This is a guest post by Josh Todd. Josh has been an Affiliate Marketer for over two years. He is also an Affiliate Manager for GetAds. He recently released a 22-page guide called PPV 101: A Step-by-Step Campaign Walkthrough. You can download it for free from his blog at http://insideaffiliate.net.

When people ask me what my favorite method of promoting affiliate offers is, I have no hesitation telling them that it’s PPV. It’s been around since the dark ages of the internet, and yet it is still successful today, perhaps more now than ever. I love PPV because it’s easy. I love PPV because it’s cheap. I love PPV because it’s profitable.

Before you write me off as just a PPV fanboy, consider the facts:

• You can get PPV traffic for a penny per view
• You can direct link all you want
• There is no Quality Score issues
• There are over 30 billion web pages to target
• You can still run rebills (just use a good affiliate network!)

If that’s not enough to get your juices flowing, then you should just hang up your shoes now and forget about making money on the internet. I’ll even give you a personal example of mine. I campaign I just launched yesterday has cost me $3 and made me back $54. That’s an ROI of 1,700%. And that’s also only bidding on one URL. If you could make $54 for every $3 spent, how much would you spend? As much as humanly possible.

Is there competition on PPV? Of course there is. But competition is a good thing. That means that people are making money, and that’s where you want to be at. There’s no reason to re-invent the wheel when it comes to traffic. There are a few proven methods for getting traffic to your website or affiliate offer, and to succeed you must be able to master one (or all) of them.

The best thing that you can do for your online career is focus on one thing until you make it successful. There are so many different ways to make money on the internet that it’s easy to get distracted trying out each idea that comes along. The guys that are buying their first Benz before most people graduate college are the ones that took one approach and worked it until it worked for them. Giving up and moving to a new traffic source is not the way to create wealth.

There are a lot of resources and tools available for today’s PPV marketer that simple did not exist a couple years ago. Tools that make it even easier to make money with PPV. Don’t like scraping URLs by hand? There’s a tool for that. Don’t like creating search engine query strings manually? There’s a tool for that. There are also more and more offers being added to Affiliate Networks that accept PPV traffic. It’s not just “adware” traffic anymore; people have realized that you can drive quality leads with PPV, and a ton of them.

No more excuses. There’s no reason you can’t start testing out your first campaign by the end of the day. You’ll thank me once you’ve got a few offers on autopilot that are making you several hundred dollars a day.

Go grab a copy of the free PPV Handbook

This is a guest post by my friend Joseph Porcelli who runs a Boston based non profit called Neighbors for Neighbors. And he needs your vote.

How many neighbors do you know on your street?

When was the last time you did something together as a community?

Have you ever had to deal with crime in your neighborhood, or known a neighbor in need but did not know where to start?

Well, if you lived in my neighborhood in Boston, you’d know lots of your neighbors, you’d have hosted an event in the last six months, and you’d know exactly what to do about crime cause you would know your local police officers. If a neighbor needed help you’d know where to go for resources.

How is this possible? It’s because we’ve leverage the Ning.com social network platform as the new online social infrastructure for our neighborhoods. Just like you invest in your businesses to earn fiscal capital, we make it possible for neighbors to invest their good intentions to earn social capital.

My name is Joseph Porcelli, and I’m the founder and Chief Executive Neighbor at NeighborsForNeighbors.org. I’m writing today to ask for your help in sharing our social infrastructure model with you, so that you too can communicate and collaborate with your neighbors and public servants like we do.

My hope is you’ll be inspired to vote for us to win $250,000 to fund our operation as we are competing in the Pepsi Refresh Challenge.

OUR HISTORY:

Neighbors for Neighbors is a Boston Based 501c3 nonprofit I founded with my neighbors in the summer of 2004. We originally set out to increase awareness about crime in our neighborhood, but soon realized that our neighbors wanted to meet each other, do activities together, and serve each other. To keep up the momentum we had created, we turned to technology so that everyone could share, create, listen and participate directly, without our intervention.

