The things that took the most time out of my day was Twitter, Skype, and Facebook. It is definitely an attention grabber with status updates, skype calls, and video shares. It just breaks my concentration and I end up clicking on the link and looking at everyone’s statuses. I even found myself on youtube for almost an hour.

Not good when I got a whiteboard filled with things to do. So this week experiment was born and I think I did pretty well. I got a lot of things done, contracts reviewed, offers going up, products needing traffic, research keywords etc. I did a lot of things. Instead of me reading DamnYouAutoCorrect.com or finding new mixtapes on Datpiff.com – I was full productive on what I had to do.

… and yes the occasional cat pictures.

Here are somethings that has helped with my productivity….

• Every morning I write my goals for TODAY and what I want to accomplish for today. This puts me in a goal oriented mood where I want to cross one of those task off the white board, and it feels good doing so.

• LeechBlock, is one Firefox plugin that I used to help stop myself from going to WorldStar, Facebook, Datpiff, Youtube, and all these other sites that I tend to randomly go to.

• SimplyNoise, replace my Winamp player and Grooveshark.com because I notice myself picking and choosing songs I want to play and listen to. This actually helps  a lot and relaxes my brain actually as well. It did take me getting use to but it definitely is worth it to have playing in the background.

• Close out Tweetdeck and try not to open it. Twitter, I do not know why I find it so interesting maybe because of what certain celebrities say that interests me or the funny remarks from music artists. I did manage to not look at twitter on my PC but did tend to look at my iPhone twitter app – but not as often – so that is a plus.

• Closed out my email. I started responding to emails more so towards later in the day and via my iphone especially if it was important. This help a little with more screen real estate, allowing me to move more windows around when necessary.

I think that was it. Just these things alone definitely helped with my daily productivity and how I manage things. It s a good thing that I have workoffice to help with managing my VAs and partners. In all I think I had a hell of a week, so cheers.

enjoy your weekend!

Related posts:

1. Sync Twitter with Your Facebook, Why?
2. Facebook Privacy Issues Benefits Facebook Marketers
3. Networking with Twitter

I do not know why but I like utilizing Facebook a lot, it is a portal of just pure traffic. I have been using a specific site to find trends base on a keyword I type in. Today, I have decided to share this site with you. The website is called YourOpenBook.org.

This specific website looks at your search term and then searches Facebook statuses. You can see what people are talking about and if they mention something important. This is similar to twitter search and twitter trends, but it uses Facebook statuses. I am uncertain how often it updates but it does provide some value to research.

I first found this website when the craze of Facebook privacy was a HUGE issue. Also this website arise when Facebook was posting FourSquare locations – showing people their friends are not home and the opportunity to rob them. OpenBook wanted to show to Facebook users their privacy wasn’t really private. It was a campaign to show everyone Facebook lacks and has privacy flaws.

Well I decided to take this website to my own marketing efforts and use it for good use. Market research.

Though this website will not search every Facebook’s user status, there is still a lot of information you can pull from the search terms you put in. A lot of users has protected their profile, but a good majority still have not adjusted their profile privacy. With so many users joining Facebook on a daily basis, they will not even know what their default privacy is. So this still benefits online marketers who want to use this service as a research tool.

For example this website is great to find problematic issues and create an info product or promote a specific offer. It is about putting in the right keywords to find what you are looking for. Even finding trends and then taking advantage of that specific trend with an affiliate offer.

One other aspect I like is you can filter this website by male or female, helping you create a Facebook campaign geared towards that specific gender. With each gender you can find the right vertical to promote to that specific group of users. Gender targeting is definitely a strategy when it comes to online promotions. In any case this specific website helps you find the niche or trend which you can immediately take advantage of.

If you see a trend in twitter, do a search at OpenBook to see if users are also posting to their facebook wall. Then look at the profiles and see their interests. Now you have a targeted campaign. It is repetitive and boring to go look at every profile, but it can help with your current Facebook campaigns when trying to target specific users. Outsource this!

