The CaymanHost | Internet Marketing Blog

Links for 2009-09-30 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

YouTube - Cayman Islands Art
Cayman artists and art from the Cayman Islands in video format

Links for 2009-09-23 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

CBProads Review One Year On

CBProads Review One Year On

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:45:14 -0600

Last year I decided to join CBProAds as I wanted to place some advertising on this blog but did not want to use Adsense for various reasons.

At that time, contextual Clickbank ads were not too easy to come by and the programs on offer were often ridiculously priced as far as I was concerned. CBProAds was the one service that seemed reasonably priced and offered a lot of customizable features for their membership fee.

I signed up and was pleased with the simplicity of set up although targeting ads using keywords was sometimes a bit hit and miss. During the course of the year I tweaked a few things as I went along but the click through rate was always rather disappointing.

In addition to the text ads placed on this site there were plenty of other tools including your own storefront which, as a pro member was reasonably customizable and looked half way decent as well, unlike many more expensive CB stores.

When my renewal came up a month or so ago I decided against paying for another year of CBProAds membership. It's not that it's abad service but now that Clickbank are offering their own contextual ads it seemed less worth the investment than it did a year ago. It means the loss of my storefront and the loss of any future referral commissions but I didn't feel right about continuing to promote something that all Clickbank users can now get for free (at least the contextual text ads aspect).

I will say that the folks at CBProAds were some of the fastest when it came to paying affiliate commissions and never once did I have a problem. My earnings from the affiliate program outweighed the Clickbank sales I made with the system and in terms of ROI it was a real winner, netting me several hundred dollars over the course of the year without too much effort. I just think that with Clickbank's own advertising script now available for publishers, there does not seem much point in continuing with CBProAds, at least not based on the click through rates achieved on this blog and a couple of other sites on which I had it installed.

Overall however, a positive experience and a profitable little venture while it lasted. If you are looking for an easy to use system or really want a clickbank Storefront then they may well be worth a look although only really as an upgraded member and in terms of value, it's looking less attractive than it did 14 months ago.

If all you want are some text ads similar to Google Adsense on your pages you might be better advised to use Clickbank's HopAd Builder from within your membership area. Success rates with this will depend greatly on the content of your blog or website but for niche focused sites they can do reasonably well.

tags: clickbank, Clickbank tips, CBProAds,

Links for 2009-09-15 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

YouTube - 911 Loose Change (full-length)
Loose change offers much evidence supporting the theories that the 9/11 attacks and the official stories and explanations were a complete whitewash and contends that those responsible were acting ob behalf of US government and corporate interests. Watch it and decide for yourself but watch it.

Links for 2009-09-14 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

YouTube - The Obama Deception HQ Full length version
The Obama Deception is a worrying documentary about the plans for globalization of the world's economy and world government
Wordpress Security

Wordpress Security

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:42:20 -0600

In light of recent events I managed to find time to look a lot more closely at the security of my Wordpress blogs and was surprised to find that although I had done a lot to square things away pretty well, there was actually a lot more that I could be doing.

Fortunately none of it is too difficult and hopefully this will save you some research time.

The most important thing to remember is to keep your installation up to date. It can be a royal pain if you use a lot of plugins because invariably the latest version of WP will cause issues with some of them until the plugin developers get around to updating their add ons too. However, that is just the way it is and it is better to keep your WP current than wait around for the occasional plugin to catch up.

I had long ago learned of some of the most obvious precautions to take with Worpdress but it is surprising how many people are unaware of many of them.

Protect your WP admin Area using .htaccess - Sadly this blog is no longer updated by its owner but this post is still a nice easy explanation.

Protect your plugins directory from snoopers. If you can type in the path to your plugins directory in a browser, so can everyone else. By doing so they can see a full directory list of what plugins you have installed. This is easy to remedy. You can either upload a blank index file to the directory or, if you are on Cpanel hosting, turn off indexes from there. Just go to index manager in Cpanel and you will see how you can turn off indexes for specific directories. Alternatively, you can add the following line to your .htaccess file:

Options All -Indexes

Now, these are just basic measures but they will deter many idle hackers who will move on to easier pickings. There are also various Worpdressplugins that you can use to beef up your security even further.

BadBehavior was a plugin that I resisted using for a long time as there seemed to be so many issues with it but I eventually gave in and installed it. Judging by the number of suspicious things it blocks, I'm glad I did and so far it seems to be functioning in harmony with everything else.

