Musings of Sharon Hayes-Tucci, an Internet Entrepreneur

Why I Left Empire Avenue

2011-07-16T23:03:00.010-05:00

I just closed my Empire Avenue account.

First, I want to explain why I joined Empire Avenue to begin with. Within a 3 day period, I had 2 major companies ask if I could do Empire Avenue related work for them. I was not on EA myself. I believe in personally mastering something myself before I work with clients on it. And so, I spent the next 10 weeks or so learning how Empire Avenue worked.

Over these past 2+ months, I have learned a lot. Here are some of the good/bad points:

Empire Avenue as a Social Network

As a social network, Empire Avenue has been fantastic for me. I’ve met a lot of extremely bright people. I’ve made more genuine friends through Empire Avenue in 2 months than I have in over 2 ½ years on Twitter.

I’ve hired several people I connected with as a result of being on Empire Avenue.

I’ve gotten business as a result of being on Empire Avenue that has more than substantiated the time I invested in it.

Empire Avenue as a Measurement Tool

In an ideal world, share price, network scores and dividends paid would have some kind of correlation to actual “value” people are bringing to the world of social media.

The reality is that there is very little correlation. This is partly a flaw on the side of Empire Avenue itself, partly on the side of the networks measured.

I’ll explain a bit about how Empire Avenue works:

You buy shares in individuals/brands on Empire Avenue at their current market price. In return, you are paid daily dividends based on the number of shares you own and the “performance” of that stock.
Empire Avenue uses some mystery formula to assign activity earnings for each network. These activity earnings, in conjunction with some secret sauce, result in dividends paid to shareholders.
The networks Empire Avenue currently tracks are: Twitter, Facebook personal pages, Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Empire Avenue itself. In addition, up to 5 “blogs” are counted.
Empire Avenue will only count the top 5 networks towards activity earnings/dividends.
Every day, Empire Avenue pays out dividends during the 2 hour period starting at 4:15 AM EDT. Dividends are paid out on accounts based on sign-up date.
When dividends are paid out on an account, there is also an end of day adjustment to share price that takes place based on activity changes during the previous day versus previous days. An upwards adjustment will be reflected in green numbers. A negative adjustment will either be yellow or red.

Along the way, I have discovered a lot of flaws with Empire Avenue. The biggest ones are these:

The system rewards activity over engagement and responsiveness. The more you output, the higher your dividends. There is no quality standard for output.
Empire Avenue has activity earnings limits for each network. All of these limits can be reached without actual engagement or responsiveness. Some of the highest earning tickers on Empire Avenue show little or no engagement on their networks.
Empire Avenue “scoring” is reliant on being able to pull data from the various social networks’ APIs. I hear daily of people having issues with this. Connections need to be reset.This is not an EAv issue but one due to the networks being measured.
From a strictly gaming perspective, many people feel compelled to do things in order to produce higher dividends just to “win.”

I’ll give you an example of the impact: I normally have a really high engagement on Twitter. From day one, my Twitter mentions were not counted. Some days, I get as many as 2,000 mentions. The logical thing is to think this would have a significant impact on my dividends paid out. My mentions were fixed recently and it had zero impact on dividends. This is likely because without them being counted and other Twitter factors (my followers/friends, tweets and Twitter-based retweets), I was probably at the maximum activity level for Twitter. I really hate to admit this, but while my mentions weren’t being counted on EAv, I felt my desire to engage drop along with it. (As an aside: a bit of irony is that as I engaged less and less on Twitter, my Klout score increased.)

Conversely, the last week, I uploaded a bunch of pictures to Flickr – from the park across the street to me, pictures of my cats, to loads of scanned pictures. What happened? My dividends shot up just by increasing my output without increasing engagement.

My Conclusions

I’ve realized that Empire Avenue is 2 things:

A superb tool with a great deal of potential for networking and keeping your personal/business brand in front of people. It is social network itself.
It’s a game that rewards activity over engagement/interaction.

From a strictly gaming perspective, I’ve learned what I want to. I understand enough about how the gaming part of it works.

I’ve made a lot of solid friendships as a result of Empire Avenue. I’ve gotten to know some new people. I’ve gotten to better know some other people. From that perspective, I’ve won and it’s made every minute spent on the game worthwhile.

I have talked with a few trusted friends about how I was feeling about EA. Although it is just a game and it is virtual currency and not real money, I didn’t want to just let my share price nosedive and negatively impact people. I felt the best thing to do right now was to simply delete my EAv account and start over when I've gotten some work projects dealt with and after a long vacation.

I’ve played EA as a game. When I come back, I want to play it for strictly networking. I don’t want to make my success in EA about my share price, dividends paid or what my net wealth is. But I want it to be about real connections made with real people. If EA is a game based on rewarding activity level, so be it. But I want to measure my own success based on being the signal and not the noise.

Canada Day on Empire Avenue

2011-06-30T20:46:00.003-05:00

Empire Avenue is giving out a special achievement and bonus eaves to all players who invest in 10 Canadians from now until July 3rd (GMT). These can be people you already invested in or brand new people. There is no minimum number of eaves required.

As a Canadian, I've been getting non-Canadan EA players asking me for suggestions on who to buy. I thought it might be useful to put together a list. So let's go:

Dups - the CEO of Empire Avenue

John Gushue - with CBC - an early Empire Avenue evangelist and a super nice guy

Michelle Gudz -a self-described geeky running vegan foodie

Eleanor Thibeau - one look at her avatar and you know she's interesting

Jerry Aulenbach - I don't know Jerry, but for the BACON lovers out there, he's a buy!

Kevin - a Montrealer who is a cool dude and hovering around the 100/share mark

Janis La Couvée - a super friendly woman from Victoria, BC.

Cendrine Marrouat - just look at her graph and you'll see she's soaring!

Stu Rader - you won't find much friendlier than Stu on EA! Nice divs & consistent.

Girlfriend Social - Amanda is a networking goddess. Every woman on EA should know her!

Of course, there's me too :) You can find me here. I found out today - just in time for Canada Day - that I'm now #1 in all of Canada for weekly earnings.

There are thousands of great Canadians you can find to invest in on Empire Avenue. This selection was more or less randomly chosen. (Please don't be offended if I didn't include you!)

Have a happy Canada Day!

Sharon

P.S. Are you following me on Twitter?

P.P.S. Feel free to recommend your favorite Canadian on Empire Avenue in the comments :)

So You Wanna Win At Empire Avenue?

2011-05-29T07:21:00.004-05:00

I was curious to know what the top performers on Empire Avenue are doing activity wise in order to generate the high dividend pay-outs and share prices they are.

I went through the top 25 I own shares in in terms of share price. I did not include those with a weekly dividend yield under 0.80%. I was curious about the activity levels. What follows are the weekly averages of the 25:

EA: 379 --- high 803

FB Posts: 117 -- high 311

FB Comments: 115 -- high 409

FB Likes: 295 -- high 1008

FB Page posts: 30 -- note only 9 of the 25 have FB Pages which recorded activity for the week -- high 70

FB Page Comments: 30 -- high 640

FB Page Likes: 254 -- high 551

Tweets: 462 -- high 1968

Flickr: 14 -- note only 14 of the 25 had Flickr activity for the week -- high 34

YouTube: 74 -- high 213

Blog Posts: 453 - note 2 did not have blog posts -- high 1495

Avg Share Price: 126.15

Avg Div/Share: 1.37

Note: To avoid distorting averages, I only based the above #'s on the average of people with activity.

Although there are a lot of other factors that comprise the EA "secret sauce" hopefully this can give you at least an idea of activity levels of some of the top performers on Empire Avenue.

Is Empire Avenue the Cure for Social Media Procrastination?

2011-05-09T06:22:00.011-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

I joined Empire Avenue a few days ago. Oddly enough, I hadn't really heard much about it before last week. I am trying to secure a gig for my company to provide social media training for a large media company. I was asked last week if I was on Empire Avenue myself and if I could incorporate this into the proposal I am working on. I had planned on doing this legwork over the weekend, then I saw a tweet from a Twitter follower mentioning Empire Avenue and decided to dive in. I was addicted within minutes.

If you aren't yet on Empire Avenue, I'll get to explaining the benefits of it in a bit and provide you with some tips on getting started. If you are already on there, you can buy shares in me at (e)SHARONHAYES. After all, you know I'm a social media junkie and a fairly solid investment :-)

What Is Empire Avenue?

Empire Avenue is a virtual stock exchange where you can buy/sell shares in individuals and organizations who are active in social media. You build your own portfolio and make eaves (e= Empire Avenue's currency) based on your own social media activity, dividends earned on the activity of those you invest in and profits (or losses) by trading in shares.

Social media activity that is currently tabulated are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr. Blogs are also taken into account but scoring is not made public as of yet. Of course, your activity on Empire Avenue itself generates a score.

Is This Just A Game?

No.

From a business/organizational perspective, it's a great way to get additional exposure.

From a personal perspective, it's provides a great networking opportunity.

For me, the biggest benefit is in timing. You see, I've been pretty consistent in social media with Twitter. But outside of Twitter, I've not been "good" at doing the things I should be doing. Since the year started, I've been stalling on formulating and following a solid plan to work on my own social media marketing more consistently. Empire Avenue has been the key that has finally made me make the plan I should I have created a couple of years ago - and start to put it into action. Take this blog for example. Whenever I have had a post to it, I have gotten anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 visitors. Yet this is my first post since December 2009!

Since your activity earnings on Empire Avenue are calculated on a daily basis, if you are a procrastinator like me, it is a great way to make sure you stay on track with your social media marketing efforts.

Some people do play it as a game. Some play it as an ego booster. There are some that do things just to manipulate their numbers. Since your home page shows the collective feeds of those you buy shares in, some people are using it as a content aggregator.

I'll be posting tomorrow some tips about getting started on Empire Avenue. If you want to set up an account there, you can use this link and you'll get 2,000 extra eaves. Make sure to follow my blog so you won't miss the tips!

'Til next time!

Sharon

Please don't.... on Twitter

2009-12-15T08:41:00.002-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

Please don't....

DM me.....

That you can show me how to get more followers (chances are I have more followers than you already)
That you can show me how to make money on Twitter (chances are I make more money on Twitter than you do)
A link to connect on Facebook and/or LinkedIn - I try to use both of those platforms to maintain communications with people I know better
A link to anything - I can see your bio when I return your follow, if a link in your tweets catches my eye, then I will look
A request to tweet or retweet something when we don't know each other
Ask me anything via DM without first looking at my website to see if the answer is there
Don't DM me after I follow back saying thanks for the follow - check out my site. LAME!
Anything that can't be said in tweets

If you want to play games or answer quizzes on Twitter, that is fine but please realize many of these services send DM's to all of your followers. It gets tiring to delete them. Please don't do things that will DM your followers.

Please don't join auto-follow services that then take over your Twitter account with tweets on how you can get more followers.

Please don't tweet me with a link to look at.

Please don't complain to me about my tweets via tweet or DM. You can always unfollow.

For any of these reasons, I may unfollow. In some cases, I may also report the person for spamming.

You may not agree with me. But the nice thing with Twitter is that we can each use it how we want.

Are you following me on Twitter?

ConversationList

2009-12-08T09:16:00.003-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

I'm amazed how fast nifty tools are coming out that are making Twitter Lists more useful. One of my own favorites so far is ConversationList. I'll give you a rundown on what ConversationList is.

ConversationList creates a dynamically generated daily list of people the list creator communicates with on a daily basis.

To create a ConversationList of your own, you can go to ConversationList's website, use Twitter authentication and then you'll be able to adjust your settings. You can choose whether you wish to include only those people you have sent actual @ replies to (as opposed to those mentioned elsewhere in your tweet), you can choose how often you need to mention someone before they are included and you can also choose to always exclude or income specific users.

Note: Twitter has a cap on 20 Twitter lists created per person. If you are at this limit, you will need to delete one before you can use ConversationList. You do NOT need to create a list called ConversationList. This will be automatically done for you.

Here's why I think ConversationList is a great idea: it will show your followers who else you follow that actually engage with users. If you have a large following yourself, it is a great way to give exposure to newer people using Twitter. If your newer and interact with others, it can help you get exposure as you get added to these lists. I think it's a great way to encourage people to interact with others too.

There are a couple of cons to ConversationList: There is a limit of 25 people that can be included. I communicate with 100+ a day so I'd love to see the number higher. Like with anything else, there is potential for abuse. Since the list is dynamically generate each day - this means that every time you get added to a list (or re-listed), their ConversationList will appear at the top of the lists you appear on. Given the 25 listing limit, I don't think this poses a serious problem.

What are your thoughts?

Are you following me on Twitter?

How to Follow A Twitter List

2009-11-05T17:49:00.005-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

Whether you love or hate Twitter lists, it's likely that you'll agree one feature that would make it much more useful is the ability to follow someone's list. There is a way to do it - and the great news is that it will take only a couple of minutes.

There are 2 ways to do this - short way:

1. Go to http://tweepml.org/ and create an account if you don't already have one then log in.

2. On the main page is a box "Follow a Twitter List" - copy and paste the URL for the list - for example: http://twitter.com/SharonHayes/music-blip-etc/members

3. Click on the "Follow" button & it will create a page where you can choose who you would like to follow.

Here is the results page for the above http://tweepml.org/@SharonHayes/music-blip-etc

Here are the steps for the long method:

1. Go to http://tweepml.org/ and click on the yellow icon "add it to your site"

2. In the "Enter Twitter Users Box" put in the full URL of the list you want to follow. For example: http://twitter.com/SharonHayes/inspirational/members

3. Click on the "find" button next to where you entered the URL. It will then populate the box below with all of the users from the list.

4. If this is just for you to follow a list, you don't really need to worry about a description. If you want to share the list with your followers I suggest putting a description in.

5. If you have an existing Tweepl account, you'll need to enter your information in the box otherwise you can create an account.

6. Tweepl will use OAuth to verify your account with Twitter.

7. You'll need to verify your account if you haven't use Tweepl before.

8. Boom - you can now go to the list URL and follow everyone at one time.

Here's an example of the list I set up for my "inspiration" list:

http://tweepml.org/Inspiration/

Note: as of writing this, Tweepl.org can only import the first page of members of a list. Hopefully they'll figure out a way to handle multiple pages in the future.

Are you following me on Twitter?

How to Measure Social Media's Effectiveness

2009-10-21T00:35:00.013-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

I've followed many debates on how the term "ROI" is being misused in social media. Josh S. Peters (one of my partners on Branded Tweets) has written a couple of posts about ROI. In the first, he explained why it was being inappropriately applied to a campaign The Gap had run. Josh followed up with a post that concluded the use of KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) is a more relevant way to measure the effectiveness of social media usage. I was originally going to comment on his latest post, then realized it was worthy of an entire post on its own.

The same debates about social media are ones that happened over a decade ago with online marketing in general. In the mid-90's, banner advertising was popular. Some people believed that all banner advertising campaigns needed to have an associated ROI. Others believed that banner advertising had to have a call to action otherwise it wasn't effective. The reality is banner advertising back then - and still today - can serve a variety of functions where ROI isn't even an immediate factor. The same kind of rhetoric is being spouted about social media today.

ROI has never, and will never be, the single most important metric that can be applied to marketing. This is true both offline and online. Consider Superbowl ads. The costs of producing and running an ad are enormous. Where does ROI come into play for Superbowl ads? In the short-term, it doesn't.

I agree KPI's are important - what I don't agree with is that KPI's are relevant on their own to social media. Benchmarks, metrics tied into business goals, other kinds of data that are quantifiable and that can be tracked back to social media efforts. But KPI's typically refer to the overall marketing efforts of an organization. Unless a company is *only* using social media for marketing and no other marketing methods, the metrics associated with the impact of social media are just part of the arsenal of what a company does to market.

Here's an example: let's say John sees your ad on TV for the Gizmo - a new product your company is offering. John uses Twitter and asks if anyone has used Gizmo. As part of your company's social media efforts, you have a monitoring campaign tracking mentions of Gizmo. You engage John, answer his questions and John buys Gizmo.

What metrics should you consider here? More importantly, what data should be gathered?

Where things become even more challenging is that it's rare that a company that uses social media will just have one objective. It's more likely that a company will have multiple objectives when using social media - some of which may not even come under the umbrella of marketing. Two examples: customer support and recruiting. Where it becomes even trickier is that business/organizational use of social media is becoming increasingly complicated.

We can compare the evolution of social media to how the Internet itself has progressed. Whereas ten or twelve years ago it was acceptable to just slap up a website - the build it and they will come mentality - things have changed and the same is true with social media. It's not simply enough to have a presence on Twitter, but you need to have objectives for using Twitter. Having a Facebook fan page isn't enough. There has to be some strategy behind it.

With an increasing number of Internet users and organizations looking to social media to get answers, conduct research etc, is it really even necessary at this point to consider social media in isolation when it comes to any kind of quantitative analysis? Would it not be better to look at things from an overall integrated campaign perspective where social media may be just one component? Then under the umbrella of social media, shouldn't we look at individual sites and applications and the metrics just as we would look at PPC advertising, banner advertising, etc?

Consider this question: what distinguishes "social media" from everything else that existed before? I first got started online when I was 16 years old - 25 years ago. What did I do online? I used forums on bulletin board services. Over a decade ago, I started to work with clients on ways they could engage prospects and customers. The term "social media" may be relatively new but what it means isn't.

What has changed is three-fold: 1. the speed at which information/news can be disseminated; 2. the strength of some very dominant presences not tied to specific companies (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc) and 3. the voice of the consumer has more impact. The end result is that consumers today are much more empowered than they were even a few years ago.

Where we are now is that a lot of traditional marketing/corporate folks are just plain confused about how to handle it. There is simply too much conflicting information about what social media really is and there's this unnecessary "push" to look at it in isolation - which is completely unnecessary. From an organizational standpoint, you should be defining what kind of social media presence you want to have. From there, you should then be looking at your use of social media in conjunction with everything else for individual campaigns - your website, your blog, your email marketing, your PPC advertising, your banner advertising, your online PR, your offline advertising, your offline PR, and so on. Now with this more integrated approach, reliance on KPI's is relevant - with social media being just one part of overall efforts yet with individual benchmarks being relevant to individual social media activities.

As more and more consumers become involved in social media activities, I think we'll see a natural progression where organizations almost automatically integrate social media into their business models. Whether this will happen in three, five or ten years - I have no idea. But it is coming. And sometime between now and then the accepted standards will evolve to where "social media marketing" as we know it will no longer be a catch-all phrase.

Are you following me on Twitter?

Top Ten Mistakes Businesses Make On Twitter

2009-10-18T01:42:00.009-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

I've now worked with a few dozen clients in some capacity that involves Twitter. The work has fallen into three categories: Twitter as part of their overall marketing strategy, training on how to use Twitter and "correcting" errors previously made in using Twitter. Clients have included corporations, small & medium sized businesses, non-profits, professionals and a few well-known individuals. It's really easy to work with an organization or individual not already on Twitter. There's no "unlearning" that needs to be done. It's a different story when that organization or individual already has been using Twitter in ways that are not following best practices or that is not right for their situation. I want to share with you the top ten mistakes I see made. Hopefully, whether you are new or old to Twitter, you will gain some insight.

