Easy Marketing Guides, Affiliate Marketing Tips, Tricks, Tutorials

How to Schedule Recurring Tweets on SocialOomph

By Don on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 | 2 Comments

Since Twitter decided to slap SocialOomph/TweetLater with a cease and desist order on the recurring tweets service, I’ve had to identify a different solution for getting messages out to all my followers. I don’t want to limit my conversations to only the few who might be listening at the moment of the tweet. More discussion of my Twitter conversation philosopy here.

SocialOomph already had a solution in place, but many are unaware of it’s existence or they don’t know how to use it. It’s a fairly simple process, but it does take a little longer and a little more effort than the previous recurring tweets solution. I’m making the assumption that you already have the Pro version of SocialOomph. If you do not, you can get SocialOomph here.

1. Open SocialOomph and go to the “tweets” menu then click on “upload.”

2. Open Notebook and write out your tweet.

3. Spin your tweet because Twitter’s TOS won’t allow you to repeat the same tweet. Notice how each of these tweets are different. I only took a couple minutes to spin this tweet, however with a little more time and creativity, it could be made into many more tweets.

4. Save your notebook file someplace where you will find it easily. I put mine on my desktop.

5. Go back to SocialOomph complete each of the following:

Select the Twitter account you wish to submit to.
Browse your computer for the Notebook file you created.
Indicate the date an time you wish your first tweet to occur.
Specify the time between recurrence of your tweet.
Determine if you wish for any URL’s to be shortened automatically.

6. Scroll to the bottom and press “Upload.”

That’s all there is to it. Now you have a series of repeating tweets going out, which increases the probability that more of your followers will benefit from your tweets.

Please don’t abuse the Twitter rules.

The SocialOomph Solution for the Twitter Slap

By Don on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 | No Comments

I had just upgraded to the Pro version of SocialOomph (formerly called TweetLater) when Twitter got after them for allowing and facilitating repetitive tweets. They have now disabled that feature.

According to SocialOomph:

On Monday, October 12th, 2009, Twitter communicated to us that recurring tweets are in violation of their Terms of Service. Twitter’s rationale centered around the potential for recurring tweets to result in duplicate tweets.

The content of the communication is extracted for your benefit below:

Recurring Tweets are a violation no matter how they are done, including whether or not someone pays you to have a special privilege. We don’t want to see any duplicate tweets whatsoever- They pollute Twitter, and tools shouldn’t be given to enable people to break the rules. Spinnable text seems to just be a way to bypass the rules against duplicate updates and essentially provides the same problems.

Hence, from Thursday, October 15th, 2009, 00:00 AM CST we will prevent the entry of recurring tweets on Twitter accounts within the SocialOomph system. Existing recurring tweets on Twitter accounts will all be placed in paused state at that time, so that the content of the tweet text is still accessible to you, but no publishing to Twitter of those tweets will take place.

Recurring tweets scheduled for other social services are not affected by this change. Other scheduled tweets are also not affected by this change.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, but it is important to us to keep our system in good standing with Twitter.

That’s very unfortunate. It was a very powerful and useful feature. It was, also, the sole reason that I upgraded from the free version of the application.

Twitter has been likened to a cocktail party. You roam around the room, talking to various people. The conversation is fast, loud, and varying. Everyone tries to be interesting, funny, controversial, intelligent, etc.

How many people have told the same joke more than once to different people at a cocktail party? Almost everyone, huh. Some even tell the same joke more than once to the same person. Oops! They will let you know of your goof and move on – no harm done.

What if you are only allowed to tell the same joke only once? Now, everyone who was out of earshot when you told it the first time is out of luck. I think it’s a shame that some might be left out of the opportunity for a good laugh, a clever insight, an encouragement, or some other useful piece of conversation.

That’s the usefulness of recurring tweets. It isn’t spam. Everyone who see’s your tweets has followed you, meaning that they have opted to receive your messages. You still must be cautious. If you get out of control and begin to repeat incessantly, share objectionable material, or talk about things that your followers aren’t interested in, they will simply unfollow you (opt out.)

So, If SocialOomph was going to discontinue the option to retweet, my first instinct was to find another service to replace them. With a quick Google search, I discovered this list of Tweet schedulers. I have to admit that I haven’t tested any of the options on their list, yet, but from the descriptions they provide, it appears to be a very useful list.

Before I had a chance to do any research on the services in that list, I found that SocialOomph already has another option. I’ve outlined the steps in another post.

Business Setup – Domain Redirection

By Don on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 | No Comments

As announced in my earlier post entitled “Step by Step Business Setup“, I’m setting up a new business and detailing all the steps as I complete them. This post is the next installment in the series.