Other plugins you may find beneficial are:

WP Security Scan

Wordpress Firewall

Worpdpress Exploit Scanner

Anti Virus For Wordpress

Whether you choose to use one or all of the above, none of them will be a waste of time and all have helped me to ensure that my WP installation is as secure as I can possibly make it. The Firewall plugin has stopped several potential SQL injection attacks already. The Anti virus is a bit oversensitive at times but there are plenty of settings to fine tune its performance to suit.

There are other things you can do with htaccess too. For example, you can prevent access to your wp-config and you can also protect the htaccess file itself.

tags: Wordpress plugins, Wordpress, Wordpress Security

Googlebot, Robots.txt, Sitemaps & Wordpress Plugins

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:08:06 -0600

It's a bit of a mouthful for a title I know, but I hope this post will be useful for a number of reasons.

Recently, my posting frequency on this blog has been a lot lower than normal because I have been involved in setting up an offline business as well as building a new site for that business. I don't have the facilities to outsource all these things so it's been a lot of hours of hard work.

Additionally, if you read my recent post about the DDOS attack on this domain you will know that it caused havoc for far longer than it really should have been allowed to. This is just the background to the events that led to me deciding to write this post because it was a combination of all these things that led me to some important discoveries that will hopefully spare others a lot of frustration should they encounter similar problems.

When dealing with SEO and blogs and Wordpress there are all sorts of things to consider, and anyone who knows me will be aware that I'm no great techie, SEO or code expert. Very far from it but I know enough to get by. This serves to warn you however that you really do need to be careful and keep a close eye on matters involving your sites and the search engines.

Folllowing the DDOS attack, I was not surprised to see TheCaymanHost.com disappear from the SERPS. The crawlers will eventually stop visiting if they keep butting up against errors. I was not too concerned as I knew once the site was live again the bots would return and find me and restore my listings. I kept an eye on things and noticed that although some results were appearing in Google, quite a few previously well performing pages were not there at all. I figured I just needed to be patient which, as it turns out was a mistake.

I was then occupied with building a new Wordpress site and giving it a kickstart in the traffic stakes so I didn't pay much mind to TheCaymanHost.com for a couple of weeks. I got the new site ready, added some content, installed all the plugins I needed and begun with some basic SEO - social bookmarking, directory submissions and other link building efforts. Sure enough I soon started appearing in the SERPS through those link building efforts, but the site itself didn't seem to be getting indexed. After two weeks I realized that something was definitely not right - Google will normally spider you far more quickly if you follow the techniques I had implemented already, often within hours or at least days.

I headed over to Google's webmaster tools to see if I could find a problem and very quickly I found several.

I will make a very embarassing admission first to get it out of the way. It's been a while since I set up a new WP blog but I had made a very rookie mistake. Wordpress has a privacy settings option and, you guessed it, I had left it at the default setting, thus preventing the search engines from visiting!! Thinking that was my problem, I changed the setting and went to bed rather red faced. If you set up a Wordpress blog, make sure one of the first things you do is change that privacy setting if you want your site to be indexed!!

However, although this discovery was definitely one reason for the crawlers' lack of interest in my site, it was far from the only issue. The next day I realized that things were no better as my sitemaps still had big red X's next to them in the Webmaster tools area.

Initially I thought the culprit might be the Google XML Sitemaps plugin so I went in and tweaked the settings a little and rebuilt my sitemaps before submitting them to Google again. Nothing I tried had any effect - Google was still saying that it could not access my robots.txt file and could not therefore read my sitemaps. I tried removing my robots.txt file completely and turned off the plugin as it generates a dynamic robots.txt from within Wordpress. This also failed to sove the sitemaps issue.

I then decided to check my sitemaps for thecaymanhost.com and found exactly the same issues.

It dawned on me that there were probably only two possible culprits - something in my htaccess file or a server side issue. I had made some htaccess changes on thecaymanhost.com but the new blog did not have the same htaccess file, so I was pretty sure it had to be something I needed to talk to my host about.

Before doing so I ran some tests using the tools at Web-Sniffer.net and SEOConsultants.com and sure enough, with all the user agents for the major search engines my sites were throwing up 500 internal server errors. I checked some of the other sites with whom I share server space and sure enough, they were all delivering up the same results! If you are on a shared hosting plan you can see who your close neighbors are using the service at Find_IP-Address.org

So, I had some indications that after tightening up server security, my hosts had inadvertently shut the door on the good guys as well as the bad ones.

However, checking .htaccess was my final port of call before contacting them and I discovered some very odd lines in both of my .htaccess files. They were puzzling because they were not lines I had added manually and I had no idea where they had come from. I have to assume it was a plugin although I still haven't figured out which one unfortunately. I removed all the lines (four in total examples in the link at the foot of this post) and tried to submit my sitemaps to Google again.

