to their Feedburner pic), and make hundreds of thousands of $.

Making a site as popular as Techcrunch is probably the dream of almost all webmasters. I was talking to a friend about this, and we were talking about how they became so popular.

So… how did they do it? And more importantly, how can you copy them to follow in their footsteps?

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There are no real ways to know for sure how many people go to your site from bookmarks, but a couple of ways

• (the usual) take a high %  (or even 100%) of unique WITHOUT any referrer data (that also are not a bot)
• Make a “bookmark this” link, but make the bookmarked url something like “http://example.com/?camefrom=bookmark”. Then just do something like

• if ($_GET['camefrom'] == “bookmark”)
  {
  // +1 to your stats thing counting bookmarks (database? etc)
  }

Making money from Myspace is quite easy. It used to be easier but they have cracked down on spam.

If you want to make sure they (probably) don’t remove your profile, make it look as crap as you can. Search for myspace layouts, put everything, glitter graphics, songs, the works. Upload a picture of an attractive girl, get a few friends, get some comments etc.

Now you have a few methods to make some money:

• Use the groups thing to make a group in your niche. Collect people who have a similar interest to what you are promoting/selling into a group. Use their search function to find people. Only bother adding people who are actually interested or at least your target market in/for your product.
• Get lots and lots of friends. Use auto adders (Google for them, most you have to pay for). Don’t do too many at once. If I were you, I would set up 5-10 accounts now, occasionally login add 5-10 people. After a couple of months after it looks like you’re a regular user (not a spammer) then start mass adding. Don’t do too many, they do remove profiles that spam friend requests. Once you have all these friends, then send bullitens or send messages/comments saying something such as “Hey, talk to me on here”, here being a webcam site such as IMLive (affiliated link, through their company Pussy Cash. You can even get around $2 per free sign up there – it is easy money) etc.
• Leave lots of comments with affiliated links. Ringtones etc. Make it seem you are not a spammer.

A good way to get people who are interested in your product, is to do a google search like site:myspace.com “your keyword”

You can also get a load of backlinks, by spamming links on comments.

Let me know in the comments for your thoughts etc on spamming myspace.

“In order to advertise this site, I pay google for certain keywords. One of those keywords used to be “Suicide”. They made up a good percentage of our users. However, I deciced to get rid of the term because they were costing me money to come here, and they were just going to kill themselves anyway. That means they would not be repeat users. No reason to pay to get them here.” http://www.sosecret.com/messages/show/1297

It is, at least, one way of clever thinking…

How would you feel if you were looking at a web page, your phone goes off and you see an advert about an answering machine? Then you are watching the Simpsons on TV while browsing, and you get an ad on a page about a Simpsons DVD? You might think that would never happen, or perhaps you are just (un)lucky? But no, Google is going to start something like this…

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What is “Adsense for paper“? Is this just something I’ve missed, or somethign new? It seems to be a bit secret… it even has “test” in the page title…

At Google, we’re constantly looking for new ways to provide effective and useful advertising to advertisers, publishers, and users. As part of this effort, we’ve been conducting a series of tests to determine where and how we might best bring value to print advertising. The publishers who display Google ads are part of these tests, and the ads come from Google’s base of AdWords advertisers. These advertisers range from global corporations to small local businesses.

See something you liked in an ad in the April issue of your favorite magazine? Just select from the titles below to view ads from participating advertisers. If you’d like to learn more, you can visit their site.

This is an interesting concept. We havn’t tried it here, but just found it over at StuntDubl and thought it was very interesting. It actually produces “heatmaps” for your site, showing how popular specific links are on your site.

Google Analytics has offered a similar service for a while with its site overlay, but it doesn’t look anywhere as pretty as Crazy Egg’s heatmap (these do use different pages, so don’t compare the actual results…):

Google Analytic (left) vs Crazy Egg (right):

Read more about it at StuntDubl.