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.

If I had to start again today….

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:37:53 +0000

I read “If You Had To Start Over With $0 Budget” at Deneil Merritt’s blog (great blog by the way), and it got me thinking about how I would start again. I don’t think I would start with a $0 budget, and if you’re interested in affiliate or internet marketing, you should try with a hearty effort, or don’t try at all and save yourself the misery of making $0 on your $0 budget. I think I do have some different opinions now for starting in internet or affiliate marketing.

Start with what you know..?

Seems like the common suggestion is to pick a niche that you’re familiar with. It definitely makes sense, and that is definitely the direction I started a few years ago. If I was to start over now, I would through that logic out the window. I think you should start with what can earn can earn decent commissions. It’s easy to be comforted with areas of interest and feel there is a level of knowledge or expertise related there, but reality says.. it doesn’t matter. It can be helpful, it can make things easier, but not worth the lost commissions.

I would start with products, services and/or niches that earn and learn about them. Spend a few hours understanding categories, trends and values and grow from there. The energy and time devoted here will reward you more in the end.

One site or many sites?

I see this question often, and there really isn’t a ‘right’ answer here. Is it better to have a few or one great site vs. many mediocre sites? Initially, I started with one ‘community’ site, then started branching out from there, tweaking, waiting, tweaking, waiting, etc. If I was to do it again, I would start with my current regiment of a minimum of 2 sites per month. Either creating new ‘test’ sites in new niches, or using the 10 degree separation with sites that are earning. All other down time is spent in blog posts, or tweaking and improving existing sites. I really believe creating new sites is the key to success to finding what you’re good at, what sites produce earnings and enhancing new traffic strategies.

What types of sites?

I’ve always broken down my earning sites into three basic categories. Community Sites, Store Fronts and Blogs. Each are good for different things, but it’s somewhat important to generate all three types, especially when starting out.

Community Sites are sites that are based on a common interest to a group of individuals. Once the site starts and grows, it will basically grow from the content provided by the community itself. Forums is a good example of a community site. These sites are great, once they go, it’s basically set-it-and-forget-it since the content is always evolving and growing without your involvement. You’ll still need to admin the site, etc. These sites are great for AdSense, product placement, etc. But the hard thing is developing a site and getting users and achieving that momentum needed for it to grow itself. Lots of time, lots of effort with very little return in the beginning.

Store Fronts are basically product stores utilizing product feeds. EPN sites and CJ sites using categorization is a example of store fronts. To me, these are by far the most successful. You’ll be targeting buyers vs. readers and conversion is much much higher. I like to promote these sites with PPC to even target better traffic than organic search traffic.

Blogs are blogs. You can blog about products, news, etc. I’ve always been ‘down’ on blogs, thinking the work is to high vs. the return and they’re hard to maintain over the long haul. I’ve changed my opinion on this.

So, if I was to start today, I would focus on getting a network of store fronts initially, maybe start a community site, but a site that I have good confidence that I can gain interested users. I would then work on a few product oriented blogs or review blogs and associate all these types of sites with Twitter. Once I saw some earnings, I would begin light PPC campaigns on the store fronts. Then work on building more sites and diversifying across affiliate networks.

Use Twitter?

Wow, Twitter. This is one of the biggest things that have changed my position in affiliate marketing over the last 6 months. I would DEFINITELY get Twitter accounts for my sites if I was to start today, and I would definitely buy Bird Feeder to grow those Twitter accounts. I cannot believe how useful Twitter is for getting consistent traffic to my product blogs or store fronts. Using Twitter Tools in my WordPress blogs to auto-Tweet posts is a must, and using the TweetMeme plugin for others to re-tweet posts is another fantastic way to get traffic back to your site.

Initially when creating new sites, I would do the normal, submission to search engines, do a few backlinks, post to a few directories, then wait. If I think it’s a hot site, I’ll fire up a PPC campaign, but overall the initial launch is slow going. Now with Twitter, I can get immediate traffic to the site, and traffic that seems to convert. Not super great like PPC traffic, but WAY better than low organic traffic or Stumble traffic.

