I think Twitter is a great medium for communication, if used properly. It is great for getting your take on the world out there. But seriously, no-one really cares what you had for breakfast or the fact that you just dyed your hair. I came across this video which pretty much sums up my thoughts on Twitter:

The best way to use Twitter, in my opinion, is to be consistent in your Tweets. Consistently try to add value. Don’t tweet just to see the sound of your voice. And don’t try to pretend you’re a celebrity. You aren’t. Even if you were, no-one cares that you’re going to bed now or you’re just getting up.

What caused this explosion of people being boring? I think it’s Twitter’s line “What Are You Doing?” – It’s just asking for trouble. I think it should rather be “What are you doing that someone else might care about”.

Use Twitter, but think before you tweet: will this tweet help someone or are you genuinely communicating with someone? If not, post to Facebook

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A few weeks ago, I came across a promotion for a product that I was interested in (in the interest of full disclosure, it was Howie Schwartz’s Black Hat is Back 2). After reviewing the offer & price, I decided to buy the program. In the current recession, things are a bit tight (plus I just put my entire personal savings towards sending my parents overseas for their 50th birthdays, but that’s another story ) so I had to “get the program for free”.

The program had an affiliate program with 60% commission. Given I wanted to get it, I figured some of my friends would be interested in it, so I posted a short message to both Twitter and Facebook just before going to bed saying I was checking it out and was probably going to get it. Imagine my surprise the next morning when two of my friends bought the program, giving me a commission enough to get it for myself! Yeah, what do you think the first thing I did that morning was

For a long time I struggled with the concept of “making money off my friends”, so whenever I would review something I thought worthwhile, I’d make sure not to put any affiliate links in there. Then something John Reese said (in an email – sorry, no link) hit home with me. He had been in the same situation as me and someone said to him that there were two reasons he should include his affiliate link: 1) If it’s going to help people and people are going to buy it anyway, there’s nothing wrong with him getting a portion of the cost (it’s not like the price changes either way) and 2) it’s a great way for someone to say “thank you” for pointing out a valuable resource.

Now, don’t expect to see lots of “offers” from me – most of the resources I come across are, to be perfectly honest, rubbish.

Till next time.

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I have been hearing a lot of talk recently about building email lists. For a long time, building email lists was “THE” way to market online. Then they died off a bit in the general conversations. But they are now making a comeback to being “one of the best ways to market”. But why is it? I want to challenge your assumptions and get you thinking whether you are using the right medium…

photo credit:
Corey (a.k.a. Ten0fnine)

Think about it this way – I could write articles for my email list and add it to the autoresponder sequence every few days, or I could post the articles to my blog. Either way, people who have subscribed to my email list or to my RSS feed would get that article.

What would be the incentive for someone to join your email list if the same information was posted to your blog and which they could access in many different ways through Feedburner (a free RSS syndication service)? Using Feedburner, they get the choice (SO important in today’s market) of how your content is delivered to them.

After thinking about this long and hard (and continuing to do so…), it seems there is merit in both. Where RSS and email cross over, in my opinion, RSS is superior, for reasons I will explain below.

Gone are the AOL days when people were so excited to get an email that they enabled a “you’ve got mail” sound to play every time someone emailed them. I don’t know about you, but I get up to a hundred emails (not including spam) every day. Unless I’m getting great content from being on a list (as opposed to “sell, sell, sell”), chances are that I will unsubscribe from that list.

An email list comes into its own when you have a great autoresponder sequence (something like Eben Pagan aka “David D’Angelo” Double Your Dating newsletter) where the content will always be relevant and you are trying to take the subscriber on a journey. If you have a “how to” newsletter on carpentry, you probably don’t want to be telling people how to make a dovetail join until you have made sure they understand how to use their tools. This, in my opinion, is where an email list can’t be matched by RSS.

photo credit: Tiago Pinhal

There are so many options to syndicate your feed through RSS, using a service such as Feedburner (my personal favourite). People can still get email notification of your posts (which can be full text or just a snippet), but using the same service, they could have your feed displayed in their sidebar on their desktop (if they are running Microsoft Vista), they could set their myYahoo homepage to display the feed or they could put it on their Facebook profile (among MANY other ways).

If you are writing top quality content, people who are interested in the topics you write about will want to hear more. I’m subscribed to a number of key player’s feeds, such as Jack Humphrey, John Reese and Brad Fallon (among others). They just keep coming out with excellent, thought provoking content. When they promote a product, they make sure it will help people first (and has their FULL endorsement) and they keep the promotions to a minimum.

Another benefit of posting to a blog is that search engines LOVE regularly updated blogs. Even if the effort you spent writing articles achieved the same results using an email list or RSS, with RSS you have the added benefit of having great quality content being available to the whole world, setting yourself up as an authority so everyone can see, not just your list. Why spend your precious time on one strategy (email list) if it is not going to be as effective as another (RSS)?