Had I not been in the process of building a new site and trying to rank well for my keywords, it probably would have been a lot longer before I noticed all this. The drop in traffic on this domain I just put down to a recovery period following all the downtime. Instead of stats showing a few thousand different keyphrase searches for a month I was showing only a few hundred. Some of this was down to the closure of the article directory for sure, but the real problem was more serious than I thought.

I am now able to see the robots all crawling again and will hopefully see a full recovery and start getting traffic back to the way it was and a lot more activity on the new Wordpress blog!!

The moral of the story is that you really must keep an eye on your stats and investigate unusual behavior immediately. There are so many possible causes but by following the steps I did you will be able to find a solution by a process of elimination. Google webmaster tools are your friend, so you really should be familiar with them whatever kind of site you are running.

There is no doubt that if you want to improve your Wordpress site's SEO performance you need to do a little work. Using sitemaps and a good robots.txt file are just part of that process, but even if you've done everything right in those areas it can all be for nothing if you don't check periodically to make sure all is working as it should be.

The solution to my problem has been posted on the Wordpress.org forums and you can read the relevant thread at Wordpress .htaccess and robots.txt problems

TCH

tags: googlebot, sitemaps, bing, yahoo, msn, wordpress plugin, xml sitemaps, robots.txt unreachable, sitemap errors, wordpress sitemaps, htaccess search engines, htaccess, SERPS, search engine crawlers

Links for 2009-08-23 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Giclee Printing On Canvas : A Guide For Consumers
Fine art giclee printing explained for artists and consumers.

Links for 2009-08-13 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Free Article Directory Closes

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:16:21 -0600

This is just a quick update regarding the free article directory that I ran for the last two years.

Unfortunately I took the decision to close the directory a couple of weeks ago. This was largely due to the fact that it was simply no longer time/cost effective to continue with the huge task of administering the site.

Spam and illiteracy and plain old fashioned abuse took a huge toll on the moderation of articles and it got so bad that probably less than 5% of submitted articles would make it to publication. It's another fine example of a good thing being ruined by idiots who seem hell bent on destroying the whole principle of article marketing and who are incapable of playing by the simple rules put in place by hardworking site owners.

I am still a believer in the effectiveness of articles, but as any directory owner, past or present will testify, spam and abuse is a very major problem. The site did bring in a regular Adsense income but in terms of time and effort involved it no longer made sense to continue.

Additionally the script was full of security holes and support was, to all intents and purposes, non existent.

I apologize to the supportive authors who contributed value to the site and thank you for your past submissions.

If you are considering running an article directory avoid Article Dashboard and find a decent script to build your site. Be prepared for a lot of admin time too.Infact, if you want to maintain quality, you may well find yourself needing to employ someone to help with the task!

tags: article marketing, articles, article directory, free article directory

ScribD Sucks And Not Just For Marketers

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:06:35 -0600

Free PDF hosting is something people seem to search for pretty regularly judging by my stats and until recently I was using the services of Scribd among others.

However, I received an email yesterday advising that my account had been terminated after a fellow user reported one of my documents for advertising. I was a little surprised by this as I have had a number of documents there for some considerable time. It wasn't too big a deal, these things often happen if you are involved in marketing online, but I was a little unhappy with the tone of the email and the blatant hypocrisy it demonstrated.

For those unfamiliar with the site, ScribD allows members to upload all kinds of documents, text, PDF etc. that can then be viewed directly on the site through the use of Flash technology. It has sometimes been called the YouTube of documents which is probably, on reflection, rather unfair to YouTube. There has been plenty of negative comment and argument about the technology and its merits and that isn't what I wanted to talk about in this post. Just Google "Scribd sucks" and you'll find plenty of information supporting and attacking the idea and the technology employed.

The email I received stated that another member had reported one of my documents and that as a result my account had been closed. Once you have been kicked out by Scribd there is no appeal process and no restitution. You are not permitted to join the site ever again. They are another company who include a catch all in their TOS that states they can close your account without warning or having to give any reason and this really should be a red flag to any internet user thinking of joining any site.

After a little bit of investigation it would appear that Scribd is not a smart service to use, so perhaps the loss of my account is a good thing. Let me expand a little further.

The site contains a lot of copyrighted material and although they claim they will remove any such content following a request from the copyright owner, it is a slow and laborious process and suggests they have little sympathy for people whose content is stolen and placed on their site. Many believe that this will be the downfall of the service and that eventually a legal issue will see them in trouble sooner rather than later. How accurate this assessment is remains to be seen.

