Twitter has become one of the most common ways I find people, services and even support. With Twitter, you can create a strong brand, or you can weaken your existing brand.

Let me give you two unnamed examples. Example 1 is a SEO that sells SEO services. I have no doubt that he is great at what he does, but when I view his twitter stream, it’s full of tweets about getting drunk, having random sex and not remembering much of every weekend.

Example 2 is a friend of Example 1, I know this because Example 1 frequently references Example 2 in his drunken tweets talking about where they are going and what they are doing. However, Example 2 never tweets about anything inappropriate.

If you were going to hire someone, aren’t you going to do a little research? For both men, their Twitter account ranks #2 or #3 behind their blogs and company websites. Googling someone’s name is the first thing I do to find out about them. When I find Example 1’s twitter stream am I going to hire him? Definitely not. Even though Example 2 is partying with Example 1, I don’t have any clue because his stream is professional (with occasional personal tweets).

What does your Twitter stream say about you?

If you’re like me, you want things to be as random as possible, this means selecting just about everything from a CSV or database. If you want to select a random line from your datasource, just create as many columns you need and use this code.


URL GOTO=http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/randomN1.cfm
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:low CONTENT=1
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:hi CONTENT=10
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=NAME:Random
TAG POS=18 TYPE=TD ATTR=TXT:* EXTRACT=TXT
'
SET !VAR1 {{!EXTRACT}}
'
CMDLINE !DATASOURCE datasource.csv
SET !DATASOURCE_COLUMNS 1
SET !DATASOURCE_LINE {{!VAR1}}

The last three lines are what choose the random line in your CSV. Line 2 sets the low range and line 3 sets the high range of your random choice, so if you have a datasource with 55 lines, set the following.

TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:hi CONTENT=10

Hope that helps you use iMacros in a better and more random way!

I’ve been using iMacros a lot lately and absolutely love it! Here is a quick and easy snippet of code to set your variable to be a random number between X and Y.

URL GOTO=http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/randomN1.cfm
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:low CONTENT=1
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:hi CONTENT=10
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=NAME:Random
TAG POS=18 TYPE=TD ATTR=TXT:* EXTRACT=TXT
'
SET !VAR1 {{!EXTRACT}}
SET !EXTRACT NULL

This bit of code will choose a random number between 1 and 10 (you can change the high and low number on lines 2 and 3), extract that random number then set your random number into an iMacros variable !VAR1. It then erases the !EXTRACT so you’re ready to move onto something else.

You can then use !VAR1 anywhere else you need to use that random number. You can even use it multiple times!

Does anyone know where the “recheck queue for spam” button/function went? I have over 200 comments on a blog and don’t want to manually go through them 20 at a time.

Anyone?

Everett Sizemore made me want to blog a little more, so I thought I would give this to you.

If you’ve never used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), you’re missing out. MTurk lets you pay people for specific tasks. These tasks could be things like writing short articles, but anyone can write a short article. MTurk does let you do a few other things that can make you a lot of money. I’m still making money using MTurk so I can’t divulge ALL of my secrets, I can give you some tips and let you adopt them into your marketing plan.

1. Content Generation – Would 100 real reviews make your product review site stand out? I have paid about $.10 per review. Works great with a Wordpress review plugin.
2. Legit Comments – Want to make your site appear well trafficked but get sick of posting comments to yourself?
3. Social Bookmarking – I’ve moved into more automated methods of social bookmarking, but if you’re still doing it yourself, this is a great way to outsource it cheaply.
The following are likely against the terms of service for at least one of the sites, so use at your own risk.
4. Digg Votes – Want to get a site to the front page? Would 100 votes from unique IP’s and unique Digg accounts help? Make sure you’re sending traffic to the page, not directly to Digg.
5. StumbleUpon - I hate SU traffic, it’s pretty much useless. They don’t buy anything, they don’t click ads so to me, they’re a waste of time. If you can monetize this traffic, use it the same way as you would Digg.
6. Arbitrage – DEFINITELY against the TOS…Pay $.25 per signup to a CPA offer that doesn’t require a CC. NeverBlue has some good email offers.

Keep in mind, these are only suggestions to help you think outside of the box. I personally don’t suggest that you violate the terms of use of any of the sites listed, including MTurk. MTurk is a little trigger happy to ban your account…Trust me on that.

Where would you like to be in 5 years? It sounds like a dumb interview question, but it’s relevant in internet marketing (IM) as well as making money online. If your 5 year goal is to make $100 a month, set your sites higher.

The future you see is the future you get. – Robert Allen

What does your future look like in your mind?

