To understand the Twitter phenomenon you have to under what Twitter is and is not and why Twitter is sweeping the connected world.
CEO Jack Dorsey -
As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Understanding Twitter
Everyday I speak with people who don't know what Twitter is or if they do they cannot imagine why they would want to be involved. Personally I am quite Twitterpated, infatuated with this emerging dominate marketplace and social connection tool.
To understand the Twitter phenomenon you have to under what Twitter is and is not and why Twitter is sweeping the connected world.
CEO Jack Dorsey -
To understand the Twitter phenomenon you have to under what Twitter is and is not and why Twitter is sweeping the connected world.
CEO Jack Dorsey -
Make money on Youtube
So, it has been a long time since my last post. I am now working on becoming a full time videographer on YouTube. And hope to share a bit of how to make money on youtube in this blog.
In a nut shell - Youtube, now owned by Google, offers those who produce videos that get at least 1,000 views the opportunity to have Google ads placed with their videos and earn advertising revenues from those ads. There are a few rules you have to follow to make your videos monetizable, and there are several things you can do to help your videos be productive. Over the next few weeks I hope to walk my readers through this process.
Let's start with you taking a quick look at my primary Youtube channel: youtube.com/SocietyofEnoch
On this channel I post videos on topics I have interest in and some expertise in, particularly gardening and growing mushrooms. Virtually everyone has hobbies, interests and skills. Or perhaps you just have charisma. Whatever it is you do that other people might find interesting you can and should video tape and post on youtube.
One of the critical factors when posting on youtube when you want to make money by doing so is to never have any music or video clips on the video that you do not own the rights to, since this can create a copyright conflict and youtube will not allow you to monetize such videos, or, if you were to post one and monetize it they could cancel your they may Adsense Account for violation of terms and you would lose all the revenue your videos have generated. So NEVER put music in your videos! And, of course, violence, porn on any level, and other offensive content is a no-no. Beyond those limitations pretty much anything you are interested in posting will probably be of interest to someone.
The next caveat is don't try to cheat the system. Yea, you can do things like join subscriber exchanges and inflate your subscriber numbers, but those subscribers are not going to watch your videos or click on the ads so they do not increase your bottom line, and Google recognizes people who use these "tricks" and rank their videos lower in searches and recommend viewing rankings, which will result in your videos actually being seen by even fewer people. You can make plenty of residual income (money you earn for years on work you do once) playing the game as it is intended by youtube.
Focus on producing good content, regularly, and frequently. If you want to make money you should be posting something at least once a week. That may not sound like much, but it takes a lot of time to shoot, upload, edit and post a video when you are doing it right.
The basic process is:
1. Shoot the video. I tend to shoot short snippets and edit them together, though I can sometimes shoot it all in a single take.
2. Upload the video to your computer. IF you happen to won some good video editing software you can do all your editing on your computer before uploading it to YouTube. 3. Upload the video to YouTube. Once on Youtube you can do a lot of basic editing, which I will cover in detail in a future post.
4. Fill out all the features Youtube provides - particularly the title, tags and description. Set the video response to always accept video responses, set the location accurately if you are willing, and pick the thumbnail that you feel best represents the content of the video.
5. Add annotations. If you have done a video that is on the same topic or is related to something in the current video then you can put a link in the video, using annotations, to the other video. This will help you get more views and make it easier for those watching the video to find the next one in a series or the previous one, etc. . . You can also, if you are producing a how to video, include written instructions, which will enable viewers in other counties understand what is going on, as they can get a translation of text far easier than of audio. 1/4 of my video views and revenues come from outside the US.
6. Promote your videos and channel. If you have a Facebook profile you can post a link to your latest video on your wall, or you can tweet it. If you belong to an online group that shares interest in the content of your video you can often post links there. Be pro-active, but not obnoxious, about letting people know about your channel and videos.
I have another YouTube channel: youtube.com/WonderfuldotPortland where I post business and restaurant reviews. I Leave quarter page flyers with each business that say "We have been reviewed on youtube.com/WondrfuldotPortland." So the businesses I review are promoting my channel to their customers. (I don't leave the flyers with businesses I give a negative review on.)
Here's a video that I have posted, on the SocietyofEnoch channel that uses pretty much all of what I have discussed above.
So there you have it. The basics of making money on youtube. Come retire with me. I think it is reasonable to build up a sufficient residual income from youtube to retire in just a couple of years, maybe less if you are an attractive female. . .
So, it has been a long time since my last post. I am now working on becoming a full time videographer on YouTube. And hope to share a bit of how to make money on youtube in this blog.
In a nut shell - Youtube, now owned by Google, offers those who produce videos that get at least 1,000 views the opportunity to have Google ads placed with their videos and earn advertising revenues from those ads. There are a few rules you have to follow to make your videos monetizable, and there are several things you can do to help your videos be productive. Over the next few weeks I hope to walk my readers through this process.
Let's start with you taking a quick look at my primary Youtube channel: youtube.com/SocietyofEnoch
On this channel I post videos on topics I have interest in and some expertise in, particularly gardening and growing mushrooms. Virtually everyone has hobbies, interests and skills. Or perhaps you just have charisma. Whatever it is you do that other people might find interesting you can and should video tape and post on youtube.
One of the critical factors when posting on youtube when you want to make money by doing so is to never have any music or video clips on the video that you do not own the rights to, since this can create a copyright conflict and youtube will not allow you to monetize such videos, or, if you were to post one and monetize it they could cancel your they may Adsense Account for violation of terms and you would lose all the revenue your videos have generated. So NEVER put music in your videos! And, of course, violence, porn on any level, and other offensive content is a no-no. Beyond those limitations pretty much anything you are interested in posting will probably be of interest to someone.
The next caveat is don't try to cheat the system. Yea, you can do things like join subscriber exchanges and inflate your subscriber numbers, but those subscribers are not going to watch your videos or click on the ads so they do not increase your bottom line, and Google recognizes people who use these "tricks" and rank their videos lower in searches and recommend viewing rankings, which will result in your videos actually being seen by even fewer people. You can make plenty of residual income (money you earn for years on work you do once) playing the game as it is intended by youtube.