Mistake #1: Focusing on quantity over quality

As of writing this, I am almost at 50,000 followers. To some people this is an impressive number. However many people are unaware of the fact that it took me 10 months to get to this level. Unless you are a household name or a company that already has a solid fan base, it is very difficult to try and build a following at a rapid pace while developing relationships. You'd be better off having 1,000 followers you communicate with and who can help you get the word out than you are to have 10,000 followers who have no idea who you are.

Mistake #2: Not having a defined strategy

Why are you on Twitter? What is your objective? Is how you are using Twitter meeting this objective? What can you be doing differently in order to reach your goals faster or more efficiently? From working with clients and discussions with Twitter users, I've discovered the most costly mistake most are making is not having a defined strategy never mind a game plan they are following that ensures the strategy is implemented.

Mistake #3: Not understanding reciprocity of follows

If you are a regular Joe Blow who is using Twitter to simply network and socialize, reciprocity is probably not an issue. However, if you are a company, non-profit or an individual who is trying to build a fan base, reciprocity is almost a must in my opinion. Reciprocity is important for psychological reasons. It leaves people with this nice cozy feeling that they matter to you and your organization. It is an easy, cost-free way to bond. Isn't that what social media is about?

If you are an individual marketer, guru, expert or whatnot, I believe that reciprocity is even more crucial. There's been a huge trend on Twitter for individuals to proactively build up large followings and then to purge most of those they follow. Some people refer to this as "Pump and dump." Blog post after blog post have been written by those who have done it explaining the reasons why. There is no reason not to reciprocate under your primary account - especially now with Twitter lists & Tweetdeck/other software allowing the use of multiple accounts.

I'm not advocating following back every single follow. I am suggesting that to gain the maximum benefit from your usage of Twitter to not have a limiting follow-back policy.

Mistake #4: Not engaging & sharing

The best way to show how this can be a mistake is by sharing an example. I've been working recently with a client who has an established presence on Twitter. They have several thousand tweets. Every single tweet had been either company announcements or links to their site. They brought me in to consult because they rarely get any click-throughs on their links and in spite of having over 10,000 followers, Twitter has done nothing to help their bottom line. By simply starting to interact with followers who send replies and passing along information in their industry from other Twitter users in a matter of a few weeks, they have started to see 200+ visitors a day from Twitter, retweets of their links (which they had not seen before) and other great stuff happening. They are spending the same amount of time on Twitter as they had been - they have simply had a shift in focus to broadcasting/self-promoting to engaging and sharing and the results are paying off.

Mistake #5: A bio with spelling mistakes

The in's and out's of an appropriate bio would take a full blog post (or two) to cover. The one simple thing you can do to enhance your credibility is to make sure your bio has no spelling mistakes. I did a random check of my last 20 "real" followers and 20 corporate Twitter accounts I am familiar with. Of the 20 "real" followers, 6 had either spelling or grammatical errors that were glaringly obvious. Of the 20 corporate Twitter accounts, 3 had spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.

Mistake #6: Not being careful of your last tweet

Most people will tweet in set time intervals. Often there will be many hours - or sometimes even days - between tweets. The last tweet you make should be done with at least a little bit of thought. Why? For two reasons: 1. It will help you get more of the right kind of followers. The last tweet of accounts show in following lists and on various sites and 2. When people go through their own following list to decide whether or not to unfollow, your last tweet could impact their decision. What the last tweet should be depends on your overall Twitter strategy.

Mistake #7: Not using keywords

Many people find Twitter accounts to follow by conducting keyword searches - both with and without the hashtag. What are the keywords for your business/organization? Are you using them in your tweets? When communicating with others, are you using the proper terminology that people would use when conducting searches? Do you have any kind of schedule for rotating keyword usage in tweets? I am not advocating keyword spamming but ensuring you actually are using terms relevant to your business. Note: I've often seen a single tweet bring in 10-20 followers alone because of using keywords. Do that once a day and that is an extra 300-600 followers per month.

Mistake #8: Not having any kind of monitoring in place

Are you watching Twitter for mentions of your company, your name, your brand(s), your competitor(s), etc? I routinely mention specific brand names and companies in tweets with comments. I'm amazed how many go ignored. When mentions are positive, it's great to reinforce a customer/client. When mentions are negative, it can be dealt with and be turned into a positive for your company. Again, dealing with explaining monitoring would take at least a blog post or two to cover - but if you aren't doing any kind of monitoring, find out how to do it and start to do it.

Mistake #9: Trying to sell directly on Twitter

Yes, mentioning a special in tweets to your followers, new products, etc is okay - as long as it is not all you are doing. However, where a lot of people go wrong is by employing monitoring methods to essentially spam people via tweets. I've even seen large companies do this. Sure, engaging people that mention your company or the industry it deals in is okay. Answering questions is okay. But avoid trying to use Twitter for a direct pitch without establishing a connection with someone first.

Mistake #10: Leaving personality at the door

Twitter IS social media. Even if you manage a Twitter account for a Fortune 500 company, showing some personality is a part of engagement and building a rapport with followers. If you have multiple people handling a Twitter account, then have the pictures of those that tweet in the background of your profile page. Have them sign off their tweets with their initials at the end so they have a chance to show their personality. Instead of having your Twitter link go to your company's main page, have it go to a special page so that people can find out more about those tweeting for the account. McDonald's has set up a great page. I don't agree entirely with their tweeting methods but they are doing a fairly good job compared to many large companies.

If you have a small business, showing your personality is even more important. You want to build a rapport with your followers. Just make sure what you do is always consistent with how you want your brand/image to be perceived!

I hope that you found this helpful. If you're interested in gaining some additional insight about using Twitter for business and non-profit usage, I invite you to attend a free teleconference I'll be a part of on Tuesday, October 20th. If you aren't available to attend the call live, you can still register and receive a link after the call to listen at your convenience. Click here to get more info and to register.

Things To Know About Twitter's Lists

2009-10-15T19:34:00.005-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

Twitter has started to roll out the much-anticipated Lists functionality. Here are the highlights:

Lists allow each user a way to group some or all of the people they follow by assigning them to a list.
It also helps with discovery: When you go to a user's profile, you can see which lists they have created and follow relevant people. You can also see which lists someone belongs to and follow the others on that same list.

Note: if you do not see lists yet, don't worry! You'll be getting access to it soon!

I jumped the gun and created my lists rather quickly. Here are some tips:

Carefully consider how you want to structure your lists before you start to set them up.
You can only create 20 lists.
Each list cannot have more than 500 people.
If you want to edit a list's name, go to: Lists You Follow, Click on List Name and on the right hand side towards the bottom is an "edit list" link. That will allow you to change the name of a list OR change it from public to private & vice versa.
If you want to delete a list, go to: Lists You Follow, Click on List Name and on the right hand side towards the bottom is an "delete list" link.

Note: at the time of posting this, neither the edit nor delete functionality are working.

Hope this helps!

Are you following me on Twitter?

More Twitter Tips

2009-09-11T04:35:00.002-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

A few months ago, I posted a ton of Twitter tips on this blog. That post represented a small fraction of what I know about how to use Twitter most efficiently & effectively. I thought it was time to give up more of my secrets ;) I hope you learn something new!

Color Counts

Take a few minutes to make sure that the color of your tweets and the background for them is easy to read on both desktops & via mobile web access. I look at every new person I follow back and see that maybe 1 in 50 are using a color combination that make it unreadable to read the tweets. It's best to use contrast - i.e. use a dark color on a light background or a light color on a dark background.

Why is this important? Most Twitter users manually follow people back. They want to have a look at the tweets of those they follow. If people have difficulty reading your tweets, it might reduce the likelihood they will return the follow (if that is important to you). There's another reason: often people will go to a user's profile page to catch up with them or because they want to see exchanges they have with other users. Again, why make it more difficult for people to read your tweets than it needs to be?

Your Avatar

Try and avoid changing your avatar unless it is necessary. If you do change it, try and keep a similar look. I made a major change in April with my avatar from a glam-style photo to the one I use now. Six weeks after the change, I was still getting tweets from people who hadn't recognized me. People reading their stream look at avatars more often than names. A major change in your avatar can make it difficult for people to realize it is you.

If you do want to make a major change, make sure it is to something you can be consistent with from that point on or that at least you can be recognizable.

DM Hygiene

If you delete a DM from your sent folder, it will also delete it from the recipient's inbox. Since many Twitter users do not receive text messages or emails of DMs, this means if you delete an unread DM, the recipient will never know you sent it.

Every few weeks I will tweet this as a tip & there are always many long-term Twitter users that aren't aware of this so I thought it was worth adding to my blog :)

Getting Behind In Mentions

If you are away from Twitter for an extended period - let's say vacation or you've been too busy with other things - be aware that if you are using tools that access Twitter via API, there is a limit of 200 mentions that can be retrieved per API call. If you know you were up-to-date with replies the last time you logged on, retrieve your mentions and check the date of the oldest one that shows. If the date/time doesn't coincide with your last tweet, then what you may want to do is use Twitter search. Twitter search also has limits on how many tweets it will show per request. However, if you go to advanced search, you can specify a date range. (This was partially covered in my previous post but I neglected to mention the API limitation.)

Using Twitter Search

Be aware if you are using Twitter search on your own mentions or for some other reason, many tweets do not show up in search. Aside from those that have protected tweets, the tweets of those people who are not appearing in search will not show up. I estimate that in my own case around 1 in 15 mentions do not appear in search.

Bio URL

I strongly recommend you do not use a URL shortener in your bio. If people do not know what they are clicking on, they will often not click. I did a short test with this and found that my click through from bio with a URL shortener vs domain name resulted in less than 50% of the clicks.

Follower Hygiene

For personal reasons, I choose to follow back everyone that follows me. (Although I may start to change this policy soon with new followers.)

I am awful with removing those that unfollow me. I did a few batches of 100-200 a few months ago and have done nothing since. Part of the reason is because with the number of people I follow it is tedious to consider doing manually via the Twitter pages. Also before Twitter changed the page numbers for following/followers, I had blank pages so none of the tools would work on my list. There were many inaccuracies.

Last week, I went to FriendorFollow.com, entered my username and then exported a list of "following" - ie people I was following and who were not following me back. There were almost 2,000. This was way too many to get rid of manually at one time so what I did was this: I added an extra column in that divided the following into followers and then sorted on that column. This let me see right away who was "pumping and dumping" - ie building a following proactively only to dump many/most of them once they were happy with their numbers or for some other reason. I've unfollowed around 500 since then. The rest I'll eventually get to :)

Miscellaneous Tips

Don't include a personal url when sending someone an @ reply. It's perceived as spamming. By this I mean tacking on your domain name to a tweet that has nothing to do with your business.
Don't tweet everyone new that follows you or that you follow. It's really annoying for your existing followers and you'll likely lose people.
If you want to greet new followers, take a minute to look at their bio and tweets to use "something" to start a conversation with. Too much effort? Then why follow people unless you intend on building some kind of relationship or network with them?
Create goodwill - if you share something someone else has tweeted, make sure to give attribution to it by using either RT or via. :) See my last tips post for more on retweeting.
If you will be away from Twitter from an extended period - whether it is 12 hours, a day or a week, try and make sure your last tweet or two is representative of you. I've noticed huge fluctuations in how many new followers I get based on the tweets I leave up when I am not around.

See you on Twitter!

Are you following me on Twitter?

P.S. If you feel you could benefit from some professional Twitter training, check out my Twitter landing page for what I am currently offering :)

New Twitter Landing Page + Training

2009-09-09T02:37:00.004-05:00

Until now, I've always linked my Twitter profile to this blog. However, with the growth in the number of followers I have, I'm finding that I get a lot of the same questions over and over again and I thought it was time for a change. I set up a page at http://www.sharonhayes.com that answers many of the most common questions I receive from followers. Hopefully it will allow me to avoid being repetitive and to focus on providing new, fresh content on a continual basis. :)

This page is a definite work in progress. I have tons more to add and will soon be offering an inexpensive consult on a by question basis for SMBs that may need help. This will be provided in conjunction with a live show I'll be starting very soon :)

On a daily basis, I have anywhere from a few to a dozen people ask if I provide any kind of Twitter training. For the most part, this is from small business owners who want to learn how to use Twitter more effectively. Until now, the training I've done has been primarily high-end - and out of the reach of the "little guy." I'm currently working with Joshua Denney and Josh "Shua" Peters on a comprehensive group Twitter training program we'll be rolling out very soon.

In the meantime, I am making myself available to take on a very limited number of clients for 1 or 3 hour one-on-one training sessions. This is at a fraction of the rate I have performed any work at in years. I've generated 7 figures of income from Twitter this year - without openly promoting any business. I do it by following rule #1 of social media: being authentic. If you find yourself struggling with Twitter in any way... if you want to grow your follower base..if you're having a hard time translating Twitter into $... if you're having trouble positioning... or just learning how to use Twitter effectively... this may be just what you need. This is NOT an out-of-the-box program but will be customized training based on the responses you provide to a questionnaire. I have been helping clients for 2 decades make more money and have fun doing it.

My schedule right now is very tight and I can only offer approximately 20 hours of training over the next 4 weeks. I suggest if you are remotely interested in this, don't delay. I will never offer one-on-one Twitter training again at this price.

Sessions will be conducted by Skype and can be coordinated to meet any schedule/time zone. Here's how it works: choose one of the 2 payment options below. Payment can be remitted easily via Paypal. If you cannot use Paypal, contact my staff via email asking to be invoiced for either the 1 or 3 hour Twitter training via Google Checkout. Within 12 hours of when payment has been received, you will receive an initial client questionnaire. This will take you anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to complete. When you have finished it, you will return it via email and we'll then schedule your training session(s). If you order the 1 hour training, you'll receive a 45 minute session and then one follow-up 15 minute session. The 3 hour training is comprised of 2 x 1 hour sessions and 2 x 15 minute follow-ups. If you order the 1 hour training, you'll be able to receive a credit against the cost of the group training should you feel you need more assistance. If you order the 3 hour training, you'll receive the group training for free which will also include your additional 30 minutes of one-on-one assistance.

Purchase 1 hour Training

Purchase 3 hour Training

New personal blog

2009-09-07T03:26:00.002-05:00

I just set up a new personal blog at http://iWeightTrain.com. The blog will tackle some emotional issues I am dealing with right now. The first post is "Putting up Walls." In the few short hours since it has been up, I've received several comments publicly and a few dozen privately. Many people have commended me for being honest and open. Most people seemed to be able to relate to it in some way. Read it and let me know what you think. It's a huge move for me to go public with this given that I'm generally a very private person.

A Twitter Time Management Experiment

2009-08-12T04:24:00.004-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

If you are one of my followers, then you likely have observed a few things:

I make an effort to respond to every tweet,
I tweet a lot,
I haven't automated anything on Twitter (even followbacks I manually do now),
and if you've had exchanges with me, you'll see I rarely am able to tweet in real time

As my follower base has increased and along with it, the incoming tweet load, I've run into a few problems:

Although I'm typically "light" on Twitter, I do take business seriously. There are often full days where I am on overload with work which prevents me from spending any time on Twitter. Since I work on the Internet, I also like taking downtime entirely away from the computer. Both of these things mean it is easy for me to get behind in responding to tweets. I've been as much as 2 weeks behind in responses at some points!
When I get far behind, I often have to resort to using search rather than Tweetdeck for responses. This means missing tweets from those tweeps who don't appear in search entirely.
For productivity purposes, it makes more sense for me - on those days I am able to tweet - to spend 1 or 2 solid chunks of time responding to tweets. The issue here is that I don't want to flood the stream of followers with responses. Also, Twitter has implemented a time-out period where if you tweet too much in a given time, you are unable to tweet for an hour (and sometimes more).
I've not been able to look as much at the streams of my friends because of time limitations.
I love live interactions/exchanges with people but with getting behind all the time in responses, it's rare that I'm able to engage in "real-time" like I used to.

For those of you that know me from Twitter or have been one of my coaching clients, you'll know that my philosophy has been to avoid automation. It defeats what is at the heart of social networking and social media. At the same time, the way I have been handling things simply isn't working for me. Twitter has turned more into a chore for me and something I have to do rather than something I want to do.

I don't want to change some parts of how I handle things. Primarily I want to make sure that I do respond to tweets. I know most other high volume users look at this differently but for me it is important. I don't want people to feel ignored. I really do care.

I'm going to be running an experiment for the next 7-10 days. I am going to schedule blocks of time to handle responses and use CoTweet to schedule sending them out on a staggered basis. I am hoping the benefit will be that I am able to interact overall with people more fluidly, that I will be able to engage in live exchanges and be more proactive in communications. I hope that this will work better for followers as well since they will no longer get hit with 50-100 tweets in a short period of time. The offside of this is that I will not always actually "be there" when people see me tweeting. I am hoping this doesn't cause too much confusion for people.

I believe transparency and being authentic are important in social media. By openly sharing what I am doing I hope that this adds to - rather than detracts - from the way I am seen in the community. The impact of this on my followers should be a positive one since I don't often have chances to converse in real time on Twitter to begin with.

I may post an update at some point on how this experiment works. Please DO post comments sharing what you think about this approach.

Are you following me on Twitter?

How to avoid the #FollowFriday problem

2009-06-12T19:58:00.011-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

One of the challenges with Twitter is finding ways to meet people. Real people who want to interact and not just number collectors/spammers/broadcasters. It used to be easier before. You had the option of seeing @replies of everyone you follow. This gave you the ability to see conversations with people you didn't know and to jump in. Now Twitter has removed this option so it's made the hunt a little more difficult.

For several months, #FollowFriday has been used as a way to share great tweeps with your other followers. But there are 2 problems with #FollowFriday: 1. It's really lost a lot of it's effectiveness. Most people continue to list a bunch of tweeps without providing a reason. Very few people will actually follow people listed like this. 2. In spite of the @reply change having been made many weeks ago, many are still doing #FollowFriday incorrectly. If you start off the tweet with a person's username, only that person, any other users listed and anyone those people follow will get to see the tweet. It more or less defeats the purpose of doing #followfriday since those not following won't even see the tweet.

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you'll know that I started to change how I did #followfriday's. Instead of tweeting individuals, I decided to do a blog post providing a more extended description about people. This worked - for a while. It took a lot of time to put together. Time I could be spending communicating, sharing, interacting with followers.

Many others since have started to go the same route - blogging recommendations (like @ConcertReviewer's blog) or providing a permanent list of recommendations (like @KimSherrell 's list). Kudos to those that do this!

