Real Happiness in Life

I've been making notes as I learn things, finding things that work, things that don't and updating as the algorithms on FanBox change and develop.

This article is broken into sections:
- Understand How You Make Money on FanBox
- Why Do I Need Lots of Fans?
- What is Everyone Else Posting About?
- When You Choose Tags Make Sure They Relate to Your Post
- Consider Your Post Quality
- What Do I Write About?
- If You Didn't Write it - Show Your Source 
- Photos will Delay Your Post, Videos Will Not
-Make Sure the Video You Choose on YouTube WILL Embed
-Using AutoPlay on YouTube Videos
- Where Should the $ Go?
- If You Buy Ads
- There is no "one size fits all" for ads
- You Can Buy Ads on Other People's Posts Too!
- There is no "one size fits all" for ads
- Import Your Existing Blogs From Outside of FanBox
- Categorize and Rate Posts for Money!
- Knowledge Investor
- Be a Teacher
- Build Your Own Blogging Community

Understand How You Make Money on FanBox
First, understand how you make money on FanBox. The FanBox algorithms are complex and written to reward you for readers who are actually interested in your content. You get paid for the time people spend reading your blogs. It doesn't matter if those readers come from FanBox, Facebook, Twitter or Google.
Also, not all readers are equal, some people will be worth more money than others to your particular blogs and interests. You get paid by a sampling of your readers.

So as you can see you need to drive as much traffic as possible to your FanBox blogs. Fan everyone you can, the more fans you have - the better; and I will cover why that is in more detail below.

Every single one of those tags you use when you publish has an assigned value that goes up or down every night at 11pm. Those tags determine how much you pay per click (or Knowledge Investor pays per click) by adding up all 6 of them. Popular tags cost more than less popular tags.
For example the tag "dog" may cost $5.00 per click and the tag "dog training" may cost .10-cents per click.
I'll use this as an example further down in this post.

My first week or so on FanBox was totally  frustrating. I made NOTHING.
Then, I started running ads and guess what? It was the exposure I needed to start bringing in traffic. I will talk more about ads below, but I am here to tell you they work and you don't have spend a ton of money, in fact you don't have to spend ANY money. I've cleared $9,000 as of November 2011 and I have spent somewhere in the vicinity of about $300 total on ads in that time. But not my own money, I earned Ad Credits, and I'll show you how to do that too!
That's a heckuva good return if you ask me in both terms of fans and money.

Why Do I Need Lots of Fans?
If you ask anyone in the Top 10 on the LeaderBoard, "What is the secret to your success" 9 times out of 10 they will tell you to (among other great advice) to get all the fans you can and here's why. When you publish a blog post on FanBox, that post gets blasted around FanBox to all your fans and friends. AND everyone that is determined to have an interest in your post based on the tags you choose. Hopefully those people become fans of you too! You can make money if you don't have a lot of fans if you run ads as they give you sitewide exposure. 

What is Everyone Else Posting About?
Check out the Top Searches at http://www.fanbox.com/PremiumBlogs/TrendingTopics.aspx?source=feedtopicsbox and see what the trending subjects are on FanBox. These are popular subjects and the competition for these topics will be huge. The top searches change a little every day so check in before you post if you want to see what they are.
As far as Knowledge Investor goes, this is also valuable research information because it shows you what is currently being searched and read the most on FanBox right now.
If you want to invest in a particular topic this is a great way to see what's popular to ensure your investment gets utilized.

Keywords are tags and tags are keywords.
Another place to go mine for keyword gold is in the tags. Go to the listing of all Premium Blogs herehttp://profile.fanbox.com/PremiumBlogs/APB_SA.aspx and see those tags? They look like this in a cloud formation:

The larger and bolder the letters are, the more popular the "tag". Happiness is more popular than hope because it's bigger. Once, I would have recommended that you write a blog post about something that enabled you to personally find Happiness and include that tag (keyword) in your 6 words when you publish.

However in the present I would strongly suggest that you expand that tag to be more unique by calling it "personal happiness" or "finding happiness" because the competition for the single, popular tags can be enormous and if you advertise, it will cost more per click.

Tags help FanBox as well as search engines like Google classify your post and drive more traffic to your posts. The downside is that there is tremendous competition on the popular tags and they will cost you more per click on ads if you choose to buy ads. I used to recommend using popular tags to blast your post around FanBox, but now with so many more people and billions of posts, I choose unique, descriptive tags for my ads so I pay less per click. You can make all the unique, descriptive tags you want simply by adding a word to an already popular tag. If you wrote a post about Angelina Jolie, instead of just using "beautiful" or "beautiful women" (which are both large if you look at that tag cloud) make it more unique and descriptive by using "beautiful slender women" or "beautiful brunette women".

When You Choose Tags Make Sure They Relate to Your Post
Now more than ever this is important to understand.
If you write about your break up with your husband and what caused it, don't choose "music" as one of your keywords (those 6 words you choose when you type in your article title and publish it) simply because it's a popular keyword.
Important: Make sure that your keywords go with the content of your article. Or the system will "punish" your post with few impressions as a low quality post.

Also, don't be afraid to make your 6 keywords that you choose when you publish absolutely unique to your post. Like if you're posting about a very specific niche or subject that hasn't exactly been covered on FanBox before such as the actress Frances Farmer. When I first wrote this post, my 6 keywords I chose were :

1. beautiful women   <-- popular tag but not exactly descriptive of the post and will cost more per click if I run an ad.
   
2. actress <- frances farmer was an actress
   
3. hollywood actress<- frances farmer was a hollywood actress
   
4. frances farmer <- her name
   
5. movies <-popular tag but not exactly descriptive of the post
   
6. famous people <- frances farmer was a famous person
   

Now, in the newer incarnations of the algorithms of FanBox, I need to do better than that.
I would suggest to add some tags that describe this post even better.
Once upon a time, it was great to use just the popular tags but now you need to be more descriptive to break out of the slush pile of blog posts.
Far better than "beautiful women" or "movies" might be:

-actresses with mental illness - frances farmer was mentally ill
-author and actress - frances farmer wrote a book
-frances farmer biography - the article is her biography

See? Those 3 tags describe this post even better than the original tags and help FanBox classify where this post should appear even more accurately. AND will cost less to advertise.

The unique tags that may or may not have been used before : actress, frances farmer, famous people, and hollywood actress will ensure that if anyone searches for blogs on those subjects - they will be more likely to get your blog post. Even more so if you add the additional tags after publishing.

Consider Your Post Quality
Personally, I don't like to duplicate content from anywhere else on the web whenever possible, so I rewrite a lot of content to make it unique.

You don't have to do this, but I seem to get better quality ratings (meaning higher rankings in FanBox Search) with unique content. Also if you DO use something from off the web - quote your source.
There is such a thing as "Fair Use" but a full article is far more content than Fair Use ever intended.

So, What Do I Write About? 
First of all, don't worry too much about what's popular and don't let it give you writer's block. It's far more important to be yourself in the FanBox community. If you just write about that things that interest you, it's almost impossible not to hit on a popular topic that