The Lazy Stoner

Everything you wanted to know

Everything You Wanted To Know About Earning With Facebook Apps

Here is a general overview of how Facebook applications work, why they  work, and how they make money. Enjoy!

Traffic:

Facebook has over 150 million active users and receives nearly as many daily page views as Google. With the viral features of the site, all 150 million active users are literally clicks away from your application at any given time. It is MUCH easier to drive organic traffic to Facebook applications than it is to get visitors to a website. The reason? Facebook applications grow themselves as people use them. This is because of the viral channels that exist there.

Facebook has many viral integration points that applications can utilize. First of all, when users take action in your application, you can send out news Feeds on their behalf. These Feeds will show up on their profile, and will also show up on the ‘News Feed’ page of their Friends. The News Feed is the first page a user sees upon logging into FB, so you can imagine how powerful this is. Notifications are similar to Feeds, but show up LIVE on the chat bar. This is a great way to constantly keep your users up to date on what’s happening in your app when they aren’t there, and it works great for getting them back. Invititations are another viral channel. Users can invite Friends within Facebook to the app, and receive a request they’re notified about when logging in. Applications can also utilize several areas of profile space on user’s Profile pages, like Sidebar, Boxes, and Tabs.

You can also use (or abuse..) Facebook’s other viral channels to promote your apps, like groups, events, pages, photos, and of course the Feeds created by all of these. Once you can harness the power of FB’s viral channels you can drive ridiculous amounts of traffic anywhere instantly.

Social Gaming/Experience:

Although most Facebook users won’t be in the same room as they interact via Facebook apps, they are still sharing a social experience. In fact, the beauty of these types of applications is that social interaction can occur without both parties being online at the same time. When the user returns to FB to find they were robbed by a Friend in a game they play, they’ll more than likely load the app up before doing anything else on Facebook and exact their revenge! Whether users are attacking their Friends and stealing their money in a Mobster RPG game or sending a secret love gift to someone they admire, they are interacting on a social level that is now both an important and lucrative part of present culture, around the world.

Monetization:

Facebook applications allow for some of the most unique monetization techniques on the web today, most of them due to the viral and social aspects of the site. For example: players in RPG games like Mob Wars will pay $1 to put a friend on a ‘hit list’, with absolutely no hesitation, just as they will not hesitate to pay to refill their ‘energy’ so they can keep playing. Another example is the Pink Ribbon app, it asked users to download a toolbar and to invite 20 Friends to the app, in order to raise $.10 to fight cancer per user that did these things. Of course, the payout for the toolbar was $1.50 per download, so with over 1 million downloads in 3 days you can surely see the power to make money within Facebook, even if you are giving away a portion of earnings.

One method of monetization that has become prominent, in part due to social network apps, is micropayments. Companies like Paypal have launched branches that deal strictly in micropayments for apps. Paypal launched Spare Change, which can be integrated into apps to allow micropayments as small as $.10 for whatever purpose you need to serve. Instead of taking a percentage out of every payment like they do with Paypal, Spare Change developers receive a flat fee at the end of the month that is quite reasonable.

Furthermore, Facebook applications can be quickly and easily monetized with cut and paste solutions that came into existence shortly after social networks opened their APIs. These are companies like Rock You ad network and $uper Rewards CPA network. Rock You allows publishers to run different sized banner ads with social network specific content, similar to Google Adwords. $uper Rewards lets users complete CPA offers in exchange for virtual credits within your apps. For example, in Mob Wars once again, when a user runs out of ‘energy’ to do missions, they can complete a CPA offer and exchange the points earned from it to refill their energy. When users are competing against their Friends in these apps, you can see crazy amounts of conversions as they continue doing offers to one-up each other or to get the latest items or gifts, etc…

Potential To Earn:

There is insane potential to make money with Facebook applications. The reasons are the three things listed above. Simple charity applications like Lil Green Patch are making between $5000 and $10,000 every day, while RPG games like Mob Wars can easily pull $20,000 or more in profit in one day. These are NOT complex applications. They simple integrate all of Facebook’s viral channels, are well monetized (although could make more!), and now have established userbases. They aren’t going anywhere, they’re only GROWING MORE. One thing to realize though, is that even Mob Wars, which makes roughly $25,000+ each day with 2.8 million monthly active users, only has around 2% of Facebook’s active userbase playing the game! There are insanely great opportunities to quickly and easily create thriving, lucrative, and self-perpetuating communities on Facebook by launching apps.

