Image via Wikipedia

A few months ago, about the time I stopped posting so much at this blog, I ran into an issue. I had a lot of things to do and could not keep them in my head any more. That was my old method.

I tried a few things to help me out, notebook systems, online systems, software systems. However nothing really worked quite right for me, and I always ended up going to more than one place to find information when I was working and I always had more than one central control panel. I also misunderstood the meaning of the “inbox”.

An inbox is just a catcher. It catches things needing to be put on a list, in with the reference material or trashed. I never made much progress getting things in order until I physically separated my inboxes from my system. One system, multiple inboxes. It is virtually impossible not to have more than one inbox, but I have tried to keep mine cut down to three: email, voicemail and pocket notebook.

These are inboxes emptied daily (you don’t believe that, well I don’t really either) into a system of organizing the data. If there is too much to go through daily, then you just can’t and nothing can change that. First you have slow the streams of data coming into those boxes, in one way or another. Sticking to a regular schedule of going through your inboxes makes you deal with reality seriously.

What I Was Looking For in To Do List Software

Once I figured that out, onto software, which I am in the process of investigating now. As I was looking, I realized I was looking for something more than a GTD system, but I did not want to look at Gantt charts. I have looked at complex project management software before, for about a minute before I uninstalled it.

Yes, I am a geek, but I don’t geek out on being a control freak to the point I need a degree to run the software that just tells me what to do when.

But some of the things I was looking for is listed below:

• Personal Information Manager – I am in control of over 20 active sites of mine and my clients. I need details of various things around all the time that don’t disappear when the task is done.
• Some Sort of Time Tracking Element – I am looking for software here. If I have to type “2 hours” into a note type field, it sorts of defeats the purpose of using software and not just a test document to begin with.
• Hierarchy – I have my projects, client projects and day job projects. I need to see tasks from one, all or some using folders or filters.
• Free – This post came about because I actually bought software that was close to what I was looking for, put all my information in it, discover it was buggy, decided I could work around it and watching it lose all of my notes last night.  So I am not buying something, unless it is 100% bulletproof.
• Not hosted – The cloud may be great, but I have seen the bugs. And it’s not so much trusting my information with someone else, it’s trusting that it will be there exactly when I need it and not a minute later. Nudge, nudge Gmail. And Gmail is not free, so I can be a chooser. Nothing that comes with advertising is.

Plus I am pretty picky and just the wrong color scheme can make me choose another program, so here is the list, filtered by my software prejudices.

The Free To Do List, Personal Information Management, Time Tracking Tools List

• MonkeyGTD – This thing is a html page that runs in your browser, so it is the ultimate in cross platform and portability. It is based off of tiddlywiki. This is what I use now. Javascript can do some amazing stuff.
• GTDTiddlyWiki Plus – Another webpage based GTD system. And just to clear things up, let me say it is not web-based. It is web page based. Download the file, edit it and it saves to itself. Pretty cool and fast.
• d-cubed – Yet another Tiddlywiki based GTD system. They are all available to also be hosted at Tiddlyspot.
• ThinkingRock – This is was close to being a winner during the search. The only thing I didn’t like was loading time and memory usage. I like to leave whatever software I use running so I know what needs done and have all the information I need in one spot.
• Chandler Desktop – A cross platform tool.
• ToDoList – Another free task management tool with a lot of features.
• Freebie Notes – For those of you who like post-its
• Chaos Manager – Nice little Windows tool that looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while but might do the job.
• TreeSheets – A free from information manager. Cross-platform.
• Total Organizer – They also have a pro version that has more features but costs money.
• Unforgiven Organizer – This one actually looks like it has some potential for doing everything I want.
• Whistler’s List – Looks like a great tool specifically set up for freelancers who want to track tasks for multiple clients.
• Kaboom Organizer – Lots of features.
• NeoMem – Another freer form organizer.
• eQit – Another tool.

And for those who want to investigate further, here are some more lists. Believe me, it is endless.

