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Twitter Gold with Tweetlater Keyword Alerts
By Todd Alan | December 1, 2008
Even without the recent addition of keyword alerts, the free tweetlater.com service is one of the best Twitter.com tools on the web. Keyword alerts, however, simply puts tweetlater over the top as one of the coolest tools for the social marketer.
First, if you’re not on Twitter then all I can say is go check it out because you’re dating yourself. Twitter is like plugging into the chit chat that flows all around you in your virtual world. It’s not easy to explain and is really only appreciated if experienced.
Tweetlater has been around for a while now and their claim to fame has always been the ability to do three things
- Schedule tweets. Say you’ve got a product launch, or an event or a series of tweets that need to go out on schedule. Rather than leave this to chance that you’ll remember, or just to be more efficient with your time, you can schedule tweets for a later time
- Auto Reply. If someone decides to follow you the auto reply will send them an automated welcome message. You can customize this to thank them for following you and to tell them about your url
- Auto Follow. The auto follow feature lets you automatically follow those people back who chose to follow you. It’s a reciprocity thing. If they want to hear what you have top say then perhaps you want to hear what they too have to say. And of course it makes it much easier to grow your followers!
The new Keyword Alert feature Tweetlater recently added lets you specify a set of keywords you’re interested in and Tweetlater will “listen” in on the twitter chatter scanning for your set of keywords. When it finds them it will send you an email digest with all the tweets containing your keywords!
If you’re not seeing the coolness let me explain. Having a gazillion followers means nothing if these followers are not at all interested in what you’re interested in. If you tweet about a new golf ball that adds 20% distance to your drives only golfers are going to care. So wouldn’t it be nice to have followers who are golfers?
Rather than simply following people at random hoping they’ll reciprocate to build your list, why not look for people who are actually talking about your niche and then go follow them? If their tweet that raised the alert happened to be a question you can honestly answer why not help them out?
In short, the tweetlater keyword alert feature is NOT meant to be a way to spam people more effectively, but to give you away to engage those who are genuinely interested in what you’re interested in.
For instance, I see a tweet about someone asking about the best golf balls. I happen to market golf balls. I don’t just send them a sales pitch. Instead I first reply to their question without any marketing pitch so I doesn’t seem like a twitter spammer and then I follow them afterwards. Odds are they’ll follow me back because I gave them something useful and now my follower list contains one more qualified prospect I can engage with.
If you’re new to Twitter you might want to checkout an earlier post I did on link cloaking with tinyurl and budurl. With budurl you have the ability to track the clicks you get from the links in your tweets giving you more analytic power than a Jedi Knight.
You’ll also find a great post by Scott Fox that briefly describes twitter and includes a podcast on how to use twitter to grow your business. Twitter Marketing - Scott Fox interviews Rich Brooks
P.S. And don’t forget to follow me on twitter 
Topics: Productivity, Social Marketing | 3 Comments »
Everything’s Amazing but Nobody’s Happy
By Todd Alan | November 29, 2008
The other day I was thinking of all the things I was thankful for, being thanksgiving and all, and it occurred to me how often I take my online marketing career for granted. The funny thing is that it took a really funny video to put it all into perspective.
Here’s a great perspective video with Louis CK on Conan. Check it out, I guarantee you’re gonna laugh … and hopefully relax a little too!
I don’t know where you’re from, I don’t know if you celebrated Thanksgiving and I don’t know what you’re thankful for, but this great video put it all into perspective for me.
I admit, sometimes I can get pretty grouchy when I work and it’s really silly to be honest. When I think about my work I can’t imagine a better career, and believe me I’ve had more than a few. As an online marketer, what could I possibly have to complain about
- I can work from home or, more importantly, from anywhere in the world that has internet access
- I work my own hours, I wake up when I want and I go to bed when I want
- I don’t have clients with asses to kiss
- If I’m unable to work, or cannot work, for an extended period of time for whatever reason (as happened to me recently) I still get paid. Passive residual income rocks!
- I can pick and choose the projects/products I want to market. This is a huge plus for me because I choose areas of interest so that my work is just an extension of my regular interests and passions. Basically I get paid for my passion
- There is NO ceiling on my salary. The sky is the limit
- Getting laid off is a non issue
- And last, but not least, I can live every day of my life exactly how I choose to live it it!
I’ve promised my wife I was going to be less grouchy and she promised that if I didn’t she’d give me something to be grouchy about 
If you’re not happy what’s holding you back?
Topics: Uncategorized, affiliate marketing | 1 Comment »
Link Cloaking: TinyUrl, Budurl or None of the Above
By Todd Alan | November 19, 2008
Move over tinyurl.com, there’s a new sheriff in town and his name is Budurl.com. While tinyurl has become a well know solution to shrinking and hiding our ugly marketing urls, it has always lacked one crucial component and that’s tracking. This is precisely where Budurl aims to take tinyurl head-on and it’s a pretty impressive offering for sure.
Tinyurl was the first big boy on the block doing exactly what its name implies, it shrinks urls. So an ugly url like this
http://www.club-veracity.com/2008/finance/credit-counseling/ 10/what-are-the-important-gains-of-a-credit-card-debt-negotiation-program
can be turned into this
http://tinyurl.com/credit-card-debt-negotiation
The second one is far more friendly and apt to get more clicks because for many people long urls scare the crap out of them.
How about this url that screams Click Me So I Can Sell You Something!
http://www.mb01.com/lnk.asp?o=668&c=7211&a=18851
What the hell is that and why would anyone in their right mind click it?
Services like tinyurl, and budurl, solve this problem by making urls like this look a little more palatable
http://tinyurl.com/thesurveyclub
A friendlier looking url like the one above has been show over and over again to get more clicks.