Focus on producing good content, regularly, and frequently. If you want to make money you should be posting something at least once a week. That may not sound like much, but it takes a lot of time to shoot, upload, edit and post a video when you are doing it right.
The basic process is:
1. Shoot the video. I tend to shoot short snippets and edit them together, though I can sometimes shoot it all in a single take.
2. Upload the video to your computer. IF you happen to won some good video editing software you can do all your editing on your computer before uploading it to YouTube. 3. Upload the video to YouTube. Once on Youtube you can do a lot of basic editing, which I will cover in detail in a future post.
4. Fill out all the features Youtube provides - particularly the title, tags and description. Set the video response to always accept video responses, set the location accurately if you are willing, and pick the thumbnail that you feel best represents the content of the video.
5. Add annotations. If you have done a video that is on the same topic or is related to something in the current video then you can put a link in the video, using annotations, to the other video. This will help you get more views and make it easier for those watching the video to find the next one in a series or the previous one, etc. . . You can also, if you are producing a how to video, include written instructions, which will enable viewers in other counties understand what is going on, as they can get a translation of text far easier than of audio. 1/4 of my video views and revenues come from outside the US.
6. Promote your videos and channel. If you have a Facebook profile you can post a link to your latest video on your wall, or you can tweet it. If you belong to an online group that shares interest in the content of your video you can often post links there. Be pro-active, but not obnoxious, about letting people know about your channel and videos.
I have another YouTube channel: youtube.com/WonderfuldotPortland where I post business and restaurant reviews. I Leave quarter page flyers with each business that say "We have been reviewed on youtube.com/WondrfuldotPortland." So the businesses I review are promoting my channel to their customers. (I don't leave the flyers with businesses I give a negative review on.)
Here's a video that I have posted, on the SocietyofEnoch channel that uses pretty much all of what I have discussed above.
So there you have it. The basics of making money on youtube. Come retire with me. I think it is reasonable to build up a sufficient residual income from youtube to retire in just a couple of years, maybe less if you are an attractive female. . .
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Twitter for business
Okay, I covered some of the cool stuff about Twitter from a personal perspective, now let's look at it in the realm of income generation. Income generation on Twitter is founded on the building of a large following on Twitter
Many of you reading this will have come to this blog because you saw the result of my efforts to produce a viral tweet that would lead people like you to this blog. That means you want to know how I went from having a handful of followers on Twitter and a half dozen updates that no one really cared about to being ranked in the top 2% of tweeters (http://twitter.grader.com/drnice) in the English speaking "twitter" world. (And all without, at this posting, breaking the annoying and misguided Twitter 2000 follow limit.)
Though I won't tell all here, I promise that you won't be disappointed, because anyone who will do the handful of simple things I'm about to explain, which I figured out how to do by intensely researching and testing various strategies over a 3 week period, can build their own following and ranking level in a similar time period. Actually you should be able to build your following faster, because I've already done the trial and error part.
Before you begin you have to ask yourself why do you want a large following on Twitter.
You will have your own reasons. However, so we can be clear, let me share a few categories of reasons, which will influence how you actually build your own, individual large following:
• Fame - Notoriety, recognition, or in the most simple terms: Attention. This is a basic human need every person has; the need to have people pay attention to them. The need is greater for some than others and is perfectly natural within a reasonable range.
Those who achieve great fame intelligently develop a significant level of positive attention, which is always preferable to negative attention. Those who have developed negative attention getting strategies online in chat rooms and forums would be well advised to reconsider their approach as they expand in the Twitterverse.
• Income - Nothing succeeds like success and, for good or ill, money is often treated as a scorecard of success. Legitimate methods of marketing can be used to broaden your client base and market your goods or services on Twitter, which can make a huge difference in your bottom line. Illegitimate actions on Twitter will come back to bite you on the rear fast and furiously due to the viral nature of Twitter and it's complete accessibility for those who use it publicly.
Through Twitter you can offer your followers special deals, notify them of changes, challenges, sales, events or other offers or news relating to your business. You can expand your marketplace substantially and you can use Twitter to steer your business into greater profitability by learning about trends and how to capitalize on them. You can post links to marketing or training videos, articles about your products and/or services, product point of sale pages, even affiliate marketing links. You can quickly build a reputation as an expert and develop a rich referral market.
• Message - You may have some special knowledge you want to share, or a cause you want to promote. You may have a belief about how things are in this world or in another realm of existence that you want to share with others, to protect them or benefit them in some way. You have a message that you want to share with as many people as you can.
Your personal reasons will impact how you go about promoting yourself; on Twitter, online, and in day to day life, and is something you will need to ponder as you set about to build a following on Twitter. (BTW You can have more than one account and use different accounts for different purposes. You don't have to put everything you want to accomplish into one twitter account.)
Though you may think you want everyone to follow you, this is virtually never true. You have a target audience. There are values you will use to chose who you associate yourself with as you follow people on Twitter.
For example, in my case, I will not follow anyone who is clearly promoting pornography or sexual services on Twitter. That is contrary to my personal values and I won't associate with people who are openly engaged in such on Twitter. I don't block those who follow me, because my reason for building a large following is to share messages and concepts I believe will benefit others and I wish to make them available to anyone willing to seek them, however I won't return the follow.
You also have some special interest that you want to connect with people concerning. It would be a waste of your time and the time of those you follow to connect if you have no common interests. For example I do not seek to follow people whose twitters are nearly exclusively about sports, music, hunting, fighting or guns because I do not share those interests. I return follows from all those who seek me out and follow me other than the sex trade people.
You will want to really think about who your target audience is. For example my target audience are those i perceive to be intelligent, educated, compassionate, noble, with desires to be involved in making the world better, and those who are experts in the online marketplace and in other areas of personal interest.
The first step to building a large following is to decide who you want to be connected with. Who will pay the most attention to you, provide you with the most financial benefit or give the most heed to your message? Young/old, male/female, fellow countrymen/foreigners? What ethnicities, cultures, sub cultures, educational level, and even more specific qualities will best serve your purpose? What interests do they share with you?
Knowing your target market is critical because you will be tweeting things that are likely to appeal to them specifically. Nothing appeals to everyone. Niche marketing is all about understanding the people you serve, know what they like and abhor, what excites them and disgusts them, what is important to them.