Recently there have been reports of a 50% drop in the site's traffic and allegations of overly aggressive SEO methods causing Google to become a little upset with them but again, I haven't investigated any of these allegations very deeply. Someone also suggested that following promotion of the site by people like Stompernet and other marketing/SEO services there have been some rather hasty and ill conceived policy changes at Scribd due to their claims of link spamming and the like.

Regardless of the merits of any of these claims and allegations, Scribd is pretty much dead in the water for anyone involved in marketing. One of their latest rules apparently is that documents containing hyperlinks are no longer allowed.

This seems a rather extreme and stupid policy change and smacks of an attempt to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. It is hardly surprising that their visitor numbers are dropping.

After the email from them I went and did a quick search on the site to find countless incidences of self promotion, affiliate links, viral marketing documents etc. all of which would supposedly be in violation of their terms. This suggests to me that they have no way of monitoring the activity on their site effectively and are reliant solely on members snitching on other members to enforce their policies. This is hardly professional or encouraging to potential users of the service. Snitching on others is done for a variety of reasons so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that anyone with an axe to grind can soon sobotage anyone they choose.

Now, I freely admit that I had documents on Scribd that were promotional in nature, but they were also very useful, at least to the target audience. What really makes me mad about sites like Scribd is the hypocrisy they demonstrate in their email to members who are removed.

Someone described Scribd as an internet parasite which, although maybe a little harsh, also contains a ring of truth. This is a site reliant solely on content from other people, much like an article directory. Their words to me were that they offered the service free of charge and that it must not be used for commercial purposes which, on the face of it is fair enough. They go on to say that they have worked really hard to keep the site free of advertising in the interests of their "community". This is the point when I start to get a little upset about the email because of its sanctimonious and, quite frankly hypocritical nature.

Scribd uses other people's content to make money. The site is littered with Adsense ads around every document and yet they claim that advertising goes against all that is holy for their membership. To raise the flag of altruism around a blatanly commercial venture is the height of hypocrisy. There was actually a thread in their forums where some members had been enquiring about the possibility of revenue sharing being introduced on the site. the last time I looked, this had been studiously ignored by the site owners and will probably continue to be ignored. It is another prime example of big sites and big money saying - do as we say, not as we do.

I honestly don't care whether the site fails or recovers and goes on to spectacular success in the future, but I do think that a great deal of what they aim to stand for is just a lot of hot air. The bottom line is that they want to make money from other people's content but don't wish their users to see any financial or promotional benefit whatsoever. That's fine, but at least have the decency to be honest about it.

Ultimately, if you use or are thinking of using Scribd as a means of driving traffic or gaining something in the SERPS, certainly anything of a marketing nature, you might as well not bother. The site owners seem to have no systems in place to control what is posted there, which explains the copyright issues and demonstrates a rather cavalier attitude to preventing such infringements if you ask me. The snitching policy is all they have to administer their terms so you may see a document survive for a little while, as getting under the radar of a non existent radar isn't difficult as much of the current content proves but I don't think it is a site worthy of your time or your work. I fell for it but I'd advise you not to do the same.

Photo Credit : Technicolorcavalry

tags: scribd, scribd sucks, free pdf hosting,

Links for 2009-08-08 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Win An Original Painting By Nickola McCoy
Cayman artist Nickola McCoy at Arteccentrix is offering a prize draw for all customers who buy any print. The prize will be an original painting by the artist.

Goodbye To DoFollow

Fri, 7 Aug 2009 12:36:17 -0600

I have come to the decision after over two years to remove the "dofollow" status for comments on this blog.

I think I have been more than patient and asked repeatedly that people not abuse the dofollow status of my blogs but it would seem that, as so often in life, a large percentage of idiots have to ruin things for legitimate visitors and those who genuinely have something useful to add and wish to enter into discussion.

I can no longer keep up with deleting the number of stupid spam comments from so many people who are either using posting software or misguidedly paying for comments to be posted on their behalf in an attempt to gain backlinks. I have a life and better things to do.

As soon as I get around to it this blog will revert to nofollow on all comments with no exceptions. The people who try to game the system once again triumph in destroying a good thing for good people.

It's goodbye to DoFollow and that's a real shame. To those who continue to abuse the idea, all you will eventually achieve is the total disappearance of all dofollow sites, effectively destroying everything you have done. Clever or stupid? You decide.