WHAT WE DO TODAY:

Today, Neighbors for Neighbors is pioneering the new online social infrastructure for neighborhoods by operating neighborhood-centric, community-generated social networks powered by Ning.com. The networks serve as a soundboard for voices and a springboard for action. Unlike Facebook, Neighbors for Neighbors connects people who live, work and serve their neighborhoods, with the intention of bringing people together offline to do activities with and for each other.

Check out our pilot network http://jamaicaplain.neighborsforneighbors.org

OUTCOMES THEY’VE PRODUCED:

Our members have created over 140 groups ranging from running and reading groups to advocacy groups organizing for affordable housing. In the last year, we came together as a community over 500 times. Together, we’ve transformed our public spaces, increased safety, and grown our collective grassroots innovation and problem-solving capacity.

Over the last year we’ve received national recognition as a Gov 2.0 leader for our work in connecting and building trust among residents and public servants such as police officers. We are even key partners in the Boston Police Department’s Virtual Policing Strategy, as seen on BPD News.

HOW YOU CAN HELP US:

Imagine what would be possible if your neighborhood — and every other neighborhood in the world — had a network like ours. What would you create and what problems would you solve?

We are not too far away from scaling our operation and you can help!

Please vote for us right now and every day this month.

With $250,000, we’ll will hire staff to:

Sustain the Boston operation (currently we are run by volunteers and have no funding)
Meet the demand for and provide technical and operating support to individuals and municipalities who wish to replicate the NFN model in their neighborhoods
Convene the “Neighbor Movement” where individuals, organizations, and community technologists will share best practices and build broad support for neighboring.

CONCLUSION:

You invest in technology to build financial capital and we invest in technology to build social capital. By helping us you’re helping yourselves, your families, and your neighbors.

Please vote to help fund our important work!

I also suggest you follow us twitter @NeighborTweet. You can help increase our chances of winning by tweeting – Vote to help fund @neighbortweets online social infrastructure for neighborhoods http://pep.si/shoenfn #pepsirefresh

Thank you, neighbors from all over,

Joseph Porcelli,

Your neighbor in Boston.

This is a guest post by Jonathan Volk, a 20-something internet marketer who makes millions of dollars a year online.

When it comes to internet marketing and working at home in general, one of the most common problems is shiny ball syndrome. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that most people reading this post have this problem!

Don’t worry, it’s not an STD or some disease passed through the air… it’s actually much worse and it comes from our inherent nature to want to do something different.

So what is this shiny ball syndrome that I speak of? It’s seeing or thinking of that next new idea (the shiny ball) and abandoning your current projects to pour into a new project that you just KNOW is going to be a winner. Forgetting all the work you have poured into the last project, you pursue that next new idea never to return to the old project.

I have a friend for example who I have worked closely with on some projects. The other day he showed me a website he was designing in order to sell some amazon products and get the 4% referral commission.

This was less than a week ago.

This morning he was asking me questions; questions about a new market. “I want to go after this new market…”, he said. And while this is commendable that he has found a new idea to market to, the old Amazon store he had poured hours into was going to end up in a net gain of zero.

This is a classic case of shiny ball syndrome. You start working on a project, but before you can even finish, you move onto the next thing.

Heck, even to this day, I am guilty of doing that at times, but I’ve gotten a lot better by using a few easy techniques.

Solving Shiny Ball Syndrome

Solving shiny ball syndrome easier to say than do but with a little effort and persistence you can solve this issue.

1. Write a to do list and prioritize. – Nearly every day, I write a to do list both for myself and my staff. I prioritize what is most important to get done and what is less important. I write an A1, A2, A3, etc next to top priority and B1, B2, B3 next to those that are of less importance.
2. Email can be a time sucker. – What I do is I open my inbox and open all emails that are important. I read the first line and in my head rank if they are important or not. Important emails I respond to right away. Unimportant emails I keep open, minimized to my task bar for review during times when I am on a break or after I finish important tasks. This way I do not get distracted by new ideas and opportunities before I have finished the tasks I needed to complete.
3. New Ideas – When you think of new ideas it’s important to remember that most good ideas will still be around tomorrow. If you never finish a project / website to the full extent you originally designed for it to be and yet move onto the next project, chances are, you probably won’t make much money like that online. Instead try to focus on what you have going. Heck, even if it only makes a little bit in comparison to your next project, at least it’s something. Compare that with the zero you probably would have if you did not complete it.