I'm starting to see more people tweet individuals with info about the person they are recommending. This provides value. It's easy for anyone to do. But it still does take a bit of work. There's also the guilt complex: ie if you give someone a recommendation one week, does that mean you need to give one the next etc.

The problem with tweeting #followfridays is that they have a very short shelf life. Pretty much only people online around the time the tweet goes out will even get to see it. It's not a very good bang for the buck.

The Great News is..... there is an fast, easy way to show your appreciation for other Twitter users that takes as little time as doing a #followfriday tweet. It provides lasting value AND you only need to do it one time....

....This is by using MrTweet.net for making your recommendations. Now MrTweet.net is certainly not something new, but I really think it is being underutilized.

MrTweet makes suggestions of people you aren't following based on people within your network and recommendations they have made for others along with who they communicate with. You get to see a nice summary of each recommended person and you can choose to follow them (and/or send a tweet to them) directly from MrTweet.

You can also make recommendations of others via MrTweet. When you do so, it gets saved permanently & improves their visibility when others use MrTweet. Recommendations that you make are also tweeted to your followers.

To get started with MrTweet, sign up by following MrTweet on Twitter.

You can then log in at the MrTweet website - discover new people to follow and make recommendations for others.

Recommendations for people to follow are updated daily.

Three tips:

1. You can make recommendations for others by going to:

http://mrtweet.com/username?rec - for example if you want to make a recommendation for me, you'd go to http://mrtweet.com/sharonhayes?rec

In the white text box - just type what you want to say about an individual after the word because. Make sure to leave the first part the way it is so that the recommendation will "take". Unlike a normal tweet, you have more space to provide details. Your outgoing tweet recommendation will have a link back to MrTweet.net. Once you are happy with what you wrote, you can click on the "Recommend him/her" button.

2. You can tweet your own recommendation list on #FollowFridays (or any day for that matter). People can see your page by going to http://mrtweet.net/username?me= - for example for me you'd go to

http://mrtweet.net/sharonhayes?me=

3. You can share discoveries you have made via MrTweet.net by tweeting this link: http://mrtweet.net/share/username?user= - for example http://mrtweet.net/share/SharonHayes?user=

There are a couple of other things you can do to help those in your network:

1. Send a tweet anytime about a user to your followers with a reason why they should follow. Just remember it's important not to start the tweet with the person's username.

2. Make introductions between 2 or more individuals that you know have something in common. Again, don't start it with @username and try to explain why you are introducing them in the tweet. This may allow others that follow you to find new people too.

I hope that you've enjoyed this post and that it's given you some new ideas!

Are you following me on Twitter?

How to Build A Twitter Following Naturally

2009-06-07T04:56:00.009-05:00

Many people ask me how I got to over 30,000 followers on Twitter. Each of us uses Twitter in unique ways & for different purposes. So the way I tweet/the things I do can't be used/apply to everyone. At the same time, there are some key fundamentals that I think will hold true for most people that want to build a solid Twitter following. By "solid" I mean one that consists of real people that interact. Let's go over them....

Your Avatar

I recommend that you use a picture of yourself for your avatar. It does not need to be a professionally done one. Heck, my avatar is just a web cam picture! At the same time, try and make sure the picture you use is a tasteful one.

If for some reason you feel uncomfortable with using a picture of yourself, then use a picture of "something". I would not suggest using a picture of someone else for obvious reasons.

Point here.... if you want to get followers, don't use just use the default brown box.

Your Background

There are a ton of places you can get a free background for your Twitter profile. Just go to Google and type in "free Twitter backgrounds" and you'll find plenty to get you started.

Again, I don't recommend using the default Twitter background. However, the other ones Twitter provides aren't bad. I've used one of the Twitter ones since starting on Twitter.

If you are using Twitter for business, it is a good idea to include contact information and a bit more about what you do in the background. Remember - your profile page is about personal branding! You want to attract the right type of people to you when they land on your profile page.

Your Bio

I look at every new follower's profile page. I estimate that 1 in 5 have obvious spelling mistakes. Even if you are using Twitter for fun, take a couple of minutes to spell check your bio. You can do this in Word or if you use Chrome, it will highlight any misspelled words.

I don't want to get into too much detail here about what your bio should contain but it is a good idea if you make sure to include any keywords of things you are interested in along with what you do in it. Many people find others on Twitter through sites that will search bio's. So the more keywords you have in there, the more likely you are to have people find you.

Your Profile Page Tweets

Most "real" people will look at the profile page of someone they are considering following or following back (exception: those that automatically follow back everyone). Obviously one of the things they will look at here are your tweets. I want to share a handful of general suggestions I give to clients. These may or may not be applicable to you:

* Make sure your last tweet or two is an informative one. For example, before I sign off from Twitter for an extended period of time, I try to provide a link relating to Twitter itself or something else of general interest.

* Make sure you show some conversational tweets. These are more attractive to regular people that use Twitter to engage/communicate since they will show you interact with followers. ie you aren't a bot or spammer!

* Try and have at least 1 or more retweets of other's tweets that provide value. This shows you believe in reciprocity.

* I strongly recommend against having tweets relating to the latest & greatest program on how to get more followers. This tends to be a turn-off for most active users.

* If you do tweet links/quotes/other content, it is a good idea to try and balance that with exchanges with others.

Your Tweet "Strategy"

Here are some general tips on tweeting:

* It's a good idea to spread your tweeting time throughout the day. Most people use Twitter at different times and there are also different time zones to consider. You'll be able to engage with more people & thus get your name out there via Twitter search, retweets & conversation if you tweet in spurts rather than at one time.

* I attribute building my own following to a few reasons: tweeting useful information that others want to retweet, retweeting others (thus making people more likely to retweet me), acknowledging people to the best that I can and actively engaging with people.

* Try and use proper words/terms and hashtags where you can. This will help others find out about you when doing searches. For example, if you are tweeting about the television show "House" - don't just type House but use the hashtag - ie #House.

* Participating in trending tweet games can attract general interest followers.

* Use URL shorteners like bit.ly for links rather than tweeting the entire URL. Exception: if the URL is very short. For example, I link to this blog using hayes.net and will often just use that since it's the same length as most URL shorteners. There are many reasons for doing this but you will likely see an increase in followers/follower retention by using them.

There are loads of other things you can be doing - making sure to get listed in the various Twitter directories like wefellow.com, joining relevant Twibes/groups, including your Twitter link on articles you have published & at your website, doing tweet-swaps with others to your blog, etc. Of course, also make sure to look at your "mentions". If you ever are away from Twitter for an extended period of time, it is often easier to do a Twitter search on your username by date (go to advanced search). This can make it easier to catch-up!

Have fun! :)

Please do follow me on Twitter

Friday Twitter Funnies

2009-05-29T18:00:00.002-05:00

One of my followers, Kim Brame, needed some cheering up so I put out an SOS for others to chime in with some funnies. Rather than RT them all I thought I might share them here. Since I didn't do a #followfriday blog post this week, this might help some of you find some new people too.

MaraBG @KimBrame @SharonHayes Fed Govt has sent an email re: swine flu warning about canned pork... Don't worry, it's just SPAM!!

ClaireBoyles where's @darraghdoyle when u need him? :) <-- apparently a very funny guy ;)

arthurtaubo @SharonHayes, @kimbrame, listen to this one, http://tinyurl.com/lzu68y, and look at this film Kim, http://tinyurl.com/ml3crv

mikeconaty @SharonHayes @kimbrame took a while to find it again: http://bit.ly/19f9t1 | Makes me chuckle anyway :-)

personified @kimbrame: As a child, my mother found me one day with a mouth full horse manure -- I thought it was chocolate? (funny @Sharonhayes) :P

Linda_Sgoluppi @KimBrame @sharonHayes Re Kim's cheerup, light relief, read in Glasgow accent, canna shove your granny off a bus http://tinyurl.com/ab2x29

merlebowers @SharonHayes @kimbrame Horse walks into a bar, bartender says, "Hey buddy, why the long face?" @SharonHayes @kimbrame Mafia put a contract out on Einstein, apparently he knew too much.

thenewpast @kimbrame @Sharonhayes a joke for the smiles - http://tweetmic.com/p/ordwsa7ufl4

Twitter Tips

2009-05-23T17:13:00.013-05:00

One of the things I love about Twitter is that it is up to us to decide how we want to use it. I want to share with you a variety of different tips. All of these are based on how I use Twitter. Hopefully you'll discover at least one new thing & find it worth sharing with your own followers.

Replies on Twitter

About 10 days ago Twitter made a change in how replies are handled. Replies are tweets that start with @username. Previously you had the options (via your settings) whether or not you wanted to see replies your followers make to those you are not following or not. Now you can only see replies your followers make to those you are also following.

Twitter claims that only 3% of users had this feature enabled. Personally, I think that those 3% were likely amongst the most active users. In any event, being able to see @replies was great for those of us who are looking to expand our network, find more like-minded people and to be able to find others to engage with. As my own follower base grew, I know that it helped a lot of my own followers connect with others. Now when I have an exchange with someone that I think may interest other followers, I will RT their tweet and respond to that or I will reply and put a "." in front of their user name.

The change in replies has made #followfriday a bit of a mess. Even though we've now had our second Friday since the change, many of the more active users don't understand how making recommendations to others is almost pointless if they start with @username. The reason is that only that person, those following that person already and anyone else mentioned in the tweet will see the recommendation. A way around it is to start off with anything other than @username.

Retweet is King

Aside from exchanges on Twitter, one of the great things about it is the ability to share information. Retweeting is used to pass along useful things you see your own followers tweet.

If you are a follower of mine, you'll see that I do a considerable number of retweets each day. I do it not just to pass along information to others but also so that my own followers can find other people that share useful information on Twitter.

I don't suggest going retweet crazy but try and take the time to share information you think others may be interested in. The benefit of retweeting others is that your own followers will see you do it and you just may find your own tweets get retweeted more often.

There are 2 ways to handle retweets:

RT @username [Tweet]

[Tweet] via @username

In both cases, make sure to include a space before the @username so that the person you are retweeting will see it (and it will also make their profile clickable for your followers).

I personally prefer using the second method. This makes it easier for tweets I pass along to catch the eye of those following me.

Always Acknowledge

If you see someone tweet a link, piece of info or something else, remember to acknowledge the source (via retweet examples above). Remember the Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you want others to credit you as a source, be sure to acknowledge sources yourself.

Look in Stream

Some days I get 500-1500 mentions. This is a lot to deal with on it's own. But I do try and take the time at least several times a day to look at my "home" page and see where:

A. I can help someone that is in need

B. I see information I can share with my own followers

C. Someone I may not have had previous exchanges with seems to be sharing a common interest

D. Something I can comment on or contribute to

New Followers

Even though I use autofollow most of the time, I DO look at each new follower - even if it is a couple of weeks behind. When I do this, I go through the same A-D I mention above. This helps build a connection with new followers and I think much better than just a simple thanks for following me.

Using DMs

Avoid auto-dms. They are a headache and in the world of Social Media are definitely not going to enhance your credibility in any way.

Requests/Favors

Unless you have a connection established with someone already, don't DM or tweet them asking for a retweet, to look at a site or something else. Those of us with higher usage of Twitter get inundated with requests like this. It's not that we don't want to help people, it's a matter of mutual respect. On an average day I get 50 or more retweet requests. Unless I have had personal contact with the person, these DM's get deleted. It will also make me less likely to retweet something of that person I may have otherwise done.

The best thing to do - retweet and share info of others before you need their help. It will make people more responsive when you do need assistance.

Using Protected Posts

Many of my followers use protected posts. Unfortunately most of the time due to tweet volume, I need to use Twitter search to respond to tweets. This means I now miss many protected tweets since they do not show up in Twitter search. If you run into the same boat - needing to use Twitter search for responding to Tweets - keep this in mind.

When you get behind on Tweets

During the week, I often get behind with reading/responding to mentions. I go to Twitter search and will do an advanced search on tweets referencing sharonhayes AND set the parameters to a specific date. I do the date filtering because it helps me limit the tweets in my search and because Twitter search only displays 75 pages of tweets. The nice thing with Twitter search is that you can see conversation threads so you can easily spot those tweets you didn't respond to.

Keeping your following list clean

Every few days I find out one of my followers accidentally unfollowed me because of using a tool like FriendorFollow. Many of these kinds of tools make mistakes and will show people are not following you that are. It seems to be more of an issue with those that have larger followings or who have empty pages in their following list (like I do). If you do use one of these tools to clean up who you are following, I suggest double checking before unfollowing.

Personally, I prefer just scrolling through my following pages. Here's an easy way to do it: take the number of people you are following and divide it by 20. That will tell you how many pages worth of people you are following. Click on the link on your profile page for "following". Go to previous page. In the URL bar of your browser, you'll see http://twitter.com/friends?page=2 . Change the 2 to the number of pages you need to go back. You can then scroll through the pages and unfollow those you see who aren't following back who you may want to unfollow. Your following pages are in chronological order so on the very last page are the first people you followed. On the first page are the latest you followed.

If someone is following you back, it will show a "Direct Message" link below their user name. If they are not following you back, you will not see this.

It really doesn't take that long to do. I go through my entire list every 4-6 weeks. The last time I did it (with around 25,000 following), it took me around 2 hours around doing other things. So maybe an hour of actual time. Note for techies: I did try to do it once by backing up both my following and follower list then comparing the two. It actually took me longer this way since I'm fast on the computer than to manually do it. If you are slower on the computer, comparing backups may save you time and be more reliable.

Please remember to give people time to follow back before you unfollow them. Not everyone checks their new followers daily. I suggest a minimum of 3-4 days, preferably a week.

There are a few different websites that will tell you the last time people tweeted. The idea being that this can help see who you should unfollow. *Many* people I do business with via Twitter are not actively tweeting but they do send DMs and read tweets. I have some people who have followed me for months that I actively engage with privately who have never tweeted at all. From a business perspective, I don't consider the idea of unfollowing someone based on their last tweet date to be a sound one.

Following Limits

For the Twitter pros, this is old news, but since I have at least one person a day asking me about this, I thought it was worth explaining.

Twitter allows you to follow up to 2000 people without restrictions. Once you hit 2000 following, you can only follow 10% more than are following you. If you find yourself stuck at the 2000 limit, you may want to look at the followbacks and unfollow some of those not returning the follow.

Recently Twitter imposed an additional restriction: you can only have 1000 follow actions per day. This includes unfollows. If you hit this limit, you need to wait for the 24 hour period to be up to follow more people. Note: there are no limits on unfollows, but when you unfollow, it reduces how many you can follow.

Being Unfollowed/Unfollowing

I think that on Twitter, friendships can develop much faster than in the offline world. At the same time, friendships can cycle through quickly. The inevitable will happen to each of you - people that you have exchanged tweets with and you may have liked - for whatever reason, unfollow you. Don't take this personally. Just as in the offline world, friends come in and out of your life. Are you still friends with everyone you talked with in elementary school, high school, college, etc?

There are also a lot of people that game Twitter - I've blogged about this previously. To circumvent the follow limits and build their following base faster, they will unfollow people that have followed them. Some of these people appear to be legitimate users too and keep their following/follower numbers in balance. Again, don't take it personally. When I come across people that are gaming and who have unfollowed me, I simply block them when I unfollow them to stop them from refollowing again.

Deciding when to follow back

There are many different approaches people take about following others back. What you decide to do should be based on your own usage of Twitter. My own rule of thumb is that I follow everyone back. Although my tweets are not self-promoting or about my own business activities, I do generate a lot of business from Twitter. I don't want to close doors by not following someone back.

One interesting thing here to consider: many of the most valuable business contacts I have made have had NO tweets and follow very few people. Consequently if you are using Twitter for business, you may want to consider the reasons why someone with no/few tweets may have chosen to follow you & if they are worth a followback. From a strictly business side, if I were to limit who I follow back, I would definitely follow someone with no tweets before someone tweeting a bunch of garbage.

I hope that you found these tips useful. :)

Are you following me on Twitter?

Thanks to Joshua Denney for input.

Excel problem

2009-05-22T20:58:00.003-05:00

Problem I tweeted about:

Column A consists of a data string
Column B contains a value relating to each data string
Column E contains if statement to compare one row against another like this:

=IF(A3614=A3613,"STOP","")

What I need to do is in column E have a formula that returns another
STOP *if* column E contains STOP and column B is not equal to D

My brain is so dead - this should be simple and I'm just not getting it.

I realize there is deduping in Excel 2007 but the client wants the
data in this specific format.

Answer: =IF(E8="STOP",IF(B8<>"D","STOP",""),"")

Thanks to @mrrichardson for helping me out!

Can Your Business Model Help You Reach Your Goals? Part 1: Service Professionals

2009-05-20T01:08:00.002-05:00

Over the past 6 months, I’ve been shifting my priorities to working with small business owners. One of the first things I’ll discuss with them is where they are now versus where they want to be. This helps us establish a path for them to take – what they need to do in order to grow their business to the desired level. Almost without exception, I’ve come to one startling conclusion:

Most small business owners do not have a business model that can help them reach their goals!

First, let me start off by sharing the most common goals most people cited:

· More free time during the regular work week and weekends off

· More time off from work entirely

· Less work-related travel and more personal/family travel

· More time and money to indulge in recreational activities

· Specific income goals – usually in the $150,000 to $250,000 range

· Debt-free

· Own a new home, mortgage-free

Basically, the most important goals for the bulk of these people were either related to having more free time or having more money. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? It is until I started to look at the plan – or lack of plan – these business owners had in order to reach their goals.

I’ll share with you some details on a client I am working with. Dan is a fairly solid programmer. He has a full-time job and does between 10 and 20 hours of work each week freelance. His rate is $45 per hour. He has around 3 months living expenses set aside and is ready to take the leap to going on his own. He and his wife have 2 young children. His wife is returning to teaching this fall and will be earning just under $30,000 a year. Dan wants to be able to take summers off starting in 2010 to spend with his family. He would need to earn an estimated $110,000 in 2010 to reach his family’s financial goals. Since he’s been freelancing along with his full-time job for the past 3 years now, he wants to be able to have weekends off to spend time with the family. Before we spent some time together, Dan had planned on only increasing his hourly rate to $50.

Let’s say that Dan ended up increasing his rate instead to $75 per hour. That would mean he’d need to work about 1467 billable hours per year. If Dan works 40 weeks per year that would mean almost 37 hours a week of billable time. This doesn’t take into account time between jobs (it’s rare a freelancer is booked solid), other work that isn’t billable, bookkeeping, invoicing, etc – all of which Dan planned to do on his own. Oh and where will all these clients come from? Who will handle the pre-sales, sales and quoting? When we had a look at this, Dan certainly felt discouraged. But then it got worse when I pointed out a few things to him:

What if he gets the flu and is unable to work for a couple of weeks? What if one or both of the children are off school due to illness? These are things that do happen.

His game plan didn’t take into account saving for his children’s college fund. With his children being 9 and 11 years of age, it was something he needed to start planning for soon.