By now you probably have a fair notion of your why and your who. The next step is the how, which is what you came here to learn. So here are the basic rules for growing a large following and climbing into the ranks of the top tweeters fast.
• 1. Follow to be followed.
The fastest way to build a following is to follow other people. People who are part of your target market, who share a common interest that you can Tweet on, (or ReTweet on), people who are already doing what you want to do on Twitter. The simplest, fastest way is to go to http://search.twitter.com/ and do a search for a word or short phrase about the topic of interest you are planning to focus your tweets on. For me that was cannabis legalization and permaculture.
Go to the home page of who are tweeting about your target interest. In their profile look for the following things:
They have a following of over 200, they have posted at least 100 updates, and their updates are clearly closely related to your purpose. open their list of followers and follow all of their followers who seem to fit your target market.
Twitter does not allow you to follow more than 1,000 people per day. However if you are using this method, as opposed to some automated method, you can on a practical basis only follow a few hundred per day (I set 200 per day or 1,000 per week as my goal).
Twitters other limit, which is that you cannot follow more than 2001 people until your followers number 2000, is an issue that be resolved with effort, but it takes a serious time commitment that only the dedicated twitterer will undertake to overcome rapidly. It will happen on it's own over time once you get over 1800 followers.
You may be tempted to seek some automated method of developing a lot of followers, but this approach is counterproductive because though you may get numbers on your profile, you end up with a following who doesn't care about you or your tweets. You will be to them the same thing they are to you, just a number on the screen. The real value of Twitter comes from connecting with like minded people, who will care about you and what you have to say, because you care about them and share with them some common interests and values.
There are other techniques you can use to build your following, but if you only did this you would be successful in developing a large following in a short period of time time.
• 2. Tweet often. Tweet well.
It's pretty easy to get people to follow you, but to retain them you have to give them a reason to pay attention to you, and your tweets, retweets, links and hash marked tweets are what form the basis for people to pay attention to your tweets.
You should be tweeting a minimum of 4 times a day average, though 10 or even more is better, up to a point. Frequency should be in part based on the quality of information you tweet about and the urgency and timeliness of your message. Twitter is very real time so matters of current event can be tweeted about heavily without driving away your followers with too much information.
Unless you are already a famous personality in the real world no one cares what you are doing moment to moment. Save that sort of thing for an account that just your close friends and family follow.
There is a great, short, article you should take a moment right now to read at http://www.twitip.com/anatomy-of-a-successful-tweet/ that outlines several keys for what to tweet and why. It covers retweeting, which can really pole vault your popularity rapidly and using hash tags.
As you receive tweets from various experts or interesting people or news feeds, etc. . . that you follow, you can retweet those to your followers. This makes you look like an expert, or at least someone in the know, to your followers and serves the people you retweet by spreading their message virally. To properly credit the retweet type "RT: @"and the twitter name, then copy and paste the tweet you are retweeting.
When you retweet you may have to occasionally reword or edit the tweet to fit in the 140 character limit of each tweet after your addition of the RT credit. Knowing this, set your tweets up for easy retweeting by leaving enough unused character space to include RT: @ and your twitter name, and maybe a couple extra characters extra.
As your read or find things online that really grab your attention, tweet those, with links, in a form that is easy to retweet. A great video like the Susan Boyles BGT performance or a great article or a report on a discovery or catastrophic event in the world, are all things to tweet about. Your purpose is to become an important conduit of valuable information, and/or a resource for goods and/or services valued by your followers.
Be as brief and to the point as possible. Learn to use & instead of "and" and use other contractions and common abbreviations, but don't use text speak stuff like "u r gr8". Use a URL shortener for any links you tweet like http://is.gd/, or http://bit.ly/ or the well known http://tinyurl.com/ or any of the growing number of URL shortening services. ALWAYS TEST YOUR LINKS BEFORE YOU TWEET THEM!!!!!
• 3. What gets measured improves.
The best way I think a person can track their progress in growing on Twitter is http://twitter.grader.com/ which calculates a grade or ranking in the English part of Twitter, (and some other social networking sites), based on how many people you are following, how many are following you, how many updates you have tweeted, how frequently you tweet, and how often you have been retweeted. I check my grade several time a day and record my progress, using that as a measure of the outcome of various methods and strategies I have tried as I have built my following.
Another useful measurement tool is http://tweetstats.com/graphs/ which provides charts on your tweeting that give you valuable feedback on how you twitter. They also have some decent trending data.
• 4. Stay on the cutting edge.
You will want to immediately follow @mashable, who tweets links to articles on his site by various authors about the cutting edge of Twitter, social networking and the internet. Through his tweets you learn about APIs, or applications on various sites that access and manipulate the information Twitter makes available. One of the greatest powers of using Twitter stems from the applications/web sites that are growing up around Twitter.
Twitter affords you with a very real time connection with your followers and it can provide great real time data about what matters to people right now. Sites like http://twistori.com/, http://www.twitscoop.com/, or http://www.retweetradar.com/ give you access to the Twitter data cloud which visually reveal trends and hot topics on twitter and are good resources for selecting things to tweet about. When you see a word specific to your interest appear and begin to grow on one of these sites research it and find things to tweet relating to it, and your tweets may get caught up in a viral effect just by being part of a hot topic or trend.
I have given a lot more than I planned to here, but I believe that Twitter is becoming tool of communication that will sweep the world and change how we communicate forever and that almost everyone should be involved in it in some way.
Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/DrNice and check back here periodically to learn more in future blogs.
Many of you reading this will have come to this blog because you saw the result of my efforts to produce a viral tweet that would lead people like you to this blog. That means you want to know how I went from having a handful of followers on Twitter and a half dozen updates that no one really cared about to being ranked in the top 2% of tweeters (http://twitter.grader.com/drnice) in the English speaking "twitter" world. (And all without, at this posting, breaking the annoying and misguided Twitter 2000 follow limit.)
Though I won't tell all here, I promise that you won't be disappointed, because anyone who will do the handful of simple things I'm about to explain, which I figured out how to do by intensely researching and testing various strategies over a 3 week period, can build their own following and ranking level in a similar time period. Actually you should be able to build your following faster, because I've already done the trial and error part.