TCH

tags: dofollow, nonofollow, nofollow, spam, blogging, blogs, commenting, comments, spammers

A DDOS Attack Takes Down The Site

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:40:00 -0600

UPDATE: July 23 2009 The criminals who are perpetrating an attack on my domain have sadly not yet been thwarted and the hosting directory remains innaccessible. I apologize to visitors and assure you we are working around the clock to try and bring the site back online.

I apologize to anyone who had trouble accessing any areas of the site recently but at the tail end of last week I suffered a severe DDOS attack on this domain which brought the server to its knees and took some time to nail down.

The hosting directory was the target and the Wordpress site was down all over the weekend while frantic messages travelled between myself and my host. Finally this morning we got most areas up and running again but there was some damage done in the process and I'm still trying to restore some areas of functionality to various sites.

Why we were targeted in this way I have no idea, but the attack was swift and came with no warning whatsoever. I wasted a lot of time thinking that it was something to do with my Wordpress installation and to be honest the tech support guys were rather slow off the mark.

I was completely baffled and only after downloading and checking my raw access logs did I see what was causing my domain to crash the server the minute it was enabled. Thousands upon thousands of calls every second from thousands of different IP addresses. Even after notifying my host of what I had found they seemed very slow to respond or even take any notice of what I was telling them, stubbornly sticking to the belief that it was a script on my site causing the heavy server load.

This is the first time I have had cause to be disappointed in the response from their support system. Not only were they rather slow but they didn't seem to be very knowledgable either. Eventually my message obviously got through and someone considered the possibility that it was indeed an outside attack on the server and they looked at the box and confirmed what I had been asking them to check for. This was a full on and nasty DDOS attack that found a vulnerability somewhere and caused a lot of downtime for my domain.

Finally this morning my index file was unlocked and so far, things have been OK. However, I continue to find areas of my site that seem to have been affected by the whole thing and I'm not sure how or why.

A whole day has been spent checking and reactivating WP plugins and having a good spring clean. Many of the widgets have had to be re-installed and the site is slowly returning to the way it was before the attack. For some reason there were also some strange effects on this blog but hopefully I have now resolved them. If you do notice any strange behavior or non functioning areas please let me know.

As a result of this however, I did do some housekeeping and cleared up a lot of obsolete junk lying around in various places. I have also installed Bad Behavior on both the WP site and this blog. I made sure that every password was changed and beefed up in all admin areas just as a precaution.

My understanding is that there is little that can be done to prevent such attacks but I am sure my host will be looking at ways to prevent this from happening at their end and I will be having a conference with them tomorrow online to see what can be learned from the experience.

I always believed that such attacks were reserved for high profile and high traffic sites, but have learned the hard way that it can and does happen to anyone. What can you do as a site owner to prevent it? Well, it seems you cannot protect yourself completely but I will say this - the security on my WP installation is probably far more comprehensive than the majority of blogs out there and it made no difference. Whether Bad Behavior would have stopped the attack I don't know but it certainly persuaded me to give the plugin a try, something I have always deemed unnecessary until now. I recommend you consider using it too, if you don't already. Anything you do to make things harder from these internet vandals has got to be a good thing.

It's been a four day nightmare that I can only hope is now behind me.

TCH

tags: DDOS attack, DDOS, dos attacks, hackers, spammers, spam, Wordpress

Internet Marketing Lies and Stupidity

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:28:31 -0600

I have a bee in my bonnet today, and it was caused by an email I received on one of the lists I am subscribed to.

If you are or have been involved in internet marketing for any length of time, or even if you haven't, you've probably at least seen examples of what I'm going to write about today.

I'm going to cover several points in this post

1) Marketers who speak with forked tongues

2) Marketers who patronize their so called "valued" subscribers

3) Marketers who forget that credibiilty is easily shattered

4) Marketers who believe that to mislead or outright lie in pursuit of a dollar is the acceptable norm and is actually fiendishly clever.

The email I recieved was one in a familiar vein, that went something like this:

"If you missed the launch of product blah blah....."

"It sold out in fifteen minutes so don't bother visiting the link because they've all been disabled...."

"BUT, I am going to do you a huge favor! I'm going to give you a copy entirely free, all you have to do is...."

OK, at this point I'm going to say that this kind of ridiculous pop psychology approach to marketing really annoys me although I concede that it probably works on a proportion of the people out there or they wouldn't do it.

Sold out? Really? A digital video information product that is sold out? So they have no more copies of these videos, they destroyed the files themselves or did someone break into their homes and steal their hard drives, raid their hosting company and carry of the servers in the dead of night?