• http://www.mister-wong.com/user/infomaniac/gtd/
• http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/Tools/pims.html

In the end, I am using MonkeyGTD and am liking wiki’s for keeping information organized.

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Guest post by Craig Smith of Trinity Insight

Within the Ecommerce marketplace, new technologies have been developed to assist online retailers in properly messaging content and promotions to different users.  These "targeting" solutions help improve the "holy grail" metric of conversion and should be evaluated and potentially included within your store.

What these types of offerings provide is the ability to customize a user session based upon data that is stored within the user cookie.  Without diving into the ins and outs of cookies and their functionality, essentially cookies allow a web browser to decipher the geo-location of a user, if a user has been to a site previously, as well as what pages the user has been to and where the user dropped off.

This information can be very powerful when properly leveraged.  Here’s an example:

Let’s say you are ToysRus.com.  You obviously have stores across the entire USA and a variety of products and brands to promote.  How do you know which to utilize on the homepage and how do you proactively promote your stores within the user experience?  Easy, use dynamic targeting!

So lets say a customer comes to the site and leaves from the "Elmo" category page.  The customer is also from Philadelphia.  By using dynamic targeting solutions, on that customer’s subsequent visit, you can promote an Elmo promotion on the homepage for a hot item as well as message in-store promotions that correlate to the users closest store.

To the user, the targeting is not really comprehended – they likely think the site is just smart and better meeting their needs and desires.  They have no idea of what is going on behind the scenes.

Dynamic targeting is best utilized for:

Search term targeting (branded terms versus non-branded)

New versus returning (offer promos or codes to new visitors)

Clickstream milestones (cart abandonment solutions)

Geographic IP (the "store location" example used above)

All of these components allow an eCommerce business to deliver a site presentation that is better suited to convert.  With bounce rates at homepages exceeding 40% for most retailers, its painfully true that users have short attention spans. 

By providing an approach of personalized content, you can capture their interest, and then work to make the sale through great site performance, clear messaging, engaging calls to action, and a seamless checkout process.

About Author:  Craig Smith is the founder of Trinity Insight, a leading eCommerce consulting company

Image via CrunchBase

This is a guest post by Craig Smith of Trinity Insight.

In early February of this year, search engine representatives within Google, Yahoo, and MSN (before it was Bing) made an announcement into a uniform method of embracing a new html tag to reduce duplicate content for a webmaster.  This “canonical” tag, which would be inserted within the HEAD portion of any HTML document, is a great way to reduce potential negative affects that can happen when you have the same page indexed multiple times under a variety of URL’s

The tag is written as this:  <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/page1.html“/>

This is essentially saying to a search crawler, “Hey Googlebot, this isn’t the preferred page for this content, href=http://mysite.com/page1.html is.”

In working with a variety of ecommerce platforms and content management systems, this is a pretty widespread issue and this tag will go along way to helping webmasters properly structure a site for optimal SEO.

Think about this for a minute.  You can have the following example variations for a fictional homepage:

www.mysite.com

mysite.com

www.mysite.com/

www.mysite.com/index.htm

mysite.com/index.htm

www.mysite.com/home.aspx

You get the picture.  Which is the primary page?  All of these pages can be indexed by search engines, but which version should an engine render when users are searching?

Sure you can use 301 redirects to fix this issue, but sometimes these are tough to generate within varied system and server environments.  You could try to eliminate varied parameters such as session ID’s and tracking codes, but then you are losing valuable data to help you understand the dynamics of your visitors and marketing campaigns.

In working with a new client in the eCommerce sector, we saw this issue first hand.  A single product page had 27 different versions of the page (different url’s for each) indexed within Google.  Each page had the same title and each page had exactly the same content.  Because of the different paths that users could take to find the product, due to the parametric filtering capabilities on the site, these urls existed in the index for years.

