File Swap Marketing?

Posted by MyOwnDemon

April 26, 2008

I was surfing the net earlier today when I stumbled upon an interesting site. I’m not going to directly link it here (you’ll see why in a second), but the URL is file-swap [dot] com. Basically, it’s a site where you can choose a file (picture, PDF, text file) on your computer and “swap” it for a random file from another user. You upload your file (up to 500k), and view a random file from another person. Pretty simple concept.

Anyway, I got an idea of a simple way you could potentially use it as a small traffic generator, or possibly even indirectly monetize it. As a quick side note though, I don’t think this site has enough of a userbase of people swapping files to really make this profitable or push much traffic, so this is just more of an idea rather than something you should actually try.

First of all, you could do one of the following…
1. Write a crappy ebook about anything you want. Stuff it with aff links. Give it some catchy title that would make people want to read it.

2. Watermark your URL onto a funny picture.

3. Even simply type your URL and save it as a text file. You never know, someone might get curious and check it out.

Next, Automate the swap…

(I’m not a coder by any means, but I am guessing this would be pretty basic)

Now that you have this watermarked file or ebook or whatever, just write a script that “swaps” your file automatically every 5-10 minutes or so. I figure any more “swaps” than that and you might set off some flags, given the size of the site.

Also, if you uploaded “yourfile.jpg”, you can’t upload that same file again. Since you cannot upload the same file name twice, make sure your script alters your file name to a unique name each time you swap.

There are no captchas on the site that I encountered. So, just make sure the script discards whatever crap you get back in the swap, and just let it run.

Alrite, that’s all for today. I hope somebody found this rambling useful.