Before you begin you have to ask yourself why do you want a large following on Twitter.
You will have your own reasons. However, so we can be clear, let me share a few categories of reasons, which will influence how you actually build your own, individual large following:
• Fame - Notoriety, recognition, or in the most simple terms: Attention. This is a basic human need every person has; the need to have people pay attention to them. The need is greater for some than others and is perfectly natural within a reasonable range.
Those who achieve great fame intelligently develop a significant level of positive attention, which is always preferable to negative attention. Those who have developed negative attention getting strategies online in chat rooms and forums would be well advised to reconsider their approach as they expand in the Twitterverse.
• Income - Nothing succeeds like success and, for good or ill, money is often treated as a scorecard of success. Legitimate methods of marketing can be used to broaden your client base and market your goods or services on Twitter, which can make a huge difference in your bottom line. Illegitimate actions on Twitter will come back to bite you on the rear fast and furiously due to the viral nature of Twitter and it's complete accessibility for those who use it publicly.
Through Twitter you can offer your followers special deals, notify them of changes, challenges, sales, events or other offers or news relating to your business. You can expand your marketplace substantially and you can use Twitter to steer your business into greater profitability by learning about trends and how to capitalize on them. You can post links to marketing or training videos, articles about your products and/or services, product point of sale pages, even affiliate marketing links. You can quickly build a reputation as an expert and develop a rich referral market.
• Message - You may have some special knowledge you want to share, or a cause you want to promote. You may have a belief about how things are in this world or in another realm of existence that you want to share with others, to protect them or benefit them in some way. You have a message that you want to share with as many people as you can.
Your personal reasons will impact how you go about promoting yourself; on Twitter, online, and in day to day life, and is something you will need to ponder as you set about to build a following on Twitter. (BTW You can have more than one account and use different accounts for different purposes. You don't have to put everything you want to accomplish into one twitter account.)
Though you may think you want everyone to follow you, this is virtually never true. You have a target audience. There are values you will use to chose who you associate yourself with as you follow people on Twitter.
For example, in my case, I will not follow anyone who is clearly promoting pornography or sexual services on Twitter. That is contrary to my personal values and I won't associate with people who are openly engaged in such on Twitter. I don't block those who follow me, because my reason for building a large following is to share messages and concepts I believe will benefit others and I wish to make them available to anyone willing to seek them, however I won't return the follow.
You also have some special interest that you want to connect with people concerning. It would be a waste of your time and the time of those you follow to connect if you have no common interests. For example I do not seek to follow people whose twitters are nearly exclusively about sports, music, hunting, fighting or guns because I do not share those interests. I return follows from all those who seek me out and follow me other than the sex trade people.
You will want to really think about who your target audience is. For example my target audience are those i perceive to be intelligent, educated, compassionate, noble, with desires to be involved in making the world better, and those who are experts in the online marketplace and in other areas of personal interest.
The first step to building a large following is to decide who you want to be connected with. Who will pay the most attention to you, provide you with the most financial benefit or give the most heed to your message? Young/old, male/female, fellow countrymen/foreigners? What ethnicities, cultures, sub cultures, educational level, and even more specific qualities will best serve your purpose? What interests do they share with you?
Knowing your target market is critical because you will be tweeting things that are likely to appeal to them specifically. Nothing appeals to everyone. Niche marketing is all about understanding the people you serve, know what they like and abhor, what excites them and disgusts them, what is important to them.
By now you probably have a fair notion of your why and your who. The next step is the how, which is what you came here to learn. So here are the basic rules for growing a large following and climbing into the ranks of the top tweeters fast.
• 1. Follow to be followed.
The fastest way to build a following is to follow other people. People who are part of your target market, who share a common interest that you can Tweet on, (or ReTweet on), people who are already doing what you want to do on Twitter. The simplest, fastest way is to go to http://search.twitter.com/ and do a search for a word or short phrase about the topic of interest you are planning to focus your tweets on. For me that was cannabis legalization and permaculture.
Go to the home page of who are tweeting about your target interest. In their profile look for the following things:
They have a following of over 200, they have posted at least 100 updates, and their updates are clearly closely related to your purpose. open their list of followers and follow all of their followers who seem to fit your target market.
Twitter does not allow you to follow more than 1,000 people per day. However if you are using this method, as opposed to some automated method, you can on a practical basis only follow a few hundred per day (I set 200 per day or 1,000 per week as my goal).
Twitters other limit, which is that you cannot follow more than 2001 people until your followers number 2000, is an issue that be resolved with effort, but it takes a serious time commitment that only the dedicated twitterer will undertake to overcome rapidly. It will happen on it's own over time once you get over 1800 followers.
You may be tempted to seek some automated method of developing a lot of followers, but this approach is counterproductive because though you may get numbers on your profile, you end up with a following who doesn't care about you or your tweets. You will be to them the same thing they are to you, just a number on the screen. The real value of Twitter comes from connecting with like minded people, who will care about you and what you have to say, because you care about them and share with them some common interests and values.
There are other techniques you can use to build your following, but if you only did this you would be successful in developing a large following in a short period of time time.
• 2. Tweet often. Tweet well.
It's pretty easy to get people to follow you, but to retain them you have to give them a reason to pay attention to you, and your tweets, retweets, links and hash marked tweets are what form the basis for people to pay attention to your tweets.
You should be tweeting a minimum of 4 times a day average, though 10 or even more is better, up to a point. Frequency should be in part based on the quality of information you tweet about and the urgency and timeliness of your message. Twitter is very real time so matters of current event can be tweeted about heavily without driving away your followers with too much information.
Unless you are already a famous personality in the real world no one cares what you are doing moment to moment. Save that sort of thing for an account that just your close friends and family follow.
There is a great, short, article you should take a moment right now to read at http://www.twitip.com/anatomy-of-a-successful-tweet/ that outlines several keys for what to tweet and why. It covers retweeting, which can really pole vault your popularity rapidly and using hash tags.