How does this impact your SEO efforts when you have these duplicate url’s in search indexes?  For starters, unlike a 301 which redirects all web traffic, the canonical tag is an indicator for only engines which allows you to keep your existing url parameters.  It will help engines in concentrating link equity into one primary URL, for a specific piece of content, as well as essentially tell them which page you want to have as the “authority” page.

Looking for answers direct from Google relating to the canonical tag?  Here are some Q&A answers that they provided in their webmaster central blog

Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.
Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as <link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” />?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the <link> tag. Also, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.
Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.
What if the rel=”canonical” returns a 404?
We’ll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.
What if the rel=”canonical” hasn’t yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we’ll immediately reconsider the rel=”canonical” hint.
Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.
What if I have contradictory rel=”canonical” designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.
Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com.

So what’s your action plan?  First thing is to evaluate your site paths and look for instances in which you have multiple url’s with the same content.  Look for the duplicates and decide which version that you desire to have as your primary version.

Embed the tag on the duplicate pages as indicated above, potentially in an automated basis within an eCommerce platform, and help the engines more effectively index your site.  The canonical tag is a major development within the SEO market that has flown a bit under the radar, but can really make a difference in your rankings.  Best of luck in reducing your duplicate content and making your website more efficient for search engines to crawl and index!

————————

About Author:

Craig Smith is the founder of Trinity Insight, an eCommerce optimization firm that specializes in web analytics consulting and multivariate testing

How can you make money online? A very common question. But there are one hundred and one ways to answer the question. And most of the information you will find online is general:

• Find a product you can promote as an affiliate and do so.
• Find a niche, build a blog and add a sprinkling of ads.

And general is vague. Vague instructions don’t motivate because there are no real life numbers attached to them.

A case study from the Winner’s Circle, however, starts with a successful site, tells you how it makes money, the competitiveness of the niche and exactly how the site gets it’s traffic and makes it’s money.

About Gyutae Park

Gyutae Park started exactly where a lot of us did. He had no background in the field of internet marketing. But he was willing to learn and learn he did. He has done SEO work for major corporations. And now he is letting you pick his brain as well as the brains of successful internet entrepreneurs.

If you have never made money online, you are starting exactly where Gyutae did. But you have the ability to sign up for the Winner’s Circle and get started much quicker.

The Parts of a Winner’s Circle Case Study

• Site Analysis – What makes this site a success?
• Market Research – How does this site compete with other in the niche?
• Traffic Strategies – What techniques did the site owner use to get where he is at?
• Monetization Methods – How does the site make money?
• Site Potential – Will the site continue to make money and be as successful in the future?
• Key Lessons – What does this site teach us that could be used for other sites?

But Case Studies Aren’t All

With your Winner’s Circle membership, you will also get:

• Exclusive interviews – Hear straight from successful entrepreneurs how they made their money. Getting the meat is all about asking the right questions.
• Members-only community – Chat directly with other members of the community to get first hand information on how to make your internet business a success.
• 4 Steps to Finding the Perfect Niche for Your Online Business – 18 pages packed with everything you need to pick your niche.

Cost

The cost of the membership is normally $57 per month but I’ll be doing a special promotion during launch – $1 for 3 days, then $37 per month.  The $1 trial will end on Friday July 3rd and the $37 price will go up to $57 on Monday July 13th.  So sign up for the Winner’s Circle now.

I have a 30 day money back guarantee and a fast action bonus for the first 50 people to sign up where I will personally audit their sites and provide 3 custom recommendations for SEO, traffic, and monetization.

Do It

I will tell you the truth. I have never signed up for a membership site in the past, because I never knew what they had to offer. I always thought I could find similar info for free. But I had a sneak peek at the Winner’s Circle and dissected the first case study. And now I’m hooked. I copied and pasted the whole case study to my swipe file. And that was just the first case study.

Sign up for the Winner’s Circle.

Cover via Amazon

"You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That’s* the *Chicago* way! And that’s how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I’m offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?" – Sean Connery, The Untouchables

And that’s the deal I’m offering you. Internet marketing is war at times. And although one of the best ways to learn to make money online is to pick someone from the crowd of internet marketers, copy what they do, read everything they have written and do everything they tell you to say without question, it will only get you so far.