Although his wife’s financial contribution was nominal under their current game plan, one big thing she was bringing to the table was health care benefits for the family. What if her job didn’t go through or if she lost it due to lack of seniority?

Did Dan want to continue coding for the rest of his life – or even the foreseeable future? The problem with any kind of service-based business like this is that you are trading time for money. When you don’t work, you cease to continue earning money.

I think at this point Dan started to feel sick. It became blatantly clear that his business model sucked. His goals are more important to him than how he gets there.

Fortunately all was not lost. We were able to structure a new business model for him that should allow him to easily reach all of his goals in 2010 and over time allow him to continue to see increases in his income. Hopefully he’ll find himself with more free time too.

Dan’s original approach to starting a business is pretty common amongst most service providers and professionals. Trading time for money is a linear model. It’s simply not an entrepreneurial one. With rare exceptions, there are always ceilings to potential earnings.

In the next instalment I’ll be looking at other types of business models.

P.S. Name and personal information was modified to protect the client.

How to Get What You Want as an Entrepreneur

2009-05-20T00:22:00.005-05:00

Over the past 20 years, I have had the chance to have a glimpse at the inner workings of literally tens of thousands of businesses – ranging from one-person shows to many of the world’s largest companies. I’ve also built several successful businesses of my own – both online and offline. I don’t have all of the answers to what makes one business succeed while another fails. However, I do believe that the insight I have goes beyond what you could find in any single book, course or even a full business school program.

In June, I’ll be rolling out a coaching program geared to small business owners and start-ups. This will be the first time I’ve done something like this. I’m not doing it for the money. I can make money more easily doing other things. The last thing I want at this stage of my life is to have more work. I am just feeling frustrated with the preponderance of misinformation when it comes to doing business online. I know there are a lot of good, decent people out there that genuinely want to create a business of substance. I feel confident I can provide the keys to unlock the magic kingdom for these people. The focus will be on becoming a true entrepreneur as opposed to being merely a self-employed technician or professional.

Before the program is launched, I’ll be sharing some general thoughts via my blog and eventually through the program’s website. This will give people who may be interested in the program a better idea of what they can expect if they choose to participate. Unlike the actual program, the content won't be provided in any particular order; i.e. you can expect me to jump around a lot. :)

FollowFriday Rockstars May 15, 2009

2009-05-15T05:38:00.005-05:00

One of the things I love most about Twitter is how it can bring out the best in so many people. In my tweets I use "rockstar" quite a bit. I also blip a few songs about rockstars going out to my tweeps. To me a rockstar is someone who simply shines. Something beautiful and wonderful comes out from them. It is not about follower count. It's not about how often they tweet. It's not even really what they tweet about. It's about people that really help make Twitter what it is by simply being who they are.

Each week I try and share with everyone some people on Twitter I think are worth following & getting to know better. I am doing it this way because I think that a simple 140 character recommendation isn't enough. Like many others that use Twitter, I believe in quality over quantity. I hope that some quality contacts come from this. That you personally can find one or more people from this list that you can also become friends with, network with & maybe get to know a little bit better.

HalSparks - For my first time, I'm actually including a real life celebrity - and with good reason. I've known of Hal Sparks since his stint on E!'s Talk Soup. Since then, he's been a host for a number of different entertainment shows, played one of the main characters on "Queer as Folk," been in a rock band (and is a surprisingly great singer), done stand-up comedy and is now pretty active on Twitter. I've been following Hal for a while now. I think he's setting a great example of how a "personality" can use Twitter effectively and can communicate with their fan base. He actually does interact with people, DM's with those he follows back and "gets" it.

TPR2 - Terry is a genuine sweetie. Although a serious business man (more on that in a bit), like me, he believes that the best reward we can get is by bringing a bit of sunshine to other people's days. He's taken it a step further by starting MyHugClub. Terry's a feel good person that you can't help but like. He hails from New Zealand and has homes in 3 cities. Terry owns 2 Real Estate Agencies, 2 Mortgage Broking Firms, 2 insurance agencies and 2 Financial Planning Practices. He also builds homes for people as well. Lately he's been making the transition to web geek. Terry's a doting dad to two boys who he loves to bits: Alex who is 6 months old and Bailey (featured in his avatar) is 4 years old. If you want to network with a sharp man that is compassionate, look no further.

WiseLeo - Leonid and I connected over music, namely our mutual love of Sarah Brightman (although both of us have very diverse musical tastes). Leonid's a sharp guy and someone that I think is going places. He truly engages with his followers. He claims to be a world-class computer expert, and with 15 years of experience he probably is one. Among his many talents, he can take your laptop with a crashed hard drive and make it work "like it never happened (tm)". Leonid can also fix computers remotely when anti-malware programs do not work. Think about it before you accept someone's offer to return your computer to you "in a few days". When not solving computer puzzles, he writes insightful articles on how to use Twitter and entrepreneurship in general. Other interests include auto racing and dance. On Twitter, Leonid answers DMs and @replies fairly quickly. Oh, and he recently won Mashable's Twitter Tips contest so be sure to read those articles. One of his services is professional Twitter account management. Ask him anything, and he will probably have an answer for you or direct you to someone who can answer it. Lastly, Leonid is an accomplished public speaker who can explain highly technical matters in plain English.

ruhanirabin - Ruhani is a super sweet guy that I'm glad to be call a Twitter friend. He kids with me about me being the Queen of Twitter, but to me, he shows true loyalty to everyone - without ever expecting anything in return. He's the epitome of what a giver looks like on Twitter & in life in general. He's my hero. :-) Ruhani is originally from Bangladesh and is now residing in Malaysia. He is currently a Chief Tech Architect/Tech director at one of the topmost Interactive Agency in Malaysia. He has extensive knowledge in software and web development industry and related technologies. He is a technology evangelist and explorer. Ruhani likes anything related to web 2.0 and social media. Although he used to be a hardcore developer, he now manages people. He enjoys listening to mainstream rock - and ladies, he is single! (Psst... he has a great sense of humor and is also very respectful.)

vardenrhode - Vaughan has been enmeshed in design ever since he took his first computer art class while getting a BFA in Film Production from the University of Colorado at Boulder. What started as something of a hobby - opening title sequence design for his classmates in school - became a full fledged professional pursuit as the years passed. He's fueled by a driving passion for visual art, design, and color. He brings his life experiences, his instincts, and most importantly his passion into anything he does. If he's not out looking for beautiful things to be inspired by, he's probably watching a movie or writing a screenplay. Vaughan is currently located in Los Angeles, CA but would love to work with you no matter where you are. Vaughan is a super guy, uses Twitter to share links & communicate on a variety of subjects. He's not a time waster and focuses on quality over quantity. A no-nonsense kind of guy.

There are many other people I wanted to include on this list. But there's always next #FollowFriday for that :)

Of course, you're more than welcome to follow me too :) I tweet a lot. I try to interact with followers to the extent I can. I spin tunes at Blip.fm. I share links I think are interesting. I'm a news junkie, voracious consumer of information - much of it useless but that which amuses me in some way.

For information on what #followfriday is, you can read here.
For information on why I do this weekly list, you can read here

How to Share Music With Blip.fm

2009-05-07T17:09:00.004-05:00

Music really is life for me. It's what keeps me smiling through stressful work days and the ups and downs of regular life. It's what pulls me through a tough work-out. It's what gives me inspiration. If you're already one of my followers on Twitter, then you'll know that I enjoy sharing music with others. I feel Blip.fm makes sharing super easy to do & it fits well with the social aspect of Twitter too.

I haven't always blipped on Twitter. One day, I set up an account at blip.fm & didn't realize that the song I blipped would be broadcast through my Twitter account. Oops! I then started to blip on a regular basis. Some days now, I'll blip 20-30 songs through the day. I also host all-request Twappy hour Fridays at 5 pm Eastern/2 pm Pacific. In the first few days of blipping, I lost several hundred followers. Many long-term followers said they didn't "get it." That's okay - social networks like Twitter are there for us to use in a way that best serves our needs. It's not odd that people share music via MySpace and other social networks, why should it be any different with Twitter? Blipping has allowed me to connect with some great people that I'd likely not have met through normal Twitter usage.

I've had a few hundred followers that have joined Blip.fm because of my using it. I am now getting daily questions from people asking how it works, so I thought I'd take some time to explain some of the basics & give some tips based on personal experience.

Create An Account

http://blip.fm - If you've managed to create a Twitter account, you'll likely find it as easy to do so on Blip. Here are a few suggestions/tips:

Use the same user name that you use on Twitter. This will help you to avoid confusing people like me :)
When I joined, it made suggestions of recommended DJ's to listen to (Blip's equivalent of "following"). I ended up removing them within a few days since I found their tastes to be very different from my own. I prefer adding DJ's as I come across them.
To link to your Twitter account, you can go to "services". Although all songs you blip will be broadcast on blip.fm, you do have the ability to turn broadcasting to your Twitter stream on and off.
You can add a profile pic/avatar like you can on Twitter. The size requirements are a bit larger than what they are on Twitter. A friend added a border to my Twitter avatar so that I could use the same one on Blip.
Go through all of the tabs under "settings" so that you can decide whether to receive email notices, add your location, add your URL, etc.
If you opt to receive email notices (like I do), I suggest setting up an email filter in your email program so that the emails will go to a folder. I have my blip emails go to a Gmail account with the following filter: from:(noreply@blip.fm) Skip Inbox, Apply label "* Blip".

Basic Terminology

Blip: to share a song - similar to tweeting :)

Props: If you like a song someone else has blipped, you can give them props by clicking on the thumbs up icon (on the far right hand side under each blip) If someone blips you a song, it is polite - although not necessary - to give them props as a way of saying thanks. If you've opted for email notifications, you'll get an email when someone gives you props on a song. When you are logged in, you can also look at your Props list - this will show you who has given you props on which songs. This is useful for knowing what music your listeners like (if that matters to you).

Reblip: the equivalent of Retweeting. Unlike Twitter, credit isn't needed. If you reblip someone's song, they get credit for it. If you've opted for email notifications, you'll get an email when someone reblips your blips.

Playlist: You can create a playlist by clicking on the playlist icon in a blip box. (Unfortunately you can't search for a song and then add to playlist without blipping it first) A playlist is something more for personal use, although, like with any blips, you can reblip them.

Replies: When someone blips you a song (this is done by simply including your @username name), it will show up in your replies list. If you have opted for emails, you will also receive email notification of it. There is a replies link once you are logged in so you can see all of your replies.

Listeners: These are the people on Blip who are listening to your blips.

Favorite DJs: These are the people on Blip who you are listening to.

Note: If you blip someone and they use the same username on Twitter, they will see the song in their mentions at Twitter. Conversely if someone blips a song to you as a reply, it will show on Twitter in your mentions.

How to Blip

There are 3 basic ways you can can find music to blip:

1. You can search for songs using the search box. The format to use is to enter in the artist name followed by the song title. It does not need to be precise.

2. You can reblip others.

3. You can reblip your own songs.

Once you have chosen a song to blip, you will see a text box come up. You can enter what you want in that box. The format I generally follow is to include the artist - song title - and often usernames of others.

Important: Blip allows you to enter in more characters in the text box than what Twitter allows. It's important to make sure if you are also tweeting your blips to leave 39 or more characters otherwise the end will get cut off when it makes it's way to Twitter.

Basic How To

Your blip home page is located at http://blip.fm/username - for example mine is http://blip.fm/sharonhayes
You can see in your stream either all blips (all DJ's) or just your favorites.
To add someone as a favorite DJ, just click on the "listen to" button where their avatar is.
There is a bookmark & share icon in each blip box to use across many different social networks.
You can delete your own blips & remove blips from your playlist by clicked on the X (delete blip). I suggest doing this when you are aware that a song is no longer available.

Advanced Tips

Song availability & quality varies. Please make sure to test a bit of a song (using preview or play button) before blipping. You'll also find that many songs end prematurely. Some songs are also incorrectly labelled. There are a lot of covers that are labelled as if they are the original song.
There's a neat software tool called Blipster that makes blipping loads easier. It allows you to queue up a number of blips at one time. You can see length of songs and the file type so you'll have less chance of errors.
You can embed blips into web pages.
Blips can also be broadcast to FriendFeed & other services. You can set this up by going to Settings -->> Services.

Whew, I think I've covered all of the bases. Please feel free to leave comments below.

Don't forget to listen to me on Blip & follow me on Twitter

FollowFriday Rockstars May 1, 2009

2009-05-01T12:11:00.001-05:00

Tommytrc - Tommy is a genuine sweet guy. He tweets about a variety of subjects - with a nice mix of something for everyone. He also has to be one of the politest people on Twitter. In spite of having almost 9,000 followers, he really takes the time to show his appreciation to people. He's all about sharing and having him around, you can't help but feel good & smile. This father of 4 with one on deck due May 22 has worked in digital prepress for the past 20 years. Tommy is self taught in the printing industry as he went to college for business administration. When not chasing around his 23 mo old Emma or beating his other 3 kids, Tommy likes to do freelance web design, dote on his very pregnant wife and serve others through his church activities. His twitter bio says it all "Tech Geek, Prepress and Printing Guy, Mac Head, PC Guy Too, -- Overall Troublemaker - His motto to live by - Find out what sucks and don't do that!"

JeffreySummers - If you do business in any niche area and want to find out how Twitter can be used in an optimal way, Jeffrey is the best example I can think of following. For a consultant who is passionately focused on the restaurant business, Jeffrey is a very fun and accessible guy to talk to on just about any subject. You will find him tweeting or retweeting everything from a great recipe for someone’s favorite dish handed down from their great-grandmother to sparring with some of Twitter’s best and brightest marketing and blogging minds. Jeffrey is also extremely easy to talk to and openly follows everyone back that follows him and has an intriguing policy of answering every @ reply or DM sent to him by anyone – follower or not and with over 6,400 followers, is no easy feat! It’s also not uncommon to find Jeffrey satisfying his addiction to Twitter at all hours of the day and night. Some wonder if he ever sleeps. Whether it’s getting advice on operating a successful restaurant or small business or just trading really bad jokes, Jeffrey is a great guy to follow and hang out with around the Twitter water cooler.

KristofCreative - Kristof (first name Michael) is on the list of those whose tweets I read on a regular basis. Although he tweets on a variety of subjects, he is really good about finding links on SEO & web design. Kristof's agency provides businesses throughout the U.S. and abroad with successful advertising, design, marking and social media solutions. With over 18 years in the business, Kristof’s marketing and advertising work has been recognized with numerous awards and accolades, and drawn an international clientele including everything from Fortune 500 corporations, to Internet startups, from international venture capital firms, to sole proprietorship's. Kristof has an uncanny knack for merging his comprehensive Interner marketing, social media, and SEO techniques into a powerful tool which allows him to transform his client's websites and blogs into effective traffic and money generating properties.

OwenGreaves - Owen is from Abbottsford, BC and has a passion for technology and how it impacts our society. He tweets about these subjects, some social media topics and lots of general talk. He's a warm, open-hearted guy you can't help enjoying connecting with. Owen has over 15 years experience in management and technology consulting. He got his start in the technology field in the 80's when he was responsible for supporting an automation system for a radio station. After 12 years of Radio & Telvision in various roles including managing his own radio station, he left to pursue his passion of technology and ventured into consulting. He has worked in key verticals such as Manufacturing, Transportation, Music, and Retail. He is currently researching and writing a series on Nanotechnology. He also provides Social Media consulting, I.T. strategic planning and does some public speaking.

JoshuaDenney - Of everyone I'm including today, I'm struggling the most on what to say about Josh. If you already follow him and/or know him at all, you'd understand why I say this. Josh has a great sense of humor, enjoys a wide variety of music and has a brilliant mind. He makes music, has worked as a talent agent and now does kick ass web design and strategy. He's a fellow #nightowl and currently lives in Nova Scotia. To me, Josh is simply Superman. :) Follow him & you'll see why I recommend him.

BradGal - Ingrid is not only simply stunning but a wonderfully sweet woman. She tweets a lot (much retweets of interesting things she comes across) but also a good deal of conversation too. Professionally, Ingrid is an electrical engineer. She lives in WV. She loves cats & dogs, computers, entertainment, high tech, iPhone and poker. Ingrid's also a huge Brad Garrett fan :)

RoseHwang - Rose is like a rainbow in Twitterville to me. I love people who are genuinely about giving and making others smile. This is Rose to a tee. Rose is in Taiwan but wherever you are in the world, she will succeed at making you smile with something she says. She's just really good people and any words cannot do justice to the joy she brings to others. Rose works in International trading, Graphic Design, Fashion Design, Events and she is also working on Social Enterprise.

Reddsmitty - Kim is someone I'm just getting to know myself. Most of our exchanges have come about so far because of music. She's a very friendly woman with a mahvelous sense of humor.Kim is a sales & marketing diva with 10+ years experience helping businesses grow through better understanding of their customers, their brand, and their locations. Kim has experience helping businesses market more effectively across every channel (including social media!). Mom to three boys 4 and under this road warrior keeps a very busy schedule and still manages to blip, blog, and tweet. I'm not sure how she manages to do it all and keep those of us that follow her smiling :)

There are many other people I wanted to include on this list. But there's always next #FollowFriday for that :)

FollowFriday Rockstars

2009-04-17T13:03:00.008-05:00

One of the things I love most about Twitter is how it can bring out the best in so many people. In my tweets I use "rockstar" quite a bit. I also blip a few songs about rockstars going out to my tweeps. To me a rockstar is someone who simply shines. Something beautiful and wonderful comes out from them. It is not about follower count. It's not about how often they tweet. It's not even really what they tweet about. It's about people that really help make Twitter what it is by simply being who they are.

Last week, I introduced you to a dozen amazing women. This week I want to share with you an assortment of men from around the globe & with different interests and tweeting styles. Each of these men is truly unique. Hopefully after you read what I have to say about each of them, you'll find yourself wanting to follow some or all of them yourself.

Minervity - For the ladies reading this, the first thing you'll notice is Richard's avatar is simply hot. ;) For many of you, that many not be enough reason to follow him. Richard is simply one extremely cool guy & one of the nicest people you can come across on Twitter. He's one of a handful of people I check their tweets daily. Richard tweets on a variety of subjects. One of my favorite recent ones was a nice article on how to work through exhaustion - something many of us could use help with from time to time. Richard has a varied creative background. He started out a songwriter/producer when he was 12 & signed to Sony Music (he still writes & produces music for artists such as American Idol, Swedish, German Idol & Lutricia McNeal). To date, Richard has sold about 10 million albums. Over the past decade, Richard has been working as a graphic/logo/icon designer. He also programs & works with 3D, flash and database development.

IAmKhayyam - Khayyam is one interesting dude. The tweeting side of him is just one aspect of this really super guy I am proud to call my friend. This guy is truly a renaissance man. His wisdom spans across pretty much everything and he's quite phenomenal at all of them. There's something about him that just makes you want to connect with him. He has an amazing energy that you want to be a part of and witness. You know - the old soul in a young body feel? That's him. A connoisseur of all things fine, it trickles nicely over to his design work. He's a print and identity designer that will get you noticed. But to call him just a designer is limiting. The side projects that he's working on will be definitely something to watch out for. He's an idea man. A thinker. Someone who will challenge you in ways you never thought of.