Take a break from what you’re doing and consider these questions.

• If you were given $1 million per year for the rest of your life, what would you do?
• If you had everything in life paid for, what would you do?
• If you lived in a monastery and didn’t have access to the internet, what would you spend your time doing?
• What is one thing you could never live without?

For me, those types of questions really make you reflect on what is important. Is money important, sure. Is it the most important thing? Definitely not.

“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” – Will Smith

What is the goal of you making an income online? Is it to buy a Hummer to impress people you don’t know? Is it to move into a neighborhood so people want to come to your house? If you think about it long term, are those things that are important to you?

“When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.” – Oscar Wilde

When you lie on your death bed looking back at your life, will you wish you had spent more time making money? Will you check your bank statements and be happy that your life’s total sum is a dollar figure?

When my life is through, I want to look at my children and grand children and see them smiling. I want my wife to know that I loved her with all of my heart. I want God to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant”. To me, the chief end of man is to glorify God in everything I do.

What do you want to see when you look back on your life? Are you current actions taking you there?

Typically webmasters start out with Adsense as their revenue stream. While it’s easiest and definitely quick to use, Adsense is not always the best performer if you’re looking to earn money online from your websites. With Adsense you’ll always run into a couple problems.

1. You can’t presell. With an affiliate link, you can talk about the product so your visitor knows what to expect when they get to the advertisers page. You can give them the price and details, and if they still click, they’re likely to buy since they already know everything. If that isn’t the product they’re looking for, they’ll continue browsing your site. You’ll make a sale, or keep a visitor. With Adsense you don’t get the chance to do either.

2. You’ll earn less. While I can’t say that every single one of my sites that has affiliate links makes more with those affiliate links, a majority do.

3. All your eggs in one basket. If all of your income is coming from one source and something happens to that source, your revenue drops to $0.

4. Unknown revenue share. This has always been the biggest issue with me. Google doesn’t tell you how much you’re going to earn. In fact, they tell you how much they will give you per click, after you send them the clicks. It’s totally backwards but until they have a reason to give you that info, they never will.

Moving away from Adsense is tough, and I wouldn’t suggest dumping it all together. Start slow, remove the ads from one page and replace it with affiliate links. Test it for a month and see what the revenue is like when compared to Adsense.

Finding Long Tail Keywords

The “Long Tail” keywords are phrases that contain up to 5 key words and are highly specific. Since they are so specific, the search volume is very low.

Long tail example:
“Large Sony Plasma 1080p Detroit” – This key phrase is a very specific search phrase. Someone that searches for that knows exactly what they want. They want to buy a large Sony plasma TV in Detroit that has 1080p resolution. If you Google that key phrase you’ll see there are less than 10,000 results, and none of the results are any good.

A regular key phrase would be “Sony Plasma 1080p”. Not only do you have a lot more competition with that key phrase, but you don’t know very much about this visitor. You don’t know if they want a 32″ or a 50″, do they want to spend $500 or $3,000? Do they plan to buy online, or are they doing research and plan to buy locally? Do they really want a Sony, or are they looking for specs. Do they already have a Sony and need a new remote?

When you target the long tail, you will get a much higher conversion ratio because you already know what your visitors are looking for because they’ve been specific with their search. Since you know what they want, you can give it to them above the fold, quickly and easily.

The best way to find long tail keywords and key phrases is through your own data. This is your search engine referrer logs. If you’re site is new, you probably don’t have logs showing what people searched for just yet, but you will. Once this data starts rolling in, start making pages based on what people want.

Until you have that data another good way to find long tail keywords is through a keyword suggestion tool. Google has one, but Keyword Discovery is my favorite. The numbers in the search totals are not very accurate, but it gives you a good idea of what is being searched for.

Using “Sony plasma” as an example we get the following long tail key phrases:

sony multisystem plasma tv
sony plasma dvd connections
comparison chart for sony, toshiba, and panasonic plasma tvs
repair of sony plasma tvs
biggest sony plasma tv
sony plasma dvd digital receiver connection diagram
prices on sony plasma hd tv
sony 37 wega plasma tv specs
sony 950 plasma wall mount
sony bravia hdtv 46 plasma
how to get my sony plasma off standby

As you can see, after a 30 second search, you now can create 11 pages of content that is highly targeted. Some of those searches aren’t going to convert to sales (diagram, specs, off standby), but others could convert very well (wall mount, dvd connections, repair). Even if your page isn’t designed to convert, it could still make you money.