As you receive tweets from various experts or interesting people or news feeds, etc. . . that you follow, you can retweet those to your followers. This makes you look like an expert, or at least someone in the know, to your followers and serves the people you retweet by spreading their message virally. To properly credit the retweet type "RT: @"and the twitter name, then copy and paste the tweet you are retweeting.
When you retweet you may have to occasionally reword or edit the tweet to fit in the 140 character limit of each tweet after your addition of the RT credit. Knowing this, set your tweets up for easy retweeting by leaving enough unused character space to include RT: @ and your twitter name, and maybe a couple extra characters extra.
As your read or find things online that really grab your attention, tweet those, with links, in a form that is easy to retweet. A great video like the Susan Boyles BGT performance or a great article or a report on a discovery or catastrophic event in the world, are all things to tweet about. Your purpose is to become an important conduit of valuable information, and/or a resource for goods and/or services valued by your followers.
Be as brief and to the point as possible. Learn to use & instead of "and" and use other contractions and common abbreviations, but don't use text speak stuff like "u r gr8". Use a URL shortener for any links you tweet like http://is.gd/, or http://bit.ly/ or the well known http://tinyurl.com/ or any of the growing number of URL shortening services. ALWAYS TEST YOUR LINKS BEFORE YOU TWEET THEM!!!!!
• 3. What gets measured improves.
The best way I think a person can track their progress in growing on Twitter is http://twitter.grader.com/ which calculates a grade or ranking in the English part of Twitter, (and some other social networking sites), based on how many people you are following, how many are following you, how many updates you have tweeted, how frequently you tweet, and how often you have been retweeted. I check my grade several time a day and record my progress, using that as a measure of the outcome of various methods and strategies I have tried as I have built my following.
Another useful measurement tool is http://tweetstats.com/graphs/ which provides charts on your tweeting that give you valuable feedback on how you twitter. They also have some decent trending data.
• 4. Stay on the cutting edge.
You will want to immediately follow @mashable, who tweets links to articles on his site by various authors about the cutting edge of Twitter, social networking and the internet. Through his tweets you learn about APIs, or applications on various sites that access and manipulate the information Twitter makes available. One of the greatest powers of using Twitter stems from the applications/web sites that are growing up around Twitter.
Twitter affords you with a very real time connection with your followers and it can provide great real time data about what matters to people right now. Sites like http://twistori.com/, http://www.twitscoop.com/, or http://www.retweetradar.com/ give you access to the Twitter data cloud which visually reveal trends and hot topics on twitter and are good resources for selecting things to tweet about. When you see a word specific to your interest appear and begin to grow on one of these sites research it and find things to tweet relating to it, and your tweets may get caught up in a viral effect just by being part of a hot topic or trend.
I have given a lot more than I planned to here, but I believe that Twitter is becoming tool of communication that will sweep the world and change how we communicate forever and that almost everyone should be involved in it in some way.
Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/DrNice and check back here periodically to learn more in future blogs.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
I've become Twitter-pated (with apologies to Disney)
Do you remember the scene in the Disney movie "Bambi"
when Owl explains that age old moonstruck condition of infatuation and love to Bambi, Flower and Thumper, describing the condition with a single word? Twitterpated!
I got onto Twitter several months ago, to see what all the hoopla was about and frankly at first I was unimpressed. It appeared to be pretty useless, kind of a glorified, temporary chalk board to leave notes to friends on. Then one of my Facebook friends, Mashable, who is big on Twitter and Facebook was posting interesting articles about Twitter, so I started following him and then I looked at the people he is following, thought some were interesting and started following them. Of course they followed me back and then I started learning about support sites and applications and pretty soon I was totally Twitterpated!
As I have learned more about the growing number of support applications and web sites surrounding Twitter I realized that Twitter was at the beginning stages of becoming gigantic on the net. Like EBay, Facebook, and Myspace kind of gigantic. With the potential to put a dent in Google's web dominance. Google has added a new word, it's name, to our language, Twitter has already added several.
What I have learned in these past couple of weeks has so changed my perspective about how individuals like you and me can make a living online and interconnect is networks of real time support that I've decided to take a detour in my planned blogging and write a series of articles about Twitter, related support applications, sites and hardware as I personally explore this emerging technosocial phenomenon.
When I try to tell my non tweeting friends about Twitter they often are just like I was before I got hooked, they can't imagine why they would want to tweet. So to start out here's a brief list of reasons to:
• You can discover many new, interesting people from all over the world who are active in the internet community.
• You can share your personal experience, wisdom and even quirks with others, connecting with others of like mind.
• You can make a living, make extra income or otherwise enhance your financial situation through wisdom received from others or the marketing of yourself and/or your goods and services.
• You can do extensive, free test marketing, perform a wide range of social experiments, follow trending in real time, study information data clouds, and other forms of research, essentially taking the pulse of the world of Twitter on any topic, phrase or word.
• You can quickly and effectively communicate with family members, friends, associates clients and businesses.
• You can provide a level of customer service that was unimaginable before Twitter, thereby developing a deep level of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• You can inspire others, and be inspired.
I could go on and on. Like I said, I am totally Twitterpated!
So let's assume that you have signed up for a Twitter name. What's next? Well, that depends on if you are in it for social interaction or business.
I know this blog is about making money online, however every cent you ever receive will be given to you by other people, so let's look at the social side first.
Finding real world friends or family members on Twitter is easy if they have used their real name or you know what their Twitter name is. Just use Twitters built in friend finding search features.
If you want to find people of like mind you can do a hash tag (#) search on http://search.twitter.com/ for any word and find who is saying what about that topic.
For example let's suppose you are interested in gardening. You go to http://search.twitter.com/ and search for garden, or gardening, or landscaping, or any other related term you can think of and you immediately get a list of everyone who has recently tweeted about that term. You go to their pages, read their bio, look at their tweets and decide to follow them if you find them to be of interest to you.
This is a pretty amazing feature when you stop to think about it. You can find people all over the world who have tweeted something, in the past few minutes or hours, that is of interest to you and connect with them. You can DM (Direct Message) them if you want to discuss something off Twitters continuous, public feed, or you can publically message them by putting an @ sign and their Twitter name in your tweet, like you could tweet: "@drnice thanks for blogging about the advantages of Twitter. I liked what you wrote." and I would see that, as would all of your followers and anyone who does a hash tag or @ sign search for drnice.
