I thought I’d take a moment and update those interested on what I’ve achieved thus far, what this campaign has looked like from an Internet Marketing perspective and where I plan to go from here.

Just so you’re aware of what I’ve done.  Yesterday after writing the a fore mentioned article on my Multiple Sclerosis fund raising efforts I sent out a message on Twitter to everyone following me.  My hope was that people would see the article and either donate or re-send (retweet) the article to their followers.

As of right now I’ve received 305 clicks or page views on the original article, 29 clicks on the donation link in that article and 10 donations for a total of $200, not including my personal $5 donation to test the system.

I was very excited by these results.  As I alluded to in my previous article, I was expecting a click-thru rate of around 10% on the donation link.  That is almost exactly what i got.  I was also expecting around a 10% conversion rate or rate of actual donations.  I was pleasantly surprised by what is currently a roughly 33% conversion rate.

Out of the 10 donations I received, almost all were from people I know, work with or have at least communicated with on Twitter.

My original goal was to raise $300 in roughly 120 days. Now that I’ve successfully raised 66% of my original goal in about 20 hours, I’ve decided that I should up the ante a bit.

I’m setting my new goal at $3,300.

As I mentioned yesterday, a big part of the reason I’m doing this, other than the satisfaction of helping people with MS, is to prove to myself that I can succeed in Internet Marketing and to get myself more experience.  Granted some might argue that fund raising is quite a bit different than selling a product but I decided this was a good start.

Given the fact that I’ve only done a small amount of marketing via Twitter and haven’t utilized any other media or tools of the trade I’ve decided I can achieve a great deal more with this.

This new goal might seem a little crazy so here is how I came up with this new number.

Given the fact that I haven’t achieved nearly the number of page views of some of my most popular articles I thought I’d set a page view goal at a much higher number.  So I’m going to attempt at getting my original article roughly 60,000 page views.  My most popular article achieved that on it’s own merits over a couple of days.

Based on that I’m still hoping for click-thru and page view rates of roughly 10% each for a total of 600 donations.  If each of those donations is at the original minimum amount of $5 I should be able to exceed $3000.

I’ll wrap up this post for now.  I have more thoughts on how I will get my original article it’s 60,000 page views but I think that warrants a post all to itself.

I am also on a personal mission to gain more experience in Internet Marketing and quite possibly find my dream job.

I decided that it might be interesting to try and combine these two challenges into one.

It occurred to me that if I can’t figure out a way to raise $300.00 $3,300 online by the October deadline that I will probably have a really hard time convincing others that I can increase their sales over the Internet.

I know times are tough but $300 $3,300 seems like a small amount of money for me to raise in 4 months.

So starting today I’m going to use some of what I’ve learned thus far to raise as much as I can through online sources, starting with this plea.

Would you donate $5 to my personal MS donation site?

In addition to raising money to help in the research and development necessary to find a cure for this terribly dehabilitating disease, I’d like to prove to myself that I have a chance at acheiving my dreams and that I can reach a wide enough audience.

This is why I am only asking for the site’s minimum of $5 dollars from you.

Let me know if you have any questions or have any suggestions for how I can increase the number of people who read this post.

By my best guess, based on personal rules of thumb, I need to get about 6000 60,000 people to view this page. Thank you for your help.

Please click the “Share” button below to post this article to your favorite site.

Update: I have up’d the ante and increased my goal to $3,300.

So here is the gist of this article if you have a short attention span …

Boston Tribune News is not a real news agency of any kind. The website address is a neatly disguised landing page for an “information product” for sale called Google Fast Cash. But that’s not the disgusting part.

My wife somehow stumbled across this page that had erroneously been indexed by Google News. She knows I’m interested in Internet Marketing to a certain degree and thought she’d send me the article. I won’t link to their page but below is a snapshot of the header.

You’ll notice that the fine print does state that the page is an advertisement. The entire page is a pretty nifty replica of an online newspaper site.

If you do click on just about any of the several dozen links on the page you’ll be directed to another landing page that will spin tales of the thousands of dollars a month you can make by “posting links on Google”. They sell you their product for a $1.95 “shipping and handling” fee which even though it’s bogus isn’t all that harmful. The kicker is that unless you read the Terms at the bottom of the page you don’t find out that it will charge a monthly recurring $80+ fee to your credit card.

So this is just a friendly reminder to all of you who may have any interest in Internet Marketing. There are a great deal of devious people out there willing to take your money. I have no doubts that if this organization is smart enough they’ll find my this article soon and issue me a cease and desist order to take down my article.

I’ll probably comply as I’ve got no real desire to get into a legal battle. But if this saves a few people from loosing $80, it was worth the trouble to post it for a few days :)

I don’t know about you, but this data is more important to me than most other data. Financial data is certainly important as well but if I was forced by gun point to choose financial data or personal life memories, I’d choose the later.

Now I’m the last person to try and discourage the use of online sites for storing data. I store almost all of my personal data on the internet on one site or another.

And yes I know you can certainly figure out ways (some hackish, some not) of backing up what you’ve posted to some of these sites. But I’ve always sort of felt that it would be neat if I could archive some of this data in a way that would last for many generations regardless of where technology moved.