Copycats won’t win because they aren’t competing with anyone. They are following them. And you are never going to tap into all your chosen guru’s secrets. That’s just not the way it works. They give away enough to keep you coming back, hopefully with your credit card.

In fact, once you start getting an idea of what you are doing here online, you will realize this. You will visit a guru’s site and see that he doesn’t follow his own rules. In fact, you can sometimes learn more techniques by just observing rather than reading. Guru’s skip things they think are common knowledge. And they don’t write about things they are currently testing. And the stuff they do write about, may be new to you, but chances are, have been around for a while.

So for a second quote:

"There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." – Al Pacino, The Godfather Part II

You aren’t going to get everything from the horses mouth. You have to use your brain. You have to analyze the top sites in your niche and anything that makes you go, "I wonder why he did that? That’s not normal.", you have to investigate.

And the ultimate way to learn internet marketing is just jumping in and failing a few times so that you get used to it and failing becomes second nature. Because every now and then, you will be surprised and not fail.

And the route to successful surprises is extrapolation, see the first quote for the definition.

After you have been beat up, knocked down and left for dead a few times, you start learning how this thing works. You are done with the table scraps and realize this stuff is easy. You have been just stuck in the tunnel of copycatting.

You just take what you learned and expand it a bit. Stretch it. Mix marketers A’s techniques with marketer B’s and test your results. Look at marketer C’s techniques through a microscope, through a telescope and then through your 68 year old grandmother’s eyes. Be the first one at the new social networks. But know when your tests are done.

And I just bet you eventually come up with something. Come on. Don’t just be a marketer, make a mark.

Cover via Amazon

I wrote this article a long time ago, before I had a blog. It references Outlook, so it had to be a while ago. I haven’t used Outlook in a long time.

After reading the about William Saroyan and how he wrote The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by writing a story a day for 30 days, I wrote 30 articles in the same time and spread them all over the internet.

This was one of those articles. One I read over and think, who wrote this. But it does make a lot of sense. I haven’t written many emails in a while and recently have had the chance to help show a few new people the ropes via email and other forms of communication. After reading through some of my emails, I remembered this article I wrote and tracked it down. It makes a still makes a lot sense and it does work.

How did you sell your last product? Imagine that I am a newbie writing you an e-mail after reading your ebook. How would you answer the question? I bet you could send me a 300 word reply in no time. Words would flow from your keyboard as fast as you can type. You have just written your next article. Don’t think so? Too easy? Read the next paragraph.

Robert Allen has written you an e-mail. He needs you to write a chapter in a new book that he is putting together and he needs it in a week. Are you up to the task? Can you have it done in time? The theme of the chapter: the unique way that you sold your last product. Okay, start writing. How long did it take you to write the first sentence? A hour, two. Remember, millions of readers will be viewing the results.

If you want to, do both exercises above and compare the results. Which piece reads better? Which one sounds like a high school textbook? Read them aloud and I bet the answer becomes clearer. You would be proud to let anyone read the e-mail addressed to the newbie but create a pen name for the book chapter. Why is there a difference here? Both of the subjects were the same. The same person wrote both pieces. Or was it the same person?

In example one, you were yourself. You were just answering a question. You were more than happy to explain your knowledge to someone who just casually wrote you an e-mail. In example two, you became "the author". Maybe you had to outline the chapter first, make notes, research it. In other words, do as many things as possible to put off what you really sat down to do. Just write. After all, with thousands of readers critiquing your work, everything has to be perfect. There is no room for mistakes. And yet the e-mail reads better.