Steps To Launch An App:

1. Head to the FB application directory and research potential app types. Original ideas are great, but if you don’t have the technical skills to create the app yourself, it’s much easier to explain a variation of an existing app to a coder, and you can still make a TON of money launching clones of other apps with different themes. Once you decide what kind of app you want, figure out what a unique theme that will work.

2. Create and launch your application. This can take anywhere from 1 day to several months, depending on whether you use turnkey scripts yourself and do it in a day, or have a complex custom application created from scratch. Somewhere in that range…

3. Get your app rolling with some promotion. Either do this organically and manually or buy clicks or direct installs from Ad networks. You need to get a strong userbase of active users built to use activate the viral channels and perpetuate the apps growth. The level of active users you have when you decide to stop promotion will determine how quickly the continues to grow on it’s own from that point.

4. That’s it. Now you can start collecting payments every two weeks and do something else while your app earns you money. I suggest setting up more apps.

Realistic Expectations:

When the platform first launched, virtually any app that made it to the app directory would gain thousands of users in a few hours. These days there are over 400,000 applications available, so that isn’t true anymore. Many people will say there is no money to be made in Facebook apps because of this. They are quite simply ignorant or inexperienced. Yes, it’s very likely that your app won’t go completely viral and gain millions of users in 2.5 days if you launch an app tomorrow. But that does not mean there isn’t a TON of money to be made with apps. And your app still could go completely viral, it all depends on what it is. One of the AWESOME things we have now that didn’t exist when the platform launched is $uper Rewards and Offerpal CPA networks, for monetizing apps. If those networks would have been around when the platform launched I think there would be a lot more apps out now, because more people would have realized how much money can really be made with apps from the get-go, versus only running banner ads.

This being said, here is what you should realistically expect if launching an FB app:

If you create and launch an app, and promote it organically a bit to the point where you have 500-1000 users and then let is sit, you won’t make any money. Well, you will… you’d probably be making around $100 a month at that rate, but that isn’t even enough to count when compared to what you could be making. If you are going to promote organically, then you need to go buck-wild and drive crazy amounts of users to your apps. You need to build up a solid userbase of at least several thousand active users to start perpetuating your apps growth automatically.

If you choose to promote by purchasing users or clicks, look at it as an investment. Spend $1000 in day and get 3500-6000 users. If your app is engaging, you can double your investment in the same day. Easily. Even if it’s not that engaging, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 1000 daily user boost ever result in less than $200 of revenue, so even if you don’t recover or double your investment the same day, you will get a large chunk of it back and of course set the stage for the app to continue to earn for you in the future. These numbers are complete generalizations, but very realistic. It of course depends on what your app is like.

You can generate some VERY easy passive income with Facebook applications if you don’t have money to invest too. Just spend some time building accounts and doing some organic promotion on FB to build your userbase. One good thing about doing things this way is that you’ll definitely have a more connected userbase from creating groups, pages, etc., they won’t have just clicked on an ad to get there.

Ok, here’s the golden chrondo. I’ve seen entire e-books/e-courses that outline this process, yet cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, so you can thank me later. :D Anyway, this technique is one that has worked for me time and time again, and once again, it’s fairly common sense.  Why people don’t start doing this right off the bat, instead of trying to figure out what will work for them or whatever is beyond me, but most people do.  This concept is so basic it kills me more people don’t get it! It’s the way business works: you get (or have) a product, and sell it to people, it’s that simple!

