I don’t know about you, but when I’m searching for quality information, my first thought is that I always want the absolutely most recent thing. Especially if it comes from a source that isn’t well edited, most likely unverified, and has massive potentials for misuse or gross inaccuracy.
And because Wikipedia simply isn’t fast enough to do all that in realtime for me, I’m so amazingly glad that Google has decided to basically get live, streaming feed direct from Twitter.
Sarcasm aside, this has actually let a few glaringly obvious holes (at least temporarily) that can be exploited in Google’s insistence that newer = better, particularly if you combine it with their new “hey, we already know what everyone wants” attitude. And these glarignly obvious holes can be exploited to your benefit quite nicely for promoting your Affiliation Cash programs.
So let’s say you’re running aff links to one of our offerings that has a search parameter that you can embed into your affiliate link*. This little loophole is great because you can now tweet / status update that you’ve just watched / listened to a great movie / album that you got for free from this awesome website. You then insert the link with the correct address, and Bit.Ly hides your affiliate link nicely (even more so because most people don’t have the Bit.Ly extension for FireFox that allows them to see where the links go).
Ok, so you’ve done this once, and if you’re being fairly current, you might get 5-15 clicks out of Google before it drops out. Possibly more, possibly less, if the term is really popular. Certainly not enough to get a conversion every time… Sounds kinda like wasted effort, actually.
And if it does, then you’ve learnt absolutely nothing from me over the past year where I keep talking about things you nee to look into for yourself, like automation!
There are heaps of automation tools out there for Twitter and Facebook alike. Look around for some, and make sure that they have the ability to spin content. This is insanely important, because it will save you ludicrous amounts of time. You simply setup a line that’s readily spinnable to make it seem like you just listen to music or watch movies and TV shows non-stop, with enough current artists or movies, and let it go about once an hour on autopost, where it can spin the new content for you each time. Then, if the software supports conditions, attach the name to the correct search query on the site… Or don’t. Let the lazy slobs on Google search for that stuff once they get to the site in question.
Keep it going over a few different accounts, and the number of followers is entirely irrelevant, because you’re getting traffic from Google, not Twitter. Any followers gullible enough to fall for your army of automated, spinning bots.
Anyway, I’m sure Google’s bound to pick up on this soon. They’re not idiots over there, so you better take advantage of this one while you can.
Happy Hunting - Harvey
*If you have NFI what I’m talking about there, you’re welcome to email or MSN me, and I’ll explain in greater detail.
Peopel will now show up with a list of which lists they're listed under.
I still simply do not get why people think Twitter is so fantastic or influential (it has fewer than one million active users), but at least they’ve finally implemented something that might be useful.
They’ve recently developed a “lists” feature, which basically allows you to separate your followers out from each other, but also to target specific ones with specific messages, and for you to search through people by what lists they may be on.
What a great way to a) weed out bots; and b) find more willing consumers by seeing what lists people are actively a part of, not just who they’re following.
You may now segregate people online like the regime of your choice
I’ll let you think out precisely what you can do with this, especially if you happen to be clever and know how to automate a few processes, program some bots, etc.
It will also (finally) allow you a better understanding of groups of people by cross-referencing which lists they may appear on, and doing secondary and tertiary level statistical analysis.
But they will no longer be tolerating spam… supposedly.
Now, I’m not sure how many of you reading this are doing so from the Twitter link. Possibly not many, because I get the feeling a lot of our Twitter followers are actually bots, but those of you that are reading this naturally, are already aware of our general opinion of Twitter being useless for promoting Affiliation Cash or other affiliate marketing programs.
This is even more so now, as Twitter is adding links to each and every profile that allows you to report that person for spam. This includes verified accounts apparently… This is supposedly being done by cross referencing email address, user name, and IP address, which in theory makes it harder for spammers to come back with new accounts. In reality, it’s a total fig leaf, because anyone with half a clue will know several ways around the IP ban i.e. unplug you modem for 20 minutes, plug back in, get a fresh IP… or use a proxy.
So there you have it folks - Twitter, no even less useful for marketing
Some of you may recall a post a little while back about how the FCC is basically cracking down on the blogs of anyone in the North American region for making false claims if they promote stuff, etc etc etc.
Nothing much to do with the article, other than the name of the piece. It's actually a poster from a Threadless tshirt artist, but doesn't it look cool?
Well, to ensure it doesn’t end up under undue scrunity, it looks like Facebook are following suite before it actually does become a legal issue. Their new terms and conditions now state:
You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications to users (such as spam).
Considering that marketing online has basically become synonymous with spam, regardless of the fact that they clearly delineated by one being wanted, even actively sought out, and the other not, it’s a frustratingly murky area.
However, if you are one of those people that has a Facebook account, and you use it for personal activities as well as spam marketing products and services to people, you may want to reconsider using your status, notes, etc., to promote anything that is likely to make you money.
I get the feeling they’re basically going to be looking for URLs with tracking IDs.
So just use bit.ly, like everyone else does over on Twitter.
Or at the very least, you can convince her you can.
Mother, or more accurately, mothers are getting onto the internet in droves, and creating a very specific set of demographics all of their own. The good folks over at Nielson (the market research firm) have basically catalogued the predominant behaviours, and slotted them neatly into some nice statistically averaged groupings they call “Power Moms”.