So why not write an e-mail. The next time you have a great idea for an article, turn that idea into a question and e-mail it to yourself. Well, you don’t actually have to go that far, but if it helps, do it. Then all you have to do is reply to it. Don’t worry about grammar. Don’t worry about going off on a tangent. That tangent may be exactly what you need to make your article, oops, "e-mail" stand out. Just explain everything you need to in order to get your point across. If you need to, click "Create" in Outlook and start writing. Try it. And don’t follow the instructions in the next few paragraphs until you are done with your e-mail.

When you are done, read it out loud. Any time you slow down or stumble over the words, cut those word out. Any part that sounds like your sixth grade English teacher instead of you, chop it. Take no prisoners. You will know your own voice when you hear it. Just listen for it. Your readers want a new perspective just as much as they want information. You are not writing for the New York Times and you definitely don’t want to become Joe Friday. Slip the facts in with your personality and your readers will be flocking to your web site in search of more info. Or for that matter, they will be flocking just about anywhere you want them to flock.

Don’t forget to make sure you covered everything that you needed to cover. If you need add a word here and rearrange paragraphs there, do so. Once the idea is alive in your e-mail, it is hard to kill it. Don’t worry about that. Just make your e-mail complete. You will know when it is. You will get that feeling that is hard to explain, but involves printing your article out, sticking it to your refrigerator, telling your neighbors, and rehearsing for your Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech. If you notice any of these symptoms, your can now safely begin to refer to your "e-mail" as an article without killing it or triggering writer’s block.

Use this method as described and I promise you will become a much more productive writer. So how did you make your last online sale? Write me an e-mail.

P. S. I did write this in Outlook and addressed it directly to you.

Forums are basically where “social networks” started.

I talk to a lot of people who want to get traffic to their site. And they usually think I can tell them how in 10-15 minutes. So I try. Rarely do people listen. And out of those that listen, very few actually use what I tell them. I am not sure why this happens. Maybe they are lazy. Maybe they think, “How can something like that help me?”. But one guy I talked to I told to use forum signatures to build links. That was about all. I thought it was simple enough to get someone started. I told him to sign up for forums, add a signature file, forget about it and just converse. Put in your two cents where ever you can add something to the conversation. I did not list specific forums.

I told him that and I was thinking, yet another person not taking my advice. But I was wrong. A few weeks later, he came back to me and we checked the site. He has a micro business and is outranking local corporations here in Kansas City. He is doing this with a site built from templates. He doesn’t even know HTML. And what he used to do it, local business directories and forums. It blew my mind. One, for getting through to someone in 10 minutes. Two, for the results.

And since most people understand forums, I think it may be the best place for the average non-tech person to build links to his site, especially if you have the gift of gab. They have been around since they were called bulletin boards and some still are. You can find multiple forums on just about any topic you want.

How Forums Work to Boost Your Site’s Position in the Search Engines

There are many ways to get links to your site and links are votes. That is about the simplest way to think of them. Think of them as another site voting for your site to rank higher than other sites for a specific keyword. He who has the most votes, all else being the same, will rank the highest. It is not that simple and not the whole story, but if you are new to this, it is a good place to start.

Most other ways of getting links will get you one link from one site. You comment on a blog that uses dofollow and you get one link back from that post. You submit an article to an article directory and you get one link, most of the time. Run down the list of link building methods and it takes a lot of work to get one link. With forums, once you create a signature, that signature will now be under every post you add to a forum thread.

Detecting if the Forum Will Pass Rank to Your Site

Remember that the links to your site count as “votes”. Well, in the early days of blogs, getting a link to your site was as easy as commenting on any random blog you happen to find. It was not long before spammers caught onto this.

To prevent spam, the “nofollow” tag was created. A normal link in html looks like this: <a href=”http://www.website.com”>This is your link text</a> and a “nofollow” link looks like this: <a href=”http://www.website.com” rel=”nofollow”>This is your link text</a> . That rel=”nofollow” does a lot. What it does is tell the search engines that happen to spider that page this link is not a vote for your site. In other words, the link is worthless for your rank in search engines like Google.