In reality, whether you’re an SEO, a PPC marketer, a social marketer, an ecommerce store or just try to make money online in any way possible, one of the most important things is focus. Focus on the projects you have going. Complete them and see them all the way through. If the idea truly turns out to be a dud, then stop work on it and move onto the next project / idea.

And remember, sometimes it’s less about trying to hit the lottery and make the next twitter or facebook as it is just building an income FIRST and through experience building something even greater.

This is a guest post made by Jonathan Volk. Jonathan is a 20-something affiliate marketer that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars each month online. Feel free to check out his blog at www.jonathanvolk.com.

Time and time again I am asked by newbies and struggling affiliates this question: “Is the only thing worth promoting a rebill (also known as a free trial) offer?”

Rebill / free trial offers are offers that generally convert well and pay a very high amount (Upwards of $40 per free trial signup). This happens because they offer a free trial to the user (usually plus shipping costs) and then after 14 days the user is automatically enrolled into a subscription (monthly) program.

A couple examples are Work from home offers, Diet (Acai, Colon, etc) offers, Skin care offers, and just about anything that can be used up or sold as a membership.

These offers have been around for a while but recently have been picking up a huge amount of steam and attention; they have picked up so much steam, most people don’t recognize affiliate marketing without rebill offers now-a-days.

First, let me debunk this myth. You don’t need to promote a rebill offer to make good money. In fact, right now I’m not actively promoting ANY rebill offer and will have hit close to $200,000 in commissions just for HALF of the month of July, 2009 (Estimated 400k in commissions for July).

Next, are rebill offers ok to promote? A lot of people seem to think that there is some sort of ethical issue with promoting a rebill offer.

I’m doing a poll on twitter (“POLL: Are Rebill / Free Trial offers ethical? http://bit.ly/MBMwd – PLEASE RT with @JonathanVolk in it.”) to see what everyone thinks about them.

Personally, I have no issues with the idea of rebills. Free trial offers have been around for years and I think when done ethically, it can be a great way to promote offers.

Recently, there have been a bunch of offers that have come out that have grown too quick for their own good and thus have caused issues. Issues like not being able to cancel because the lines are always busy, etc. When these issues arise, the government starts to step in and it gives the entire idea of a rebill offer a black eye.

That being said, I have no issue with the free trial / rebill model as long as the company is ethical, allow for cancellation, etc. Ultimately, the choice is your own – whether you will or won’t promote the offers. (Take a minute to vote now! – http://bit.ly/MBMwd)

Lastly, How does Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, And other big advertising agencies feel about rebill offers?

Google

First, check out my most recent guest post on Zac Johnson’s blog entitled, “Help, My Adwords Account was Banned!” Google adwords recently had big ban on people promoting rebill offers. It was not as much the rebill model as it was the way that the rebill offers were being promoted, thankfully.

You actually can promote the rebill offers on Google but you have to be compliant with the way Google will allow you to promote them. This means, no bridge pages, no fake blogs, etc.

Yahoo

At the moment, Yahoo does not seem to mind the rebill offers as much as google. You still see them a lot more than you do in Google and they certainly won’t ban your account. At worst, Yahoo will simply delete the campaign from your account and send you a fairly mean letter asking you to not upload it again or face a ban. (Shouldn’t Google act in this way too? haha)

Others…

Most other ad networks have not seemed to mind with the exception of Microsoft Adcenter. Adcenter has also been known to ban accounts for promoting rebill offers in non-complaint ways but will allow you to promote them when they are complaint with their set of requirements.

Other Offers You Can Make Money With

So, if you don’t want to promote rebill / free trial offers in affiliate networks, what are some offers you CAN promote?!

