A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

Ever since Twitter CEO Evan Williams stated Twitter has plans to have monetization in place by Q1 of 2009, there’s been a lot of discussion about various methods that Twitter can use to monetize their popular micro-blogging service. Most Twitter enthusiasts have speculated some sort of Twitter-Ads platform such as Facebook and MySpace have implemented but from my perspective, Twitter users tend to be more savvy than MySpace and Facebook users and such an implementation may damage Twitter’s reputation more than help monetize the site.

Considering the fact that Twitter began it’s lifecycle free of advertisment, the core community of early adopters will probably not react well to monetization efforts involving cluttering the site with spammy advertisments. One thing that currently separates Twitter from other social sites like MySpace and Facebook is that Twitter’s content is not wrapped in advertisments for ringtones, diet plans and other affiliate marketing scourge. Twitter is known for it’s clean, uncluttered interface. Despite the fact Twitter’s servers have been slow, unpredictable and experienced a great deal of downtime, the site is still generally fast loading when there are no hardware related problems.

So how could Twitter monetize their site without creating an uproar from the existing community?

ITProMarketer wrote an interesting article on monetizing twitter with several viable suggestions…

Charging for corporate presences, but keeping personal presences free There is a lot of speculation that this may be the method that Twitter incorporates into its business model. With this method, people who wish to use Twitter as a front for their brand names or companies would have to pay a fee. This is logical because the business accounts are the ones that would have the money to pay for this service. However, I am not sure if this would work or even be accepted by the social media community. Here’s why: One facet of social media is that it is bridging the gap between personal usage and business usage. They are becoming one, and in effect, increasing trust and credibility for audiences of those who utilize social media. This model seems to be in opposition to that idea.

Marshall Kirkpatrick outlines a possible solution involving selling friends on Twitter.

Who says you can’t buy friends? $1 per user who takes the suggestion and opts in to getting messages from @JetBlue or @Zappos? That could happen. Could those companies keep their freshly purchased friends? Only if their Twitter output stayed interesting!

Both of those suggestions have a lot of holes in them and both involve corporate or big business interest in Twitter. While many corporate entities have experimentd with Twitter, most have figured out that it lacks significant potential for corporate infomercials disguised as tweets. Stan Schroeder pointed this out in his article Twitter May Have Made Dell a Million, it Doesn’t Mean it Can Be (Easily) Monetized.

My opinin is that Twitter will have to be monetized very carefully with unique implementation that don’t seperate their communication service into corporate and personal. Here are a few of my ideas on how Twitter could monetize their site without creating a backlash :

Multiple Twitter ID Packs - Allows a user or organization from a specific IP to register multiple accounts on the service. I have two Twitter accounts but I know a few web 2.0 social media spelunkers who create hundreds of accounts on new media services such as Twitter, in hopes of one day re-selling those established accounts. If Twitter were to provide and interface for people to easily switch between and manage multiple accounts, such as Entrecard has, they could concievably sell 5, 10 or 100 username packs to interested marketers.

Twitter Username Sales/Auctions - Taking a percentage of auctions for Twitter user names and/or accounts. Allow selling of identities only through the Twitter auction site. Offsite sales are subject to banning. Creates a new secondry community for Twitter in addition to providing revenue. Hey, people used to sell low E-Gold numbers for thousands of dollars, anything is possible, and if it’s free to signup service you can bet there are people out there acquiring sought after usernames.

Twitter Profile Upgrades - Let’s face it, people like to customize their profiles on social media services and one of the most obvious methods for Twitter to monetize their members is to allow enhancements to user profiles for a fee. I’m sure there are thousands of marketers on Twitter who would gladly pay for an enhanced profile. This method propagates itself when somebody sees a member with an enhanced profile and wants one for themselves.

Revenue Sharing - One way that Twitter could possibly slip in some traditional advertising such as Google Adsense is to create a revenue sharing systems such as many popular forums have. Ads could be turned on or off depending on the users participation in the program.