Imagine someone in a forum asks “how to get my sony plasma off standby”. Someone answers by linking to your site. When someone else comes along looking for issues with Sony TV’s, they’ll find your site. Then they might find your comparison chart, or your 1080p vs 720p guide. Since they’re looking for more information, you keep giving them information and your site makes a sale, and gets a link. Win-win for you and the person you helped.

Do you know of other ways to find long tail keywords?

Wordpress has a weird “feature” of stripping extra line breaks out of posts. Often times you will want more than just a single space between paragraphs or pictures. If you try to use standard html code like the following, it won’t work.

<br /> – doesn’t work

<p>&nbsp;</p> – doesn’t work

The only method that I have found of adding extra line breaks in your Wordpress posts is to use the following code.

<p align=”left”>&nbsp;</p>

Copy and paste that as many times as you want.

See?

Another one that seems to work just as good is: <p style=”text-align: left; font-size:1px”>.</p>

.

.

.

.

See?

Ezilon.com contacted me recently about a site review for their directory. Initially I didn’t want to do it because general web directories are overrated and boring. They sent me a link to their regional web directory and I checked it out. It is unique! Yes, a unique web directory.

What makes Ezilon Unique

Since Ezilon is a unique web directory I thought I would start with that. What initially makes Ezilon unique is the design. It isn’t just about template based directory script with a million crappy sites and DMOZ listings. It is a web directory that is designed to be used as a directory. Ezilon is ideal for finding a local business since the first way you’re presented with is a clickable world map that takes you to regional based directory listings. I was able to quickly and easily find backup providers in the US.

Submitting Your Site

Ezilon is a paid web directory. Generally I don’t pay for web directories, but this one made me give it a second thought. The reason is the high authority and high PR inner pages. For example if you sell baseball gear, here is a page with 4 outgoing links that is a PR3 and a steady PR 3….not a spammed quickly fading PR 3.

Baseball gear isn’t the only high deep linked PR page. Here are a couple others I found with only a couple outbound links.

osCommerce

Preschool Programs

Dating

Projector

Those type links are not only hard to find with strong PR and limited outbound links, but this site is loved by Google. I don’t know their stats, but I would imagine they get nearly 100k Google referred visitors per month. I see over 260,000 indexed pages, most of them cached. Did I mention the homepage is a PR6?

Subdomain Crazy!

One of the first things I noticed about Ezilon.com was their prolific use of subdomains. I counted about 20 subdomains ranging from country listings to an answer service like Yahoo Answers. Unless you’re site is really large, you shouldn’t need 20 subdomains, one situation in which you could use subdomains is for different languages like Ezilon.com does. Google often treats subdomains as different websites so a subdomain that is for a different language is truly a different website targeting different people.

Ideas and Suggestions

After spending considerable time browsing all aspects of Ezilon.com (and the various subdomains), I noticed a considerable lack of advertising. While this is definitely not a bad thing, it isn’t the best business practice, unless you’re running a pro-bono site. The advertising that I did see was mainly Adsense ads. When you have good page rank and good page views, you should have no trouble selling advertising.

I would suggest targeting specific markets and selling advertising on those pages of the site. Ezilon could sell Miami Beach real estate listings and web directory listings to that market. They could create a process and duplicate their process across the US and the entire world. With Ezilon there are a million different possibilities for upselling and cross selling including homepage advertising and featured category listings.

In addition to the different types of direct selling, they could promote their paid web directory and give out coupons to specific target markets they want to break into. When you give out a coupon to “Company A”, and they sign up, it’s easier to sell the product or service to “Company B”. The sales call would be easy, “I wanted to let you know that Company A is advertising on our website. If you’re interested in advertising as well, I can list you as a featured site and you’re website will display above theirs!” Fear and competition can sell advertising. Company B thinks that if Company A has paid for advertising, I should to. I can be featured above them? Great!

Ezilon has so many PR 6 and PR 5 links, they could easily be selling $2-5,000 worth of text links per month. On this Help Desk page alone (PR6), they could sell a link to any number of help desk companies looking to increase their rankings.

I would suggest starting with an inventory of assets. These assets are mainly high trafficked pages and high PR pages. Once the list is created, start selling!

In addition to the high value assets, there are a lot of other medium quality assets that can be monetized including the Article Submission section. Article Submission services are a great source of passive income.

Another medium value section is the Job Board. It’s a PR 3 with only one untargeted banner advertisement. Even just an affiliate program from Monster or Snag A Job would be better than no monetization.

Now You See…

Ezilon isn’t just another basic web directory with a bunch of junk listings. Their site provides value in a variety of ways and has huge untapped potential! Check out Ezilon Regional Web Directory today!