If you look closely at the reflection on the monitor, you can tell the laptop's not even on ;)
There are two important things to note here:
All these Power Moms are trying to look out for their families in these tough economic times by looking for the best deals they can get online (i.e. unlimited entertainment for a low, low price so as to keep the kids busy and quiet *cough cough, nudge nudge*)
Mothers below the age of 34 are heavily into social networking over forums, social web sites, and blogs.
They’re into networking, and looking for good deals.
Sounds like we’re onto a winner here: Look for forums on raising young families and start pretending like you’re a young mother. Hell, find a *shudder* Twittering mother with plenty of followers, follow them and start to follow their followers for the refollow… you follow?
Good! Then along with your sporadic, pre-scripted bits posted at random intervals about your (supposed) children and the cute/bizarre/awful/joyful things they do, you can insert the occasional link for your Affiliation Cash offers saying how awesome it is that you don’t have to pay for tickets to the movies anymore and it’s saving you $50 a week on iTunes fees or some such.
So by now, if you haven’t heard of Twitter, you’re either sitting there with fingers in your ears screaming “LALALA!” at anyone that gets within 10 feet of you, or living in North Korea. If you don’t fall into either of those categories, and still want to know what it is, it’s yet another social media platform, limited to amazingly small post sizes, and everyone seems to be using it, including celebrities (well, actually, they hire people to ghost write it because they can’t think of 140 characters of profundity).
Everybody’s doing it!
Marketing “gurus” have swarmed to this phenomenon in flocks, saying how much it’s increased their sales and earnings. These dubious claims spew forth yet more “info” product eBooks about the wonders of Twitter for your online marketing campaigns.
So how is it really, in the context of the sort of campaigns that Affiliation Cash runs?
I’ve tried it out, been grossly disappointed, given up hope, cried a little because we’re not afraid to show our emotions around here, and moved my concentration back to things that were generating sales and money. Like exploiting lazy people on Yahoo! Answers.
To lay it all out for you:
It’s just another one-to-many communication tool for telling people what you’re up to, and is EXACTLY like Facebook’s status update, but more limited because it won’t show pictures or descriptions of the things you link to, and has a very limited (140 characters) text field. In fact Twitter is like any other social network in respects to getting traffic from it directly.
What I mean is IF you have a pre-existing site, you merely need to tweet about your latest update. “PersonX: is writing about the latest political infighting in Uzbekistan - uzbekpolitico.com” or whatever your blog is about, and whatever the address is. Better yet, if it’s running of a CMS like Wordpress, there are even plugins that will do it for you automatically. Obviously, with our programs, your site likely centers around some form of entertainment media, not Middle Eastern politics.
The point is you can’t make money directly off of Twitter. Even if you wanted to cram in an affiliate link, most affiliate URLs are too large. I suppose you could use a shortening service like TinyURL. Our PID encrypted links will fit in, in most circumstances, so long as you’re not actually saying anything else, or passing variables to a site with a search function… but it doesn’t really matter as most people resent having a URL shoved in their face when they don’t know what it is.
IF you happen to be running the sort of site that people would return to regularly for new content then it is possible to get followers who use it because they haven’t figured out what RSS is for. On the bright side, people that haven’t figured out RSS generally are the exact sort of people that won’t think twice about laying down the credit card for what you’ve got on offer.
But if you don’t already have flocks of people following you, it can be hard to get the crowd going.
Here are a three simple things you can do to increase your flock of followers, or as I like to call them, Twits:
Start following others, hope that they add you in return, and then dump them unless you actually read them. It takes ages, but there are some automated tools out there now if you don’t mind doing it the blackhat way.
Produce “quality” tweets… however the hell you produce quality anything in 140 characters. People will eventually follow because they’ll tell their friends about your posts. Haikus seem to win friends and influence people, as to scathing replies to other people. It’s almost like highschool again.
Link bait… Post controversial BS, and people will flock because they’ll tell their friends… Especially if you can keep up a BS story, like the guys that does professional media hoaxing.
Just to keep things fun, here’s a video of Twitter in action:
As Twitter has become the Next Big Thing in social media and marketing, it’s foolish of us not to have an account there, even if all it does is repost the news we put up here.
Which is pretty much exactly what it will be doing.
It will also serve as a way of getting our message out there to you, our valued clients, in the event of our site going down for whatever reason.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m searching for quality information, my first thought is that I always want the absolutely most recent thing. Especially if it comes from a source that isn’t well edited, most likely unverified, and has massive potentials for misuse or gross inaccuracy.
So let’s say you’re running aff links to one of our offerings that has a search parameter that you can embed into your affiliate link*. This little loophole is great because you can now tweet / status update that you’ve just watched / listened to a great movie / album that you got for free from this awesome website. You then insert the link with the correct address, and Bit.Ly hides your affiliate link nicely (even more so because most people don’t have the Bit.Ly extension for FireFox that allows them to see where the links go).
There are heaps of automation tools out there for Twitter and Facebook alike. Look around for some, and make sure that they have the ability to spin content. This is insanely important, because it will save you ludicrous amounts of time. You simply setup a line that’s readily spinnable to make it seem like you just listen to music or watch movies and TV shows non-stop, with enough current artists or movies, and let it go about once an hour on autopost, where it can spin the new content for you each time. Then, if the software supports conditions, attach the name to the correct search query on the site… Or don’t. Let the lazy slobs on Google search for that stuff once they get to the site in question.