One tragic aspect of Twitter is that the site is not search engine optimizable and the vast majority of Twitter’s traffic is “type in” traffic or “word of mouth” traffic. In contrast, MySpace has both social traffic as well as search engine traffic. The downfall for Twitter is that they are intrinsic to the community they created and causing early adopters to change the way they view the service could have negative consequences.

Despite all the hype and hoopla surrounding Twitter, I personally have not found it very useful for anything other than killing time. I’m sure there are many people who would extoll the virtues of the platform but I really can’t see the advantages Twitter has over chat rooms, newsgroups, forums, blogs or even other more organized sites such as Digg and Reddit. Is Twitter is an immediate avalanche of micro information in a text format or is it an over glorified guestbook. Given you remember the “sign my guestbook” scripts on every webpage a decade ago (BG) before Google.

If Twitter can tap into their community and work accordingly to offer value added services to existing members, I think they could monetize Twitter without selling out.

         

20 Comments Permalink

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a lot of affiliate marketers talking about Social Media Marketing. Social media has become a cornerstone for successfully promoting a product, services, websites, blogs and anything else you can think of. While the concept might seem straighforward, many novice marketers completely miss the boat on this powerful asset. In some cases an adverse social media effect might end up causing more harm to their online reputation than good.

Before You Begin - The Social Media Strategy

Prior to launching any type of campaign, whether it be an advertising campaign, a backlink building campaign or a social media campaign, you must be pragmatic in implementing a well researched strategy. If you don’t have a strategy, you will eventually hit a brick wall and be forced to start all over again. Wasted efforts - “while sometimes good for the learning process, are an occupational hazard for professional business that can easily be avoided with careful research and design beforehand.”

The first step is to have a clear definition of exactly what you will be trying to get out of your campaign. Are you trying to network with other like- minded individuals or are you looking for more traffic to your website? Are you simply looking for backlinks to increase your site’s SEO value? Ask yourself what are you doing this for and with that in mind you can begin to search for social media sites that are appropriate for your social media marketing campaign.

The second step is to analyze which social media sites you will be targeting. Don’t even signup an account during this stage. Simply spend a few minutes or hours analyzing if the site in question is worth your time and effort. for example, if you are looking for backlinks and SEO value, you will obviously want to find social media sites that aren’t using the nofollow tag. Each site you find that seems as if it might be beneficial to your social media optimization, copy the url down in a notepad use in the next phase. Again, resist the urge to join sites as you find them because you’re not ready for full optimization just yet.

Creating an Identity - Social Media Public Relations

In social media marketing, the two strongest assets you posess are your identity and your good reputation. I’ll discuss the reputation part further down in this article, but for this phase of development, we’ll focus on identity.

Unless you’re intending to be a shameless self promoter or social media spammer, establishing an contigious identity is crucial. If you will be using your identity across the various sites or networks you discovered in the first phase, this means you will have to decide on a username that you can work into a social identity. The identity is essential because it will establish your personal brand recognition.

If you are a blogger named Johnny Thunders who has a blog about old school punk rock bands, you may want to pick a username such as “JThunders” or “OldSchoolPunk”. One huge mistake I see people making, especially on Twitter, is creating a username like “CellphoneSales”. Use your head here. Nobody is going to add “CellphoneSales” to their friends list or follow a name like that on Twitter or any other social media site.

You will also need to find a creative avatar to represent you. If you don’t want to use your own personal picture as your avatar, you should use soemthing creative that is relative to your goals. I’ve found that using your own personal picture and using it across networks is yet another form of brand recognition that online envrionments thrive on. Once again, establish a personal identity that others can relate to.

Up and Running - Social Media Ethics

Once you have a strategy, sites to join and identity thought out, you’re ready to begin signing up for the various sites and services you targeted. It is important that you ease yourself into a new community and not come on too strong. Also, make sure you are aware of that rules. Don’t just go rushing in and spamming your links everywhere unless you want to ruin your reputation or worse, get banned.