The website is used to show the lack of privacy, but it still provides data such as – profile interests, genders, trends, new niches, etc. Again it is how you use the website and how you look at the data. Data and information is important in any business and in life, it is how you utilize the information.

Related posts:

1. Start a Facebook Campaign for Less than $30
2. Twitter: TwitScoop – Finding Trends
3. Sync Twitter with Your Facebook, Why?

One issue that is very compelling is Jason Rubacky’s mother. Jason created a donation website for her, Save Jason’s Mom. She is ill and Jason would like her to get better. In just under 24 hours Jason was able to generate $2,500 in donations.

That is amazing to generate that amount in a short period of time with just social media. He is reaching out to his network, twitter, and facebook. Those are the sources he has been using and it has helped with his donations.

Now in just under 36 hours, Jason Rubacky has generated $5,100 of donations for a his mother. His mom is a very important person to him and by creating such a site he is definitely showing his love.

I first heard about this when Jason hit me up and just asked me to share. I read the original site and I contributed to his cause. Family is a very important part in one person’s life. I personally am very family oriented. Even though I may have my own ups and downs, family will always be there. I even go out of my way to visit my cousins across the US to just say hi. For Jason to want his mom to get better shows the bond they have.

Jason Rubacky is one person you want to get to know in the affiliate industry, he is also the reason why I am doing CPS offers recently than the traditional CPA/CPL offers. He has also shared a lot of insights and is one person that gives more than he can. If he had a plate of food and saw you were still hungry – he would give you his plate, the utensils, the table clothe, the table itself, the chair, and if possible the waiter/waitress waiting on you and anything else that he can. He just gives.

He is an influential person in the industry and one that always goes out and helps more than he can. I even went out to Chicago to just visit him and show my appreciation for the help he has contributed to my own business. Te time he spends with his daughter and own family is priceless, I was fortunate to have witness it myself.

If you have the time head over to Save Jason’s Mom read the issues she has and make a decision to donate, more importantly help a great friend and person. I Did.

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So when I signed up the other day, it was fairly easy and simple to use. I logged in via my twitter username and password via a secure connection to twitter. Once redirected I was prompt to start an opportunity. Which means creating a campaign. It was very easy to use and write your tweet. It was straight forward.

Within the backend you get to chose specific targeted keywords and tags, which is really good. I would thought this would be just base on the amount of followers and not targeted, good thing they can categorize and find publishers base on keywords and tags.

Below is a screenshot of my tweets being submitted via the user I chosen base on their twitter follow base (monday shot).

As you can see it became somewhat viral, well not high enough. But someone did retweet it. So it was a free traffic source to someone elses followers. This is great since I get more exposure or reach. So anyways lets take a look at the results.

I also had a smart way of writing my copy, because I didn’t want to ad the #ad at the end implementing it was an ad. So I tried to integrate it with the conversation, so it seemed it wasn’t going to look like an ad that much. So did that work? Would I got a higher response if I added it to the end instead? or beginning? More testing needs to be done.

My first initial test was HIGH followers vs LOW follower base, what was the CTR and the response. So did I bank?

I spent $84.54 made $3. Offer eMail Submit, Payout at $1.50. There was 2 test done. One test was finding high followers 2k+ and the other test was users with just 100+ but have interactive users. The interface helps you find users that are more clicky friendly.

With this 2 test alone I found paying users $1 to $4 with low followers but active are more responsive than users with higher followers. I spend $9- $15 per tweet with users that had high followers, but they were not that responsive.

I got about the same clicks from users that had followers of 200 than with users that had 2000! Well almost but they were very close to each other. SO users with lower followers cost less to tweet to but are more responsive than those with high followers and cost more. Something to test more in depth about…

This doesn’t look that good right? Well, there are some issues with the network as well, because the clicks did not match up. I also contacted Ted Directly and he gave me straight access to his lead dev guy. To talk about this a bit more.

While Twitter is a great viable resource to get traffic, does sponsored tweets give it full potential to use it for advertisers, more importantly for affiliates? Here are some small things I noticed from my case study.

