Money-Code » Twitter

eBay and Twitter.. some confusion

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:27:17 +0000

It’s been well documented that you cannot promote eBay listings on social networks.. or any site you do not currently own. Meaning, you can post rover links on Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo, etc. It has been the general understanding that you can use those social networks to promote your OWN site where you’d have rover links on them.

Today, I noticed a very disturbing post on the EPN forum by mrguyhp where a affiliate had their account suspended, then reinstated, but withe following warning from EPN:

We have completed the investigation of your account and decided to unsuspend it. It is now active again. However, please be advised that as of August 20, 2009 publishers are no longer allowed to post on twitter.com or any other social network (facebook.com), even if they are merely sending traffic to their own sites. Please remove all your links on these sites and stop those campaigns. If you continue to receive traffic from these sites, your account will be expired and all your pending commissions will be reversed

Now, this makes no sense! According to their EPN blog “10 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Strategy” they have the following listed:

Although eBay Partner Network does not allow our partners to directly promote eBay through social media arenas, we want to make sure you know that you can drive traffic to your own website(s) through appropriate social media strategies.

These two statements seem to be opposite. So far no word from the ‘pinks’ on the subject. You can follow the entire thread here.

UPDATE

Looks like we have a pink reply on the post!

Hi everyone,

To clarify our policy allows social network traffic to be sent to your own site, just not directly to eBay. The blog post is correct. We are looking into the context of that response from Network Quality.

Thanks,
Casey

So hopefully, this is all cleared up now.

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Twitter Alliances

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:08:27 +0000

Over the last few months, I’ve been creating new hub blogs as well as new store fronts using (ReviewAzon and WPReviewSite). Along with these sites, I’ve been creating support Twitter accounts and building followers using BirdFeeder. The benefit of this to promote offers, posts to potential customers very quickly. It’s hard to beat Twitter for getting quick quality traffic to your sites.

The other important thing that I’ve been realizing, is the importance of networking with others. So many of us are all trying to do the same thing, generate traffic and to hopefully make a few bucks off of our sites. Twitter is a great platform to make those connections. Many of us are just starting out with our support Twitter accounts, so when I meet someone that seems cool, I’ll offer to ally with that person. What does this mean? Basically, we agree to RT and to mention each other on #FF of FollowFriday announcements. Hopefully, by doing this we can help generate more traffic and followers by combining our current followers. I also try to comment on their sites as well as RT (ReTweeting) their posts. Some of you that follow my blog here already know what I’m talking about.

On a few of my sites, I’ve seen fantastic results by allying with a few similar Tweeters. You should give it a try. Working with others is a great way to increase your traffic.. which in turn, raises your earnings.

If you’re interested, follow me on Twitter and look me up!

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Take advantage of automating your daily tasks with tools

admin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:41:31 +0000

One of the big things I’ve been learning about over the last few months, is how important it is to use tools to automate processes related to affiliate marketing or internet marketing. There are two concepts I wanted to address.

“Think bigger” and “Takes money to make money”

When I say “thinking bigger” I’m not talking about your marketing hopes and dreams, but rather, expanding your technique on how earn commissions or earnings, and how to reach out to people. Many of us have the mindset of creating a site, put some content in it, put some ads on it and wait for money to start falling from the site into your pocket. Next, when reality hits that you’re not going to get rich you either quit or you figure out what’s wrong. Usually the problem is traffic, so you start tuning the site and begin promoting it, either via SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising or both. Traffic increases, but you’re still not seeing your income rise.

To think big is to think about your process larger. Increase your sites, increase your backlinks, increase your promotion and the ability to contact more and more people to encourage them to your site. To do this manually can be extremely tedious and time consuming. Time is money, and it’s important to focus your time on things that will benefit you the most. Submitting sites to directories is a poor use of time, but spending your time creating new sites or content is time well spent. Why? Because one can be automated and the other can not (unless subcontracted).

I wanted to describe some of the things are that I would consider vital to my operation.

I’ve been creating Twitter accounts for my support hub blogs. These hub blogs are ways I can promote sales/products, talk about news or information about niche, while connecting to some of my store fronts. My store fronts are good and produce, but it’s hard to create the sense of community to attract repeat visitors. That’s the primary reason why I wanted to create a hub blog within a primary category. To me the best way to attract new visitors and to keep existing visitors engaged is to use Twitter. Having a Twitter account is one thing, but gaining followers is a whole other ball of wax. This is where one of my favorite tools come in, which is Bird Feeder. With Bird Feeder, I can search based on niche related keyword and follow a set amount of users. I can also set unfollows based on time and protect my mutual followers (don’t unfollow if they’re following me). Every morning while I make my pot of coffee, Bird Feeder is doing it’s thing following many people and unfollowing many people. Eventually your counts will rise and rise depending on your Tweet quality. The amount of Twitter traffic I get to my hub blogs illustrates the importance of these Twitter accounts, and not manually following or unfollowing people saves a ton of time!