If a site you are working with has groups, introduce yourself into groups that are of interest to you and groups where you may be of interest to others. Don’t just join groups and add friends blindly to increase your stats. Most social media sites frown on this type of behaviour. Remember that slow and steady wins the race. The worst thing you can do is get banned for unethical or irresponsible behaviour because you will lose all the work you have done up to that point.

As the operator of several forums and social networking sites myself, the one thing I have noticed is that so many amateurs get banned quickly from every site they join. The internet isn’t so anonymous and many social site members will remember the link to a blog or site owned or promoted by a jerk who got banned for spamming. I get more abuse reports concering returning, previously banned members than anything. So, with that said, never spam social media sites because it will not only waste your time, but it will waste the time of the site administrators.

Conclusion
Social Media Marketing can be a powerful tool if used correctly. Always remember that with any “social” medium, there is an implication of community and how you behave in a community can help you build a strong reputation or can give you a bad reputation. Follow each communities rules and be a productive, contributing member and the rewards can be limitless.

         

13 Comments Permalink

  If you haven’t been using EntreCard to promote your blog, you’re probably missing out on one of the best tools bloggers have to garner short bursts of traffic on a regular basis. Sure, there are detractors who will say EntreCard turns only traffic with a high bounce rate and most people visiting a site from EntreCard are only visiting sites to drop cards and earn credits. However, in my experience, regardless of how traffic is generated, whether it be from EntreCard, MyBlogLog, StumbleUpon or even organic SEO, there will always be a significant bounce rate and a lower percentage of visitors who remain on a site more than a few minutes.

That being said, my philosophy is “all traffic is good traffic” and for the most part, EntreCard does have a developing community of supporters who genuinely visit other community members’ sites and participate, not just bounce. If I can get one out of one hundred visitors from any traffic source to hang around long enough to read a few articles and leave a single comment or subscribe to my RSS feed, that’s a positive.

Now that I’ve given my reason for having the EntreCard widget on the sidebar of this blog, it’s time to get to discussing EntreCard’s “economy”, which is undergoing several critical changes that will impact the community. Here’s the latest update from EntreCard :

In order to continue operating in the long-term, Entrecard needs make some significant changes. These are summarized below: 1. Buy credits for less: Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them here: http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits 2. More pricing increments: Instead of prices doubling every time, there are now a few more steps. The new price points can be found on the Advertising page in the wiki, here: http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=advertising 3. Members are not allowed to sell credits: This goes for ebay sales, posts in the Marketing forum, and posts on other forums. If you have references on your site to the sale of credits, please remove them immediately, as it is now against our terms. 4. Credit transfer limits: Members are allowed to make a maximum of 14 credit transfers a week, up to a maximum of 1,000 credits, whichever comes first. This means you can still run contests where you give credits away for free, and under 1k per week. Note: This does not affect linked blogs, you can transfer unlimited credits between linked blogs. 5. Transfer tax: From now on, all transfers, including transfers made with our new payments API, will be taxed at a rate of 12.5%. The taxed credits will be sold to members (see #1). 6. Blogs cannot be unlinked: Once you link a blog, it’s there for good unless you ask us to delete the blog from your account. This prevents linking/unlinking to get around the credit transfer limits, and it also stops you losing access to a blog if you unlink it in error, which happens a lot. 7. No more coupons: You are no longer allowed to send coupons. 8. Shop closed: Except for Entrecard upgrades (Featured Status, Fast Pass) the Entrecard Shop is now offline until further notice. Please do not request a seller token until the shop returns. When it comes back, it will be bigger and better. We’ll communicate more details nearer the time. We really do believe that an economy with plenty of 3rd parties involved is a stronger economy overall, unfortunately just right now we’re unable to support that given the need to keep everything running. We hope that, by taking the steps we have, we will be able to reach a good balance between maximizing the overall benefits for our users and getting the revenue we need to pay the bills and expand the service. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll be in a stronger position with a more diverse income and we’ll be able to reintroduce independent credit sales and unfettered credit transfers among members. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve had over the past few days on this topic, please let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our blog post here: Changes affecting the Entrecard economy Thanks for standing by us while we make these important changes, and know that these changes will allow us to continue to make available to you the great Entrecard service that brings you more traffic, comments, and subscribers and better rankings.