As I promised in my previous post, “Domain Name Research and Selection“, I’m going to talk about the domain name redirection and the addon domain in the hosting account.

When you purchase a domain (I purchase all mine from GoDaddy.com, so that is where my examples will come from), it is not pointed to any particular site. You need to redirect it to point to the desired site. You can simple forward the domain, which is the simplest way to redirect your domain, but limits you in the use of subdomains later. I choose to redirect using a two step method that is slightly more complicated to set up, but allows more flexibility with the use of subdomains.

First, login to your GoDaddy account and navigate to Domains-My Domains. There you will see a list of all the domains that you have purchased through GoDaddy. Click on the domain that you are wishing to redirect.

In the section of the page entitled “Nameservers”, there should be 2 listed. You need to change those nameserver names to those that your hosting account provides for you. Since I use HostGator which uses a program called cPanel as it’s control panel, that is what I will be describing here. It looks something like this:

At the very bottom of the screen on the left, you will find a little box that provides all the details of your hosting account. There you will find the nameservers that you will need in your GoDaddy redirection.

Back in GoDaddy, click on the “manage” link by the Nameservers area of your domain. This takes you to a place where you can change the nameservers to your assigned nameserver names at your hosting account. Once you have saved this change, it takes 24 to 48 hours before the redirection is completed. I like to do this as soon as I purchase the domain so that I can get that process moving along and use my new domain as quickly as possible.

The second step in the process is done in your hosting account’s control panel (hostgator-cpanel for me). On the home page, of cPanel, scroll down to the section entitled “Domains”.

Click on the Addon Domains button. This will let you set up the location in your hosting account that your domain will be redirected to. It looks like this:

type in your domain, then tab down to password. The other fields will self populate. Verify your password and click add domain, then you’re done.

No your domain is ready for you to upload your website. That will be for another post.

Domain Name Research and Selection

By Don on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 | No Comments

As announced in my previous post, I’m setting up a new business and detailing all the steps as I complete them. This post is the next installment in the series.

I already have a hosting account, so I didn’t have to purchase hosting. I have an account with HostGator and have had for some time now. For only $7.95 per month, I purchased an account with them that offers unlimited domains, so each time I want to start in a new niche, all I have to do is purchase a domain name, redirect it to my nameservers in HostGator, and create an addon domain in my hosting account.

Yesterday, I researched some available domain names and purchased one that I felt was appropriate for my “learn to play guitar” niche. To do that research, I used a site called NameBoy.com and their two word search tool.

NameBoy lets you enter two keywords into their search and then it provides a large group of suggestions. They display .com, .net, .org, .info, and more. They also indicate the availability of the domain with each extension.

I, also, used GoDaddy’s search to help me find the domain.

When you search a specific domain in GoDaddy, they will tell you if it is available, but they also give many domain name suggestions to choose from.

It’s not that easy to find a real good domain name, especially one with a .com extension, which I recommend highly. Keep searching until you find something appropriate. Think about synonyms, hyphenation between words, and addon words like my, best, now, online, etc. Godaddy uses that technique in their domain suggestion tool.

I ended up purchasing the domain myjamminguitar.com for this exercise.

I’ll go into domain redirection and addon domains in my next post.

Step by Step Business Setup

By Don on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 | 2 Comments

I listened to a video that was provided as part of the Affiliate Classroom 2.0 program that I am going through. This video is about setting up a business using You Tube. It seems simple and very plausible, so I’m going to go through the steps. I’ll document them in this blog.

This will take me longer than most people take to set up since I only work at my business about 1-2 hours per day. Make sure you subscribe to the blog feed so that you can come back each day or two as I make my updates.

Here are the steps I’ve already taken.

Keyword Research

We looked at Clickbank to find popular products. In Clickbank, you will click on the “Marketplace” link at the top of the page and that will take you to a search page you will use to identify products. I select the option of sorting by “Gravity” since I am looking for products with the highest gravity. These are the products that are being promoted and selling the most.

We scanned through the highest gravity products in each category and put together a list of general categories that each had 2-3 products with a gravity of 50 or higher. I will emphasize the word “general” here, since we are not looking for long tail keywords in this plan.

Next, we took our list of general categories to You Tube and looked for the ones that get a lot of quick hits in YouTube. To do this, you just put your keyword in their search bar and enter. Then change “Uploaded:Anytime” to “Uploaded:This Week”. You want to find several hundred views within a few days for the videos in the search results.

Using this method, we chose the category “Guitar” and will be promoting Guitar Lessons on YouTube.

That’s where we are right now. The next step is to put our website together.

Explosive Article Marketing System that Multiplies Your Efforts

By Don on Monday, September 14th, 2009 | No Comments

An effective article marketing requires momentum. Article marketing isn’t a get rich quick scheme to become massively wealth your first week in business. It’s a method that slowly grows, article upon article, directory upon directory.