Maybe that is what happened but surely they could contact one of the mugs, sorry, customers, who bought it and ask them for a copy, or am I being naive here? Where is my free copy going to come from? It's all very worrying.

OK, so they've taken down the links on the salespage temporarily. Let's be honest here folks, we all know it will be back up and running in the near future, if it's such a great seller why would you stop selling it? It's not a membership site or a software product, it's just a bunch of videos.

So, I think we can say that heroic email marketer is guilty of sins one through four above already, but not satisfied with this he makes it worse with his special offer to me, his "valued subscriber".

Now remember, although it is sold out, he is going to give me a copy for free. Lucky me, I can't wait, it's too much excitement for a hot and muggy Sunday afternoon in the Caribbean. He tells me that ALL I have to do is take a trial of another Clickbank product for just $4.95. As it's a product I'm very familiar with, I already know that after taking that trial period I will have to hand over a monthly membership fee of $67.00 should I want to keep using it. I also know that the product in question pays a healthy recurring monthly commission to affiliates.

Now, lest we forget, he is doing me a favor, not the other way around, so of course the email neglects to mention any of these pertinent facts.

This is marketing at its lowest level. I don't care what labels the promoter might put on it - bonuses, deals, never to be repeated, you'll thank me forever etc. etc. The truth of the matter is that it is good old fashioned bullshit designed to trick the unwary or inexperienced. The product he is trying to sell, in order for you to get something for "free", is not for the inexperienced either, something I also know for a fact. It's not a bad product, but as usual the sales copy skims over a lot of the facts with a lot of these $$$$$$$! Besides, doesn't something stop being free the moment you hand over money?

My point is this - if you are new to the whole internet marketing hooplah, don't be taken in by people like this who are the reason that marketing online is so damned hard a lot of the time, and please, whatever you do, don't think these kinds of tactics are the only way to succeed and are something you should be emulating.

Find some decent and helpful people to learn from and help others by passing on your knowledge and experience.

For this subscriber, it was a very quick bye bye to that list and I hope I'm not the only one either. Why build a list and completely destroy your credibility with emails like this? (For information on how to use email marketing in an ethical and non-scummy way I recommend you read the New Age Email Marketing Report)

If you genuinely feel that life is too short to live it honestly and don't believe that there is more to life than easy money on the internet, or anywhere else, then you won't care what I think. The "nice guys finish last" philosophy might help people like this guy sleep at night, but do you really want someone like that to get their grubby hands on your hard earned money?

Think about it. That's all I'm saying.

PHOTO CREDIT: ATENCION

tags: branding, email marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing blog, internet marketing business, internet marketing online, internet marketing strategy, liars, marketing lies, marketing plan, marketing, promotion, marketing scams, dishonest advertising

Marketing And Twitter Revisited

Sun, 24 May 2009 17:27:46 -0600

Twitter marketing, it's all the rage and since my last post on Tooting Your Twitter Horn I've come up with a bit more to add to my previous thoughts. Some of this has come from experience and some of it from the thoughts and observations of others.

No, I'm not going to retract what I have said previously, I still believe Twitter is a kind of love/hate thing for me, but I have learned a lot more since last writing and much of it is worth sharing. This is not a "do it my way" "do it this or that way" type of offering, just a few more things to share and disseminate to those struggling to find their Twitter comfort zone.

So many people are talking about Twitter that it is fairly easy to find answers to most of the questions you may have, and it seems there is always something new to learn.

My use of Twitter on a daily basis has seen my network grow steadily and there have been no real secrets to this happening. If you participate and seeek out like minded people it is almost inevitable. Yes, there are ways to accelerate the size of your network and I've tried a few of them. Like most new users my choices were not always wise when I first started out, but I have since discovered some very useful and powerful tools.

Hint, many of the scripts that require you to Tweet a message advertising the service are not well received by many but it's up to you regarding the use of individual programs.

However' learning as you go has always been my preferred method online and it will be the same for most new Tweeters. So, let's get onto a few gripes first...mostly everyday things on Twitter.

(These things irritate a lot of people but if you think they are things that will work for you I'm not going to stop you - the Twitterverse is a land of free speech to my mind).

I have come to agree with the overriding philosophy that Twitter is first and foremost about getting involved and interracting with your network. I have struck up some really cool conversations and met a lot of people by participating actively so as far as I'm concerned it was time well spent. By the same token, the mistakes that so many make, seem so blatant and obvious (and we're talking strictly marketing here).