I’ll play devil’s advocate here and bring my economics background into factor to question exactly how EntreCard feels that their credit system is in fact an economy? If you have any experience in the field, you know that for an economy to exist, free enterprise must exist. In #3 above, cutting off the free enterprise system by disallowing members from selling EntreCard credits amongst themselves literally devalues EntreCard credits alltogether. Can you imagine if any government said that citizens were no longer allowed to sell gold or silver and that all gold would be sold by the government alone? Free enterprise sets a market value for a commodity and a governing body controlling all sales of a particular commodity is not an economy, it’s a totalitarian state.

Transfer tax ??? While I’ve never bought or sold credits, nor have I ever had the intention of doing so, this announcement seems more based on greed than anything else. Considering the lack of free enterprise, a tax on a valueless commodity is essentially a handling fee, not a tax. One thing I particularly dislkie is overinflating of credit based systems and for all it’s worth, if EntreCard is going to be the sole distributor of credits, they have essentially become just another traffic exchange like TS25, Traffic Pods or Trafficera (all of which are very good sources of traffic).

Once again, I’m not a member of the EntreCard community for reasons other than to network and generate traffic to my blogs so none of these changes impact nor bother me. I am merely offering my opinion on these changes in economic terms and reiterating that for any economy to thrive, free enterprise must be a factor. I’m not the only one who thinks so, Jeff at Buzz My Blog has weighed in with his article, EntreCard Changing the Rules - Too Little Too Late? and Jude8573 at Beauty Denominator has been put in a bind by the New EntreCard rules regarding 14 transfers per week.

Possibly these changes are due to EntreCard’s owner, Graham Langdon trying to sell the site at SitePoint within the last week but most likely it is due to Graham feeling the stress of operating a startup venture on a shoestring budget.

If you have an opinion on Entrecard’s recent changes, please feel free to leave a comment.

         

16 Comments Permalink

As bloggers, most of us have experimented with social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Searchles and others to garner a wider audience for our work and to possibly get some traffic to our respective blogs. In theory it seems like a good thing but in reality, social bookmarking leaves a lot to be desired. Examining several of the most popular social news and social bookmarking services, it becomes apparent that the genre suffers from the same malaise across the board leaving the impression that using these services is a complete waste of time.

Why do I have this opinion of these potentially enlightening services? It’s simple, the vast majority of them suffer from what I call the “Lord of the Flies” syndrome. For those of us who have read William Golding’s novel about a group of British boys marooned on a deserted island, who govern themselves with disastrous results, it’s a clear comparison to the social bookmarking genre where more often than not the inmates run the asylum.

Digg - Digg is definitely the biggest and baddest of the bunch. With that reputation comes the power to turn unmetered traffic at a story that hits the front page. It’s not uncommon to see a story that hits the front page get so much traffic that the server goes down amidst a flurry of Diggers. With the upside of Digg also comes a darker, more sinister underside. It’s fairly safe to say that groups of people in the elite eschelon at Digg control what hits the front page and what gets buried. In that Digg is loosely based on social networking principles, article writers who have a large group of friends on Digg can easily manipulate the system to put their stories in front of the masses of sheeple who will click the Digg button in effort to build up their reputation in the community. Sometimes I’ve seen the most poorly written articles from the most poorly written blogs float to the top time after time with the same people digging the stories over and over again. How is this truly social bookmarking? It’s not and I think the reason Google left the deal to purchase Digg on the table was that somebody with half a brain at Google realized that the Digg community is falsely inflated and really are not a good indicator of a truly well written article or story that would have appeal to anyone else other than the Digg community.