Why do most people NOT do this from the beginning? Well I think there is more than one reason, off the top of my head I can think of a few that might make people try other methods of earning first:

1. They don’t have a product.

2. It seems like a lot of work.

3. You don’t see immediate results.  

Those reasons are weak and here’s why:

1. I don’t have a product

Not true.You are literally filled with products without even knowing it. Even a LAZY STONER like me has skills that are profitable! I have launched MANY successful products that were nothing more than an ebook guide or a series of videos I created on a topic a topic I am an ‘authority’ on. Now don’t get discouraged by the word authority. Do you have hobbies? Of course you do… Well this makes you more of an authority on this topic than most people are, which is more than you need to know to sell them a product For example, before Google banned running ‘pass your drug test” type keywords in AdWords, I made around $30,000 in under 2 months by selling a simple $20 ebook telling people how to pass drug tests everytime without using any $50 system cleaners or anything…. It’s that easy! Another great example of one of these types of products is this one:

http://www.secretsofskateboarding.com/main.php 

This guy has simply made some videos of him showing people how to skateboard and is selling them for $27 each, if he pushed 500 of them in a month, he’d make around $13,500.  Are you starting to understand? Take what you are good at and think about how you can sell it… And remember one thing: Information is the #1 selling product on the internet!

Maybe this isn’t your thing though. Maybe you don’t want to sell stupid ebooks or videos and want some real products to sell. Well this is just as easy, but it will take a bit more of an investment if you can’t create the product yourself. If you’ve got some cash, then the next thing you need is a decent (or profitable, rather) idea. Good ideas for selling products are usually technology related, but you could definitely apply this concept to what we just discussed above as well. I know people who use this process to have the ebooks and videos they sell created for them. The reason I like technology-related products is because they’re cheap and easy to make money with.

I know a few people who have started up either Joomla template sites or Wordpress theme sites, and been very successful with them. The best part is that these people didn’t know shit about Joomla or Wordpress or templates when they started doing these sites! They simple paid a freelancer to create a site for them, and then also paid them to make new templates each month. One guy was paying around $50-$100 to have the templates created, and then turning around and selling 1000 or so copies of them for $40 or $50 bucks a piece. That’s the kinda stuff you wanna do.

If that’s what you’re after: head to a site like Guru.com, Scriptlance.com or one of the many other sites like this that exist. Find someone here who can create your product for you! Do be careful here, as you can easily waste tons of time and sometimes money by choosing the cheapest bid on your project when the person bidding may not have the skills to do the job to your expectations. Do your research on the companies/individuals you hire when taking this route!

OK, enough about that.

2. It seems like a lot of work.

It can be a lot of work, depending on what you decide to do, and whether you hire some of it out or not. You should know that in must situations, outsourcing the job in it’s entirety will still entail a decent amount of work for you. This is especially true if you’re going to be particular about what you accept. It can also be difficult to find good freelancers to work with. Once you find some good help, treat them decently, because like I said, good help can be hard to come by.

The reason I like earning this way, is because once you’ve done all the hard work, you can continue to benefit from it each month. Imagine if over 4 months you setup 5 businesses that were each doing $1500 in sales each week. That’d be $30,000 a month, or $360,000 a year. And those numbers are very achievable. Keep in mind that this would also enable you to have the free time to launch even more businesses, or make investments elsewhere…  As long as you maintain a digital inventory, maintaining the businesses from month to month could be as simple paying someone $500 per month to handle all the customer service issues for you with you carrying a Blackberry for emergencies and maybe running some advertising when necessary, which you can also pay someone to manage if you want. Bottom line: is this is the way to do it if you want to earn some serious cash that’s recurring and dependable. Take it from the laziest dude around, putting in the little bit of work required at the beginning is well worth it. You may take a hit at first as you take the time to build the business and get it going, but once it’s going you’re good to go.

3. You don’t see immediate results

No, in most situations, you don’t. It can take a month, or it can take four, it all depends on what you’re trying to do. The important thing to keep in mind is that by taking the time required to setup a successful business, you may lose a few days worth of trying to find work a day at a time, but the end result is a financial security that makes it worthwhile.

Believe me, I tried many different methods of earning when I started working online back in the day, and nothing else has come close to making so much money so easily. 

Remember, time IS money. But if you don’t have the knowledge to utilize your time to the fullest, then your time isn’t worth much.