You might say “but what about selling?” Selling to your list is best done as a review of a product or service. You wouldn’t EVER hard sell something to your friends, so why would you do that to your list? That’s what your list is – friends of yours who trust what you have to say. John Reese wrote an excellent article recently about how important transparency is in today’s business practice. If your sales message can’t be shown to the world, you probably shouldn’t be doing it . Think how you would sell to a close friend – “hey, I just found this, I know you’re looking for a, b and c and I knew this would help you because of x, y and z. Check it out.”

photo credit: drp

Of course, the one major exception to the above is when you have people on an exclusive priority list for, say, a product launch. You might have some exclusive information for them and if your product is great, many people will want to be the first to know so they can get any priority bonuses. Email lists are usually better for this if you want to give some people a headstart over the rest of the world and your supply is short, though I think RSS could be used just as well – even if you setup a special blog (eg a blog on a subdirectory) which gave people updates on how your product development, etc was going.

I suggest that email lists should only be used when you want to take people on a journey or you feel the need to introduce exclusivity. That is what they are best at doing.

It will take a paradigm shift for many marketers to shift their priority to RSS, but I believe that in the future you will see a lot more people promoting their RSS feeds over their email lists.

More from the blogosphere…

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John Reese came out with an excellent tool for getting your blog out there. It’s called BlogRush and I have been using it for some time. This nifty tool serves links related to your content in a widget that most people put in their sidebar.

It looks like this and comes in a range of colors. If 175px is too wide for your sidebar, you could use the alternative 120px version.

The way it works is that every time the BlogRush widget is loaded (ie every time your page is viewed) you get one credit, so your blog will be shown once for each time someone goes to a page on your blog

BlogRush also has a couple of filters. You can filter keywords so that particular posts of yours aren’t displayed. For example, I have added “BXVI” and “Jackson 5″ to my filter list because they are things in my life that only my friends would actually be interested in. You can also filter posts coming in, so say you are competing with ipods, you may want to add ipods to that list, so you don’t display anything with the word “ipod” in it. You can take the filter one step further and add an entire blog to the filter list, so that even if they aren’t currently on BlogRush, when they eventually do, you won’t have their posts displayed on your blog.

I have been using BlogRush for several months now and have got great results. There has been decent traffic coming through. What I like most about it is that it is FREE and it’s “set and forget”. You just put the code they give you into your sidebar and they take care of the rest.

What are you waiting for…? Go and get it!

See what the rest of the world is saying…

• Does BlogRush Work?

- I’ve been running BlogRush on my site for the past two weeks. BlogRush has positives and negatives. The biggest positive is getting your content syndicated across a large number of sites with related content. …

• How To Add BlogRush To A WordPress Blog

- If you have a WordPress blog, or any blog for that matter, chances are you have heard of BlogRush. BlogRush is a traffic generation strategy specifically for blogs.

• Blogrush

- If you have not signed up for Blogrush, do so. I know, I know, you have heard some crazy things about them but hey! it is free, you do get some traffic and why not utilize a free service to help your blog get out there on the web? …

• Best day ever

- September 17th was the day John Reese launched BlogRush.com. I suspected something was coming; John had contacted me in advance (although all references cited a mysterious and revolutionary BR). My little blogrush site on wordpress …

• Using BlogRush to Get Free Traffic to Your Blogs

- Blog widgets are a hot trend now and BlogRush was the first one I ever cared to try out. BlogRush is a free content sharing network system created by John Reese that allows you to display the title of your latest article from your blog …

• BlogRush: Success or Failure?

- Many bloggers are shouting out loud that BlogRush have failed miserably and are removing the BlogRush widget from their sidebars, while there are few who still believes in BlogRush and said that bloggers are to be blamed for low …

• BlogRush: Driving Free Traffic to Your Blog

- What is BlogRush? BlogRush is a site offering free widget to help bloggers to share their contents automatically over the blogosphere. The widget: By signing up for BlogRush, you will get a widget like the picture above. …

• Blogging Tech: BlogRush

- Basically, BlogRush syndicates other blog headlines and includes them on your blog (ie. in your sidebar, where you add the widget code). Of course in doing so, YOUR BLOG HEADLINES get syndicated on other blogs as well. …

• Blogrush works

- I’ve spoken about Blogrush before and I still think it’s a great concept. As you can see by the image in this post, this blog has appeared on the Blogrush widget on someone else’s blog, so that is proof that it works! …

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Regardless what you market, whether it be online or offline, services or products, physical products or infoproducts, it is crucial to use a service such as Squidoo.com.

The main purpose of Squidoo is to show the world that you are an authority in whatever niche or market you are in. It is becoming very popular as a site with great content. The idea is similar to what Ask.com tried to achieve all those years ago: authors sign in, create great content and publish on Squidoo. It was designed by legendary marketer Seth Godin and is beginning to have quite a lot of clout with the search engines… and why wouldn’t it? Squidoo aims to be everything a search engine loves – good quality, unique content that is updated regularly.