Research is a time sucker in itself, and it sucked so much time in the past, that I ended up doing very little, which is bad. Research is the key in finding quality niches, and understanding the competition. I’ve been pushing hard with SEO trying to gain more organic, yet targeted traffic to my web sites on top of my PPC efforts. A tool that I’m absolutely loving for this is SEO Elite. Here is a tool that can do many things for you while you work on building sites, etc. It does an excellent job finding backlinks, showing where you’re ranking, finding backlinks of competition, etc. To do this by hand via Google is painful, speaking from experience. It’s very nice to create a query, and let it run while I do other things. When it’s done I review the results and store the information and formulate plans based off of the data. To me, SEO Elite is the best SEO research tool out there and I wish I purchased it years ago.

With SEO, one of the critical pieces is creating backlinks to your sites with proper anchor link/titles along with relating content. I use two tools to help with this. The first is Blog Comment Demon. This is a blog discovery tool. It’ll search for blogs based off of keyword supplied. It will return a listing of sites, their PR, number of comments, number of outbound links, etc. It’ll also let you know what type of blog it is (WordPress, TypePad, etc). Clicking on the URL it will open a browser window inside the software where you can contribute a useful post. It records when you submitted a comment. The other nice thing is the ability to create ‘projects’, which helps organize your backlinking efforts.

The other tool I like to use, made by the same developer (EdWin Soft) is Book Marking Demon. Basically this will help submit sites to various book mark directories on the web, but in a way that is automated. You create a account that Book Marking Demon creates accounts at those directories and submits your sites as that user into those directories.

This is where I go back to the next ‘concept’ mentioned above – “Takes money to make money”. These tools are not free, but the amount of time it frees up is amazing, and are worth their weight in gold. You need to think bigger, figuring out how to reach more and more people, and I don’t think it’s possible, or extremely difficult without the use of tools and services.

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Twitter troubles

admin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:13:07 +0000

Is anyone else out there having Twitter connectivity issues this morning? I also noticed that Facebook seems to be having troubles. Is there a big network outage/problem somewhere?

Other sites for me work great.

Update
Looks like Twitter and possibly Facebook is currently undergoing a DoS (Denial of Service) or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)

Here is more information about it:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/06/twitter.attack/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/08/06/technology/AP-US-TEC-Twitter-Outage.html?_r=1&hpw

0 Followers on Twitter is being addressed

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:32:28 +0000

0 Follower problem on Twitter is being addressed. I checked out their Status site and saw the following post for Tue Jul 28th

Working on missing followers for recently joined users

If you’ve joined Twitter in the past week, you may be running into a problem with followers. Specifically, some recently joined folks have reported losing their followers or have reported an inability to be followed.

We’re actively working on this problem and hope to release a fix soon.

The accounts in question for me were definitely new accounts. I’m glad the problem has been identified and is being corrected. Hopefully, we’ll get the follower count returned to what they were.

Here is a link to the post at Twitter Status.

Working on missing followers for recently joined users 3 hours ago

If you’ve joined Twitter in the past week, you may be running into a problem with followers. Specifically, some recently joined folks have reported losing their followers or have reported an inability to be followed.

We’re actively working on this problem and hope to release a fix soon.

Something is up with Twitter Follower count (0 Followers)

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:02:25 +0000

Today, I was helping a client set up their first Twitter account. She placed a few tweets, basically a intro and links to her Facebook business page and actual web site. We started following a few people, and she was getting the “So and so is following you on Twitter” email, so I thought that was good. But when we went to her profile, it showed 0 Followers?! I followed her with my account, she got the email, but the page still shows 0 Followers. Oddly, when I refreshed my page (when it was on her profile), the “You are following” message turned into the “Follow” button, as if it didn’t stick?

I heard that they were correcting follower counts this week, adjusting banned/suspended accounts from the count (apparently those remained in the follow count), but something seems messed up. I logged into another Twitter account that I’ve been working with and I saw that my 200+ followers were reduced to 0 followers like my client?

Here are some links with others describing the same thing:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in…8141623AAMGfQK
http://www.steverubel.com/twitter-clips-hundreds-of-followers-from-high
http://help.twitter.com/forums/31935…/37611?page=41
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=12092941

Hopefully this is just a simple glitch in the system and things will be restored? I’m hoping that these are ‘suspended’ or ‘banned’ accounts now. Logging in and participating with the individuals you’re following remains the same, so I definitely don’t get it. Why some accounts are affected while others are is puzzling too? Could be taking a while for the follower count to propagate throughout the system?

Can anyone shed some light on this?

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Racheting up Twitter follower count

admin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:12:35 +0000

This might be a no-brainer topic, but I wanted to put this post up for any people out there having trouble on how Twitter follower counts work.