There are several support sites to facilitate finding people, interest groups and topics on Twitter. There's http://wefollow.com/ which allows you to list yourself as being associated with three hash tags.
In our earlier example of you having an interest in gardening you might list yourself on http://wefollow.com/ under garden, gardening, & plants, and then new people searching we follow will find you listed with others who have selected each of the hash tag categories. You can also find people to follow who have done this under any topic of interest you may have.
On http://wefollow.com/ you can leave yourself in the three categories forever or you can periodically change the categories you list under. Once you select three new ones you will no longer show up under the previous ones. This allows you to put yourself in a position to meet a lot of people looking for your shared interest who you might otherwise never connect with.
In a category that could only be called "Cool Twitter Stuff":
http://twistori.com/This is nothing but cool! Twistori has 6 hash tag terms that you can choose from: "Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Fell, and Wish". You choose which word and Twistori feeds you a continuous stream of tweets with that word in it. The result is a pulse on humanity that is funny, insightful, depressing, invigorating and maybe a bit overwhelming, because it is such a peek inside the human psyche and so represents humanity at large.
http://www.twitscoop.com - A site that shows a real time date trends on Twitter.
As you can tell, there is a lot to Twitter. Probably the best explanation as to what Twitter is and how it is used is by listening to CEO Jack Dorsey talk about How Twitter came to be.
when Owl explains that age old moonstruck condition of infatuation and love to Bambi, Flower and Thumper, describing the condition with a single word? Twitterpated!I got onto Twitter several months ago, to see what all the hoopla was about and frankly at first I was unimpressed. It appeared to be pretty useless, kind of a glorified, temporary chalk board to leave notes to friends on. Then one of my Facebook friends, Mashable, who is big on Twitter and Facebook was posting interesting articles about Twitter, so I started following him and then I looked at the people he is following, thought some were interesting and started following them. Of course they followed me back and then I started learning about support sites and applications and pretty soon I was totally Twitterpated!
As I have learned more about the growing number of support applications and web sites surrounding Twitter I realized that Twitter was at the beginning stages of becoming gigantic on the net. Like EBay, Facebook, and Myspace kind of gigantic. With the potential to put a dent in Google's web dominance. Google has added a new word, it's name, to our language, Twitter has already added several.
What I have learned in these past couple of weeks has so changed my perspective about how individuals like you and me can make a living online and interconnect is networks of real time support that I've decided to take a detour in my planned blogging and write a series of articles about Twitter, related support applications, sites and hardware as I personally explore this emerging technosocial phenomenon.
When I try to tell my non tweeting friends about Twitter they often are just like I was before I got hooked, they can't imagine why they would want to tweet. So to start out here's a brief list of reasons to:
• You can discover many new, interesting people from all over the world who are active in the internet community.
• You can share your personal experience, wisdom and even quirks with others, connecting with others of like mind.
• You can make a living, make extra income or otherwise enhance your financial situation through wisdom received from others or the marketing of yourself and/or your goods and services.
• You can do extensive, free test marketing, perform a wide range of social experiments, follow trending in real time, study information data clouds, and other forms of research, essentially taking the pulse of the world of Twitter on any topic, phrase or word.
• You can quickly and effectively communicate with family members, friends, associates clients and businesses.
• You can provide a level of customer service that was unimaginable before Twitter, thereby developing a deep level of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• You can inspire others, and be inspired.
I could go on and on. Like I said, I am totally Twitterpated!
So let's assume that you have signed up for a Twitter name. What's next? Well, that depends on if you are in it for social interaction or business.
I know this blog is about making money online, however every cent you ever receive will be given to you by other people, so let's look at the social side first.
Finding real world friends or family members on Twitter is easy if they have used their real name or you know what their Twitter name is. Just use Twitters built in friend finding search features.
If you want to find people of like mind you can do a hash tag (#) search on http://search.twitter.com/ for any word and find who is saying what about that topic.
For example let's suppose you are interested in gardening. You go to http://search.twitter.com/ and search for garden, or gardening, or landscaping, or any other related term you can think of and you immediately get a list of everyone who has recently tweeted about that term. You go to their pages, read their bio, look at their tweets and decide to follow them if you find them to be of interest to you.
This is a pretty amazing feature when you stop to think about it. You can find people all over the world who have tweeted something, in the past few minutes or hours, that is of interest to you and connect with them. You can DM (Direct Message) them if you want to discuss something off Twitters continuous, public feed, or you can publically message them by putting an @ sign and their Twitter name in your tweet, like you could tweet: "@drnice thanks for blogging about the advantages of Twitter. I liked what you wrote." and I would see that, as would all of your followers and anyone who does a hash tag or @ sign search for drnice.
There are several support sites to facilitate finding people, interest groups and topics on Twitter. There's http://wefollow.com/ which allows you to list yourself as being associated with three hash tags.
In our earlier example of you having an interest in gardening you might list yourself on http://wefollow.com/ under garden, gardening, & plants, and then new people searching we follow will find you listed with others who have selected each of the hash tag categories. You can also find people to follow who have done this under any topic of interest you may have.
On http://wefollow.com/ you can leave yourself in the three categories forever or you can periodically change the categories you list under. Once you select three new ones you will no longer show up under the previous ones. This allows you to put yourself in a position to meet a lot of people looking for your shared interest who you might otherwise never connect with.
In a category that could only be called "Cool Twitter Stuff":
http://twistori.com/This is nothing but cool! Twistori has 6 hash tag terms that you can choose from: "Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Fell, and Wish". You choose which word and Twistori feeds you a continuous stream of tweets with that word in it. The result is a pulse on humanity that is funny, insightful, depressing, invigorating and maybe a bit overwhelming, because it is such a peek inside the human psyche and so represents humanity at large.
http://www.twitscoop.com - A site that shows a real time date trends on Twitter.
As you can tell, there is a lot to Twitter. Probably the best explanation as to what Twitter is and how it is used is by listening to CEO Jack Dorsey talk about How Twitter came to be.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Web Presence
In order for people to find you online you have to make an effort to be found. Just because you have a web site or an email address doesn't mean people are going to rush to meet you. You have to enter the web communities that are of interest to you and are your target market. Perhaps the most basic and first one you should consider is Twitter.