BuySellDomains - John is an incredible sweetie. Someone I had come across before Twitter but has gradually becoming a friend. He really makes an effort to support his friends - which is an admirable quality in anyone. John does web site design and is gradually making his mark in the domain industry. He's interested in health issues & natural stuff. He also is an animal lover and proudly owned by one little kitty.

Arodomus - Arod may seem like a strange choice to include if you look at his stream. (If you are easily offended you may want to avoid his stream.) He's one of the early people I connected with on Twitter. He's a normal guy with a heart of gold that shares his day to day life in his tweets as opposed to someone that interacts. He's just someone I find myself wanting to cheer on as he gets himself back in shape & celebrates life every day. If you follow him, you can't help but start to find yourself cheering him on.

AndySowards - Andy is a doting dad to 3 beautiful kids, a loving husband to his wife, a great friend that you can rely on and a simply mahvelous tweeter. He’s a freelance web designer and the selfless provider of the Web Development Nerdy Daily Links; a huge collection of links, tips, resources, tutorials and inspiration that he collects and shares with web designers the world over, every day. Andy produces extremely high quality custom Web 2.0 sites, Web Applications, e-Commerce Solutions & Wordpress blogs. He's done work for my businesses & clients - top notch job. One client was so thrilled, he even wrote a birthday song when Andy finished up a job on his birthday :)

BrianCray - Brian is a super dooper all around nice guy. Someone I'm just starting to get to know. Brian is a web ninja with a mix of marketing and web development knowledge that will karate chop straight through 5 thick cardboard boxes. He uses his knowledge to help businesses with everything web 2.0. He is the guy behind Nearbytweets.com and pxtoem.com. Brian is working on a book that is due out later this year - something I can't wait to read & tweet about myself!

TonyBlakeLive - Tony's tweets can be a little out there at times. He has a wicked sense of humor. Tony was a friend well before Twitter. We reconnected after I found him on Twitter. What can I say about Tony? He is one of the original Internet gurus while avoiding the guru type mentality. He combines his expertise with mentalism with some kick-ass marketing expertise to be top notch. Beneath the tough outer shell, Tony is a real sweet, stand-up guy who is loyal to his friends and always willing to go the extra distance.

There are many other people I wanted to include on this list. But there's always next #FollowFriday for that :)

Of course, you're more than welcome to follow me too :) I tweet a lot. I try to interact with followers to the extent I can. I spin tunes at Blip.fm. I share links I think are interesting. I'm a news junkie, voracious consumer of information - much of it useless but that which amuses me in some way.

For information on what #followfriday is, you can read here.
For information on why I do this weekly list, you can read here

10 Things I Love About Twitter

2009-04-16T08:01:00.012-05:00

Are you following me on Twitter?

Haven't you noticed how the media & bloggers simply love Twitter? Even if many (most?) haven't figured out how to use Twitter effectively, they have discovered that any article or post about Twitter will result in traffic. Until recently most of the coverage surrounding Twitter has been positive. However lately it seems that about 1 in 3 are now harping on the negatives of Twitter without a true understanding of the awesome potential it offers people & organizations. I wanted to take some time to share some of the "good" stuff.

10 Things I Love About Twitter

1. The friendships. I have been able to make some amazing friends who I know I'd want to keep in my life even if Twitter disappeared tomorrow. For all that many say about friendships forged through social media being shallow & superficial, I have to strongly disagree.

2. So many interests, so little time. I have a voracious appetite for new information on a variety of different areas. I'm also a news junkie. I've been able to share information I come across with others. I've been able to connect with experts in areas which I'd never have otherwise had access to. The older I get, the more I realize how little I know, how precious time is and how much more I want to discover. Twitter helps fill a void in this respect.

3. It's there when I need it. When I have time between work & real life stuff, I can go to Twitter. Some days I have very little time to tweet. But it is there when I want it.

4. Getting answers & input fast. I've had at least a dozen cases where I've needed to get input on something or find out how to do something. Within minutes someone on Twitter has been able to come to the rescue.

5. Making an impact on others. I'm a firm believer that we are what we put out there. I try to live my life by doing "something" each day to brighten up other people's day. Twitter makes this very easy to do. Let's face it - there's a lot of negativity in the world. Every one of us has a rough day from time to time. Reaching out somehow to others to do something nice not only helps them feel better but also can make us feel better too. It's helped make me happier on a day to day basis because I really don't waste time now on the small stuff. Twitter flows with positivity.

6. Connecting with personal heroes. I've been followed first on Twitter by a number of people I consider to be personal heroes in business. One is a bit of a funny story. A few years back, I was at a dinner with friends. The dinner game of - if you could have dinner with anyone living or dead started. Someone before me mentioned Richard Branson. My next choice was Michael Tchong (he was a tremendous influence for me during my early years doing business on the Internet). I was excited to see he had followed me on Twitter and in my overabundance of enthusiasm, I tweeted about the dinner story. Michael responded, we've stayed connected & hopefully soon I'll be actually meeting him. Another personal hero of mine is Scott McKain. Scott is a business strategist with a unique take on what drives true customer service excellence in organizations. His best-selling books have had tremendous impact on the way I create and manage my businesses. I now regularly communicate with him because of Twitter.

7. Actual business. If you are one of my followers, you'll likely have noticed that I rarely tweet about my businesses. The only times I do are when someone asks me a question. Even then I try and have the courtesy to bring it to DM or an alternate communication method. In spite of this, Twitter generates a substantial amount of business for me. For one of my sites listed in my bio, I am getting anywhere from 5-14 new clients a day - just from Twitter. The lifetime value of clients gained from Twitter per day is averaging $3-4,000 right now. I've had over a dozen domain name sales as a result of Twitter. I've had several very nice size deals for various businesses I operate. The most recent of these is a $20,000 per month 1 year contract. I'm also working with a VC firm on domain valuations & acquisitions for companies they invest in.

8. Money connections. To date five venture capitalist firms have contacted me about investing in businesses I own. All of these contacts stemmed from Twitter. I'm not looking for investors right now, but to have these contacts for the future is invaluable. I've also made numerous contacts who are interested in passively investing in domain names.

9. New doors are opening. Some extremely exciting things have been happening that I could never have foreseen. I've been in talks with a large company to do a daily podcast. A radio station contacted me because of the music I tweet. They asked if I'd be interested in doing a regular show with them once a week. I've been invited to be a guest on many webinars/teleseminars. I have several interviews and guest posts for blogs lined up. I'm also working on a coaching program+workshop series to be held in a dozen different cities.

10. Deals get closed faster. When dealing with contacts made outside of Twitter, I'm finding that my Twitter reputation is enhancing my credibility - thus helping me close deals much faster. This goes both for prospective clients as well as partnerships/joint ventures. They know if I am "out there," I'm not going to risk my reputation over a single deal.

None of the above were benefits I had expected to get from using Twitter. They have all been pleasant surprises and definite reasons why I consider Twitter to be of high value for me. At the same time there are 3 reasons why I had wanted to become active on Twitter - all of which have materialized. I thought it may be worthwhile sharing these too:

1. Networking. I've been able to meet a lot of like-minded people, have traded business leads and have had some private "shop talk" which has been beneficial.

2. Recruiting. Finding talent is difficult. For both full-time and occasional staff, Twitter has proven to be invaluable. Like non-Twitter recruiting, not everything has worked out. But the ability to get an insight into the people I am considering hiring has been invaluable in pre-filtering candidates so that the relationship has a better chance of working.

3. Chronicling some of my life. Although I really don't micro-blog per se, I do share tidbits of what is going on in my life. I doubt I'll ever go back and read it all, but it's still "there" if I ever want to someday.

I'm not implying that anyone using Twitter will be able to benefit from these same 13 things as I have. That's the nice thing about Twitter - we each use it for our own reasons. How we use it helps define our own success. I just wanted to pull up the blind so you may have some idea of the potential that may be waiting for you.

One of the issues many people have about Twitter is that they feel it is too time-consuming. I spend a lot of time on Twitter. In under 4 months, I've accumulated well over 10,000 tweets. I probably average 15-21 hours a week on public tweets. I can appreciate for many small business owners that it is hard enough to find the time to do what needs to get done - never mind indulging in something as seemingly frivolous as tweeting. The key here is - to be able to leverage the power of Twitter, you need to have your business and life organized in such a way that taking advantage of an opportunity like this is possible. Personally, I have no doubt that the ROI on my time has been well worth it. This is part of the reason I will be conducting my upcoming coaching program & workshops - to help share with entrepreneurs & professionals how to strategize and systematize their businesses so that they can focus on what they do best in their business. Info on these programs will be coming up soon :)

Please feel free to share your own successes with Twitter in the comments.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter too :)

P.S. I'll be posting a follow-up to this next week on the "bad" to provide some balance.

FollowFriday Rockstars

2009-04-10T05:47:00.004-05:00

Today I want to celebrate & share with you some amazing women who I believe are each beautiful inside and out. I've tried to provide an assortment of women from around the globe & with different interests and tweeting styles. Each of these women is truly unique. Hopefully after you read what I have to say about each of them, you'll find yourself wanting to follow some or all of them yourself.

TasteLikeCrazy - Amy Tucker is my own regular source of comedic relief. She's Twitter's own Janeane Garofalo before Janeane went political. Her tweets are a combination of a hilarious look at the life of this blogging wife & mother and exchanges with her followers. I'm not sure if she realizes how great she is.

LollyDaskal - As beautiful a person inside as she is outside. Lolly is a uniquely talented artist. Her vocation is to help bring out the inner beauty of others by tapping into their spirit. She works with small business owners on mindset. Her avocation is her painting through which she lets us see a glimpse of who she is and how she sees the world.

MissNixs - You can't help but smile when you see her avatar float by on your stream. She's a "normal" person that is totally not normal. She has a delightful sense of humor, warmth and silliness all wrapped into one.

Potentiate - Wendy's bio reads: "Marketing. Psychology. History. Progressive. Liberal Elitist. Alternative Rock. Nature. Freethought. Dogs. Teens. Wine. TechBiz. Fitness" - that's just a start of the many subjects that she engages in. She's one smart chick & someone I'm looking forward to knowing better.

SusanPowers - Susan is one gorgeous, smart chick that I'm truly happy to call a friend. Her full-time gig is as a real estate agent. She's into raw foods big-time & working as establishing herself as a name for herself in that area. She will be big-time one day soon. She has the drive and determination. Oh and she's also a yogi :)

SharneseLaNier - Sharnese is someone I hope I can get to know better. She is an incredibly warm, generous woman. She's a work-at-home mom building her own empire in Internet Marketing, health and travel.

JuliaRosien - Julia is a breath of fresh air. She naturally brings joy to those that are a part of her world. Huffington Post missed out by not including her on the "hot women of Twitter." Julia's interests are in sharing green, natural and organic choices.

VanessaCobb - I almost left Vanessa off the list because I'd like to get to know her better before too many people find this treasure. Vanessa is an enthusiastic businesswoman, novelist, mother, friend and cat lover. Her company focuses on presenting seminars to people throughout Europe on the subject of motivation and helps her business clients communicate more effectively through spoken and written word.

Mistygirlph - I haven't had much personal contact with Misty but have to include her in this list for her continual generosity to the Twitter community. Misty gladly helps her friends and followers however she can. Since starting to blip recently, I feel I've gotten to know the woman a little better through her music. I hope to get to know her more. She's just the type of woman I'd love to be able to call a friend.

LoriMoreno - You can't be in Lori's world without feeling her warmth. A former corporate attorney who has made the transition to entrepreneur, Lori is making her mark on Twitter. She's a true rising star.

Kirsty_Wilson - Kirsty is a virtual assistant who loves travel. She's a genuinely friendly woman. Kirsty contributed a wonderful guest post to this blog on Twitter resources - just to help others out. She loves to travel & often tweets about it.

Girlstoys - If you see Ghada's avatar - the warm laughter shining on her face with her spirit showing through - that is a good representation of who she is. Her tweets run the gamut from movies to social media to general chitchat. She's a great pick me-up when you are having a tough time.

If you weren't listed, don't take it personally. This is just a handful of the hundreds of great women on Twitter that stand out to me. Get to know me better by interacting, sharing, exchanging and maybe you'll be one of my next FollowFriday Rockstars :)

Why I'm Changing How I Do #FollowFriday

2009-04-10T05:01:00.002-05:00

The FollowFriday game on Twitter is a lot of fun. I've previously blogged about how exactly it works.

The problem is - like almost everything good - the original purpose of it has gotten lost over time. Too many people are just generating bulk lists of recommends without any further explanation of it. Unless you are just chasing follower numbers, this really doesn't do very much good.

As my own follower count has skyrocketed, FollowFriday's have become more difficult. The last 2 weeks I spent most of my time just thanking those that recommended me. It's not that I don't appreciate it - I do. But it clogs up the stream for everyone if I tweet 100+ thanks containing a half dozen or more people. I'm having to change the way I handle this to both maintain my own sanity as well as to do my part to conserve the integrity of the original concept.

Each week I'll make an effort to prepare a limited list of people I really do recommend & who I can give a specific reason why I recommend them. I'll either blog or tweet about these people on Friday's. For the most part, I'll try and focus on what I consider to be undiscovered shining stars. People that just stand out to me for some reason. People I truly feel that at least some of you will enjoy your Twitter experience more by getting to know them.

I'll blog the list later. Meanwhile, for those of you that have recommended me for FollowFriday - huge thanks to you. I really do appreciate that you thought enough of me and enjoy my tweets enough to do so. :)

If you aren't already following me, you can do so here.

Useful Links to Twitter Statistics

2009-03-31T15:28:00.008-05:00

Today we have a guest post by Kirsty Wilson of http://www.interimbusiness.com.au/

You can also follow me on Twitter here.

Twitter is all about building connections with like-minded people and the focus is more about the individual rather than the business. However, it seems to be a fairly organic process that just naturally directs visitors to your website that are curious about the business behind the avatar and the personality.

In my short time tweeting I have discovered and utilise a number of links to review various statistics about my tweeting time; the ‘Followers’ I have attracted and the individuals I am ‘Following’. Here are some of my favourites and the information they provide:

http://tweetstats.com/ Displays your tweeting in a number of graph forms – a tweeting timeline can be viewed (since you commenced); your tweet density (days/time); Aggregate daily and hourly tweets; the top 10 Tweeters you reply to and the various interfaces you may use to Tweet.

http://twittercounter.com/ Displays much the same data as Tweetstats but also makes available the number of new Followers added in a day and the average growth per day. It will also make a prediction of how many Followers you will have the following day.

http://twitter.grader.com/ Displays where you are ranked out of all Twitter users world wide. (When writing this the total was 1,823,407). A ‘Tweet Cloud’ is also present. A ‘Tweet Cloud’ for those that do not know, is a list of dominant feature words you have used in your posts. It will also present you with a grade out of 100 and lists a number of ‘Suggested Folks to Follow’.

http://twitterholic.com/ Displays your ranking by Followers and then your ranking for your location. You can see where other local Tweeters fall within the rank.

http://mytweetcloud.com/ Displays all dominant #hashtags used during your posts. By adding a hashtag to any word or phrase, will allow real time tracking. For example some that I use frequently include #followfriday #travel #business #virtualassistant and you can search for other Tweeters that are tweeting the same topics. It’s a great way to find new Followers and make connections. Note: this site appears to be currently down.

http://twitter-friends.com/ Displays your relevant network and some stats about your tweeting behaviour compared to other Twitter users. It provides a list of the top 10 people you reply to and the top 10 people that reply to you. It clearly defines who is part of the ‘gang’!

http://www.twitalyzer.com/ Displays your activity in percentages over 5 categories, being - influence, signal, generosity, velocity, clout (How this is measured and the definition of each can be seen in detail visiting the above mentioned site)

http://twitterratio.com/ Displays the Twitter Ratio and is the ratio of your followers to friends (or people who you follow). It is measured with the TFF Ratio (Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio). The higher the ratio, the more Twitter heat you pack.

http://happytweets.com/ Displays a happiness score and a short description as to your happiness or maybe, unhappiness! Generally, a Tweeter with a score of 700 plus are the happiest Tweeters and the least happy, will display a score of 100 or below. My score for some time has hovered around 560 ‘Ridiculously Happy’!

Lastly, I wanted to share the fact that I analyse my own Website statistics and during the 3 months I have been involved with Twitter, the traffic to my website has almost doubled. The pages that were once viewed the most (Home & About Us) has had a huge shift to the ‘Services’ page being viewed significantly more than it ever has during the past 3.5 years and there has been a large increase in the number of visitors ‘saving to favourites’. “Social Media is truly awesome!”

About Kirsty
Kirsty Wilson, established Interim Business Solutions in 2005 when a need was recognised that small businesses and professionals were wishing to access virtual, temporary or ongoing administration support that allowed them to develop a close working relationship with the one service provider, without having to go down the path of employing some one. With more than 18 years experience across all areas of Business Administration, Kirsty believes she is extremely well equipped to deliver high level support offering a range of services. You can follow/thank Kirsty for this great list on Twitter here.

FollowFriday On Twitter

2009-03-20T00:29:00.013-05:00

Each Friday brings a fun "game" to Twitter called FollowFriday. With the number of Twitter newbies who follow me each week, inevitably at least a few people will ask me what the FollowFriday is all about.

The aim of FollowFriday is to share with the Twitter community which tweeps you enjoy following. Of course, it can help you find new people to follow too. One of the biggest benefits for those that participate is that they can pick up a good number of new followers.

When I was newer to Twitter myself, I used it primarily as a way to find interesting people. I find that most people recommended by others are conversational in nature. Now that I have a sizable follower base myself, I participate to help my followers out.

The game was started by @micah as a way to suggest just a person or two. Most of those who participate tend to recommend more than just one or two.

How does this work?

Hashtags are used on Twitter to enable others to search on specific topics. You simply add "#" before the word/term without a space.

#followfriday is specifically what should be used in tweets relating to FollowFriday.

Note: If you are using TweetDeck, one of the recent updates will automatically include hashtags used in a tweet if you hit reply on a tweet where a hashtag such as #followfriday is used. For web access and for other Twitter apps, you would need to enter it manually.

How to find others

There are 2 ways you can find others recommended with #followfriday:

1. In the Twitter search box type #followfriday - this will display all results across Twitter. You can also click on this link:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23followfriday

2. You can look at the tweets of those you already follow. I think this is a preferable route to go since you probably already have things in common with those you follow, so it's likelier that the recommendations will have at least something in common with you too.

How to recommend others

There are 2 common ways that Twitter users recommend others.