When I first started getting serious with my Twitter accounts, I was confused about the max followers issue. When I followed 2000 tweeps I could no longer follow more people? I was confused how other high profile twitter accounts were following many thousands of accounts. Asking around (thanks @therealjosh and @MattLevenhagen) I was able to get the answer. The issue is related to the people following you. 2000 is the first threshold you must break through, once you get past 2000 followers, you will be able to follow more people. It slowly ratchets you up in follow numbers.

So how do you manage the following/follower ratio? The trick is to unfollow people. By unfollowing people then following more people with the wiggle room you create, you literally ratchet your way up. Currently, I have 2,220 followers, which allows me to follow 2,445 people. For every new follower, I can follow more people.

This is where a tool like Bird Feeder is invaluable. You can set Bird Feeder to unfollow based on time frame. Every day, I unfollow people older than 3 days old, while keeping all of my mutual followers. You can also whitelist people you like to follow, but are not following you. So with Bird Feeder I unfollow 250 followers every morning, then follow based on search criteria, by doing this my targeted follower count increases easily every day. Using tools to automate free you up to do work, which translates into cash. I wrote a review about Bird Feeder for Twitter if you’d like to learn more about it.

Twitter Followers

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:00:01 +0000

Over the last few months, I’ve been working on improving my Twitter presence. This includes my hanjicode (Twitter Profile) as well as other Twitter profiles. Twitter is a very powerful tool to reach out to many individuals, as long as you have targeted followers. Let me say that again, as long as you have TARGETED followers.

I primarily say this because, if you have followers and they’re no way related to your profile, you will not be able to attract them to offers or to your sites. They won’t care and eventually unfollow you anyway. If you have targeted followers, they’re more likely to see what you have to say and follow some of your links, etc.

Here is a graph from TwitterCounter showing my followers from the last 3 months

The large spikes are directly related to my BirdFeeder integration. I wrote a review about BirdFeeder recently, and I can’t say enough about how powerful this tool is. It is truly a great tool, and obviously gets the work done. As I mentioned in the BirdFeeder review, this is not just a ‘follow’ tool, but a tool designed to follow targeted tweeters, based off of search criteria or individuals.

Including Twitter updates in your site

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:51:10 +0000

A client of mine wanted to include his Twitter feeds into his site. This is quite easy using the cURL library to access the Twitter RSS or XML feed. This might be a nice way to dynamically include additional content into your site. There are Twitter widgets that embed content into your site, but they use JavaScript to do this. Personally, I want this content to be read by bots, so PHP/HTML integration is a good option.

Basically, using cURL, you can bring in the RSS feed or XML feed. The RSS feed only includes date and status, and the XML feed will give you additional information including profile information (website, bio, etc).

I wrote a simple custom function which I’ve used in other examples here on the site called send_request(). This calls the request for the RSS file.

function send_request($rest){
global $rootpath;
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $rest);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = @curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $file_contents;
}

This function can be on the same script or in a include file. Next we need to assemble the querystring to send to our function. The function will return the XML which we parse with simplexml_load_string(). I should mention that this script will work with PHP compiled with simplexml and have cURL extension. If you’re using PHP4, you’ll need to use a different method to parse XML using DOM.

$username = ‘hanjicode’;
$rssUrl = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/’.$username.‘.rss’;
$rss_feed = send_request($rssUrl);
$i = 0;

if(strlen(trim($rss_feed)) > 0){
$resp = simplexml_load_string($rss_feed);
if(isset($resp->channel) && sizeof($resp->channel) > 0){
foreach($resp->channel->item as $tweet){
$tweetDate = $tweet->pubDate;
$tweetStatus = change_string($tweet->description);
if($i < 10){
$tweetStatus = str_replace($username.‘: ‘,”,$tweetStatus);
echo $tweetDate.‘ – ‘.$tweetStatus.‘

‘;
}
$i++;
}
}
}

It looks through the RSS result and displays the contents to the browser. Let me know if you have any suggestions with this script or if you have any problems. I’ll be more than happy to help.

Cloudberry’s Tweet Fox – Great Firefox Add On

admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:15:49 +0000

Last week I wanted something that could easily Tweet sites that I’m reading and be able to add text or notes along with that particular Tweet. Luckily, I found Cloudberry’s Tweet Fox Add On.

This add on is absolutely great. You simply highlight some text on the page you’re visiting and click on the Tweet Fox icon on the upper right hand corner of your Firefox browser. I small pop up application window will appear with the text you highlighted in the edit box. You can add additional text to your tweet, and add the shortened link to the site.

Once you’re all ready, you simply click the “Tweet” button, and the tweet will be posted to your profile. You can manage your various Twitter accounts as well. I’ve been having a blast posting sites I’m visiting and tweeting my own posts. I highly recommend this add on.. it’s great!

You can read more about Tweet Fox here.

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