Consistent performers have always been: offers that offer a solution to a common problem, offers that are free, offers that deal with dating / meeting others, education, refinancing, insurance, and mobile just to name a few.

Affiliate marketing has existed for many years without the rebill offers and will continue to go on with or without them.

For more information on affiliate marketing and making money online, visit my blog, JonathanVolk.com

This is a guest post by my friend and elite retreat alum Chris Hedgecock.  Chris started a website a while back called Cars For A Grand which he says was inspired by my below-a-buck site.  The concept is it shows all cars currently on eBay for under 1k.  Pretty simple huh? Anyone could have done that?   Well Chris did!  AND unlike my below a buck site Chris has stayed on it and is now earning a high six figure a year income from it!.  He recently did a homegrown PR stunt which is an amazing case study for anyone looking to score free PR.  I asked him to write about it for shoemoney.com

As you may or may not know I run a used car website called CarsForaGrand.com. I thought it would be a great idea to buy a car for under $1,000 from the site and drive it coast to coast in an attempt to get some news coverage and visitors to the site. We were successful in appearing on a dozen news broadcasts and driving almost half a million visitors to the site in three weeks – all for free.

Here is an example of the coverage we got, this one is from San Diego:

The basic hope was that we could drum up some news coverage and backlinks with the unique story, especially amid the current economic climate and automaker bailouts. The initial idea was to get on a few local TV stations, you know the classic filler on a slow news day ‘Two guys are driving across country in a $900 car…’ stuff like that. It also sounded like a bunch of fun, never having been across country before. I thought about hiring a PR firm, or getting a consultant, but then I remembered that stuff costs money. So I talked to a few friends in the industry like PR guru Chris Winfield, whipped up a press release, and got to work. Here is the first release:

COAST TO COAST IN AN $899 CAR

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

SAN DIEGO, CALIF (April 2009)- Who says you can’t afford a reliable, safe, working car in this recession– for under $1,000 bucks! Early this month, two young entrepreneurs will set out from San Diego, Calif. to show the country that they do not need a bailout to get a decent car. Chris Hedgecock and Jorge Gonzalez, founders of the website CarsForaGrand.com, have purchased a car from the website for $899 and will drive from San Diego to Miami to prove you can buy a reliable car without the hassle and burden of financing one.

These two young guys will be cruising through your town and would like to stop by your station as they make their way across the country. You will find their story to be inspiring, interesting and humorous as they honk through towns just like yours.

The car is a 1974 Pontiac LeMans, purchased for $899.89 on February 26, 2009. To make sure the the car was safe and road-worthy, $200 was invested in parts like belts, spark plugs, and a much needed oil change. The car was purchased from CarsForaGrand.com, a website that only features used cars under $1,000.

Chris and Jorge’s journey can be followed at (http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/) where daily updates will be posted including pictures and video. The entire trip is expected to last 14 days barring a major incident (fingers crossed!) The route and city list will be updated with dates daily as schedules might change, always find the newest information at (http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/the-route/).

AVAILABLE IN SAN DIEGO APRIL 2, 2009

To schedule an interview or a drive-by please contact

I had the good fortune of having my friend Drew Schulte to help out with the PR legwork. Drew is not a PR professional, actually he’s my real estate agent but in this market he has a lot of free time So I had Drew put together a spreadsheet with all the cities we were visiting, and all the TV news stations in each city. He then called all of them and got the email address of the ‘assignment editor’. We learned early on this term ‘assignment editor’ was really important as this person decided who did what on what days. The great thing about TV news stations is they are open 24/7 looking for newsworthy stuff to put on the air. So we would pull into a town as it was getting dark, and while we would be getting settled Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors, and emailing the release to their ‘breaking news’ address.

After a few cities we altered the release to include the specific city we were in, and links to the previous news coverage. This really helped because it showed them that other stations were covering us and the last thing a news station wants to do is miss covering a story other stations might be covering. So once we got the ball rolling it was pretty easy, pull into town, get a hotel, wake up early, do a news spot, and get back on the road.

