People follow people they are interested in and want to know what they are doing (unless I am missing something).
What I don’t get is why people follow me, but then bitch about what I say… repeatedly…. and often times will say “Who gives a shit” in response to my tweets. Well I guess you do jackass or you would not follow me.
Here is a good example… Last Friday I went with my wife and daughter (it was my daughters birthday) and she REALLY wanted me to get my toenails painted.
So I put up a twitpic of it:
and this jackass incredibill who has been following me for years but is always the first one to bitch comes out with:
Now don’t get me wrong. I am all for free speech and if this failure at life wants to spout his bigoted comments at me then go ahead. He is one of many that like to make personal insults I receive every day. I am a big boy and have put myself (and my toes) in the public spotlight.
What I don’t understand is why people devote there resources to following people they do not like.
Gyutae Park of Winning the Web has just launched a new Internet marketing training program today called Winners Circle. And at first glance, I think it is pretty awesome.
Winners Circle is a members-only site with exclusive Internet marketing case studies, interviews, and community. Currently, there is one case study up and a new one is released each week. There are also a few interviews with top Internet marketers (released bi-weekly), a special bonus report called “4 Steps to Finding the Perfect Niche for Your Online Business”, and a forum which gives you direct access to Gyutae and other like-minded Internet entrepreneurs.
What sets Winners Circle apart from other Internet marketing sites is that it uses specific case studies and examples of successful sites (in various niches using different business models) to show you what works and what doesn’t. You really can’t find this type of information anywhere else.
The cost of the membership is normally $47 per month but as a special promotion, Gyutae is offering a rate of $27 per month to the first 200 members who sign up. There is even a 30-day money back guarantee and a fast action bonus for the first 50 people to sign up where Gyutae will personally audit your sites and provide 3 custom recommendations for SEO, traffic, and monetization.
To take advantage of the limited $27/month price and bonuses, you just need to head here and sign up!
Mid last week a lot of blog owners saw their RSS subscribers count drastically decrease. I had seen this before but it never lasted more then a day (that i saw). I was surprised to see the issue still going on several days later as it started to pop up on forums, blogs, and on some Google Groups that Feedburner was no longer showing your Aweber Blog Broadcast Subscribers.
I talked to a friend who works at Feedburner and he said he was not sure the exact reason they stopped showing but that Feedburner in general was cleaning up questionable services that might not be reporting properly.
I think this was kind of funny as seeing as how they just started reporting friendfinder… anyway…
Earlier today Aweber’s CEO responded to me and John Chow’s tweets on Twitter:
I do hope its a temporary glitch. If its permanent it would be a huge blow to Aweber.
After being threatened with sanctions for bringing a lawsuit without merit – On Friday, Google Adwords Specialist Keyen Farrell withdrew half of his counter suit against me.
If you have been following the case closely you already know this is the 2nd time Keyen and John J Farrell have had to significantly reduce or withdraw their claims/motions.
We plan to continue this winning streak in our case.
I would like to thank everyone for your support in the case. We will continue to fight the good fight.
This guest post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat.com, a complete resource for entrepreneurs complete with advice articles, start-up profiles, interviews, news analysis, and more.
It was about eight months ago that I was talking with a friend of mine who had been rapping recreationally for a few years and had built up a small group of local fans for his work. His lyrics and beats were great, but he had never had access to a medium that would allow him to attract a larger audience and build up a serious fan base for his work.
His primary promotional technique was to distribute mixtapes and MP3 files to friends and family and encourage them to share it with everyone they knew. While his content was good enough to get him some traction in the community, this strategy never allowed him to reach an audience beyond a limited geographic area.
It was only once he began to promote his work online that he was able to start to gain traction in the area. The first video we created an uploaded to YouTube, a remix to the hit song “I Love College” by Asher Roth, took off amassing over 450,000 views and leading to requests for concerts, interviews, possible recording deals, and countless messages from new found fans. This is how we did it:
There are hundreds of up and coming songs released by unsigned artists on YouTube every hour. Most of these songs never attract more than a few dozen views. In order to get past this barrier, we had to do something different. A look at the industry showed that “I Love College” was a song that was quickly gaining popularity, but hadn’t quite reached mainstream media. Realizing the opportunity, we created a remix to the song and posted it on YouTube. While there wasn’t a lot of competition that this point, we knew we had to promote the video a little to get it to appear near the top of YouTube search results for “I Love College”.
One of the easiest ways to spread a video at first is to leverage social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace. Seeing how most of our Facebook friends were college students, it was fairly easy to post links to the video on our friend’s profiles and have them spread around quickly through our personal network. You can also set up a page for yourself on Facebook and invite as many people to join as possible. (Invite all your friends and ask your close friends and family to invite all their friends)
Another very effective method is to find related forums and post links to your video. However, you have to be careful not to spam. Make sure your video is something the audience would be interested in and provide some background information on why people should watch it. Even though you are promoting your content, make it seem natural, not like a sales pitch.
It is important to get as many views as possible in the first 24 hours so that you can get your video on the “Most Viewed Page”. It may be difficult to get it on the main “Most Viewed Page”, but it is much easier to have your video featured on a specific category’s “Most Viewed Page”. This video was featured on the page for the subcategory Rap and Hip Hop under Music.