Squidoo allows you to write articles on a related area, include your own links, take credit for the writing, let people see other “lenses” you have written, promote other resources you think would aid the reader (eg for more information see …), direct readers to books on Amazon and a whole lot more.

Squidoo is definitely going to feature more heavily in my marketing plan and you should consider whether you can work it into yours.

Things that have helped me grasp the power of Squidoo recently are an article by AskBobtheTeacher and a pdf recommended by Seth Godin on the secrets to traffic on Squidoo.

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I just read a great article that has helped me with my writing for blogs. Chris Brogan has written a list of practical ways to get around writer’s block. While it is tailored specifically to blogging, if you do any sort of creative writing, it’s worth checking out. He talks about getting a “scratch blog” and just writing down your ideas where no one can see. The key is to just get out there and start blogging. If you are too scared to, maybe start with a microblogger, like Twitter.com. Just keep plugging away and you’ll be a great blogger in no time

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I just read an excellent article by Jack Humphrey. Click here for the full article (a new window will open up). It’s a brilliant “State of the Web” address that is well worth the read.

Jack talks about how the internet is constantly evolving (well duh! but apparently some people just don’t get it) and how the marketing methods that we used to use have become largely ineffective. There is a huge paradigm shift needed for those of us who started in the “old school”, using methods such as “google cash”, putting up adsense sites without caring too much about the content, free-for-all link farms (my gosh, I can’t believe we thought that would work!), etc.

People want great quality content, and so they should! Who wants to do a search on Google and the top 10 results are all “filler sites”? If you are looking for information, you should get information. If you are looking for nonsense… well there are plenty of places to look for that, but why waste your time. People want to be entertained and/or educated. That’s why web 2.0 is so popular. A recent Comscore survey of US internet users (January 2008) found that people in the US spent over 200 minutes per person *ON AVERAGE* in January 2008 watching online videos. Why did they do that? Entertainment. Information. Education.

SEO works and works extremely well, but not using the methods that were used years ago. You have to have good content or you’ll just be a “flash in the pan”. Sure black hat can work… for the short term. But if you want long term results, if you want to be a “player” in your niche, you can’t go past great quality content. You have to use “white hat” SEO methods (and/or head to the relatively unexplored Web 2.0 fields).

Give the people what they want… your market/audience/clients will reward you for it.

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I am on one of internet marketing expert, John Reese’s email lists. Just over a week ago, I got an email from Reese saying he had seen the value in having a Facebook profile and anyone who wanted to be on his friends list should go to http://profile.to/johnreese. Of course I added him – such an esteemed marketer… I couldn’t pass up that opportunity. People rushed to add him because he said he would be giving some top material exclusively to his Facebook list. Having some experience of Reese’s idea of “top material”, it’s a list worth being on.

But it’s too late. I just checked now – he has 5,000 friends, which is the maximum permitted by Facebook. So those who are on it are the fortunate few… the rest will have to take a lesson in marketing. Or, you could go and join his “fan page” on Facebook. That should achieve a similar result.

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Jack Humphreys has done it again! I just found out that one of the best resources if you want to understand the Web 2.0 scene has been updated. Oh yeah, and IT’s FREE! I know, we all like free stuff. What’s the catch? well you have to give him your email address, but who cares? it’s worth it. Jack is one of the leaders in this industry. He has a super content email newsletter that is worth paying for. Yep, that’s free too His emails always have great content and are very practical. I think that Authority Black Book is like the Definitive Guide to Adwords by Perry Marshall, except that this is free.

Check it out at Authority Black Book. You’ve got nothing to lose.

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There is this awesome new product which John Reese’s team at Income.com has just come up with… it’s called:

BlogRush

Just go there and watch the trailer (a new window will open). It will blow your mind how cool this is. As you’ll see on the right, I’ve already incorporated it into my blog traffic strategy. I think everyone who does any form of blogging should get a hold of this.

Oh, and did i mention it is FREE?

It’s currently in its Beta stage and there are no indications whether it will or won’t remain free. Just in case, I’d go over there and get into it right now if I were you. It’s super easy to setup, you just put in your details to sign up for an account, then enter your blog details and it gives you like five lines of code. You then enter it in the appropriate area of your blog template, save it and your done. It’s that easy. It took me all of five minutes! And that was including the time to watch the video. So don’t tell me you’re too busy to do that.

The implications from a Search Engine Optimization point of view are vast. It’s like what TrafficSwarm and others tried to do with advertising, but was just too difficult to keep up. The reason they failed was because the “owner” of the account had to do the web surfing him/her-self. With BlogRush, you “earn” credits whenever your blog is viewed. But it’s way cooler than that, so I’ll leave the surprise for when you watch the video.

Enjoy.

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