After we hit New Orleans we noticed the coverage kind of snowballing. For example, the news story we shot in San Diego got picked up by their sister station in LA, the one we shot in El Paso aired in San Francisco, etc. By the time we were done in Miami, the story had gone national… on the largest day we did over 110,000 uniques – all for free.

Not to say it wasn’t a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. I got to see a lot of this great country and meet a bunch of cool people. I also learned a whole bunch, which is really my favorite thing. I really knew nothing about PR, and was usually pretty shy in front of the camera. Now my smiling mug and my ‘74 LeMans have been all over the national and local news across the country. I hadn’t touched a Mac since the Apple II GS, and now I am zipping all over iMovie on my new Macbook Pro.

The real driving force behind this trip was attitude. I had the idea for the site a few years ago, and had the idea for the road trip around December or January, but it really took going to Elite Retreat to motivate me to get off my ass and go. There are just so many smart capable people there and the attitude of “We Can Do It” was just so infectious, I started planning as soon as I got home.

So to recap, if you have an idea get off your ass and just go for it. The worst thing that can happen is you will learn something new, and you might just succeed beyond your wildest expectations in the process.

You can see all of our video blogs at http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/ or check out our YouTube channel.

UPDATE:

Here is the official count from third party site NewsPowerOnline.com:

Total Story Count: 28

Total Nielsen Audience: 1,220,161

Total 30-Second Ad Equivalency: $13,164

Total Run Time: 49:50

Total Calculated Ad Equivalency: $30,885

Total Calculated Publicity Value: $92,652

This is a guest post written by Alexander Barbara. Alex is the founder of EasyTweets, a marketing and brand management tool for Twitter.  Alex also is an Elite Retreat Alum.

Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate – approximately 55% month over month. As more and more people start tweeting, the service and how it is being used by its community are evolving in a number of ways.

Though it began as a way for bicycle messengers to communicate with each other, Twitter now offers something much more: the ability for businesses and celebrities to directly interact with and market to a large number of people at once. You can think of Twitter as “Mailing List 2.0″, with each Twitter account and its followers being a unique content channel. There are several advantages over traditional e-mail:

1. there is no need for a double opt in system – people either follow you, or they don’t

2. deliverability is pretty much guaranteed as part of the Twitter.com service

3. with re-tweets, @replies, and #followfriday, your list can grow virally at no cost to you

4. public tweets are quickly crawled and indexed by search engines, providing some SEO benefit if you are promoting your own sites

Whether you are trying to promote your business or start a new one, you can build and monetize your own Twitter content channel in four steps:

1. choose your niche

2. set up account(s) and post content

3. grow followers

4. profit!

Choosing a Niche

Pick a Twitter account niche the same way you might pick a blog niche. ProBlogger has some great tips.

There are an infinite number of topics you can discuss. The more niche, the better. If people are talking about it, and if people might spend money in some way related to it, it has potential. Take a few minutes to visit search.twitter.com, and check if people are talking about your niche. Is it something people are interested in? If you have no ideas, browse the public timeline. What are people talking about?

You want to think long-term here. Yes you will try to monetize it, but your primary goal should be growing the eyeballs on your Twitter account. You want to build an account profile that adds value to your followers – something people will want to read, want to follow, and would even recommend to their friends. You want it to be good, because good content will get you more followers, and the more followers the more you can monetize. So avoid creating Twitter accounts that are too commercial in nature.

Remember, you are building an audience here. If you account is overtly spammy or adds no value – such as if you just tweet affiliate links 24×7 – you will eventually get flagged for spam. You don’t want that. So focus on providing content that people will actually be interested in.

Creating Your Profile

Be sure to fill out your account bio, description, and provide a link to your site if you have one. And make sure you add an image. The image doesn’t necessarily have to be a person’s photo; depending on your account name etc. you may want to have a photo of a place or thing etc. If you have an account about widgets, use a picture of a widget as your avatar. Use a stock photo if necessary.