1. They will send a tweet recommending a single person. For example:

#followfriday @sharonhayes because she is really cool

Go ahead, copy and paste that into your tweet box ;)

2. They will send a tweet recommending a bunch of people at one time. For example:

#followfriday @sharonhayes @designmeme @andysowards @Minervity @styletime @iamkhayyam @unmarketing

Again, feel free to go ahead and copy & paste that into your tweet box ;)

Some tracking sites do count #ff and not just #followfriday but for the sake of helping others search on recommendations, it is a good idea to use the full #followfriday hashtag.

Notes: Try and remember to use the proper hashtag - #followfriday - since that will help with the search aspect. Also remember to put the @ in front of the person's user name. Finally, remember NOT to start the tweet with @username but instead with #followfriday since only that person + people following that person will see it - defeating the purpose of making a recommendation.

How to find out who has suggested you

Since FollowFriday recommendations are rarely done as @replies, it's a good idea to take a peek to see if anyone has suggested you. If you are using TweetDeck, they should show up in your @replies column. If you use Tweetie, you can go to your profile page and there is a link to search from there. If you are using the web, you can put @yourname in the search box.

Remember to be courteous

In my opinion, it's a matter of courtesy to say thank you to those who have recommended you. After all if they are taking the time to suggest you to their own followers, it should get at least a nod.

How you handle this is at your discretion. I used to DM (direct message) people. Then I would tweet a list of those who have suggested me and include the #followfriday hashtag. Something like this:

Thanks for the #followfriday @designmeme @andysowards @Minervity @styletime @iamkhayyam

Now with the volume of thanks I need to do I tweet songs to people who have recommended/retweeted me during the week.

Resources

There are some sites that have sprung up that look at #followfriday recommendations.

http://nearbytweets.com/search/followfriday - is a nice tool that will show you people suggested by others that are geographically near you.

http://www.topfollowfriday.com - provides daily ongoing counts for all users suggested by someone for the first time. It does not count duplicate, it does not count #followfriday lists that start with @user, it does not count tweets containing RT.

http://www.boxuk.com/followfriday/ - updated every 15 minutes on Friday. Counts duplicates from what I can see but does not include suggestions that contain RT (retweet).

http://www.tweeplerank.com/ - a ranking service that shows #followfriday #mrtweet recommends and #tweepletuesday. Like Topfollowfriday.com, it does not count recommendations including RT and if it starts with @username, it seems that the first person is not counted. Duplicates do not count.

http://www.followfridays.com - provides live #followfriday feed

Note: these sites only track where #followfriday tag is specifically included.

http://thetwittertagproject.com/followfriday.php - a site that allows you to autogenerate #followfriday recommendations based on those you have most recently communicated with. Note: I'd suggest you review the list before just tweeting it :)

Hope this helps you! Please feel to follow me too :)

P.S. The tweets provided above were for simply for the purpose of providing an example. :)

P.P.S. - I have made some changes myself to how I am handling FollowFriday. Please read about it here.

Twitter Gaming & How It's Costing Everyone

2009-03-04T02:31:00.009-05:00

Warning: This is a bit of a rant.

I am getting sick and tired of the gaming for numbers I am seeing on Twitter. Before it was people that would follow as many as Twitter limits allow...

Twitter allows you to follow up to 2000 people. At that point, you can only follow 10% more than are following you.

... that was one thing. It didn't put a lot of "stress" on the system and wasn't a huge manipulation tactic.

The more recent trend is one that I personally find disturbing - and I'm not the only one. I'll explain what the trend is and then share why I think it is costing everyone.

Some people have figured out an "easy" way to game the system. Basically it is to bulk unfollow existing followers and then bulk follow new ones. Presumably the people doing this believe that a couple of things will happen: a. new people they follow will be "impressed" and a good percentage will follow back and b. that the people they unfollow won't notice they have been unfollowed.

Why is this a bad thing? Let me count the ways...

1. I have no idea how many people are doing this across Twitter. However, between myself and a few others I've communicated with who have noticed the same shenanigans, we've found at least 30 reasonably high profile people (high profile meaning a considerable follower base). But let's say that there are 500 people doing this and are unfollowing/refollowing in batch an average of 5,000 followers at a time. Yes, Twitter can handle a lot but how much of a drain is this putting on system resources? Keep in mind, it's not just the resources needed for the follows/unfollows but the follow emails that go out, people going to look at follower pages, and so on.

2. It's misleading to Twitter users. You look at one of these profiles and say to yourself - oh they follow back every one that follows them. For the most part, people engaging in this behavior try to keep the numbers balanced. There are also some that have been gaming Twitter who - after reaching a certain magical threshold number of followers - have made a big stink about how hard it was to keep up with all the people they were following so they were no longer going to follow everyone. The other aspect of this is that it gives false "social proof" of these Twitter users when looking at their follower count alone.

3. At least a few of these people are using their Twitter high follower counts to add credibility to whatever it is that they do. I don't know how you feel, but to me this is tantamount to faking testimonials.

4. Twitter is a fantastic networking tool and a great way to meet people you may not have otherwise. It's a superb way to stay in touch with others. But one thing that is crucial to Twitter's continued growth is the authenticity of it's users. Gaming the system in this way diminishes authenticity.

5. People are getting hurt by the unfollowing. I've had a few people tell me they were upset that so and so unfollowed them - especially since they had had communication etc. I've had it happen to me as well. It's hard not to take it personally in some cases.

6. Then let's not forget the time being wasted with this. Let's say the numbers above hold up. That would be 2,500,000 bulk follows a day. How long does it take to check out a new follower? 30 seconds? That works out to 20,833 hours a day being lost to gaming. Let's lowball the productivity of each person impacted to $20 per hour. Over $400,000 a day. Still think it's not an issue?

What isn't surprising to me is that these people have been smart enough to find out some way to game the system yet they don't realize that literally everything they do on Twitter is tracked somewhere or is trackable. You can get an instant snapshot through various sites like FriendorFollow.com to see who is gaming. You can backup someone's following/follower list and compare it on a day to day basis. There are sites like Twitterholic.com that show trends of how many followers/following any individual has had.

Here are some takeaways you can derive from this:

1. Don't hold much credence in a Twitter user's follower count. You may be shocked to learn who some of the people engaging in this behavior are.

2. Follower count really doesn't matter. Some of the sharpest people I know on Twitter have fewer than 1,000 followers.

3. If you are gaming the system now or are considering doing it & you are in business for the long haul, consider the potential damage to your reputation that can be done if/when you get called out on it. People are getting called out now. Your actions are being recorded. Is it really worth sacrificing your reputation in the long haul?

If I sound bitter in any way about this, I'm not and have no reason to be. I have close to 12,000 followers at the time of writing this. All but 30-40 were gained in just over 2 months time by using Twitter in an ethical and responsible manner. I tweet on a variety of subjects, I engage in conversations, I retweet, I try and help others when I see I can and I share worthwhile/ entertaining links I come across. I make an attempt to answer DM's. I have a very busy life yet I can handle this without resorting to tactics. I've made several dozen incredible contacts - both of a business and personal nature. The time I've spent on Twitter has been more than worthwhile when I consider just the new business I've gained. I know that I'm building a solid network with what I'm doing.

Follow me on Twitter

How To Boost Launch Sales During A Recession

2009-02-28T03:06:00.002-05:00

If you do any marketing online, you'll probably know that product launches can be a fantastic way to drive immediate sales. In a nutshell a launch helps build momentum for the release (or sometimes re-release) of a product. Over the past few years product launches - especially in the Internet Marketing circle - have become more popular since the release of Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula. Even if you aren't in a position to leverage a network of joint venture partners and/or affiliates, treating a marketing campaign as a launch can have a much larger impact than focusing on a trickle of sales. I want to share with you one very simple technique you can make use of in your next launch which could potentially mean hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands in extra profits.

Before I share this technique, I want to provide you with some additional information so you can be of an appropriate mindset...

Here are just a few of the many reasons that product launches work as well as they do:

It allows you to better engage a potential buyer and through the sequence of a series of marketing messages be able to chip away at their potential objections as lot as their interest remains.
A strong human need is wanting to feel a part of something. Becoming the excitement associated with a launch day can help fulfill this desire. This is especially true when you have a solid name within a well defined market/niche.
There is often scarcity associated with launches - i.e. there are only X number of the product available at this price. Perhaps you may be increasing the price. Maybe you might never offer the product again. The scarcity approach helps drive the urgency.

So let's say you've taken someone through the product launch cycle. You've chipped away at their objections. The price of your product is not an issue. You've done such a great job with marketing, they are completely sold even before your sales page goes up. But on launch day, one small thing stops them from buying. One little thing that even months ago may not have been an issue but with today's economic crisis it is. You miss out on not one sale but potentially 20% or more of what you did generate.

Even if you are one of those optimists that are harping that the economy isn't affecting you - you need to keep in mind that no matter what you are telling potential buyers during your pre-launch, no matter how sold they are, no matter how affordable your product is for them - they just may just not be able to pay today.

Credit card companies are restricting credit limits. With some companies increasing fees, many consumers are cutting back on the number of credit cards they have. Consumers with cash flow problems are turning to using their credit cards more and more for routine purchases. Many consumers are losing credit cards period and being forced to use debit cards in lieu of credit cards (meaning the money has to be in their bank account at the time of ordering).

All of these things add up to a situation where at least some portion of your potential buyers not being able today because of not having access to sufficient funds on a credit/debit card. If you are dealing with higher ticket items - which I'd consider to be $50+ in today's economy - it will likely be more of an issue for you.

Many Internet marketers have borrowed from traditional marketing the idea of offering split payments. For example, with a product costing $1797, they may offer the option of 4 payments of $497 spread 30 days apart. This strategy is especially useful during a recession, but it doesn't deal with the issue that the buyer still needs to pay $497 today. $497 which they may not have access to on a credit card on the day of launch.

There is a simple alternative: offer buyers the ability to submit their credit card information today but they will only be billed/have their product shipped/delivered in 2 weeks time.

From a technical side, if you have your own merchant account, you may want to say $1 will reserve their product. This will allow you ensure that the credit card information provided is valid. If you are using Paypal, you can create the product as a subscription item.

I have a client that has multiple sites in the same niches. (Opening "competitive" sites in the same niche is one of most effective ways of dominating a niche.) He will often launch second tier priced products in the same niche a few weeks apart. Same product with slightly different packaging and marketing geared to the differentiation of that site. He had a full schedule of second tier products to be launched in 2009 and was concerned with how the economy would affect sales. I had suggested he do a side by side comparison in one niche to see whether or not the deferred payment would make sense.

The last week of January he launched a $147 product to one subscriber base in a niche (Market A). He had slightly modified the product for positioning to a more upscale market at $197 to another subscriber base in the same niche (Market B). Traditionally this market was less price resistant. This was launched this past week. All those who received marketing messages for either campaign consisted of people who had either opted-in or made prior purchases from the respective sites.

With the exception of differences in marketing/positioning for Market A and Market B, all of the following held true:

The pre-launch sequence was the same
The sales page URL was the same
The sales page content was the same

All that changed for either group was that the pricing component varied. A cookie was placed on the computer of a visitor upon their first visit. This ensured that the same visitor would see the same offer. Otherwise, two different pricing option sets were equally rotated amongst visitors:

Pay up front or 3 equal installments
Pay up front, 3 equal installments or reserve today for $1 with $147 charged in 14 days

Here were the results for Market A:

$147 upfront, 3 payments of $57 or $1 now with $147 due in 14 days.
38,104 subscribers mailed
6,312 subscribers in pre-launch sequence
Soft-sell message sent to only those subscribers NOT in pre-launch sequence day of launch - 34,692
Total mailed on launch date: 41,004
Unique visitors to sales page: 9,819
4901 viewed no deferred option - 192 orders @ $147 and 167 orders @ 3 payments
4911 viewed deferred option - 184 orders @ $147, 171 orders @ 3 payments and 162 orders @ deferred payment
3 deferred payment orders were declined upon processing

Total gross sales with no deferred option: $56,781

Total gross sales with deferred option: $89,830

* Obviously this doesn't take into account charge backs, returns, and potential rebill issues with those opting for the 3 payment option.

I have to admit, I was shocked when I saw the numbers myself. I had expected that it would boost overall sales by enough of a percentage to make it worthwhile. But I had also expected that some buyers that would have opted for the 3 payment option would have gone for the deferred option as well. That didn't happen. My client and I both thought this was an anomaly. Sometimes randomizing simply doesn't work. However, when the same thing was done with Market B - keep in mind here that it is targeting a group where buyers are known to be less sensitive to price than Market A was - the outcome was almost identical. (A slightly higher percentage of buyers in Market B opted for payment in full.) Since the launch for Market B was only done a matter of days ago, we won't know whether or not declined payments will be an issue.

My client is sold enough on this concept that for any tangible products he will be selling for the next several months using the launch method, he will be offering a deferred payment option without split testing it further.

Can this strategy work for you? First, something like this will only work when using a launch method or special promotional effort. There is really not much point in using it for ongoing market efforts. Second, I think this would work best when tangible products are involved. For ebooks, membership sites, e-training, etc, converting this method would amount to a free or $1 trial. Trial offers do work well, but my own experience has been that you get a lot of freebie seekers - i.e. people who will sign up with the intention of cancelling before they are billed - and people that will go through what they can and then cancel. This method works fine when content is "dripped" but if all information is provided upfront, you are likely to see overall revenue lowered.

Auto DM's Killed The Twitter Star - Or Did It?

2009-02-25T21:07:00.006-05:00

In case you don't use Twitter or are newer to Twitter lingo, auto DM's refers to automatic Direct Messages. Direct messages are one-to-one communications between 2 Twitter users. You cannot send a Direct Message to another user unless they are following you. There are a few services that allow you to have direct messages sent to new followers automatically. Marketers think auto DM's are great but many Twitter users see this as the Twitter equivalent to spam. In fact, many spammers will create Twitter accounts for the express purpose of getting followbacks so that these auto DM's can be sent to users. Note: don't get any wild ideas about doing this - Twitter is pretty quick to close down such accounts.

If you are an active user on Twitter, you may have noticed that several Twitter users with decent size followings have bulk unfollowed just about everyone and are selectively refollowing people. Each one has given different reasons as to why they are doing it but many have attributed the glut of auto DM's as being at least part of the reason. I don't know what the numbers are across Twitter but I've seen myself that somewhere between 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 new Twitter followers use auto DM's. If these numbers hold true for most high profile Twitter users - basically that means getting 20 to 35 or so DM's for every 100 new followers. If you are getting 100's or 1000's of new followers a day this can add up.

The thing is - auto DM's really don't need to be an issue for anyone. A couple weeks ago, I was really getting fed up with them myself. I have enough trouble dealing with tens of thousands of emails per day, nevermind getting 2-300 auto DM's on some days. I did some homework, did 2 simple things and now my DM inbox is virtually free of auto DM's. Yours can be too.

Here's what I did:

Socialtoo allows you to automatically block any auto DM's being sent from their service. Just create an account and on your preferences page, you can choose to have auto DM's blocked. Bonus tip: I get really annoying with people who follow then will unfollow as soon as I've followed back. To save myself some grief, I use Socialtoo's autofollow feature, will filter new follow emails until I can manually check new followers and also use Socialtoo to block my account from automatically following those that will unfollow upon follow.

Tweetlater is another service that sends out auto DM's. If you follow this link it will give you simple instructions on how to stop auto DM's from being sent to your Twitter account.

I get anywhere from 100 to 600 new followers a day. I used to sometimes get up to a couple hundred auto DM's in a day. Now I get maybe 10-20 unpersonalized DM's a day from new followers. I don't know about you, but I think that is a rather significant difference.

One of the nice things about Twitter is that it is up to each of us as individuals to decide how we want to use it. This goes to what we tweet, how often we tweet and of course, our our decisions as to who we wish to follow back. Some of us choose to follow everyone back that follows us, some of us choose to follow more selectively, some will follow based on our own needs rather than who is/isn't following us. I personally have a hard time buying the reason that someone has chosen to unfollow everyone based on DM's alone. You can deal with auto DM's as I've suggested above. You can choose to ignore DM's entirely & provide people with other ways of contacting you.

I've made some fantastic business and personal contacts through Twitter that I may not have otherwise. For the most part, the best contacts have been kicked off with DM's rather than simply tweeting public exchanges. Some of the better business contacts have been with people that don't tweet themselves and who follow others very selectively. It's really difficult for us to know in advance the true value of any individual and how they may enrich our lives in some way or how we may enrich the lives of others.

Update on 03/01/09 - Socialtoo has now removed the auto DM functionality from it's service entirely. Unfortunately I've now started to see auto DM's come in from elsewhere. Spammers are quick to find new methods.

Will I Meet You In Vegas?

2009-02-25T01:07:00.003-05:00

My apologies for a third post on PPC Classroom. If PPC/affiliate marketing is of no interest to you, then just scroll down - lots of other things below.

I signed up myself for PPC Classroom. I was really pleasantly surprised to see that you get immediate access online to the contents of the DVD plus a ton of bonuses and tools. Basically you can get started right away. The only cost for the program is the shipping & handling.

As I mentioned in a previous post, when you sign up, you will also get a free ticket to their Vegas event at the end of May. I love Vegas, so it's a good excuse to go there.

Let me know if you'll be attending!

Orders for PPC Classroom have been moving pretty swiftly. I'm not sure when they will be shutting it down so if you've been on the fence or want to know more, I suggest taking a serious look at it now.

P.S. We're experimenting on our side with different simple sites - one we just put online coincidentally is a Vegas Guide. No aff/CPA stuff there yet.

What is PPC Classroom about?

2009-02-23T13:31:00.004-05:00

After my last blog post, I had a few people who had read it and pointed out I didn't explain what PPC Classroom was. One even asked what PPC meant. My bad. I should have explained more.

What PPC Is

If you go to Google, Yahoo, MSN or virtually every search engine, you will see ads returned when you perform a search. Advertisers create ads and place bids on various search terms at an individual search engine. The bids are what the advertiser is willing to pay per click. PPC = pay per click.

What Affiliate Marketing Is

Affiliate marketing is where a business rewards an individual or company for sending them traffic, leads or actual buying customers. These individuals and companies are called affiliates. The business providing the reward are called merchants. Affiliates get this result by sending visitors from their website, blog, newsletter etc to a merchant's website. Many affiliates also engage in arbitrage.

What Arbitrage Is

Arbitrage is when you find gaps in pricing and take advantage of it. It's basically buying at a low amount and selling at a higher amount.

What PPC Arbitrage Is

PPC arbitrage is when an individual or company looks for affiliate opportunities where greater commissions can be earned than the cost of utilizing PPC advertising.

What PPC Classroom Is

Now that we have the basics out of the way for those of you newer to affiliate marketing & PPC, I'll give a brief rundown on what PPC Classroom is.