1. One thing I noticed they all went out at the same time. Now I chose to send it between a set time frame. I thought as it would be approved by the end user I would be sent in that typical order, guess not. They were all tweeted at the same time. So I guess they were in queue but not sure if it was network wide or just me
2. The interesting part is my bit.ly URL is different among users, wished it would be universal (just my 2 cents). One campaign one universal bit.ly link. Because this way I can see how many clicks went to that specific campaign via bit.ly. (I talked to the tech guys and they state they do this because they want to make sure and track each click per twitter user, using that data to provide to other advertisers. They use it to help provide quality clicks to the advertisers)
3. Another thing I also noticed was every tweet has the “from Sponsored Tweets” at the bottom. This is shown via TweetDeck, web base, and other apps. This may deter away from users clicking on the link. So that may be an issue on clicks, the word sponsored just seems to ‘advertisy’
4. A lot of irregular clicks, Prosper202 detected a bunch more clicks than what bit.ly and sponsored tweets was showing. Yes, I actually checked each bit.ly link to make sure it matched up to Sponsored tweets. (they are using the bit.ly API) – I talked to Sponsored Tweets and these clicks were undetermined. The problem is these clicks are appearing before the tweet is actually sent out. They do use Click Forensics to assure the links are live links.
5. I hate waiting. Yes you are waiting for someone to approve you. You get to chose who you want to sponsor and you have to wait. Some are pretty quick and are approved within 5 minutes. While some deny your ad and either does not respond to the opportunity. Also once the sponsored tweet is approved by the publisher, you wait till tomorrow before it is tweeted out. I wish it would be once it is approved.

While there were somethings that I had issues, I found that I can spend less and get a higher CTR. So is this a viable source of traffic, yes. Is it good? Well I only did 2 days of testing. I need to do a couple more to find out if it is viable and useful to me as an affiliate. I still need to talk to my cpa network as to why there were some click discrepancies. That is another issue, sponsored tweets and bit.ly clicks matched (ofcourse, using the bit.ly API) and the network did not at all. Something happening here, CPA network side.

So I have to talk to the network about that.

Is Sponsored Tweet a good source of traffic? I still have to do in-depth testing. Like ad format. Split test the variations of #ad and the other formats they provide. The traffic is there but not worth the high spending on the users with higher followers. Is the traffic substantial? With my test, ehh not really. Is it better for brand recognition? Maybe. Good for affiliates? Not sure…? Currently an email submit should have been super easy. Might be better for ecommerce? Maybe.

Twitter marketing is all about recommendation and believing someone else advice over an editorial review online. So does it make sense to promote something other than email submits? Not sure… I have to test it. But as you can see the traffic isn’t substantial, especially with users that have 1000 more and I didn’t get that much clicks.

So that is my case study. Hope it was informative. Ted got a great service here, helping grow brand and social marketing. I do not think this maybe a viable source of traffic for affiliate marketers. I know it is still in it’s early stages and they are still getting a lot of data from users using it. I will definitely check it out later on though.

The algorithm to determine how much a person’s public tweet is worth may change as more users use it and more users click a bit.ly link. So it will be worth it to check it later down the road.

The crazy part is ted is almost giving away free trials or credits, just follow @spontwts. Just the other day they tweeted they will give you an extra $1000 if you join and deposit your first $1000, giving you $2000 to sponsor conversations on twitter.

Still waiting to get advertisers to my publisher account. So I can write a case study for that.

Related posts:

1. About to Play Around with #SponsoredTweets
2. Case Study: Auto-Tweeting Blog Comments
3. How to Make Money with Twitter and Datafeeds

I love twitter to death because of the instant traffic, I mean I create the sold out product Twitter Snipe and now creating a new full blown marketing platform for twitter. Ted took this at a new level and approach, which was interesting. Having vendors sponsor your tweets. I think this is a better approach than those other be a mag pie and twtads.

So what I am going to do is test this on the publisher and advertisers side. Can you really earn money with this? Can this be a viable traffic source for affiliate marketers?