An experienced eye can soon tell the people using services like TweetLater that queue messages and post them on a schedule set by the user who will doubtless be off doing other things with no intention of ever spending time on "social" Tweeting. For them it's just an advertising medium. The fact that their Tweets are monotonously uniformly spaced and are always the same sales messages every day is, I would suggest, guaranteed to turn people off. It's the good old scattergun approach, probably delivering the same old carnage in terms of results.

It's a sloppy tactic and it's probably doomed to failure.

Then we have the "liars". Yes there are lots of them, so let's be frank shall we? There are many examples of this type flowing through the stream of Twitter.

Affiliate links blatantly posted with accompanying false claims "I'm making XYZ a week with this crap and you can too...."usually followed by a hoplink. Alternatively, "I've suffered from XYZ infirmity for years but this cured me....(another hoplink).

Now, if you want people to trust you and buy something on your recommendation, lying is not a good start. Speaking in the first person when it is obvious you have never done anything more than troll your way through the Clickbank marketplace and grab a hoplink is marketing ineptitude at full throttle. And let's face it people, who believes someone who has made a fortune last month, reversed his balding, lost 500 pounds, given up smoking and perfected his golf swing all at once? That's some dude.

Then we have those promoting Twitter tools to explode your following. If you have only a small following yourself how do you think this looks? Be very careful with your reputation, because online, it's often all you have. I know people are looking for simpler ways to build their accounts, but if you behave naturally and talk to others, your following will grow "organically". Be patient or spend lots of money on a pro tool like Hummingbird (see resources below).

Along the same lines are those who brag about success but forget that it is easy for someone to do five minutes of research and blow them out of the water. Prime example was a young lad (if his avatar is to be believed) pushing several sites promising marketing riches and the like. On inspection, each site was an early 90's cookie cutter template with a few PPC ads slapped on and content written by someone probably more accustomed to eating Farley's Rusks and peeing in their Huggies. What's more, the sites were receiving zero traffic, or as close to zero as you can get.

More disturbing however was the individual's fawning and retweeting of a so called "guru" by whom he has obviously been conned into parting with money probably better spent on a college fund, for information worth absolutely nothing. Said guru/marketer was also busy making claims for another of his devotees sites regarding levels of success, totally debunked by looking at the site's statistics.

Now, as I've said before, far be it from anyone to tell anyone that there is a correct way to behave on Twitter, that annoys me just as much, but there are right and wrong ways to behave in life and those should really carry through to what you do on the internet. Yeah, some hope I know but it's worth saying.

On the upside, I have also met some cool people on Twitter and have found some great uses for it. It can be fun, if time consuming, and from a marketing perspective it is certainly worth incorporating into your efforts.

Yesterday I posted a tweet that was picked up by SEO master AndyBeard and the resulting response by way of sales was quite remarkable. Not many high profile users will give you the time of day like Andy, but, if someone with a large and relevant following knows you and decides to press the right buttons, the benefits can be delivered very quickly on Twitter.

I've posted some interesting but by no means extensive, resource links below for further reading. Ultimately Twitter is rising in my list of priorities and I'm now suggesting that maybe it should in yours too.

Oh, and don't forget to follow me @Caymanhost and get to meet some other cool marketing Tweople

Useful Twitter Links

Creating Multiple Twitter Accounts With One Email Address

Learning Twitter (Hashtags, Whales etc)

HummingBird Pro Twitter Tool (expensive but powerful) Best For Those Wanting To Build Networks Fast

Brute Force Twitter - Another network building tool (untested)

Twitter Salvation - Twitter For Small Business Users

Tweeting Too Hard - Tweets and Tweople Lampooned

Qwitter - Monitoring Twitter Unfollowers On Your Behalf

Exit Tweet Generator (For Webmasters Wishing To Promote A Specific Site)

MrTweet - recommend your friends to others

Twitter Business Cards

File Twitter - Easily Share Files With Twitter Friends and Followers

Twitter Grader - Find Out How You and Others Rank

Tweet Backup - If You Really Want To Backup Your Twittering

Twitter Graphics - Excellent Selection Of Free Twitter Buttons and Badges

Keeping Up With All Your Friends & Followers Try Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck

tags: Twitter, Micro Blogging, Marketing With Twitter, Hummingbird, Twitter Tips, Twitter Tools

Tooting Your Twitter Horn

Fri, 8 May 2009 15:39:14 -0600

Much has been written and continues to be written about Twitter. I thought carefully before writing this post, wondering if it was worth adding even more noise to the Twitter craze and eventually decided to air my opinions on the whole Twitter gravy train.

