Be sure to check out part 1 here.

Well, it worked for a while. Here are some lessons I learned from implementing part 1 of the experiment.

Lesson 1: Don’t Break Your Crossposter
I was using a crossposting plugin to re-post t-shirt’s blogs onto the myspace blog, but there was a nasty drug-interaction sort of situation between that plugin and another I’m using. After that, I had to start re-posting the blog notifications manually because I wasn’t particulularly interested in coming up with a fix. If you’re going to do this, lesson 1 is that you can’t break your crossposter, because it’s essential. Manual crossposting is a pain in the ass and impossible to maintain. I know that Jared Smith is using the same plugin without fail, so it’s definitely my fault and not the authors.

Lesson 2: Outsource
Outsource your spam monitoring and friend-adding to someone, either a hired hand or maybe just a gullible friend. The MySpace friend-adding process is incredibly clunky, and a terrible drain on time. It seriously wasn’t worth my time to send out those invitations.

Lesson 3: Don’t Bypass msplinks.com
I was also using a little code trick to bypass MySpace’s msplinks.com outgoing link redirect. Apparently that will get your account deleted. I say “apparently” because there was no warning, or even a notification email. I just noticed one day that the account didn’t exist any longer. This is the only thing I did that I could imagine would piss off the powers that be at MySpace.

I’ve since re-registered the name, but have not re-created the profile. If I’m going to pursue this again, I will need to apply some of the above lessons and approach it from a different angle. That being said though, there WAS a noticable traffic increase and some new RSS subscriptions, so I’m convinced that this can work well if your demographic matches the MySpace crowd. You just have to have the resources to commit to such a high maintenance site (at least to begin with).