You see even if you do figure out a way to extract all of your Facebook status messages over the years into one nice and tighty little zip file on your thumb drive, what happens 100 years from now when the only thing capable of reading data from that thumb drive exists in a museum somewhere?

I’d like to see a service where I could buy a sort of personal yearbook on an annual basis with all of my Twitter Tweets or Facebook status messages and save them away for posterity. I’d probably still prefer that I have a digital backup of this data in the event it can easily be restored, but assuming optical scanners will always exist, in one form or another, even the paper versions could be re-digitized.

What do you think? Am I crazy? Is my logic flawed? Do you know of a site where this is already possible?

I know I can already do this with my Flickr photos, are there other services out there?

Editorial Note: Half the reason I wrote this post is to encourage my readers to keep blogging about technical things. Part of the beauty of blogging is that anyone can do it and provide a fresh perspective. Don’t rely on the established bloggers to provide all the valuable content.

The other half of the reason I wrote this was selfish. I needed a place where I could jot down all of the things I’ll use to jog my memory and figured I might as well share it.

Please also note: I am VERY interested in getting feedback on the articles I’m writing. It’s the only way I’m going to get better. If you don’t find this article interesting or well written please critique it, and be frank!

I don’t plan on trying to “scoop” technology reporters. I don’t live in silicon valley and still have a day job. So a large majority of what I write will be editorial in nature. But I do understand the importance of blogging about things I’m actually doing and providing value to my readers as opposed to commentary alone.

Below is a list of approaches I plan on using to generate interesting posts for this blog. Let me know if you have any other ideas.

Interview Interesting People

If I’m to be sucessful blogging one of the things I’m going to have to do is learn to network more with people I think my readers might be interested in. Starting this month I will begin to report on interviews I’ve conducted with some interesting people in technology.

I’ll focus first on local CTOs, entrepreneurs, and other bright technologists. If you have an idea for somebody I should interview, drop me a line. Remember this is a blog on technology in general, not just information technology, so any smart person will do :)

Attend Local Tech Events

No matter where you live people are talking about technical things. Technology is not reserved for the computer geek. Just about any topic you can think of in today’s world has a technical spin to it. Like working on cars? Lots of technology there. Like to garden? Be a gardening geek.

I live about 35 miles outside of the Philadelphia suburbs. There are tons of events in this area related to technology that I can attend. My plan is to put these events on my calendar, pay their registrations fees if applicable, attend and write an aritcle about what I learned. Paying for the event in advance is important. It forces you to go!

Develop Useful Tools, Apps, Products or Documents

If you work in a technical field there are things you do every day that are worth blogging about. If you don’t but do technical things in your space time, blog about that! I personally am forcing myself to develop an app for the iPhone. The iPhone is comparitvely a pretty easy platform to develop software for and has a great distribution system in the iTunes App Store.

This project will allow me to learn something new while providing a fresh perspective on application development from a person who doesn’t write much code any more.

Test Interesting Products and Provide Reviews

Writing reviews on products is not a new idea. The spin I’m placing on it is two fold. First of all I will try my hardest to look for products that very few people have reviewed, if any.

The second thing I’m doing is writing reviews from a technical perspective about the science behind the product and why the product is a real advancement.

Review Interesting Web Based Tools

I point this subject area out specificially because I feel many people don’t realize just how many web based applications are out there and how sophisticated they’ve become.

Report on Obscure Topics in Futurism or Transhumanism

At the risk of loosing a few people with this one, I plan to try my hardest to distill all of the information available from people who spend all day thinking about the future down into potentially useful, understandable tidbits. Some of these people are PhD level thinkers and science fictions writers that aren’t exactly known for writing in a style the average person can easily digest.

How Tos on Obscure Tools

I work in a niche of IT that affords me the pleasure (and pain) of working with software tools that the average person probably doesn’t even know exist. Many of these tools will not be of much interest to the audience I’m trying to reach but from time to time I may stumble across an unconventional use for one of these tools that warrants publicizing.

Wrapping it all up

Given that technology is moving at such a fast rate and it is so easy to hit a level of total information overload I feel it’s important to provide the service of filtering information that my readers should be aware of as technology advances to a level that makes all our heads spin.

I feel like it’s my job to try and make people aware now of just how crazy things are bound to get soon if technology really is growing at the exponential rate many people believe it is. I can’t do that job alone and that’s why I’ve made this article public and will continue to try and get others to write in frank and simple terms about technology and it’s impact.

Once in awhile a piece of technology comes along that reminds us just how much Hollywood can be a source of inspiration. Star Trek communicators and clamshell cell phone designs come to mind.

But this one, if it really ever does get into mass production, could just take the cake. Whether you believe life imitates art or art imintates life you gotta admit, this is pretty cool.

According to Oh Gizmo the folks at Martin boast the following stats:

The Martin Jetpack is capable of 30 minutes of flight at 60 mph and 8,000 feet, which is more than enough for your commute. It doesn’t technically require a pilot’s license, and has just two primary controls: left joystick controls pitch and roll, right joystick controls yaw and throttle. It runs on standard automotive fuel, too. The cost? Only about $100,000, and the first 10 units should be delivered sometime this year.

Thanks to Engadget for pointing this video out.