Twitter users will click through from your Twitter profile to your site; if you want to track that traffic, use a URL shortener such as cli.gs and/or append Google Analytics UTM parameters to your URL.

Finding Feeds and Posting Content

You’ve heard it before: content is king. It’s no different on Twitter. Good content sources are key to building popular commercial Twitter profiles. You want great tweets that people are genuinely interested in – the kind of thing they will re-tweet or @reply to. This shouldn’t be too hard if you picked a decent niche. It will just take a few minutes of research.

If you have a blog or niche site with an RSS feed that pertains to your niche, use your RSS feed to promote the site via Twitter. You can also use newspapers and other content sources, such as Yahoo, Google News, other blogs, or even create a custom Yahoo Pipe. The sky is the limit here. Ideally you are looking for 2-5 content sources that have RSS feeds. Each should have one or more new articles every few hours.

You want to post regular content, but you don’t want to overwhelm your followers with content. 1-2 items per hour works pretty well. There are various tools that can do this part. Of course, I recommend you use EasyTweets.

Growing Followers

Once you get your account set up and are posting content regularly, you will want to focus on building your followers. Good content is the key to this, but there are other things you can do to help nudge things in the right direction.

One way to quickly get some followers and give your account some credibility is to follow a bunch of users that are known to auto follow you back – such as @guykawasaki, @barackobama, and @chrispirillo. (Google is your friend here.)

You can also @reply users that are engaged in a conversation that interests you, and try to get involved in the discussion. This works best when the user asks a question and is looking for an answer. If you are responding to a tweet that’s more than a few hours old, the person may not remember their original question – so link to their original tweet in your response.

Be careful not to overdo it, though. You want to engage people in conversations, but you don’t want to spam. There is a fine line here, and some users are much more sensitive to it than others. You can’t just write one canned response and send the same @reply to everyone. The responses need to be tailored to each conversation, and you should space them out over time in between other tweets. At a minimum you should have 5-10 different “canned responses” that you can rotate over time.

Also, make sure you are tweeting other things. Don’t just reply to 25 people in a row with a promotional message – users will look at your tweet timeline, and this sort of thing will get you blocked and/or get spam complaints, both of which could ultimately lead to your profile getting suspended. Instead, use a service that lets you schedule tweets (such as EasyTweets), so you can post your responses over time and in between your other tweet content.

Another thing you can do is follow users that are using your target keywords in their conversations. Ideally you should pick a handful of keywords that are relevant to your account, and auto follow some users that are using your target keywords. Many of them will not follow you back, but roughly 30-50% of them will if you are posting decent content that is of interest to them.

Ultimately you want to maintain a healthy ratio of following vs. followers – i.e. about the same number of followers as following, or more if possible. This is hard to do with new accounts, so you should limit the number of people you follow per day to 50 or less when you are first getting started. You want to ensure you don’t exceed Twitter’s follow limits. If you get too aggressive with following or un-following, or if your following is significantly higher than your followers, your account could get flagged by Twitter for “aggressive following.”

Profit!

There are three major ways to monetize a Twitter following:

1. send traffic to one of your sites, which you can then monetize directly (via product purchases, affiliate offers, adsense, etc.)

2. send traffic directly to an affiliate link

3. sponsorships and ad networks

Sending Traffic To Your Sites

If you have your own site that sells products or has affiliate offers, you can include links in your tweets (and your profile page) that send Twitter traffic directly to your site. You might annoy your followers if you keep posting the same link over and over, so try to post fresh content to your site. Twitter users tend to be more web-savvy than users that arrive via organic search, and are less likely to click on Adsense than other users. Use CrazyEgg’s Confetti View to see what Twitter users do on your site vs. other types of traffic.

Send Traffic To Affiliate Links

You can also just drop affiliate links in your tweets that redirect to promotional offers or sale pages. Special offers and discounts, especially time sensitive ones, tend to work well here. You want to add value to your followers by giving them the opportunity to save money or get a great deal on something. Don’t just post a link to buy blue widgets, give them the chance to “save 70% on blue widgets if you buy today”.