But, you must publish with regularity to get that growth. To develop momentum, you must be actively involved in marketing your business with consistency. That means organizing a system or setting up a calendar with tasks to be completed each workday.

I use a system for marketing my business that is truly amazing. I call it a “Cloning” system. It makes so much sense, I don’t know why I haven’t seen this packaged as a high dollar product and sold. In fact, I should be selling this information, but I’d rather give this away to my loyal readers.

Have you ever wished that there were two of you? Or four of you? How much more could you get done if you had a “mini-me” or two to help you with all the tasks that you needed to complete. The stystem that I’m about to share with you has the same effect, but rather than more people doing more work it’s a method that helps you to do much more with way less effort.

Here’s how this cloning system works. Be sure to read and re-read this part. Using this system properly and regularly will blast your business to the top.

Write a blog post.
Spin the post into an article, reworded slightly so as not to be considered duplicate content, then submit to the article directories.
Adjust the article into a press release.
Create a short powerpoint of the article outline, screenshot the powerpoint into video while reading the article.
Read the article into a podcast.
Using the article, create a Squidoo Lens and a Hub Page.
Add the article into your MySpace, Yuwie, Facebook, and other social networking sites that you are using.
Announce your blog post on Twitter.
Submit your article to all your social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Propeller, etc.

Of course, you will be sure to have these all point to your squeeze page, either through a resource box, or a link in your article. In fact, everything you do should point to your squeeze page.

Can you see the power of this system? Once you have spent the time to create just one article, you can quickly and easily multiply the effectiveness of that article over many places without much incremental effort.

HitTail Keyword Research

By Don on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 | No Comments

Watch this video about HitTail keyword research tool. This is a useful tool for advanced internet marketing people to get real time data on keywords that they are using.

You can try it out for 60 days free, but then have to pay a fee for continuing a subscription to their service.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0eSeSPaEh8

How to Create a Simple Squeeze Page

By Don on Friday, August 28th, 2009 | No Comments

I can’t begin to describe how much time I wasted while agonizing over getting a squeeze page setup. That was one of my biggest stumbling blocks in my internet marketing career.

The following video is a very good – but fast paced - tutorial on setting up a quick and simple squeeze page using the free KompoZer program and linking to your Aweber autoresponder.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c3Arw77RjM

Video Summary

Download Kompozer HTML Editor

Kompozer is a very good and very simple to use WYSIWYG editor program. It’s free to download and should satisfy everything you need without having to spend the big bucks for a program like DreamWeaver or FrontPage.

In KompoZer, click on the “Table” icon and select the 1 x1 format.

Right click on the table you just created and select “table cell properties” and the “table” tab. Change the width to 600 pixels, the spacing to “0″, the table alignment to “center” and press “ok”.

Type your headline and bullet points into your newly created table. Format everythin appropriately by using the Word-lik” toolbars above. You can select a font size and style, center or justify text, and make your bullet points into an ordered or unordered list.

Add another table inside the first one you created and after the text that you’ve entered. This table will be just like the first one you created except that it will only be set to 400 pixels.

This table becomes the space where your web form will go. You will set up your web form in your autoresponder. I use Aweber as my autoresponder as do many people in the internet marketing business, however, any good autoresponder will have this functionality. I won’t detail the autoresponder setup procedures in this post but will do so in another.

Copy your code that you’ve created in your autoresponder. Use the javascript type of code as opposed to the html type of script. Click your cursor into the table that you created for your web form. Select the “source” tab and paste your code into your website code.

Save your page and it’s ready to be published.

I use FileZilla to transfer my data to my hosting account just as is done in this video. I will go into more detail about using an FTP program like FileZilla in another post.

Marketing Basics

By Don on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 | No Comments

I just got a phone call from someone in Scottsdale , Arizona . I didn’t recognize the number, so I let it go to voice mail. When my phone alerted me that someone left a message, I knew that I had received one of those automated broadcast messages.

I believe that most telemarketers don’t want to waste their time leaving messages because they know their calls will never be returned. They’d rather get on to the next call and try to catch a live voice. The machines have all the time in the world, though, so they go ahead and state their business.

The message had something to do with starting a business where you can make $3,000 in the first 2 days….blah, blah, blah….guaranteed success….blah, blah, blah….only work 2 hours per week…blah, blah, blah….no selling…..WHAT??? No Selling??? Where does the $3,000 come from???

Who wants a business that doesn’t sell anything? The IRS has a name for businesses that don’t sell anything. They call them a hobby and they don’t allow you to deduct your expenses for very long if you don’t quickly start to sell something and turn your hobby into a business. A hobby doesn’t pay the bills.