There are some people that say this link still counts as a vote with a lesser value, but if you are new to this, we will stick to this rule: if there is a rel=”nofollow” around your link, it is worthless for building your rank in the search engine results. If it is a high traffic forum, people may click on your link but it is not helping you anywhere else. It’s value is limited to those clickthroughs.

Okay, let’s see if a forum is passing rank. Browse to a thread in the forum of your choice and make sure there are some signature showing. To detect if a forum is using nofollow tags, first right click in the middle of your browser’s window. On a Mac, this would be Control and your normal mouse click. After doing that, a menu should pop up for you. Now depending on your browser, you should see something like “View Page Source” or just “View Source”. Click that.

Now that you are looking at a bunch of html code, the easiest way to determine if a forum is dofollow is just search the whole page for “nofollow”. Ctrl+F usually brings up a search menu on most browsers and you can do this with source code. So push Control and F at the same time, type “nofollow” and hit enter. If nothing comes up, you are at a dofollow forum.

If your search does turn up a “nofollow”, check it to see if it is around one of the signature links. People nofollow links on their site for various reasons and some other links on the page may be nofollow. To make that a bit easier, go back to the real page, copying one of the signature links, search for that on the html source (the page we got by right clicking) and determine if the signature link itself has a nofollow tag.

And there are Firefox extensions that make this easier. But if you are not using Firefox and are not used to addons, showing you how to use them would have made this post a lot longer and involved, so I skipped that process.

And most forums I have run into are dofollow, so the manual process of right clicking and viewing the source may be overkill, but it helps to know before you invest in creating a profile there and fleshing it out.

Creating Your Forum Signature

This will be a general tutorial and some forums are set up differently then others, so you may have to do some looking around to edit your forum profile.

Usually on a bar, across the top of a forum, you will see various links like Forum Jump, FAQ, Search, Tools. There should also be a “Sign Up” or “Register” link. Obviously, this is where you sign up. Do that first. Most are basic forms and most will send an email to the email address you used to sign up. You will have to click on this link before your forum membership is activated.

Once you have determined that the forum will follow signature links, you have signed up and you have activated your account, it is now time to add your signature and flesh out your profile. Look around on that top bar for something that says “Edit Signature”, “Edit Profile”, “Control Panel” or something similar. While you are in there, you might as well fill out your whole profile, because it will get some traffic from other forum users especially if you are active and on most forums, every post you make will also link back to your forum profile.

In your signature, put your links or your links and a small blurb. Some forums limit the amount of links and text and a whole bunch of links there looks a bit spammy, so use good judgement when creating your signature. And here are the basics of your link:

<a href=”http://www.thesiteyouarelinkingtoo.com” Title=”This pops up when you mouse over the link and should have important keywords, if allowed by forum”>This is your anchor text and should have important keywords</a>

Or, if the forum uses BB code, which many do: [link=http://www.thesiteyouarelinkingto]Your Anchor Text[/link]

Finding Forums

Before the critical mass of blogs, if you searched for a very specific question on just about any topic, forums showed on the first page of results at Google. Now, chances are that blogs have taken that place in search engine results. But forums are out there and some still outrank the blogs.

Should you find forums related to your niche? Yes. That will give your most valuable backlinks because the content on both the forum and the site you are linking to in your forum signature are related. But if you find that this limits the amount of forums you can be active on, branch out to other forums and use them also. For example, if you only found 3 or 4 forums on “window and door repairs”, make sure you are active at those forums.

But if you have more time, go to unrelated forums and add your signature. And if you do, you might as well find ones on topics you like and can gab about for days. Most webmaster forums are full of members with signatures that have nothing to do with being a webmaster. The members still talk about webmaster things. But their signature point to unrelated sites.

One of the easiest ways to find forums is to use a keyword related to your niche and add forum to the end of it. Then search Google for that phrase, i.e “webmaster forum”. Basic and simple.