Tracking Twitter Traffic

One of the challenges with Twitter is tracking how many users actually visited your site and what they did when they got there. URL shorteners such as cli.gs can provide statistics on clickthrough rate etc. But to track their actual conversion rate on your site, you will want to use Google Analytics.

Google Analytics lets you append parameters to the end of your URL that identify the name of the campaign and where the traffic came from, such as UTM_SOURCE, UTM_CAMPAIGN, etc. You can read more about this in our recent blog post, or use Google’s URL Builder Tool. You can still shorten the URL even with the added parameters, making it very Twitter-friendly.

If you are promoting your blog on Twitter, EasyTweets can automatically add these Google Analytics parameters to RSS feed items for you.

Sponsorships and Ad Networks

If you have a network of multiple accounts with thousands of followers, you can also set up a direct advertising deal with sponsors that are interested in reaching your audience. But if you’re not yet big enough to do this, there are other ad networks that can help you monetize your Twitter profiles.

One ad network for Twitter that can do this for you is Magpie. Magpie will automatically posts tweets to your account at specified intervals (like 1 sponsored tweet for every 5 regular tweets, etc.). Magpie has several options you can choose from. Some pay commission (basically affiliate links), and others will pay you a small amount of money (about 50 cents) for each tweet you post. They also let you choose the ratio for the number of sponsored tweets vs. your normal tweets. This may not seem like much, but if you have multiple automated accounts it can add up. The available inventory of relevant tweets will vary depending your niche.

Another option is Twittad. Twittad matches up advertisers with Twitter profiles that have audiences they are interested in. Like Magpie, they will post a couple tweets to your account. They will also upload a background advertisement to your Twitter profile during each campaign. (You can see some sample background ads here.) In order to use Twittad you will need to add your Twitter account profile to categories in the Twellow directory.

You can also use Adjix to monetize tweets and links that you post. Basically when you shorten a link using their service, there is an option to place an ad frame at the top of the page. You get paid whenever someone clicks on that ad. Last month they launched Embed Ads, which will embed an ad at the end of your tweet (if there is enough extra space). Adjix lets advertisers set the price they are willing to pay per Twitter follower.

Conclusion

The real benefit of Twitter is connecting with people and providing value to them, so you need to make sure you connect as much as you can. Check your @replies and direct messages and respond as necessary. Do whatever you can to not appear automated or spammy. Remember, you are building a list – you want to get as many eyeballs on your tweets as possible. The bigger your list, the more you can monetize it.

Special Offer

EasyTweets is an all in one Twitter marketing tool that makes it easy to take control of Twitter. I’m confident that once you’ve tried EasyTweets, you’ll never use Twitter without it again.

Shoemoney readers can save up to $98 by trying one month of EasyTweets – any plan – for just $1. Hurry – we can’t offer a deal like this forever. Try EasyTweets now.

Note From ShoeMoney:I had someone contact me anonymously via the contact form telling me he was a former employee of Cash4gold.  If you are not familiar with Cash4gold its a new thing where you send your old gold to them and they send you cash back.

Anyway he contacted me after seeing a twit of mine about the cash4gold product.  I asked him to write something up and I would post it.  I found it pretty interesting what he said:

Well I am a former employee of Cash 4 Gold. I did not know much about the company before being hired. On my first day of being hired, I was taught the “Cash 4 Gold Scam” from beginning to end.
1. The “refiner’s pack” that is used for you to put your jewelry is “insured for UP TO 100 dollars, ” according to how much they feel your items are worth, NOT appraised at.
2. We receive your “Refiner’s Pack” within 3-4 days, but we are instructed to tell you that it takes “7-10 business days, for us to receive your pack, ALTHOUGH your package has already arrived.

3. Your jewlery gets appraised by hand/magnifying glasses/
a small weight pad, and a bottle of mystery fluid, which your items are then give a value for. Not million dollar equipment or specially trained jewelry experts.