I’ll take the business where you gotta sell stuff rather than any hobby business, any day. In fact, I want to sell lots of stuff and make lots of money.

Does that mean I’m going to get the phone directory out or buy a bunch of leads and start cold calling? Heck No! I find that offensive and distasteful, though it must be effective or there wouldn’t be so many people doing it.

The key is to find people who want what you have, and get them to call you to ask for it. That’s what I’m all about.

I like to use the system that everyone calls “the funnel system” of marketing. Here’s how it works.

Promote a capture page.
Collect names of people who are likely to be interested in your product.
Introduce yourself to them and develop a connection with them.
Share information about your product with them.

Some will buy, some won’t. The better the job you do at creating a capture page that draws your target market in, the better your sales conversion will be. The better the job you do in communicating with your list and developing a trust relationship with them, the better your sales conversion will be.

Set it up, then perfect your system.

Savvy Twitter Twenius Plan

By Don on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 | No Comments

Not that long ago setting up a web site was the “in thing” to do. Next thing I know, blogs became the rage and we all raced to put up a blog and commence blogging. But that is ancient history in internet time, and today is today. All the talk at this point is of “Social Media” with Twitter and Facebook dominating the conversation. It’s the latest phase in online communication, it’s the latest phase in community, and as you might expect, it’s beginning to catch the attention of marketers as well.

It’s unbelievable how Twitter has established itself as a major means of interactive communication in the online and mobile world. Movie Stars, athletes, government officials and well known people from @MarthaStewart to @Dr.DrewPinsky to @LarryDavid to @SophiaBush and beyond, are all mad about Twitter.

But Twitter is much more amazing than that. In fact, Twitter is a local area social tool as well. It’s likely your town government is on Twitter, your local TV news, your local Fire Fighters, your library, your local college, even the guy that bagged your groceries recently. If they are not on Twitter now, it’s just a matter of time.

But there’s another audience moving fast and furious on Twitter. It’s an undercurrent of a more serious nature where business owners (both large and small) including entrepreneurs and home-based businesses are successfully tapping the enormous potential of Twitter. When we observe established companies such as: @ConnectByHertz, @comcastcares or @kodakCB begin lining up on the Twitter bandwagon, it’s unmistakably time to to start planning YOUR Twitter plan.

It is likely that this “craze” boils down to the enduring fact that a lot of business actually occurs in social gatherings, at cocktail parties, on the golf course, and at various other social events. Now, through Twitter it’s become possible, if not down right easy, to benefit from the internet version of a non-stop 24 hour, 7 day a week cocktail party of unending proportions.

The statistics and stories are eye-catching:

Twitter is virtually 100% consumer content. “Consumer content is ranked as the #1 aid to a buying decision, cited by 91% of respondents.” ~JC Williams Group
“MyTwitter Toolbar brought in over $2,000 in the first 30 days with a 100% free download marketed ONLY via Twitter.”
“Unique Visitors to Twitter are dominated by 2,935,000 in the 35-49 age range (41.7%)”
“Business owners age 30 to 39 are most likely to be using social media marketing (44.8%), followed by 20 to 29 year-olds (40.3%) and then 50 to 59 year-olds (38.7%).”

What does all this mean? It means that if you are an entrepreneur or are involved with any business, you must not hesitate to head over to Twitter and set up your own Twitter account.

Simple enough?

Well, not quite. Once you have your Twitter account opened, that’s when the simplicity goes out the window. It’s a very very basic concept, but like a Rubik’s Cube, unless you know WHAT to do, you’ll soon be scratching your head.

Thankfully, there’s help. Internet strategist and social media marketing expert, Dan Hollings has spent over 12 months researching and testing Twitter strategies for business. Along the way, Dan wrote 100 extremely helpful top Twitter tips for business. Next he created a browser toolbar for Mac or PC that puts about 240 Twitter tools, tips and apps easily within reach. Recently, he released his remarkable Twitter training program called, “Twitter Twenius” (that’s Twitter-talk for genius).

Here is a helpful Twitter tip, to get your juices flowing:

A radical thought… Make Twitter the “CENTER” of your online universe. All profiles across the social media universe should list and link to your Twitter page as your primary page. If you are doing Twitter seriously, this will be very effective. With the exception of specific campaigns, you should drive all ancillary traffic to Twitter as a primary destination.

Without doubt, there’s a lot more to learn, however if you’re looking for the money in Twitter or a way to rev-up the Twitter rocket boosters on all your promotional campaigns whether in your local area or throughout the world, I wholeheartedly recommend Twitter Twenius.

Subscribe

Categories

Resources

Pages

Archives

Categories