Another way is to use a forum search site. These sites search only forums. Just enter niche related terms and these search engines will search a bunch of forums at once and give you specific forum threads as results. Here are a couple:

• BoardReader
• BoardTracker
• Omgili
• And now, right in Google

Some DoFollow Forum Lists

I was going to build my own and still might, but there is a lot of forums out there and it is rare to run into one that does not give you a dofollow link. So instead I will lead you to other blogs. Use this list if you are lazy. These forums have already been checked for dofollow links.

• Zakpack
• SEO Marketing
• JR’s Internet Marketing Strategies
• Make Money Online
• Reviewer of Sites

How Not to Spam

Just don’t. That’s about it. The beauty of your signature at a forum is that you can forget about it. Do so. And start conversing. It may take a while. It’s like driving. At first, you stress out, thinking Step 1, Step2, Step3. But eventually, you’re a natural.

Don’t look for opportunities to get links. Just about any forum you land on will have hundreds of active threads. Browse them until something strikes you. Answer questions. Ask questions. Post tips. And mainly watch the other forum members. Learn from them.

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I am not quite sure why a made my last post a cliff hanger. To tell you the truth, I was running out of time and decided to just cut the post in two parts. The machine is rather simple and mine is geared to affiliate marketing, but I will explain it so that you can create one for just about any topic or industry.

Now I now there will be questions about spam whenever any sort of automation enters the conversation. Spam is how you cook it. This Twitter account I actually use. The automation is there because I don’t use it as often as I would want to. It picks up the slack when I am away.

Here are the concepts I started with:

• Not everyone can start with celebrity and gain 1,000,000 Twitter followers by osmosis.
• People like to follow others that tweet about content they are interested in.
• You want the amount of people you follow to not be too much higher than those that you are following.
• The most active Twitter users are either new or addicted.
• Tweeting links related to your topic that aren’t your own is altruistic…on the surface and spreads new knowledge to the people following you.

The Machine

My focus on this account is affiliate marketing, like I said. So first I found a lot of blogs that I trusted to have great posts on the topic. I actually already had all of these in my feed reader. So I took these feeds, created a category in Feedhub and added them to a hub.

Once I had these feeds waiting and ready, I created a twitterfeed account attached to my digireviews Twitter account. Twitterfeed uses OpenID for logins, so I also created a Google account first. It is a good thing to have a Gmail account attached to each various blog and "persona" you may have. I may be Stephan Miller on this other blog also and cover similar topics but I do so from another angle. There are many reasons for this, but the reason I will use now is that I can only used one Twitter account with one twitterfeed login.

So after creating the account, step 2 is now adding the feed I created in Feedhub to twitterfeed. I also added the feeds from two of my blogs to the same twitterfeed account. I guess I could have added all the feeds I added to Feedhub one by one at this point rather than adding the extra, but Feedhub has a filtering processes that picks the top posts from the feeds rather than every single post. It also tracks clicks on the feed links to improve these choices. I figured it would cut down on noise and improve the tweets over time.

Now is this all I did. Of course not. This was to make my Twitter account active when I was not and I found myself actually checking the account to see what I tweeted and reading the posts that were.

Next I created an account with Tweetlater. This allowed me automate specific tweets like affiliate products I was promoting and send automated DM’s to people. Now some people hate automated DM’s but it all depends on the industry. My automated DM sent new followers to my blog to subscribe and hopefully while subscribing they noticed I was giving a free Wordpress plugin that ads Clickbank hopads to each post. And in order for them to get it, they had to subscribe to my list. You see there is more too this machine than Twitter and I always like killing as many birds with one stone as I can, pun intended.

Building a Following

This part was easy but it involves a lot of grunt work. First you must imagine who your perfect followers would be following now. In affiliate marketing, I went for affiliate marketers that had a lot of followers and also for the Twitter accounts of affiliate programs like Clickbank. And I went through and followed about 200 a day, give or take and some days I just did not have the time.

But you never really want the count of people you follow to get much higher than the count of those following you. So every two to three days, I went in and unfollowed people who didn’t follow me back. There are some tools to help you do this out there, of course like Friend or Follow, Twitterless and Less Friends.

