About half a year ago, I wrote a small article about entry strategies to social networks at Newsvine. During those days my purpose was to combine economics and military strategies together and:

write something totally unscientific about entry strategies to social news site.

Now after my article about reusing articles, I thought that I should go little further and write a whole article series about different entry strategies to different virtual communities. So here’s the first article about front attack.

Front Attack

Front attack means usually attack with superior force towards the main defence positions.

Front attack means that newbie will go there where the audience already is. He/she can choose a popular subject(s) and try to get popular and be on front page from the very beginning. With Newsvine, Newbie should choose an already popular topic like Bush, celebrities or what ever is popular on the virtual community already. On Weblo, you might have to work with popular celebrities site.

The strenght in front attack is, that it’s easy – or at least it may feel easy. But the weakness is, that you may be overwhelmed with the mass. You’ll have to work really hard to get heard. On the other hand, if you manage to get attention, you’ll have big audience there already.

Here’s some strategy hints for Colonization game, which I’ve been playing since finding the open source version from Internet.

Quick start for Colonization
Establish a colony with both of your settlers. You can use your pioneer and his tools later. When you have founded two towns, make them produce something to sell to Europe – not food or wood.

When you have two towns running, try to search an Indian village next to sea, to be able to sell goods. After you have found an Indian village, check that you have enough material to sell at Europe, that you will make at least 200 cold, which is needed to buy goods.

Then take the cargo and go to Europe. Sell cargo and buy goods. Sail back to America and the Indian village. After bargaining, you should make at least 1800 cold. Now you have got some money and you can start developing your empire.

Hint: Inka and Aztec villages pay best and horses are very good commodity too.

Picture 1. A good start – Indian village next to colony.

Picture 2. Use Indian villages to train your colonists and send a missionary to convert Indians to your towns.

Three towns per ship strategy
You should establish 3-4 colonies close to each other (max 5 moves), because then you can run them with just one cargo ship. This will save your resources, because you can sail between Europe and America with full cargo.

Picture 3. Three villages close to each others can be supported by one ship.

Attacking other Europeans
This is quite risky strategy. Best way is to buy cannons from Europe and then attack against enemy. A frigate could be useful to protect your colonies from enemy, which are attacking from the sea. Be sure, that you don’t start this strategy before you have some troops at each of your own town. The benefits is the cargo and settlers from conquered towns, and an the other hand – other Europeans may not leave you in peace ever if you don’t attack against them.

Picture 4. Fastest way to get troops for war is to buy them from Europe.

Picture 5. The faster you attack, the weaker is the enemy.

Independence war
Your mother country seems to be skillful to find the town, which is less defended. You can use this information and build a trap for her troops. Choose a colony next to mountains. Then after declaring independence, leave the town without soldiers and instead group your forces around the town on the mountains, which will bring them good protection and benefit in fights. Now your enemy will waste it troops while trying to attack you from fields to mountains.

Picture 6. Place your troops on mountains close to town to get the benefit from battle ground.

Has it ever happen to you, that you have written a good story that no-one ever read? Quite soon your story gets buried in “virtual heaven”. However, someone might be interested in your article, if they just could find it. Here’s a simple solution for these kinds of cases.

Reuse your articles or other information products. It is not forbidden -  it is sensible. You should not do the same work again, but you should rewrite your article and try to make it a little better. There might have been something, why it was not read in the first place. You could also search if there are similar articles, to get ideas and remember to respect the rights of other authors.

Give it a try. Check your old articles and rewrite something and publish it again. See what happens.

This far there has been several possibilities for bloggers to make money with sponsored writing. However small earnings, dollar falling and continuous rejection of written posts is not that attractive anymore.

Now it looks like some companies are not doing that well anymore.

At GeekySpeaky forum, there are comments like these:

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007
It’s October and it’s been *weeks* since I’ve gotten a Blogitive assignment and they used to be my most reliable.

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007
same here. All I’ve gotten in the past few months are the test posts to reject.

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007
Seriously, I haven’t done a task for them in ages. I still log in and check, but there’s just been nothing there.
I don’t like many of their tasks anyway, I usually reject more than I take. Once in a blue moon I get a good one, though.

I’ve tried to get my blog accepted, but nothing has happened for over a month. The latest Blogitive blog entry is from May 2007. It sure would be nice to read about the situation about the company from Blogitive web pages.

I got familiar with AuctionAds from Text Link Ads after my pages were rejected and they promised free $5 for joining. The sum was of course too small to be payed, so to get it out, I had to earn more. In several months I did not make any and now even the earned $5 had disappeared. Latest blog entry at AuctionAds Blog seems to be from September 29, 2007. Today I removed the ads from my site.

Anyway, if you are interested the idea is simple:

1. Sign Up

First sign up to be an AuctionAds publisher.

2. Insert Our Code

Insert our code on your site. The code contains ad links.

3. Place Ads On Your Site

AuctionAds places ads targeted to your content on your site.

4. Make Money

<>Users buy products they’re interested in and you make money. This must be the hardest part. You don’t get money from clicks but user have to buy something.