Well make sure you read this blog the next coming days, because I will be testing the publisher side and advertisers side. I really like the concept and I wanted to test it while it was in beta but my apologies goes to Ted as I was super busy to test it and now I am able to play around with it.

What is Sponsored Tweets?

Basically what I think of it is helping spreading news to your followers while making money off it.

At this day an age, everyone would rather takes someone recommendation over the authors of a popular review magazine says. So twitter is almost and similar to that concept. We take someones recommendation and click on the link to fulfill our interests. Now Sponsored Tweets says, why not get paid for that?

So as advertisers look to twitter as a form of traffic, Ted has bridge the gap of twitter spam marketing into a usable resource for advertisers and users of twitter. The best part is as being a publisher, you get to chose the ads that you want to display to your followers! So there isn’t spam, if you trust something you can forward it to your followers without your followers getting super pissy.

Other aspects, I like the web 2.0 look, its too bad Ted doesn’t have me as a celebrity photo on his main page! HA. But anyways, the sign up process for both publisher and advertiser is very easy. The best part is he got it to work with Oauth real well, meaning Izea and Ted does not store your information and it is being verified via Twitter first and then you are redirected back to Sponsored Tweets. Very good as there has been several issues of users having their passwords stolen.

Another thing was that the sign up process for both publisher and advertiser is super simple, you just login via your twitter username and you get taken to form which completes your sign up process. Once that is done you are then redirected back to your dashboard.

Fairly easy. So watch this blog and subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter to see the up coming new releases of the case studies I will be going with Sponsored Tweets. Again both the publisher and advertisers side. Check out the site as well.

Related posts:

1. How to Make Money with Twitter and Datafeeds
2. Keeping it Real Builds Twitter Followers
3. Twitter Targeted Followers – FREE

With all the projects I have been doing and just keeping up with my campaigns which have not been so nice lately. I have and am revamping one of my old tools that I use for Twitter. I have partnered up with Sam from DiggaLive to help create this new twitter system and also creating a new platform for the problem of twitter monetizing.

But today I want to talk to you about twitter marketing and how it is a powerful way to market too and easily make money off. If you have read my free report on Twitter Banking, then you know how easy it is to really create money off twitter.

Now the biggest problem is getting users to follow you and your niche. Now there are power tools out there that adds followers, I have even bought one. But it didnt do what I needed it to do, like target users by keyword. The specific software I had just follows users from the public timeline, didnt really help me much. Since my CTR wasn’t that impressive. Well I wanted to know if I can use the power of search.twitter.com and use its search functionality to find targeted users.

Well Twitter Snipe is born! Like I said I have been using a script to help with this and teaming up with Digga to revamp it to make it more web 2.0 like and add a couple more features. Right now it is in pre launch but check it, here is a video:

As you can see even before pre launch Sam and I have decided to give away a couple copies to our readership, all you really have to do is explain how twitter snipe would grow your business in 140 characters. Just Click this Link. That is the challenge, winner will be chosen the day prior to the launch and will be contacted.

This new platform will definitely kill those other system outs there, plus those other systems do not think on a marketing side like I do! Sam and I have definitely produce a killer product and ca not wait for launch, so if you want a chance to get this system for free make sure you give us a reason why it would benefit you in 140 characters. Just Click this Link

Also, if you are an affiliate start getting your cookie place on the site! >> Sign Up Here (product ID 12)

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As you know I auto tweet my new blog posts to twitter, which happens one time. I also thought certain followers may not be that active at certain hours of the day. So I figured if I post my comments to twitter, there would be a great deal of visits and interaction. So I basically just grabbed my comment rss feed and inserted it into TwitterFeed.com ti ping every 2 hours and post any new comments within those 2 hours.

Well I did a case study on this and found the results to be interesting.

It isn’t much traffic as I expected less than 4% out of my 1000 followers per link generated clicked through. Also there wasn’t much interaction within the comments of the blog post, which was my primary goal. I wanted to create more interaction between social networks and my blog, fail.