Reddit - Reddit is a spin-off of Digg that was started by a bunch kids from University of Virginia. Hardly old enough to buy a drink at a bar, these “experts” seem to misconstrue the meaning of the word social with geek culture. It comes as no suprise that people who have spent 1/4 of their lives in a dorm room would have little or no experience with how the real world works. Just like the “hunters” in Lord of the Flies, the school children who manipulate Reddit gradually become more savage, put on their face paint and completely abandon the concept of society in order to empower their tribe. As with Digg, if you’re not well connected at Reddit, you can guarantee submitting an article you’ve writtin, no matter how important or well written, will get buried by the “hunters” who seem more comfortable communicating in netspeak than in a humanly readable language. Once again, in theory Reddit seems like a wonderful experiment in social storytelling, however, the presence of children who live for popularity contests spoils the true essence of Reddit and makes the experiment a total failure.

Sphinn - Sphinn is basicly a Digg clone. It lacks the originality of Reddit or Searchles and is even more tightly controlled than Digg by those with a vested interest in manipulating the front page. Almost routinely, stories are removed from Sphinn by the over-zealous moderators. Why? I don’t know?? It seems to me that removing articles instead of just letting them slip into the fold is a childish action that is certainly not in tune with Sphinn’s self-proclaimed agenda as an “Internet Marketing News & Discussion Forum”. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Sphinn is merely a marketing tool for it’s founder, The Evil Green Monkey, who by chance happens to be a “self-proclaimed” SEO and search marketing expert named Rob Kerry from Britan. hmmm, maybe he is really Jack and is intent on setting the entire SEO island on fire to hunt down Ralph and kill him.

Andy Beard had this to say about Sphinn

When Launched, Sphinn was described as “Sphinn: Our Social Site For Search & Internet Marketing Professionals” I first wrote about Sphinn 6 months ago, almost to the day, and my emphasis was on attention, market segmentation and building bridges within the industry. In my personal opinion, Sphinn has totally and utterly failed to achieve that, and in some ways it has helped widening the gap between different online marketing professionals.

I have the utmost respect for Andy Beard, mainly because he does not fall into cliques nor is he a sheeple who blindly follows the sheep herders to what they believe are greener pastures. Andy is an independant very much like myself and he is well known for calling things for what they truly are. Sphinn is yet another failure. As the officer in the closing scene of Lord of the Flies tells the children on the beach about to kill Ralph, “I would have expected better from British boys”.

Searchles - Searchles is possibly the most creative and well laid out social news and social bookmarking site, however, once again we find the sheeple and hunters clouding the mix with their ignorance. You can almost guarantee that if you submit anything to Searches that somebody would have to read (ie: not a YouTube video), it will immediately get several “1″ ratings from the hunters who prowl the site looking to play games with the rating system. Call it sheer stupidity or a tragic oversight but Searchles has a 1-5 rating system where 5 is the highest and 1 is the lowest. While articles I’ve submitted into the affiliate marketing community on Searchles have achieved numerous 5 ratings from fellow affiliate marketers, there’s always a few jokers who cast a 1 vote on anything as soon as it’s submitted. I find this rather disappointing because there’s no way somebody could have read an article in 30 seconds and decided it was worthy of casting the lowest vote possible at it. Even more disappointing is checking out the low voter’s profile and finding out that it’s some 13 year old kid who has submitted hundreds of stupid YouTube videos and has never submitted any original content in their history at Searchles. How submitting YouTube videos to a social news site is relevant is beyond me. After all, YouTube does have a search function and if somebody wants to watch a video, they can go find it for themselves. Once again, the hunters have taken over the island and the concept of society has been tossed by the wayside by a bunch of children who think life is a popularity contest.

So what is the future for this genre? Where will social bookmarking and social news propel us in the future. I’m not entirely certain but the one thing I do know is that I will not be wasting my valuable time contributing to high school popularity contests because I hated that game when I was in high school and I’m surely not going to play that game as an adult.

Perhaps the children who operate and populate these sites and social networking sites such as MySpace, FaveBook, Twitter, etc should all take a few hours away from their precious online social networking and get out from behind the computer, go outside into the real world and take a few lessons on networking with real people. They might also take the time to read The Lord of the Flies and try to faintly grasp the concepts of Golding’s allegorical novel about how subcultures created by wild children lost on deserted islands are doomed to failure.

Tagged : Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Searchles, Lord of the Flies

         

8 Comments Permalink