4.  Although the payment (check) for your item is dated within 24 hrs of testing your jewelry, we sometimes DO NOT actually send out the check until up to 3-4 days later.

5.  We claim a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee or your jewelry returned, BUT THE CATCH IS, that the guarantee is contacting us within 10 DAYS from when your check is DATED. (This begins with the time it takes for the accounts payables dept. to issue the check and also including the transit time for you to receive your check in the mail. **** NOTATE THE COMMERCIALS THAT STATE U GET YOUR CHECK IN 24 HRS.***

6. IF you are lucky you will receive your check around the “7th-10th” bus iness day, AND more then 97% of the time Customers are outraged when they lay eyes on the amount of the check. Some Customer’s even receive a check for 0.01 cents. (TRUTH) Thats including items of great value (Diamonds, Platinum/ Gold and Sterling)

7. They sometimes even receive your valuables and like them so much THAT we CLAIM to not have received the items just so the “TOP” people or even “FAVORED” people can get first dibs on your items. From which point we issued an INSURANCE CLAIM for UP TO 100 dollars. GOD FORBID your items are worth more then a 100 dollars, and when you call in to check on the status of your items, we tell you ” YOU SHOULD”VE ADDED EXTRA INSURANCE ON YOUR ITEMS.” We do not have an actual Insurance company, they use customer service reps as the claim department agents.

8. For those who receive there check within the 10 day frame, GOOD LUCK with trying to get in touch with a cust. srvc. rep before your 10 days are up. Which after your 10 days, your items are “ALREADY MELTED” or NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR RETURN.”

9. For the “LUCKY” people who do get in touch with us within the alloted time frame, we already know what you are calling about. Customers want their items returned, because there check amount is so insultingly LOW. The first thing a Rep will ask you is “HOW MUCH WERE YOU EXPECTING TO GET BACK?” This way we can know how much to “BONUS” you.
Definition of a BONUS: We issue low checks just to have you call us back if you are smart enough to realized that you just got scammed. For the smart one’s we are paid to offer u a bonus up to 3x the original amount of your check and you accept. For ex: Sally Smith receives a check for $27.86 for a rolex watch(which we dont issue value for), a class ring, a ring with diamond chips, a pair of earrings with emeralds, as well as a few sterling silver pieces, and maybe a few items that were really of no value. Now Sally Smith calls the cust srvc dept, where she speaks to a rep who seems so concerned and will see if she can do better with the amount by speaking to a “SUPERVISOR”. We then place the caller on Mute, and speak to our neighbors or doodle on a sheet, or twiddle with our hair for about 45 seconds, while we are supposedly speaking to our supervisor about Ms. Smith’s complaint. We then come back with an offer to “BUMP UP YOUR MELT DATE or any other lies the cust srvc reps can think of, and offer you a total amount of $53.20 which is a little under double the amount of your original check. In which case if you accept, the cust srvc rep makes a 15.00 bonus off of your transaction. If the cust srvc rep offers you under triple the amount of your orig check, she makes 10.oo in bonuses.

10. If you accept the offer, the deal is done, and you are told that the call is recorded(which most of the time, the record button does not work.)Just a way to make your feel binded by a verbal contract. IF you do not accept the deal, you have to return your check, and it takes sometimes up to a month to receive your items back after we receive the check.

11. If you only want the items that we do not find of any value back, you have to pay a 10.00 shipping and handling fee to have your own items returned, which varies depending on sales for that week. IF sales are good, there is no fee, when we are slow, you must pay.
Cash 4 Gold is definitely not a trustworthy or credible company to do business with. You are almost better off taking your items to a local pawn shop or shopping around for other companies. With the economony the way it is, Cash 4 Gold seems to be a way out of financial stress for some, but in actuality becomes a stress of its own. I would advice you to think twice before sending in valuables or items inherited and of sentimental value. Its not worth it. I am not doing this as a way of Bashing their money making process but more so to warn everyone.

I guess this guy has posted this a few other places around the internet but I thought it was pretty good info that should be passed on.