This allowed YouTube’s system to see that the video was related to “I Love College” and was something viewers were interested in. This allowed us to be ranked #2 in searches for “I Love College” behind the official video. The timing was perfect as it was just as the song began to get major radio play and the video amassed 100,000 views and then 200,000 views very quickly. Yet, YouTube search results are fickle and the video began to drop in ranking and eventually began to disappear and reappear from the first page. When this happened we had to take an alternate approach to keep the video growing.
While growth tapered off, we still amassed over 250,000 more views through our tags which allowed it to appear alongside more popular videos in the “related videos” sections, accepting video responses which placed a link to our video from other uploads, and continuing to comment which kept the discussion going and kept people talking about the video.
One thing we found after the process was that posting the video as a “video response” to a large related video was a good way to attract large quantities of targeted traffic.
The Results
To date the video has been viewed over 450,000 times and attracted over 575 comments. It was “favorited” 2000 times and was featured on Maxim.com. One of the things we did with the video was to put our phone number at the end of the video which has attracted hundreds of calls, mostly from new fans, but also from people interested in performing concerts, other artists interested in collaborating, and some possible production deals. Not bad for something which was simply a hobby and a video which was created with just a Macbook.
It was also the largest remix to “I Love College” on YouTube, which is especially remarkable considering remixes with well renowned rappers from Ludacris to Lil Wayne have been created.
While I know most of you may not be rappers, the situation is similar. Chances are you have quality content, but have trouble getting it out there. Video promotion is a great way to attract some publicity. As a few final recommendations, market to those you know through social networking and book marking websites in the first 24 hours to try and get on the “Most Viewed Page”. Always respond to comments and tag the videos so they are featured next to more popular related videos. As a last reminder, take a look at what is currently being talked about, or better yet will soon be talked about, in the industry and create a related video.
We just added the SEO Checkup Tool to the suite of tools inside of ShoeMoney Tools.
The tool works like this. You give it the keyword you are optimizing for and the page you are trying to optimize. It will then fetch the top 10 results in Google for the same keyword and compare all of your SEO efforts with your competition. Then it will make suggestions for each section.
The reports can be viewed section by section, all at once, or exported to PDF for offline viewing.
UPDATE: There is still time to enter the contest. Entries must be submitted by today by going here. The cards below were the best that had been submitted thus far.
The overnight prints “Win Business Cards for life” contest is coming to an end this Friday June 26th. I have gone through the 400+ designs that were submitted and narrowed it down to these 7. I would be proud to sport any of the following as my business card. You guys all did a fantastic job.
But I need help!! (and am pretty numb from going through them all) So I am asking you guys, my readers, to browse over the following final 7 and vote below. Choose wisely!
John Chow is now 301′ing Google bot to a Google compliant johnchow.ca domain. Johnchow.com will still remain up and sell text links ads and paid posts but johnchow.ca will be fully 100% Google compliant John tells me.
The site is already ranking very well for some of John’s old terms.
After the huge success of their first webinar last spring the MySpace Myads team is ready to rock with another Webinar.
If you waited to long on the first one or missed it this is your chance to get in. Its 100% free and they will be giving out some great coupon codes during the webinar.
What if while during a sign up process you had an opt in checkbox which you agreed that you were a total idiot. Would you notice?
I am betting you wouldn’t.
What if I put in a privacy policy that says that I can do anything I want with your data including rights to ownership. Would you still do it?
I am betting you would.
What if I put in a terms of service that said I rule and you lose in every way imaginable. Would you still do it?
I am betting you would.
Why? Because almost every major website does exactly these things. Ever read the Facebook terms of service? Ever read any affiliate offer’s privacy policy?
Are these companies evil? No… this disclosure crap has gotten so out of hand that they have to do this to cover their tracks.
Now Google, for their own commercial interests are strongly campaigning for MORE government mandated disclosure.
Where does it end? It doesn’t.
We have become SO NUMB to these massive agreements and terms of services and privacy policies that nobody ever could possible read, that it has had exactly the opposite effect.
Here is what every blog will have in the footer within a couple years-
“Disclosure: I am benefiting financially or otherwise from everything you click on, read, or look at while on my website.” – In fact I might add that today.
But who does that help??
When can we get back to personal responsibility? Or can we ever?
I have had a Sprint account for 9 years. I got my first “smart phone” in 2004.
A couple years ago the iPhone was released on AT&T. I really never could consider it because there was next to no AT&T coverage here in Nebraska. As of right now we have the fastest AT&T coverage in the world (according the AT&T reps) because we have the newest AT&T towers.
But I have been waiting to see what Sprint would come out with that was comparable.
They miss the boat on getting the Blackberry Bold…
They miss the boat on getting any of the HTC phones….
So I wait until the big thing came a couple weeks ago… the Palm Pre.
Been playing with it for the last week… its junk…
I give up.
I got a new iPhone 3gs this morning. Unreal…
Its only been 1 day but… I am very happy and we will be moving all of our lines over to AT&T in the next week.