PPC Classroom launches Tuesday, February 24 at noon Eastern US time. When you sign up, there is a small shipping & handling fee, otherwise it is free. You receive 3 things:

1. A DVD containing an interview that goes over the program & the full 9 module program. Topics covered include:

How to pick a winning affiliate offer to promote
How to conduct keyword research
How to construct effective PPC campaigns
How to monitor and optimize PPC campaigns

Once again, although the information is geared to those using affiliate programs, much of it can also be useful for any type of PPC advertising.

2. A set of landing page templates to use for your offers.

3. A free ticket to the PPC Classroom live event taking part in Las Vegas May 28th-30th.

There is a catch, albeit a tiny one: you will be enrolled in their monthly program which gives you access to a PPC mastermind, an advanced module each month, monthly webinar and some other things to help continue your learning. You can cancel at any time - even right after ordering the free program.

Hope this helps!

PPC Classroom

2009-02-23T11:21:00.006-05:00

It seems that every time a new program is launched in the world of Internet marketing, I'll get a bevvy of emails from clients, associates and friends asking for my take on it. The latest questions surround the (re) launch of PPC Classroom.

Anik Singal and Amit Mehta are the guys behind it. I haven't had personal dealings with Amit, but I've known Anik from a distance and really believe he is not only a class act but have seen firsthand he is driven by the idea of helping others.

I know several people that signed up with PPC Classroom v.1. They, and their results, fall into various categories as can be expected. One of these people signed up because she was interested in learning more effective PPC strategies. She is not an affiliate marketer but has her own line of products and several sites. She also has an affiliate program of her own and wanted to be able to give better advice to her affiliates who use PPC for promotion. She has been very happy with the results and the knowledge she gained. I know a couple of people who promote CPA offers rather than traditional affiliate deals. Again, they were happy with the results. A couple of others I checked back with said they had no results but they hadn't actually either gone through the materials never mind followed the advice. Granted this is a rather small sampling but Anik & Amit have many, many people who have come forward with assorted testimonials of their success. I've yet to see or hear of anyone that actually followed the program who didn't see results. It's like anything else though, if you don't take action, you won't see results.

Anik & Amit have released 2 very interesting things - both of which are entirely free. The first is a report that gives the 5 fatal flaws most people make with PPC/affiliate marketing. If you do any kind of PPC advertising, I recommend reading it. Just one part of it - about how you select keywords - can have a huge impact on your results if you make this mind shift.

The other thing they have made available is a recording of a webinar they did. I did not personally attend/view it. However, my business partner did. He took notes and shared them with me. The webinar gives a really good overview of using PPC advertising in affiliate marketing. For many people, the webinar on its own may provide enough information to get started. One part of it deals with how to adjust your bids on ads - and that alone can be the difference between the success (or failure) with PPC advertising.

The basic part of the program will be made available for free. There will be an upsell to an going monthly membership program (that is reasonably priced as compared to similar programs). In my opinion, it's a no brainer. At least check out the 2 free things I mentioned above and then you can make your own decisions from there when PPC Classroom launches.

How I'm Staying Organized in 2009

2009-02-19T05:16:00.006-05:00

I'm definitely not a Microsoft product fan but this year I've actually come to use and love one of their products - OneNote.

Basically OneNote works like a notebook. You can create Section, Section Groups, Pages and Subpages. You can add links, copy webpages, audio, video - basically whatever you want in there.

My computer desktop used to be a mess. I used to add shortcuts to webpages I wanted to go back to, would download files to the desktop, have folders for things I was working on there. Basically all the "stuff" I didn't want to forget about went on my desktop. Needless to say that over time it made it impossible to find what I needed (defeating the purpose of putting it there) and it also would slow down my computer.

At the start of 2009, I decided to start using OneNote instead of my desktop. I'm actually putting files in proper folders now and am no longer saving shortcuts. Everything is going in OneNote instead. I'm not only able to find things quickly, but I'm also saving time AND getting things done.

I'll share the way I am using it. Maybe it can give you some ideas:

* I created a new OneNote called Projects. This is my default one so that whenever I open up OneNote, it will open where ever I was last in Projects.

* I have a section called "To Do's". Within this section, I have a page called "Timed". This is where I put all upcoming appointments. I have a page called "Miscellaneous" where I just dump stuff in that I need to get done at some point and don't have a time/date for it yet. I then have a bunch of sub-pages - one for each day of the week. On these sub-pages, I create mini areas where I group everything I need to do by category. For example, I have one category for "Financial", another for "Domains" etc. This allows me to move a full category forward to another day or just individual tasks if need be. When I am waiting on something from someone else, I will highlight the item. I also drop links in for sites I want to go back and check into a relevant area.

* I have a section called "Staff". On the main page, I keep a summary status page so I know anything major going on with individual people. One look at that a day tends to be sufficient. I then have a page on each person where I keep a general log of communications. This is linked to from the summary page.

* I have Section Groups for Domains, B2B websites, Websites and Ideas. Within each Section Group, I have a section for each site/area. The main page for each site/area will give a snapshot look - often providing a timeline. On a weekly basis, I do a quick revision of each section and make sure the relevant tasks are linked to from my daily planners. Typically when I get one thing done from my daily planner, I'll then add the next item. But the weekly recap helps me make sure that things that get dumped in there for future reference don't get "lost". The Ideas section is a great way for me to organize ideas I have that aren't close to being actually worked on. I typically will dump in relevant research links, links on my computer to documents I've downloaded, contacts etc in the appropriate section.

Internally, we're still using Central Desktop accounts. I'll share more about how we are using this at another time. Although Central Desktop is a great tool & I wouldn't want to be without it for collaboration purposes, for the variety of things I need to get done/stay on top of, it was just taking too much time for it to be efficient.

Being Security Conscious Online Take 2

2009-02-09T04:12:00.004-05:00

One of my previous posts about being security conscious focused primarily on passwords. After that post & sending my client newsletter out, I received a few interesting emails that raised another huge issue: the amount of personal information people are now sharing online.

Let me recount what happened with each of these people so you can understand some of the dangers. Names & specific details have been changed to protect privacy.

Marie provides a business to business service. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and travels a good deal. She is married with no children. Her husband traveled recently with her to a weekend conference in the South. They returned home on a Sunday night to find that their house had been broken into. She had both blogged and tweeted before leaving that her husband would be going with her. Perhaps it was a mere coincidence. But she feels certain now that she made a mistake advertising to the world that their home would be empty for 3 days.

John was in Vegas for a conference a couple of months ago. He's a snapshot crazy person. Takes pictures of everything and uploads them online. He had secured a suite with a cool room number at a hotel and took a picture of the door & room number which he then put online. John relayed online that he was going to a show. His hotel room was broken into - his laptop and other valuables were stolen.

Jamie is a single girl that blogs about her day to day life. She uses a pseudonym online. She had felt she was pretty safety conscious in terms of not revealing personal information. Her domain name was registered using privacy. She had mentioned several times in her blog posts that she lived alone and the city she lived in. One day she mentioned going to see a specific movie with friends at a repertoire theater. A movie that was only playing at one location at one time in her city. As she put her key in her door upon arriving home, a man jumped her and attacked her. He repeatedly referred to her by her pen name. He had apparently followed her home from the movie.

Facts:

Social Media usage is increasing
Many SM sites allow you to find users based on location or to search sites for references to areas/events/etc
The economy is in a pretty bad state as we all know and it's going to get worse before it gets better
Crime is on the rise

I'd suggest taking some time to review your own online habits & see what you can do to ensure your own security. If you see your friends, loved ones or associates revealing too much, let them know gently. (Perhaps refer them to this post.)

2009 Listcast.com Live

2009-01-12T02:41:00.005-05:00

We just had a major update to our email marketing service http://www.Listcast.com go live. The service continues to be not only one of the most affordable services but also has one of the best deliverability rates in the industry. Our backend was a finalist again in the 2008 ClickZ.com annual roundup for Email Marketing.

Our parent company has been in the email marketing services industry since 1998. During this time, we've provided reliable service for over 10,000 lists. Our company was created by people with marketing and customer service backgrounds. Our focus is on providing clients with exceptional support. We pride ourselves on closing 99.9% of support tickets within 3 business hours and have staff coverage 24/7 - even on holidays.

You can sign-up for a free account to test drive the service. This is also ideal if you are just launching a new site where it might take you some time to put all of the pieces together. When you're ready to upgrade, just let us know. I'm sure you'll be tickled pink at how robust our system is for the low pricing.

We offer free webinars to new clients using the service. Just let our customer support department know you are interested in attending one, when good days/times are for you and we'll get you connected.

Being Security Conscious Online

2009-01-06T06:18:00.002-05:00

I'm working on my next client newsletter and will be writing about security online. The newsletter isn't actually due out for another 2 weeks so I wanted to share some thoughts here beforehand.

There are a few common mistakes I see many people commonly when it comes to online security. All of these are things that have caused problems for friends, clients and associates.

1.Using the same password at one or more sites

Hacking and phishing scams are nothing new. The recent Twitter issues showed what can happen and how difficult it can be to contain them. If you use the same password across multiple sites and even one of those sites is compromised, you might find yourself in trouble.

Consider this: if someone knows what your email address is, your common password, what user name you may be using at other sites, what industry you work in, maybe even where you work... what else could they potentially get access to?

Solutions:

A. Ideal - create a totally randomized password for each site that you visit that consists of both letters and numbers, preferably with some upper and some lower case letters. Use an entirely different email address for each site that you need log-on credentials with. (If you have your own domain, this can be easily accomplished by using a catch-all POP account.)

B. Next best - use some kind of common format for password creation based on the site you are joining. This will save you from having to remember/record the details for each site. Use an email address specific for each site that you need log-on credentials with. For example, blogger@yourdomain.com.

C. Finally - if you don't want to deal with so many different passwords, at the very least make sure that any crucial passwords are different from others. For example, your email password, financial ones, etc.

2. Password reset information should be known only to you.

Many sites these days allow you to reset a password if you know a bit of information about the user. Sometimes it's as little as knowing your country and birthdate in order to reset a password. Before you join a new site, have a look at what the procedures are for resetting a password. Then make sure whatever information you provide them with is something you can remember but no one else can guess.

3. Be careful what information you reveal in public or even privately.

Several months back a young man I know learned the price of sharing too much. He had met this "incredible" woman through one of the social networking sites. They spent a few hours chatting on IM. She had asked him loads of questions - seemingly random and in an effort to get to know him. A few days later, he finds out that domains he owned had been transferred out, financial accounts compromised, etc. It turns out that by revealing just 3 pieces of information, he gave the person enough information to hack his accounts. Ouch. He could have prevented all of this trouble by using multiple passwords, using different user names at sites and by using security question answers HE could remember but that weren't accurate.

Microsoft Office On New PC's

2009-01-04T13:28:00.002-05:00

Just a quick tip if a new computer is in your future: If you have Office (other than the Home & Student version), make sure to check your new computer for Office before you install it.

This is a mistake I've made twice in less than a year: I blindly installed Office Ultimate 2007 without removing the trial version of Office on the computer. Yes, you can activate Office using your activation key. However when you actually run Office, you'll see a message at the top "Non-Commercial Purposes." Not nice if you've shelled out close to a $1k for software to see.

If this happens to you, what you need to do is uninstall both the Office you installed along with the trial version. If you are unable to remove by using the "Add or Remove Programs" feature in your control panel, Microsoft has instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=928218 on how to uninstall the remnants. Once you've completed the removal, you can install Office from scratch.

Marketing Maneuvers to Make Your Business Soar In 2009

2008-12-24T01:23:00.006-05:00

This post is an abbreviated version of a newsletter I recently sent to my clients. Whether or not you agree with everything I've written, I hope you can at least find one takeaway.

As we come to the end of another year, it's time to not only look back over the progress we've made in our businesses/job/life/health but also to look ahead, set new goals and refine our strategies for 2009. I'm going to share with you some ideas that can hopefully help you get to where you want to go a bit faster.

Mobile usage is continuing to grow and along with it mobile surfing. What does this mean for your business? That depends on who your audience is. But the adoption rate is accelerating at a rapid pace within North America across all age groups and income levels. Mobile considerations:

Do you have an alternate version of your website(s) for mobile devices? If not, how does your existing site look? How much scrolling do people need to do?

How do your emails look when viewed on a mobile device? If you are using HTML, consider dropping multi-column tables.

Do you have videos on your website? Are you relying on videos to perform the entire selling job?

How is your marketing/sales/ordering process being impacted?

Personal commentary: I recently got an iPod Touch and am having a blast with it. I was surprised to see that almost every sales site I've seen with only video could not run the video on the iPod Touch.

The Internet is Increasingly About Communication. Web 2.0 has given the individual a voice and with it power. Sure there is a lot of noise, but if you use social marketing in constructive ways that allow you/your business/your organization to engage in communication with your prospective/past/existing customers, you will stand out. It takes very little extra time/effort to do things right on this front. The same thing is true for literally every kind of online marketing you can do.

Assuming you have some form of a social marketing strategy to begin with, take some time to really assess what you are doing. Are you using it in a way that is in line with the image you want to project? What are your competitors doing that seems like it would feel right from a consumer's standpoint? What are they doing wrong?

If you send out emails to your customer/subscriber list, what are you really sending out? Are they simply marketing/sales pitches for your own products/services or for others? Or are you actually providing your recipients something of value at least some of the time? Many people say that email marketing is losing it's effectiveness. I suspect that most people that say this are doing 2 things wrong: 1. They are focusing on selling rather than marketing and 2. They see the recipients of their emails as subscribers and not readers.

What return email address are you using on your mass mailings? There's been a growing movement towards "do not reply" addresses. Many people/companies say they can't handle the responses. At minimum use an autoresponder. The best case is to have someone actually deal with incoming emails and route them accordingly.

Many Tactics That Worked Well in 2008 Will Not in 2009. This past year, we've seen a lot of new marketing methods pop up that worked very well. But new methods can get stale rather quickly and you'll need to carefully consider what is most appropriate for your business model in 2009. Here are just a couple of example:

Exit discounts became common place and worked but they are losing their effectiveness. I've had several clients that did conversion comparison with and without them in the past 2 months. Although order rate went up slightly with an exit discount, the overall profit actually went down. If you are backending a continuity program or something else, then getting more paid customers in the door may be worth the loss of upfront profit. I suspect part of the reason it seems to be resulting in diminishing profits is that more Internet buyers are used to seeing them so they'll test a site by leaving before they actually order. (None of the clients that did this comparison were in Internet Marketing .)

Lengthy videos doing 100% of the selling will lose their effectiveness. Don't get me wrong - videos do have their place in the marketing & sales process and can truly boost conversion rates. But the novelty of long videos is starting to wear off for a lot of people. In one day last week, I received 22 different emails from marketers whose lists I subscribe to that simply pointed to a video sales page. If the average video was even 20 minutes long that would represent my full working day. What does the profile of your ideal prospect who will actually have the money to buy your product/service look like? Is it someone that has hours a day to watch videos?

Obviously I haven't covered everything here. I tried to focus on smaller things that I believe can have the most significant impact on ROI and shortest deployment time.

Use Paypal? Something You May Not Be Aware Of

2008-10-29T00:00:00.003-05:00

I am continuously surprised by the number of people that don't see to know about a Paypal feature - Mass Pay. If you are already familiar with it, you can skip this post, but for the sake of those of you who may not be, I thought I'd share it.

Mass pay is a way to send payments to an individual or a group of individuals at one time. The funds must be available in your account in order for you to send money. The sender pays the fees which are capped at $1 in USD or $1.25 in CAD. There are no fees for the recipient.

Sending mass pay is pretty easy. For US sending accounts, you click the Mass Pay link at the bottom of each screen once you are logged into your account. You'll need to prepare a text, tab delimited file that contains the recipient's email address, the currency and the amount to be paid. Other field options are available. You then upload the file to Paypal.

For Canadian sending accounts, it is pretty much the same procedure except to get to the Mass Pay screen, you'll need to go to the merchant area.

As with normal payments, the recipient gets a notice that they have received funds.

I use Mass Pay for the majority of the payments I send via Paypal. It gives negotiating room when making purchases, paying contractors, etc since the recipient doesn't need to pay any fees. I also ask buyers/clients in many cases to send payment via Mass Pay when appropriate.

From what I understand, the risks are much lower with Mass Pay than with accepting other kinds of payment via Paypal. Unlike with cc funded payments, buyers cannot go back to their cc company where Paypal will typically reverse the charges immediately without even waiting for a response from the seller.

Hope this has saved someone reading this some money!

Surprising test results of email marketing campaign

2008-10-21T12:33:00.002-05:00

I don't have a lot of time to get into details on this but I thought it was worth sharing. I've now been working in the email marketing space for over a decade. I continue to be surprised by new test variables that prove to have interesting results. Interesting in that it can be well worth the bit of time involved to test.

In the past month, I've worked with 2 clients who were doing limited launches. Both for products outside of the Internet Marketing circles and in niche areas. Both followed a string of successive emails building up to launch day. Both had a limited number of products available for sale. Price points were almost the same. No affiliates/jv partners used. These were launches done to in-house lists.

Client A followed the normal strategy to almost a T in that everyone received the same emails. At launch - 3 hours, 1/3 of the 28,000 list received one of the following emails:

A. <> opening in 3 hours
B. <> opening at 1 pm
C. <> opening at 1 pm Pacific

A minor difference to most people, but the results and how this translated to sales was significant. Who received which of these 3 emails was entirely randomized. The content of the emails as well as the email that went out at actual launch was exactly the same for everyone. The shocker here is that not only did version C recipients open more than A+B recipients combined, but over 75% of the orders in the first 30 minutes came from version C recipients. In the end, version C recipients ordered only slightly more units than versions A or B. However it did take almost 6 hours to sell out entirely.

Lessons learned: Specificity on the timing side is important if you are shooting for a fast sell-out. If you are promoting as a JV partner or as an affiliate, it could help you to get a bit more sales in.

Client B's launch was the following week and I asked if we could take this testing idea one step further. His database actually contained state/zip/country for more than half of subscribers. For the rest, IP addresses were saved. We broke his database down into 11 segments based on time zone and 1 for ones we were unable to determine. Starting the day before launch, we started to customize emails based on these segments. There was one email sent out the day before launch, one email sent out -3 hours, one email sent at launch and then a final one sent at sold out. Here's where things get really interesting: for all 11 time based segments, between 60 and 75% of orders came in during the first 30 minutes. If we consider the 12th group as a control group - something to compare results against - the overall conversion rate was about the same (it took 4 hours to sell out) however only 18% ordered in the first 30 minutes.

Lesson learned: specificity is even more important than I would have thought. Making it a no-brainer for people to know the time they need to be ready to order can help boost immediate sales.