Signing up on Twitter will allow you communicate in semi-real time with those whom you network with online. If you are not already tweeting (posting to your twitter profile) you're out of touch with the fastest growing form of social networking communication.
Twitter is a fast growing, leading edge form of online social networking that has a real time aspect that appeals to many. Tweets are short bursts of information from you to those who follow you. It is accessible from cell phones and via the internet, accepting 140 character messages, as you post them. In that 140 characters you can include URLs, which makes Twitter an incredibly powerful way to convey lot's of information about a topic of interest to a group of followers.
Twitter allows a person to follow the activities and share in the discoveries of friends and interesting people and organizations. Want to keep up to date with your favorite band member or policies in your corporation or your favorite tech gurus? Want to save time getting news out to friends and family members? Want to know what is coming to market soon or going on sale at your favorite stores? Twitter is the perfect tool for you.
Every time you, or anyone you follow, tweets, everyone in your network can see it. Networks of like minded people communicating worldwide in real time. Membership rose from 6 million to over 9 million between Jan and Feb of this year, and Google is in the final stages of negotiations to buy it. You can even set Twitter to post your tweets on your Facebook profile.
And speaking of Facebook, that's the next place you will want to set up a profile. Like Twitter it allows you to post things and your friends will see your posts, only on Facebook you can post pictures, videos, large blocks of text and much more, but still in a fairly rigid format.
Once you have signed up on Twitter and have set up a basic Facebook profile, complete with a photo or logo and information that will lead your followers to your main website, start doing research on what is working for others in your area of interest as far as getting their name and website in front of a lot of people.
On Twitter you will want to follow Mashable, who is currently one of the top social networking gurus. I have found his posts incredibly useful. Search who he follows and add those whose posts you find helpful. Soon others will begin to follow you. Tweet at least a couple of times a day and follow the suggestions you will find on what kind of things attract and hold followers.
Another good way to get noticed online is to sign up for a Technorati Profile.
Take advantage of the code various sites offer to cross promote yourself such as:
or by providing links to your various profiles:
I read a lot every day. when I find something really cool, something that makes me say "WOW!", I tweet about it. You can track how well you are doing in Twitter by using a cool free service called Twitter Grader Following tips I found online I managed to take my grade on Twitter Graderfrom 64 to 70 in just a few hours.
Tweet, search for people to follow, build up your Facebook profile, and expand your knowledge of web page coding, particularly HTML. The process takes time, I suggest doing a little bit every day instead of trying to do it all at once.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Online income generation basics
1. Email account(s)
The first thing a person needs to do business online is an email account.
If you have an ISP (Internet Service Provider) they probably provide you with one or more email accounts, however as the internet changes and time passes odds are very high that you will change ISPs and therefore have to change your email, unless you select an online provider.
The more permanent your email, the more effective your marketing efforts will be, and the less you will have to redo with as changes occur. You may need only one account or several depending on the model you choose to follow for generating income. More about this further down.
Over the years I have used many, many free online email services and hands down Google mail (www.mail.google.com)blows all the rest out of the water.
I have had an account with them for several years. I virtually never experience spam, yet I have not had any problems with people or businesses that I want to have contact me succeeding, and they can handle whatever load may be placed on them, and they are as permanent a service as you can hope to find online. I use gmail as my primary provider, with a backup account at Yahoo.com, so if I were to forget my password, get hacked or have some other type of problem, I can recover quickly.
Selecting a name may be a little tricky, as millions of names have already been taken, but after a few minutes of trial and error you will find one that isn't taken that you can live with. The shorter the better, and making it easy to remember is advantageous but not absolutely necessary.
2. Paypal.
There are several online payment handling companies available. Frankly I have had only the most limited experience with most of them, mainly because Paypal has remained the pre-eminant funds management service since it's inception. They pay decent interest and in my experience are very like a bank that is designed for doing business online. I suggest you start with a personal account (as business accounts don't pay interest). You can always upgrade if you need to. They provide you with a wide range of services such as banners for your website, acceptance of major credit cards, echecks and other forms of payment. Their fees are very reasonable, and kick in mainly only when you receive money.
You will want to advance through their "verification" process as rapidly as possible, linking your Paypal account to your bank account and credit card so that you can easily transfer your funds in and out of your Paypal account.
3. Fulfillment
When someone orders something from you online someone has to take the order, pick and pack it, ship it, collect the funds and so forth. If you are focusing on a niche market you may be able to handle the entire process personally, however the internet is a world wide marketplace and if your advertising is effective and your product becomes popular, you could experience receiving hundreds or even thousands of orders per day, far more than one or even a dozen people could handle effectively.
If the name of the game for you is automated residual income you will need to carefully select a company or service to perform fulfillment for you or choose something that requires the least amount of effort possible to achieve fulfillment. Selling ebooks is a good example of a low fulfillment requirement business.
As Fulfillment companies go online, Amazon.com seems to be head and shoulders above the others I have seen. They have an excellent system for enabling you to effectively market just about anything and have exceptional fulfillment services available.
4. Presence
One of the more subtle aspects to success online is knowing how to build a web presence. It will be important for you to have at the very least; a MySpace profile, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter account. Use the same name and information for all and cross link them. To see what I mean go to my MySpace profile and follow the links to my other web presence pages.
The first thing a person needs to do business online is an email account.
If you have an ISP (Internet Service Provider) they probably provide you with one or more email accounts, however as the internet changes and time passes odds are very high that you will change ISPs and therefore have to change your email, unless you select an online provider.
The more permanent your email, the more effective your marketing efforts will be, and the less you will have to redo with as changes occur. You may need only one account or several depending on the model you choose to follow for generating income. More about this further down.
Over the years I have used many, many free online email services and hands down Google mail (www.mail.google.com)blows all the rest out of the water.
I have had an account with them for several years. I virtually never experience spam, yet I have not had any problems with people or businesses that I want to have contact me succeeding, and they can handle whatever load may be placed on them, and they are as permanent a service as you can hope to find online. I use gmail as my primary provider, with a backup account at Yahoo.com, so if I were to forget my password, get hacked or have some other type of problem, I can recover quickly.