As you can see from the image above, the initial post only received 23 clicks, but then after received a total of 141 clicks. Not really impressive I think, especially when I was trying to accomplish something.

Also, since I sync my facebook account with twitter, they also show up on my facebook status. I personally also got annoyed at the fact that it was on there and filling up my facebook wall, if I was annoyed others were too.

The others were not afraid to tell me either. I respect these guys for just letting me know how it is, which is good feedback I think anyways. @lenstrom and @nickycakes basically just told me it was annoying.

So since I didn’t accomplish what I wanted with my case study, I have removed the auto commenting from blog to twitter. Though it seemed like a good viable way to use twitter day parting and seeing what time of day you get more responsive tweeters. But annoyance is annoying, it even caught up to me.

So I have removed the rss feed for my comments from TwitterFeed.com and everything should be good now. I am still going to sync my Facebook status with my twitter though, might do a poll on that as well.

Related posts:

1. Sync Twitter with Your Facebook, Why?
2. Free Blog Comments: A Directory to Buy Blog Comments?
3. MySpace ADs: First Case Study

Well, as you know there is a lot of hype out there that will build your followers for you. It simply is a viral follow form, but is it really targeted? Are you really interested enough for them to really interact with you? Also are you providing content to your followers in which they want to follow  you? Building a good follow is important because they are curious as to what you do and what you have to say, plus if they interact with you it is a big plus.

Below is a screenshot of my followers base on a 3 month time frame:

As you can see my following has been steadily growing and it is not like the big ballers following but its pretty impressive I think, since I do not use any automation to build my followers.

If you look at my twitter account, I only followed about 235 people! If you look at others their following and followers are almost close in range. This means they are following people to get followers and there is a lot of software that does this but on a larger scale and on a scale where it just grabs random tweeters from the public time line.

This isn’t useful at all.

With Twitter and any social branding you need to be yourself and your followers will want to follow you because you are interesting. Being interesting is important and keeping it real. I post multiple pictures on TwitPic via Twitter, I post random thoughts, and also provide useful reads to my followers.

You have to treat your followers as if they are part of your email list, publicly. Sometimes I do not understand why building a huge list of followers overnight is important when you have nothing to provide.

Twitter People will Follow you if you are:

• Interesting
• Provide Content, useful
• Provide Images and Videos
• comical
• Retweet useful information

When it comes to marketing and you want fast following, start pumping out content so you can be searchable. If you have not read about twitter being the next big search engine, then you should be aware that your 140 characters of content is important. There are a bunch of ways to market via twitter, if you have downloaded my report Twitter Banking it shows to how to make money from eBay Feeds on Twitter, but you still need to pump content.

The upgrade version, Twitter Traffic Exposed is another way to utilize twitter properly without using useless tools and garbage software. It shows you to utilize a bunch of free tools for your marketing needs.

But twitter is all about keeping it real and showing your followers you have credibility in your specific conversation, not niche. Why I say this is because you do not always promote, you create conversation. Conversation leads to Viral marketing, if you provide value. If you are interesting enough for someone to follow you then they will interact with you.

Interaction is important because you create instant relationship, just keep it real because its who you are.

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I even tweeted a comment about how I hate IE and I got a ton of response via twitter:

• from aroussi: @ianternet IE Sucks. Here’s why: http://tinyurl.com/57vm83
• from blackbottom_com: @ianternet ya -IE 6/7, Safari 3+, FF 2.0.0.16/20, 3.0+, and all the CSS intricacies, I’m usually tuckered out.
• from blackysky: @ianternet feel you for IE or I hope IE8 will be more like firefox
• from: quirkyjessi: @ianternet I couldn’t agree more!

But last night while at launched, I got an email saying it looks messed up in IE. I decided to check and to my astonishment here is what I saw:

As you can see the dashed table is pushing into the sidebar, the reason for this is because the form button is extending too far out. So it pushes everything that is on the sidebar at the bottom of the table. I am too ashamed to show the whole site, but you can see it in crap action in POS IE!So lesson learned always test LPs in other browsers. The problem with me is that I usually outsource this all and I do not have to really worry because they do all the testing. But since it was a simple squeeze page I am creating, it should be easy right – so I did it. I was all super happy that it was getting traffic already and receiving optins – until someone emailed me how crappy it looks in IE.