A few caveats:

Because the numbers worked out this way in these tests does not mean that they would necessarily work the same way for you. This is why testing is important. (If you do run a test of this kind and would like to share your own results, I'd love to hear about it.)
For time-based launches, it's really important to use a vendor that can actually get your emails out on time. I'm continually baffled by the number of big time Internet Marketers who use third rate mailing systems where their emails go out HOURS after a launch has actually sold out and/or many of their emails end up filtered in spam folder because they are using the same content as other marketers. Reliable email marketing service. (Yes, it's my company.)
What about if you don't have data to do geo targetting? If you are using double opt-in, you likely have the IP information associated with a sign-up stored "somewhere". Although that is a laborious process to match back, you can go to Rentacoder or Odesk and get the work done for about $1-2 per 500 addresses.

WII Fit Challenge

2008-05-22T14:20:00.006-05:00

A week ago, I got a WII in anticipation of the WII Fit. Fortunately without preordering from anywhere, I was able to get a WII Fit at my local Walmart. It was one of 2 they had left by around 8:30 am.

I want to tell you why I was so excited about it and why I'm posting about it here.

I work from home. I have a fully equipped home gym. Tons of exercise videos. Basically I could be in amazing shape just with what I have right here.

For more of my life than not, I've been on some kind of regular fitness program. The problem for me is that the majority of my day is pretty sedentary. Working out 30-60 minutes a day while sitting on my butt the rest of the day is not an answer. I find myself having too hard a recovery time. I find when I have to do things like travel, go to conferences, or just normal higher activity days, I'm not able to keep up as well as I'd like to. Giving up having a cleaning woman and doing more household chores hasn't helped. (It certainly hasn't helped my house since I have zero motivation when it comes to cleaning!)

I have a theory. No scientific foundation behind this. Just based on what I am seeing in my own life.

For the past couple of decades, fitness experts have all pretty much agreed that to optimize your metabolism you should be eating 5-6 meals a day and not going longer than 2-3 hours without eating. The idea behind this is that one of the best calorie burners is our metabolism. By continually stoking it, we keep the metabolism going. Of course, what you eat is important in the equation as well. In spite of the scientific evidence backing this, many nutritionists, doctors etc still say that you should eat 3 squares a day with 1 or 2 snacks. I know from personal experience that moving to 6 meals a day made me realize that the idea that we simply need a calorie deficit in order to lose weight is entirely wrong. I lost around 70 lbs in 8 months by following a few simple guidelines:

Have 5-6 meals per day with the first meal being within 90 minutes of waking up;
Each meal should be between 100 and 400 calories;
Alternate how much I eat from one day to the next;
Have one day every week or two where I go over the max calorie count for at least 2 or 3 meals;
Drink lots of water;
If I want something, have it - but either in moderation or save it for one of my higher calorie days;
And try to limit the amount of processed food - especially starchy ones.

I've never had any difficulty with losing weight but keeping it off is proving to be another story. Even if I stayed with the above, eventually my body starts to adjust and the weight gradually creeps up.

I think that a missing part of the equation for me - and many others - is that our lives in general are way too sedentary. Scientific research has shown that we get a boost of calorie burning from physical activity during the hours after. Doesn't it make sense given what we know about the way our metabolisms function with frequent mini-meals that we could see the same boost in our metabolisms from having frequent mini-exercise sessions?

Having longer treadmill/other cardio and weight sessions is not the answer. Been there, done that. It just makes me resent exercise. Adding on extra sessions is not the answer. It's hard enough to find the time to exercise in the first place, nevermind doubling up sessions. Besides, I've already gone through the experience a few years back of setting an aggressive exercise goal (training for a marathon) and dealt with the ramifications of it - blowing a knee out from overtraining.

So this is why I was excited about the WII Fit. I don't expect it to REPLACE a regular exercise program, but to provide me with an easy way to fit in 5-10 minute exercise sessions every 2 hours or so during my work day. Most of us know that some kind of break during our workday is good. It helps keep us our mental motors running smoothly to get a change of pace. I enjoy games so for me, having game/exercise breaks sounds perfect.

I'm hoping that an added benefit will be a bit of reduction in my stress level too. I know that exercise in general helps settle me down and clears my mind. Hopefully during these mini breaks, it will help me deal with daily stresses a little better.

On my first day (Wednesday), I did only 15 minutes on it. I also spent about the same amount of time on Wii Sports on boxing/tennis and baseball. I find that my upper body strength has been declining as I've been getting older and those 3 sports focused on upper body in ways that my normal exercise routine doesn't. Today (Thursday), I did 21 minutes on WII Fit and another 20 minutes on Wii Sports. A little more than I intended to, but I was having fun. :)

My objective is to try and spend somewhere between 30-45 minutes 5-6 days a week between Wii Fit and Wii Sports.

CentralDesktop

2008-04-05T13:30:00.002-05:00

I recently decided to investigate different project management/collaboration tools. The last time I did this was a couple of years ago and I was surprised how many different ones are available. After spending countless hours researching which would be the best one for what I needed, I ended up settling on CentralDesktop. Here's why:

Having read the company's blog and forum, I know the people behind the company are passionate in what they do. That is a huge plus. Having read what I did I know that this is about more than just money but creating a really great product.
CD differentiates between internal and external users. This is a plus because for many upcoming projects, we'll be bringing people in on a short-term basis and giving limited access to only a specific project they are involved with is crucial. Plus, internal staff can access more (read: confidential info pertaining to a project) than what external service providers can.
There is version tracking for documents and you can do rollbacks. Although it's not something I am in need of at this minute, it is a feature that will be important as our team is developed.
Their storage capacity and upgrading it is billed on a reasonable basis. I was amazed how many service providers in this area are charging huge fees for storage.
You can have private or public workspaces.

CentralDesktop uses slightly different terminology than other services. For example, you set up workspaces rather than projects. Workspaces can include a variety of things such as blogs, discussion areas, documents, wikis and of course project tracking.

They allow for a 30 day free trial of a personal workspace - allowing up to 2 users and 2 workspaces. Their normal billing structure is very reasonable for what is included and the number of users. For example, we opted to start with their Company Plan 3 which costs $99 per month. It allows 25 internal users, 250 external users, 25 workspaces and 5 GB of storage space. Since they allow you to archive/delete old workspaces, this should carry us for quite a while. The average competitive service I looked at charged around $40/month per user - whether internal or external and had half the storage space. This seemed like a steal comparatively speaking.

On the offside, there is very little documentation right now. There is one long video and several short-ones that deal with specific tasks, but I noticed that several items have been changed since the videos were made. From reading the forum it seems that providing better documentation is something they are working on.

The lack of documentation hasn't been a huge problem for 3 reasons: The system is pretty easy to use. Their email support has been very fast. There is also an active and well-supported forum. Most of the questions I had I found the answers to by looking through the forum. It still would be nice if one of their higher level staff could actually sit down for a half a day and make some additional videos on applications of the different features. I'm sure this would increase their client retention rate because I know that most people wouldn't have a clue about what some of the features can be used for.

If/when I have some time I'll share some comments in the future on other tools I looked at.

My list of daily sites to visit has just gotten smaller...

2007-07-03T02:54:00.003-05:00

As a 'net entrepreneur, one of the things I like to do is stay on top of new sites. Innovation is getting faster online - much faster. If you run a business, then it may not matter to you what new business models are emerging. You might just be interested in new competitors that pop up. If you are an entrepreneur, however, it's crucial for you to stay on top of trends. Unfortunately, as everything is accelerating, it's become much more difficult to do so. Sure you can find out what 'users' are evangelizing. Check out Alexa's top movers, Digg, De.licio.us, etc. But it's much more useful to be ahead of the ball by knowing about start-ups before they start to be adopted by the masses. A new site has popped up that can let you eyeball new trends... see what others have actually gotten to launch stage. KillerStartups.com

I've been negligent...

2007-05-26T17:19:00.000-05:00

I've been negligent in posting here again. Just been very busy with projects and life in general. Email is also tracking behind - don't take it personally if you are waiting for a response on something and haven't heard boo. Before I sign off, I want to leave you with some thoughts... this might be as close to your stereotypical blog posting as you'll ever see from me and like most rambling thoughts I share here, I'll probably remove it soon. This is meant for a few people that may or may not actually read it.

Life's about taking chances.
Picking yourself up when you get knocked down.
Starting all over again
Not in spite of the bruises you still wear
But because of them.
The determination to try again will never be as strong
As when the hurt and disappointment are still raw.
Do you appreciate how truly short life is?
People who don't are the ones who
Miss out on the opportunities and then
Whine that other people are just so damn lucky
Simply because they are too afraid to try.

If everything seems cloudy to you right now
The future seems uncertain
There's no clear path or direction
You can make a decision here and now:
You can either continue to live in this fog and
Let life and everything pass you by or
You can choose to draw from your past experiences
To make you a stronger person.

It's also about your attitude.
Your attitude is always your choice.
No matter how bad circumstances may be,
Your attitude about what happens is what makes
The true difference in the big scheme of things.
Heroes of today and the past:
Anne Frank, Helen Keller, Christopher Reeves, Michael J Fox
What was their attitude?
You can use your past and your current situation
In a negative way
Opening the doors for possibly more negativity
And decreasing your chances of succeeding and
Never feeling truly satisfied.
Or you can take the attitude that
You are better than your current situation
You are better than your past demonstrates
Your drive instead of anger, revenge or other negative
Emotions becomes about wanting the universe to
Give you everything you truly deserve.

If you are steps away from losing it all right now;
And feel like throwing in the towel.
What if you knew that if you gave it
One more shot
That for X more days
You need to do A, B and C
You'd find your own pot at the end of the rainbow?
Would you give up
If you just KNEW what was waiting for you would be
So incredibly sweet it would make everything else
Pale in comparison?

What does YOUR pot at the end of the rainbow look like?
If you can't see it yet with your eyes and
If you aren't living it yet
Can you at least visualize it?
If you can't, then why be surprised and question why
You are so miserable and then
You complain about all the bad life is throwing you.
Keep complaining about the bad and
You'll continue getting more of it.
That's the way life works.

Life. Shit happens. Inevitably.
This ain't no contrived drama.
For most of us it will never be Leave it To Beaver.
Who wants that anyhow?

'til next time.

Sharon

Another free typo tool

2007-05-16T17:28:00.000-05:00

I probably go to Domaintools.com more often then I check my email - and that says a lot. They have a number of nifty features especially if you opt for a paid membership.

They now have a free domain typo tool available at their site. Since I do some proactive copyright/tm searches for clients, I'm always on the lookout for more ways to research. I ran a couple of recent searches I did for clients and found a few domains that I hadn't come across through other methods. (Of course, I wouldn't register tm/copyright domains for my own purposes!) It also has a few other capabilities that make it a cut above other typo tools.

Check it out yourself before they start to make it a paid service.

One of the problems with domain parking

2007-05-14T20:36:00.000-05:00

Almost all parking programs work the same way: you change your name servers to that of the parking company and then add your domain to your account with that company.

I've been having a bit of a problem lately. When I register/purchase/win an auction for a new domain name, by default depending on the registrar, it will set the name servers to one of the parking services I deal with. This saves me having to manually go in to change the name servers. The problem is I don't always immediately add those domains to my parking account. I try to deal with parking bits just once a day. Seems like that is a more productive use of my time. Unfortunately, it seems that some unscrupulous people are tracking name server domain gains and adding gained domains to their accounts with the same parking companies. Essentially they are trying to steal the revenue from the domains. The normal procedure with the companies I deal with is that you need to submit a ticket to get ownership of the domain verified.

I've mentioned this to a few active domains who basically gave a virtual shrug of their shoulders as if to say there's nothing wrong with it.

Come on. These same people have to be doing it to more than just my domains. Aren't parking companies noticing this? Unless of course they are the ones responsible.

I have no problem with the parking company receiving any revenue generated because of my own delay in adding domains. But I do have a problem with people that are essentially stealing. I also have a problem with parking companies that sit back while people do this and put the onus on the legitimate owner. Meanwhile, while I wait a day or two or three for ownership to be verified, the thief continues to make money.

I'm not a Sedo fan by any means, but I do have to say at least this is one thing they have right: if the email address associated with a domain does not match the email address they have on file for you, they will verify ownership. Granted their reasoning is more likely tied into concerns about sales than about parking revenue... and this also poses problems for those of us that use multiple email addresses on our domain ownership records... but how much work would it be for parking companies to implement such a practice? Or at least to take action on people stealing the traffic/revenue of others.

Why you should be investing in domain names regardless of what your online business does

2007-05-13T18:02:00.000-05:00

It's funny..... I started working on a post a couple of days ago about the value of generic domain names and then I came across an article by Matt Bentley "Don't Buy the Keyword - Buy the Domain" that covered a lot of what I wanted to.

I'll give you a personal example. For one of my businesses - email newsletter publishing, a typical click on Adwords runs close to $2. Several years back, I started picking up some generic keywords/phrases related to that business. These domains individually get anywhere from 5 to 200 unique visitors a month. Let's figure that I have a dozen domains that are generic and averaging 1000 unique visitors a month overall. Renewal costs run a whopping $84 a year. If I were to spend that money on PPC advertising @ $2/click, that would work out to 42 clicks a year. Instead, I'm getting around 12,000 visitors a year. If I were paying for that traffic, I'd be spending $24,000 a year. A bit of a difference wouldn't you say?

The best part is, even at the $2 per visitor, I am still making money. All this does is increase my profits even further.

Right now, it's almost impossible to find good generics that will get type-in traffic like this just for registration costs in the .com extension (pretty much any other extension is useless for generics as far as type-in traffic goes). Many of these domains suitable for your business might already be held by your competitors. But it's more than likely a good chunk of them are being held by domain speculators. Basically people that thought enough ahead of time to register these domains.

Most domainers will "park" their domains. I'm sure you've come across a fair share of parking pages in your time using the net. Basically these look like search pages - often with ads. Domainers make money when someone clicks on one of these ads.

The bulk of generic domains are sold based on the revenue generated by them or revenue combined with traffic. This isn't always the case. There are many domains that go for much more just because they are simply great domains for branding purposes.

A couple of years ago, if buying a domain based on revenue/traffic, you could expect to pay between 2-5 years revenue. Now solid generics are getting anywhere from 3-100 years revenue. Even at 100 years revenue or more they can still be an incredible bargain. Let me explain why....

When a domain is parked, the owner of the domain is getting a small cut of the CPC paid by an advertiser. There is the company selling the advertising and the parking company that also have to make money.

To see what the discepancy is between what advertisers are paying versus what domainers are getting paid... I parked a few domains that I use for traffic redirecting. I used the same keywords for parking that I did when advertising on PPC. I found that, on average, I was getting about 1/10th of what the going rate was for a click. So let's say for example, I would normally pay $3 for a click advertising, that means I would get around $0.30 for a click parked.

Now let's apply this to your business. Let's say there's a generic domain that applies to your business. That domain gets an average of 10 visits a day. The person that owns the domain is getting 3 clicks a day @ $0.20 each or $0.60 a day total. One year of revenue would be $219 and 3650 visitors. Let's say they are asking for 5 years revenue for that domain - $1100.

Let's say you have been doing PPC advertising on that same phrase. You are paying $2 a click on average. (And hopefully making money at that rate!) Let's say that 30% of the visitors that type in that generic domain in their browser are as qualified prospects as those that click on your PPC ads. So you'd be getting approximately 1200 qualified visitors in the first year after purchasing the domain. If you got these same 1200 visitors by PPC advertising, you'd be spending about $2400. In year one alone, you are ahead of the game by 1300. ($2400 less the 1100 you paid for the domain.) Everything after that is gravy.

Going back a step here... let's say the owner of the domain wanted 10 years revenue or $2200. Even at that asking price, it would still be a bargain, don't you think? From time to time, those of us active in the domain industry will hear of domains selling for 100 years revenue. Seeing this one example, can you understand why? In this case, 100 years revenue would be 220,000. Let's say that your $2 per click on PPC advertising represents a huge ROI for you and that for every $1 you spend on PPC, you are making back $100 in pure profit. 2400 (what you would have spent on PPC advertising) x 100 (the profit per $1 spent) = 240,000. At that level, you are in the black in your first year.

Spending $110,000 for a domain doesn't seem like a bad investment now does it?

If you are a careful shopper when it comes to domains, there's another advantage to it. Let's say you are a true entrepreneur and you build up businesses/websites with the intent of selling them off eventually. Perhaps you move onto a new business every 2-3 years. Sometimes a business may not work out. Well, guess what? Getting generic domains with natural type-in traffic can represent an additional asset for your business. Even if your existing business doesn't work out, you can always turn around and sell the domain - and the way the market is going, likely for much more than you paid for it.

There's been so much hooplah in the past year or so about PPC/CPA arbitrage. Before that it was PPC arbitrage between the different PPC sites. The problem with methods like this is that they are truly opportunitistic. As more people find out about them and as you perfect the system yourself, the opportunity to make money dimishes to the point where you stand a much better chance of losing money than you do of profiting.

Domains represent a different arbitrage situation. Since there are a finite number of generic domains, there are only so many opportunities. As long as the cost paid for a domain can be recouped at SOME time in the near future (ie the next 10 years), the potential risk is nominal.

I was recently explaining this to an entrepreneur that didn't understand why people would pay so much for domains. His reasoning is that when it comes to technology a lot can happen in 10 years. True. But I know I have had several domains now for 10 years myself. There are countless billions invested in the current Internet structure so the odds are pretty good that it won't be changing dramatically within the next 10 years. There's just too many players at this point that would lose too much money for this to happen.

But I gotta tell you, the window of opportunity is getting smaller with each passing day. If you want to take advantage of this for your business, the time to act is now and not in a year or two years from now. Not even months if you can avoid it. It can take time to learn the ropes.

There's three ways I can help you: I handle acquisitions (brokering) for a small number of clients. If you have a budget of at least $20,000, we can work through your needs and I can handle the acquisitions for you. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, each month, I offer a workshop to work with clients via teleconference calls and emails. If you can't make the teleconference calls, you can listen to recordings after the fact. This is a fairly intensive program where we work on your overall marketing strategy combined with domains. I also have a very limited circulation predrop subscription service. This deals with expiring domains that can be backordered via services like Snapnames and Pool. This service can make research for you essentially hands-off. If you're interested in any of these services, please leave a comment on my blog with your contact info. (I have comments set to approval so no one will see it.)

Time management

2006-07-25T21:11:00.000-05:00

I came across a neat tool called AllNetic for tracking time. It can handle two levels of tracking - by projects and by tasks. I've only started to mess around with it, so it's too early to pass judgment one way or another. The author of the software needs some grammatical help though!

I also found a neat egg timer that can act as either a stopwatch or timer.

Why was I looking for timers? Well, to put it mildly, after taking a 'vacation' from serious business, I need to focus on spending time on a regular basis on some core areas instead of wasting so much time with distractions or non-priority work. If I were to list all of the areas, you'd probably wonder where I AM spending time, so I won't waste space here. Suffice to say, my time management skills have been sucking lately.

Web-based typo generator for domains

2006-07-14T19:21:00.000-05:00

If you don't want to shell out money on a program to check for typos, TypoGen is a free web-based one.