Use Tools?

This is something I was a little behind on. For some reason, I could never justify the expense for buying tools. I’m also a web developer by day, so I always felt I could write some of these things. Now, I’m starting to value my time more. The time it would take me to write a plugin costs more than purchasing the plugin itself. The time I would be spending writing a plugin or platform, I could have spent on writing new sites, reviews, researched new niches, etc.

I’m a total believer of software tools now. The amount of time these tools save and the amount of work these tools accomplish throughout the day is incredible. If I was to start over again, and after getting some earnings coming in first (I like to roll my earnings back into the pot for tools, domains, etc initially). I would buy the following tools for sure:

ReviewAZON product review plugin for Amazon products
WPReviewSite Review plugin for ranking across your blog
BirdFeeder awesome tool for getting targeted Twitter followers
SEO Elite excellent suite of tools for determining where you rank, find backlinks, research competition, etc.
Blog Comment Demon excellent tool for finding WordPress blogs related to keyword search. Great way to find quality sites for potential comment backlinks

In conclusion, I think the most important thing is consistency when it comes to production. Make sites, keep making sites, keep improving sites, keep moving forward. The earnings will trickle and drizzle in, but it’s important to create the foundation of sites where you can always research with analytics and determine what sites work for you. The other item to pay attention to is diversification, remember to diversify across different niches, affiliate networks and sites. Things change ALL the time so you want to make sure your eggs are not all in one basket. Lastly, remember to be flexible and learn to adapt to situation. Don’t let your network crumble because of a ‘change’ to policy or TOS, learn to take the punches and adapt with the new trend, and be ‘okay’ with letting something go if you need to.

Well, I hope this was useful to someone. I really wish I could have a time machine, I would definitely do some things differently, but at the same time, the path I took gave me the experience I needed for where I’m at today.

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!

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?

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.

Hub Blogs Strategy

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:00:53 +0000

As some of you know, if you’ve been following me, I primarily focus on storefronts, either with EPN or CJ or a mixture of both. Overall, they are light in content, and I’m in the process of pumping them up with category descriptions and additional home page content, etc. I’ve often thought about including blogs for these sites, but unfortunately, most of my money makers are micro-niche sites. Niches that are very narrow and specific. I have many micro-niche sites that are related to a primary niche of field. The thought of including blogs would be extremely difficult.

What I’m deciding to do is to create, what I’m going to call, a “hub blog”. Basically, I’m going to take one of my primary niche sites that have slowed down a bit, which is related to several micro-niche sites and convert that into a storefront/blog. By doing this, I can blog on various topics that can cover one or more of my micro-niche sites and include backlinks, coupons, discounts, etc related. I’ll also be able to create a blog roll of all my micro-niche sites on this blog.

After I create a few of my hub blogs by identifying primary niches my micro-niches are related to, I’ll work on schedule of writing (possibly contracting out some freelance work), and promoting this on many social networks including Twitter.

There are a few things I’m liking about this idea.

This will be easier to maintain and write for
This will give me a platform to promote offers to multiple sites in a single area
This will help create a brand for the primary niche which I can promote with a identity (ie: on Twitter)

I will most likely be using WordPress for these blogs. I’ve created several ’support sites’ using Blogger, etc. which I will continue to do. Anything to increase the traffic and backlink network should help in the end. I’ll keep you posted.

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.

Thinking about security for Affiliate Marketing

admin — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:00:45 +0000

It’s like the saying..

A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

This was the saying generally for people to stay healthy by avoiding things that make you sick, be it lifestyle and behaviour or what you put into your body. This saying really applies to security as well.

I’m currently a web developer and server administrator, so I have a background of security. I’ve seen things when they’ve gone ‘bad’. I’ve also seen the damage that can be done to your business and way of life when a security breach directly affects you. To say a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure really applies to internet security. This topic can fill a book, but I’ll try to keep it short and cover some basic points, from a affiliate marketer point of view.