Before going any further, please realize that this comes from an internet marketing perspective, and understand that Twitter is not solely an internet marketing tool, although many would have you believe that it is.

Having used Twitter for the past few months, I have plenty of observations, some of which will doubtless ruffle a few feathers and cause argument, but these are my honest opinions and conclusions as a Twitter user.

On Twitter you will find a large number of idiots, as well as a large number of insecure and opinionated people. Of all the social networking sites I have ever used, Twitter definitely takes the prize for having some of the most obnoxious internet policemen types. What makes me say this? It is the Twitter Horn Tooters, of which there seem to be an endless supply. The one thing that most of them have in common is an ulterior motive or an axe to grind.

By way of a few examples, here are some of the things that I find most unsavoury about some Tweeters.

The Rule Makers - these are the kind of people who feel they have a right to tell everybody else what they can or cannot do with Twitter. What is often noticeable about these types is their blatant "do as I say, not as I do" ethos. The world is full of them and so, alas, is Twitter. It is sorely tempting to tell them simply to **** off, something you would more than likely do in the real world.

These are the people who somehow believe that you can apply the word "spam" to anything and everything that they don't agree with. Newsflash, no Tweet can be considered spam, because you elected to "follow" the person who sent it. In effect you opted in and if you don't like it, you can opt-out just as quickly. On Twitter it's called "unfollow".

Another favorite pastime of the Rule Makers, is to belittle anyone whose follower numbers are less than theirs, somehow making the leap that they are superior in almost every way to whoever they are attacking based on this idiotic premise. Additionally of course, they will attack those who are not building their Twitter following the "right way" and throw out the tried and tested spam arguments, the holier than thou protestations against anyone who has the audacity to try and use Twitter for any kind of commercial or personal financial gain.

Of course, most of them have no intention of trying to open anyone's wallet, they are the picture perfect example of altruism and will often go as far as to tell you how they "value" their followers and dream of only good things for them, whilst extolling the virtues of their latest products and services, naturally, because they genuinely care about the thirty thousand people who follow them. You have to ask, why would anyone want a list of thousands of followers if it was not for business or commercial purposes? Have you ever known a person who had thousands of friends? Didn't think so.

While on that subject, do you really believe that someone with thousands and thousands of followers is even remotely interested in you and what you have to say? Do you think they are ever going to see one of your Tweets, let alone enter into any sort of dialogue with you? In short, are you their friend, their equal? Not in their eyes, which brings up an interesting point in the chosen terminology of Twitter.

"Followers", was the word chosen to describe your network of names on Twitter. Followers, think about that. You can see why it appeals to a certain type of person, and you could draw some pretty ugly comparisons had you a mind to. Those who obsess about the size of their following, those who believe that this somehow bestows upon them some kind of status and importance not enjoyed by the mere mortals who follow them (like sheep?).

Let's move on to another class of Twitter user, usually a bit cleverer than the rule makers, these are the kind who are selling the idea that Twitter is the next big marketing holy grail. Unfortunately, this is usually in an attempt to sell you the latest greatest Twitter fad, guaranteeing to "explode your following and therefore make you rich overnight.

Come on! This is obviously blatant hype and untruths - let me qualify however. I'm not saying that Twitter is useless as a marketing tool because there are plenty of people who have integrated it into their marketing and been very successful. My guess is that if you are in the right niche and target the right people it can work very well. I also think that just like any form of marketing you need to establish yourself with your audience and if they like and trust you they may eventually buy some of the things you recommend to them. However, if you think that just adding countless numbers to your follower count is going to make you a huge online success I'd think again.

People will lie to you online, particularly to try and sell you the latest, greatest guarantee of wealth and success. Think before opening your wallet.

Twitter also has some major flaws as far as I can see. Trying to keep up with even a few hundred people is virtually impossible. Using a service like TweetDeck or other third party applications will soon see you exceeding the flow of tweets allowed. These people with thousands of followers are extremely unlikely to be paying attention to what you are twittering about because it's not humanly possible to keep up with everything. I can fire up Tweetdeck and within a minute I've exceeded the API's allowable traffic and that means I see no new Tweets until an hour has passed.

I follow one or two people whose mailing lists I have been on or am still on, or bloggers whose prose I continue to read. Those kind of Twitter users, i.e. those with an already established base of customers/readers can continue with those relationships via Twitter and in that way it is another useful communication tool.

If you're starting from scratch though, don't expect miracles, that's all I'm saying.

Image Credit: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

tags: Twitter, Twitter Sucks, Twitter Truth, Twitter Users, Love Twitter, Hate Twitter, Twitter Opinions