There is a another process you can use for this that takes a bit longer but you will have much more targeted and receptive group of followers. Search twitter for "first tweet" and then check each person’s bio and website. Then just follow those people who seem to fit the demographic for your niche. Of course, you can also just use Twitter search to find the people who might be interested in what your account has to offer just by searching for specific terms related to your topic or niche.

And these tools may help: WeFollow, Just Tweet It, Twitterator (when you happen to find a list of good people to follow), Twubble, Who Should I Follow? and Mr.Tweet.

Keep It Real

This is not meant to be a set it and forget it account. I am active on it almost every day. Finding new things, making observations and retweeting other’s tweets. But after having my first account, I realized that to build a targeted one and to build it faster, you have to be proactive. My personal account here will remain what it is, but I needed something more for my affiliate marketing Twitter account.

And for the ultimate tool, download Seesmic Desktop. It allows you to moniter and tweet from multiple accounts with one click. It allow you to search and save searches. I will let the picture below explain this:

In a Nutshell

Everyone with a blog makes lists and unfortunately this leaves you with a lot of tools that you have no idea how to use efficiently until you have time to investigate them all. What I do with these lists is find out how to make these tools work together for a purpose. It’s the difference between features and benefits. People are out looking for the benefits. And everyone is writing about features.

This process is relatively simple and my listing of useful tools may have made it more confusing than it needs to be, so here are the basics.

• Find people who you think would want to follow you and follow them.
• Find some useful feeds you trust to have good material and tweet them automatically.
• Set up your own automated tweets for specific marketing reasons.
• Use the time you saved to be real as you would with any Twitter account.

UpDate – HootSuite

I was going to add this as a comment, but I thought this would be better. I have had a HootSuite account for a while and just had a chance to try it right after publishing this post. This tool is awesome. You can schedule tweets with it, control multiple Twitter accounts and post to multiple Twitter accounts.

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I have had my first Twitter account for over a year now and just topped 1600 subscribers. With that account, I tweet things and go through new followers and follow anyone that interests me, manually. I rarely go looking for people for follow. My second Twitter account is a few months old and had less than 200 subscribers, so I tried an experiment. But let me show you the results first.

In one week, I gained over 1000 followers. And if you trust the “Twitter rank” algorithms out there, I also look good on that front:

Here is this account’s Twinfluence stats.

While on Twitalyzer, I could use some work. But the signal to noise ration shows 100%.

That’s enough for now. More about how I did it later. And that’s what I call a cliff hanger.

Image by Guido Jansen via Flickr

Building an online store is not a walk in the park and I have developed a lot of them with osCommerce, ZenCart and even X-cart. Then I ran into Magento which has more potential than all three.

But that doesn’t mean it is necessarily the easiest software to use. Anything that runs smooth and looks good on the frontend does have a lot going on in the backend. And Magento does take some getting used to. And Magento’s Beginner’s Guide is a great place to start. While it won’t take you through all the complex procedures of building multiple store or using Magento’s API, it will show you how to get a store up and running. And it truly is a beginner’s guide, walking you through each step with annotated screenshots.

With this book, you’ll learn:

• How to upload and install Magento on your web server.
• How to build your catalog of products.
• How to display related products.
• How to set up sales tax rules down to the zip code.
• How to accept payments with Paypal, credit cards or check and money orders.
• How to create your own shipping rates or use the API’s of the United States Post Office, UPS or Fedex.
• How to give discounts based on quantity.
• How to create attributes to let your customers customize their purchase with colors, size or style

And the publisher is offering one of the most useful chapters for free. It explains the process of creating categories and attributes in Magento. But it goes further than that. It actually gives you a lesson on structuring an e-Commerce store: what should be a category and what should be an attribute. And this is useful to anyone, not only Magento users. The link is below and if you want to bring your web store into the 21st century, I suggest you click it and give free a try.

Chapter 3: Categories and Attributes