According to analytics only 13.73% of my traffic is using IE, the majority is using FireFox! I still have to consider about the 13%, gah. But the site should look like this – click here.

When I find out it was all F’ed up I was too tired to try and fix it, I will probably end up giving it to my programmer to fix it and stuff. But lesson learned always cross test browser compatibility with your sites, landing pages, sales letters, etc – because it does matter.

You can be losing traffic, that small 13% can be the best buyers in your lists! So you really have to cater to all your traffic and make sure their user experience is the best – create that brand and credibility right away, with that you can easily grab attention.

So make sure you split test all your sites in multiple browsers – after I found that the site wasn’t looking good in IE, I Googled ‘cross browser testing’ and found a really great site called Browsershots.org. What this specific site does is actually load your website in a browser, I guess on their backend and take a snapshot of it – providing you a screen shot of your site in multiple browsers.

It is pretty cool because you get to chose the browsers from Google Chrome to third party browsers such as Avant and Opera. There is a huge selection and it puts it in a queue for process, then you refresh the page every so often and it spits out a screenshot of the site. Great tool for your arsonal.

So to me there were some browsers that it does not work with at all, like old versions of Opera (who uses opera?), obviously IE all versions except 8 <- didn’t know there was an 8. But overall FF took the chain and definitely made the site the way it is suppose to be. If your not with FireFox, go download it now!

So later today, I will be adjusting it – my programmer is already busy with things so I may have to do it – but it shold be a quick fix I think, if not to my programmer it goes too.

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The best part was CNN also sync Facebook with their live feed and millions logged on to view the inauguration live and logged into facebook to see what everyone was talking about. I got my fair share of responses to my facebook status updates via CNN live and to my twitter account.

Now, you can tell this creates conversation with others that are watching the inauguration and my current friends on Facebook. Now, this post is about syncing Twitter and Facebook and I just wanted to introduce the social aspect of facebook and twitter on today’s inauguration.

As you can see the inauguration brought a lot of conversation: (timestamp: 1:28pm est)

This is just for twitter imagine the status updates from the CNN live and the conversations they were having. Syncing both service would be beneficial because you get more exposure from 2 big social networks.

Getting exposure and showing I am active helps increase brand and conversation. This is good to gain trust and better yet, to network. I was reading everyone’s status on facebook via CNN live and I responded to some, while I got some responses of my own.

I recently just synced both my twitter account and facebook – so anything on twitter will update my status on facebook. Ever since I did this it has increased conversations with my facebook friends! It is amazing that interaction happens both on twitter and facebook.

If you click on the image to the far right you can see the conversations I was having with facebook friends about today’s inauguratio, my friends participated in the conversation.

I was getting a better response on facebook than on twitter. So I was happy I actually sync my facebook with twitter.

So how do you sync twitter with facebook?

1. Get Twitter
2. Get Facebook
3. Sync with Facebook Twitter App
4. Done

That is really it. Everytime you tweet something it updates your facebook status. The thing is I have noticed it does not update when you respond to someone or begin your tweet with # or @.

It does not matter, since if I am responding to someone via twitter, facebook users do not need to know.

The only thing is facebook doesn’t sync back to twitter, which is fine too since I doubt anyone will be on facebook 24 hours. I mean I have twitter on my iphone, other than that I am rarely on FB.

So getting more social in today’s internet world is important. You want to be interactive and seen. Being more social is important to your brand as well since it brings in more trust. Being a ghost in today’s marketing world does not make sense, unless you want to be a down low marketer – which is fine too.

I already definitely benefited by just syncing twitter with Facebook. There is far more interaction and far more diversity.

Related posts:

1. Simple Facebook Adjustements to Get Traffic
2. Networking with Twitter
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