So it’s clear, short, non-marketing looking urls are the way to go if you want to get clicks. But what can Budurl do for me that tinyurl can’t? It can track your clicks.
I had heard of budurl but it was Jack Humphrey’s post Track Your Social Marketing that pushed me to take a closer look and I’m glad I did. Budrul offers the same features as tinyurl with the addition of the all important link tracking.
If you’re sending out tweets, digg shouts, or squidoo casts, for example, wouldn’t it be nice to know how many clicks you’re getting. This will help you tremendously by steering you from wasted campaign efforts and towards those that are actually pulling traffic. It’s all about testing testing testing, and with budurl this is a snap.
As Jack points out in his post, be sure to keep track of where you place your various urls so you know not just that url was clicked x number of times, but where that urls actually was! This means different locations should have different urls.
So is Budurl the end all in link shrinking, cloaking and tracking?
While budurl and tinyurl are great tools, are simple to use, and in the case of budurl offer some great link tracking, they both have one major drawback … It’s Not Yours!
In fact any online url cloaking service has this problem. If you don’t think it’s a problem then consider what will happen if you have a few hundreds (or thousands) of urls out there all running through budurl and budurl goes down for the day due to technical problems (or business failure problems). Instantly your business grinds to a halt and is at the mercy of a third party service to get things going again.
For some marketers having their links become inactive for a day could mean thousands of dollars. What happens if you’re doing a promo or launch of some sort?
Having a third party service being the conduit for your money flow is in my opinion pretty risky. Sure the benefits are that it’s free, simple to use and ready to be put to work immediately, but when you use them be aware that they do carry risks.
And the risks are not just technical downtime wither. Consider that you have those thousands of links spread around the web, or already sent out in an ebook, and your free link cloaking/shrinking service decides to change their business model and chart $5/1000 links. It’s not much, but the point is it’s out of your control.
So while budurl is a great service, it’s quick and easy and free, just be aware of the dangers all this convenience comes with.
I’d be hypocritical if I told you I never use these services myself, but I’m doing so less and less these days as I move my campaigns over to a solution I own and have full control over. One that runs on my own hosting account.
My links are my assets and to place those assets in someone else’s hands for the sake of convenience doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If you’re building a business it’s important to maintain control over your assets, especially the ones that are critical path like your links are, and you can do that for only a few dollars with any of a number of third part cloaking tools.
One that’s been around a couple years now and has a lot of followers is powerlink generator. Powerlink Generator is feature rich but some people have had issues getting it set up. Fortunately their support will actually log into your account and help you fix any issues you have with setup if you ask them to.
There are other options but I have not had a chance to evaluate them personally.
Lastly, these scripts are not that difficult to write if you have some programming skills. Also there are some free scripts flying around but for the time you might spend looking around, testing the various freebies or writing your own I think you’d be better off dropping $20 and then spending your time on more productive tasks.
Topics: Social Marketing, affiliate marketing, link building | 9 Comments »
The Win Free Marketing Tools Contest Update
By Todd Alan | November 16, 2008
Wow! The free marketing tools contest is a wicked success and therefore the show will go on!
It’s amazing what you can learn from simply trying to give things away for free! Last month I began what will likely be a monthly draw for some cool free marketing tools and I just wanted to update everyone on what’s going on with that.
The prize for two months free Wealthy Affiliate membership has been awarded. No worries if you didn’t win though as the contest will continue and your entries from the previous month will carry over to the new month. In fact they never expire. Enter once and play over and over.
I’m just finalizing the next prize and will announce it in the next few days.
Dang It! Now I Have to Change the Rules!
So this being the first contest of it’s kind that I’ve run I’ve learned a few things that are going to require some minor changes to the rules.
So what did I learn?
- I learned that the comment box on a squidoo page is really NOT the best way to accept submissions or any other specific type of feedback from readers. Squidoo users have become so accustom to simply dumping random comments for the sake of backlinks into those comment modules that they really don’t take the time to read description text associated with the comment module. I could have told people that they could leave their info and receive a free IRS audit and it would have filled up just the same.
- Next thing I learned was that there are a great many people who would rather not leave urls back to their pages where they placed contest entry links. This to me was a little surprising since most people are just begging for back links to their content. Well it turns out I received vastly more entries via email. People were emailing me saying they’d placed a link to my lens but would rather just email their url to me rather than put it on the lens. That’s ok with me. In fact, given that there is a couple other places on the lens to place PR4 backlinks to your content I guess it’s not really a big deal for people.
- Lastly, there are no shortage of people trying to game the system ;). There were a couple people who submitted the same url multiple times hoping to get multiple entries. Fortunately I check for this and so if this is you trying to game the game then you’re wasting your time. Sorry.
How To Enter
OK so in light of the first month experience here are the new revised rules for entering the draw. I think they will actually work better for most people.
- Place a link to any of the following
- Email me a link to your page with the link you placed
- Send it to the email address for the Long Tail Treasure course
- Se sure to put “Win Free Stuff” in the subject line of the email. This is important because my mail program will be using this subject line to filter all the contest entries for me
- If you’re not signed up for the free course then you can do so with the signup form on the side bar of this blog. The email you receive from the course is the address to send your entries to
That’s it. Pretty simple huh? Tell others about my free course and then send me an email about it and you’re automatically entered for the free draw.
Prize Suggestions Please
There’s such a diverse group of people here at Long Tail Treasure and I’m really hoping to find prizes that will appeal to as wide a range of people as possible which is why I’m rotating the prizes each month. I’m looking at membership trials to various sites as well as SEO tools and course material.
Hitting the target and picking the right prizes will be much easier if you can take a minute and tell me what sort of prizes you’re interested in winning. Just leave a comment on this post and I’ll see what I can do.
thanks
Topics: Long Tail Treasure Updates, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
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