Platforms
It seems like most affiliate marketers are using various application platforms like WordPress, Drupal or BANS, etc, etc. These tools are great. They’re free (open source) and are easy to install and configure. The problem is that since it is open source any one can download a version and reverse engineer or scour the code for potential security holes and vulnerabilities. From there, a attacker would only need to Google a specific ‘footprint’ to find the same application and version to attack.

The damage this can cause is catastrophic. A attacker could gain priviledge of the entire server and have access to all of your sites. If you’re running dedicated servers, this is even more of a threat, since you would be managing the server and the attacker would recruit this server as a potential tool in his bot army. If you’re on a shared environment, the hosting facility will most likely shut down your site and stop services for you until you correct the problem.

Normally when exploits are discovered the author of the application (WordPress, etc) would be notified, and their developers would create a fix and release a update to correct this issue, usually in a extremely timely manner. Plugins are outside of the WordPress relm, so I would recommend plugins that show ‘activity’ and a community or development team that actively works on it. Stale plugins could be a security vulnerability.

The ounce of cure in this case… UPDATE YOUR WORDPRESS PLATFORM AND PLUGINS! It is so simple and easy.

I know I’m focusing on WordPress in this example, but this would be applied to any 3rd party software application or platform.

Services
If you’re running a dedicated server you must stay on top of your service updates, specifically PHP, Apache, MySQL and SSH. Just like in Platforms, these are all open source products and have potential bugs or exploits that are discovered at times. Either work with your hosting provider or perform the updates themselves. Depending on your flavor of Linux there are various ways to perform these updates.

I’m only mentioning Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) since you don’t see a lot of Windows based hosting at affordable costs. Plus.. I hate talking about Windows.

ACL (Access Control Lists)
This is something that is not mentioned often out there, but I really feel strong about. Using firewalls (iptables, etc) to manage access to your dedicated server is important. Limit SSH access to certain IPs (assuming you have a static IP at your home or office.. which you should). Along with SSH access to the servers, I also like to limit access to administrative areas and control panels. No reason these should be open to the world. This includes my wp-admin access as well.

Hardening Services
There are certain items you can do to ‘harden’ services. Basically making PHP harder to hack or limiting access to the system with a chroot, etc. Along with that you can control error messages (don’t display error messages) to prevent information disclosure. Usually attacks start with information gathering (finding versions, file path info, etc).

Passwords
Work on your passwords. Make them difficult. Think in pass phrases and include alpha numeric characters. DO NOT USE THE SAME PASSWORD FOR EVERYTHING! The more important the information, make the passwords more difficult. For instance, I don’t want people guessing my domain registrar passwords, etc. Think defensively with passwords, watch out for potential insecure Twitter applications, etc. 75% of people use the same password in other areas, so your Twitter password, could be quite valuable if you’re one of the 75%.

Okay, so those are a few items (many more actually while I’m thinking about it), but I wanted to talk about some worst case scenarios.

I had a client that was working on affiliate marketing. He was primarily working with AdSense and creating review and community sites (forums, etc) and was doing quite well. Some how a hacker was able to get is FTP password for the site and infiltrate his host. He had a dedicated server and was then locked out of all of his sites. My client also used the same password for his registrar and the hacker was able to take control of his domains. This was when I was called in. The hacker tried to ransom the sites asking for $100K to return control of all his domains (over 100).

My client was able to start piecing over some of the domains, and even had the FBI involved. Unfortunately, the hacker was in Asia and little could be done. About 3 months later the client was able to get his domains back, but had to create a new hosting solution. After the client recovered the domains, the hacker began a very brutal DOS (Denial of Service) attack on his domains in a last stand type move, but the damage was severely done.

While the hacker had control of the domains, he was PMing invidivduals in the forums and causing mass havoc and confusion. Lots of members left, not to mention that the hacker probably stole all of there user credentials and emails. My client was also ranking very high in Google, and with content changes (pornographic and exploit software) he lost rank and had to start it up again. He also lost his AdSense account and had to re-apply and explain the situation. It was a major blow to his finances but he was able to recover after about 6 months.

So the lesson? If he worked on his password management, this would have been avoided. A ounce of prevention, is worth a pound of cure.. or at least 6 months of cure.