Selecting a name may be a little tricky, as millions of names have already been taken, but after a few minutes of trial and error you will find one that isn't taken that you can live with. The shorter the better, and making it easy to remember is advantageous but not absolutely necessary.
2. Paypal.
There are several online payment handling companies available. Frankly I have had only the most limited experience with most of them, mainly because Paypal has remained the pre-eminant funds management service since it's inception. They pay decent interest and in my experience are very like a bank that is designed for doing business online. I suggest you start with a personal account (as business accounts don't pay interest). You can always upgrade if you need to. They provide you with a wide range of services such as banners for your website, acceptance of major credit cards, echecks and other forms of payment. Their fees are very reasonable, and kick in mainly only when you receive money.
You will want to advance through their "verification" process as rapidly as possible, linking your Paypal account to your bank account and credit card so that you can easily transfer your funds in and out of your Paypal account.
3. Fulfillment
When someone orders something from you online someone has to take the order, pick and pack it, ship it, collect the funds and so forth. If you are focusing on a niche market you may be able to handle the entire process personally, however the internet is a world wide marketplace and if your advertising is effective and your product becomes popular, you could experience receiving hundreds or even thousands of orders per day, far more than one or even a dozen people could handle effectively.
If the name of the game for you is automated residual income you will need to carefully select a company or service to perform fulfillment for you or choose something that requires the least amount of effort possible to achieve fulfillment. Selling ebooks is a good example of a low fulfillment requirement business.
As Fulfillment companies go online, Amazon.com seems to be head and shoulders above the others I have seen. They have an excellent system for enabling you to effectively market just about anything and have exceptional fulfillment services available.
4. Presence
One of the more subtle aspects to success online is knowing how to build a web presence. It will be important for you to have at the very least; a MySpace profile, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter account. Use the same name and information for all and cross link them. To see what I mean go to my MySpace profile and follow the links to my other web presence pages.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Models for generating income online
There are just about as many ways to generate income online as their are people on the planet, maybe more. Most fall into the following categories:
• Online POPs (Point of Purchase) - These are websites set up to market specific goods and/or services provided by a single person or company. Examples: Blockbuster.co.uk and www.sproutpeople.com
• Market Aggregation sites - These sites that collect the goods and services provided by others and markets them to a target market. Examples: eBay! Stores and Alibris.com
• Advertising programs - These are sites that sell, buy and place advertising online and come in many flavors. Examples: Yahoo!. and MIVA: targeted, cost effective Pay-Per-Click advertising solutions.
• Affiliate marketing sites - These are more diverse than regular advertisers because anyone, through affiliate marketing can sell anyone else's stuff on their page and get paid a commission. Examples: this blog and my Spiderweb Marketing System page.
POPs, Market Aggregaters and Advertising programs often use affiliate marketing to help sell their stuff through the word of mouth/viral marketing that affiliate marketing provides.
There are many other models used that are successful and worth giving consideration to such as Multi-Level Marketing or referral marketing programs. In these you get paid as a result of inviting someone to join a program who subsequently buys a product, and usually you also earn a commission on the sales and subscriptions generated by the people you invited, often down through several levels of connection. Examples: Vitamark and Global Domains Inc.
I will expand on these more in coming blogs and share with you the one I have chosen to use and why, as well as those I have opted out of or avoided altogether. Affiliate marketing blended with referral marketing is my choice of online business model for the average individual to go online and start generating income quickly and for building my favorite type of income: residual income.
Residual income, by my definition, is income received for months or years after the work done to earn it has been completed. An easy to understand example is writing a book (or blog) and being paid a commission on the sale of each book. You write it, perhaps do a promotional tour to boost sales, and then collect royalties for a long while. You will find some form of affiliate marketing link or income generating link on almost every page I post online, including this one. I try to always capture the greatest return on my time and efforts invested.
Next up
- Online income generation basics - dealing with money online, fulfillment, presence
In coming days
- Short cuts to generating income online
- SEO, page optimization, and greasing the wheels of commerce
- Social Networks, hot bed of wealth or waste of time?
• Online POPs (Point of Purchase) - These are websites set up to market specific goods and/or services provided by a single person or company. Examples: Blockbuster.co.uk and www.sproutpeople.com
• Market Aggregation sites - These sites that collect the goods and services provided by others and markets them to a target market. Examples: eBay! Stores and Alibris.com
• Advertising programs - These are sites that sell, buy and place advertising online and come in many flavors. Examples: Yahoo!. and MIVA: targeted, cost effective Pay-Per-Click advertising solutions.
• Affiliate marketing sites - These are more diverse than regular advertisers because anyone, through affiliate marketing can sell anyone else's stuff on their page and get paid a commission. Examples: this blog and my Spiderweb Marketing System page.
POPs, Market Aggregaters and Advertising programs often use affiliate marketing to help sell their stuff through the word of mouth/viral marketing that affiliate marketing provides.
There are many other models used that are successful and worth giving consideration to such as Multi-Level Marketing or referral marketing programs. In these you get paid as a result of inviting someone to join a program who subsequently buys a product, and usually you also earn a commission on the sales and subscriptions generated by the people you invited, often down through several levels of connection. Examples: Vitamark and Global Domains Inc.
I will expand on these more in coming blogs and share with you the one I have chosen to use and why, as well as those I have opted out of or avoided altogether. Affiliate marketing blended with referral marketing is my choice of online business model for the average individual to go online and start generating income quickly and for building my favorite type of income: residual income.
Residual income, by my definition, is income received for months or years after the work done to earn it has been completed. An easy to understand example is writing a book (or blog) and being paid a commission on the sale of each book. You write it, perhaps do a promotional tour to boost sales, and then collect royalties for a long while. You will find some form of affiliate marketing link or income generating link on almost every page I post online, including this one. I try to always capture the greatest return on my time and efforts invested.
Next up
- Online income generation basics - dealing with money online, fulfillment, presence
In coming days
- Short cuts to generating income online
- SEO, page optimization, and greasing the wheels of commerce
- Social Networks, hot bed of wealth or waste of time?
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