Net Marketing Chaos

 The latest Net Effect magazine from Stompernet had an article about tracking the links you put out on Twitter and various other Marketing Consultants on the net, written by Paul Colligan. The service he recommends is BudURL. I signed up for it tonight and did a little testing, and it’s pretty sweet. It not only counts the clicks, it also gives you a live “clickstream” showing the clicks as they happen, where they came from and the IP address of the people clicking on it. There’s something addicting about being able to watch the clicks happen in realtime, and seeing where they come from. I posted a test link on Twitter and started getting clicks on it within 15 seconds. I’ve got a total of 12 clicks in about 15 minutes, which isn’t a huge number, but considering it’s 9:30pm here on the west coast, it’s not the ideal time to be putting out links. I was going to record a video showing how this works, but seeing as how Paul Colligan already made one I figured why reinvent the wheel?

Here’s Paul’s intro to the service: Tags: budurl, clickthrough, ctr, tracking, twitter Filed under Testing-Tracking by John Permalink Print Comment February 12, 2009 How To Get Nowhere Fast By Building A Big Following On Twitter Would you rather communicate with a list of 19,530 people who don’t know you, have no idea if you can be trusted, and are sorting through information from a bunch of other people at the same time OR a list of 200 people who know you, trust you and want to hear what you have to say? I hope you chose the second option. Your chances of connecting with your list are immensely greater if they know you, trust you and care about what you have to say to them. And that means your chances of actually selling them Marketing Consultants Birmingham – assuming that’s your ultimate goal – are much, much better. For the last couple of days, there has been this new “viral” Twitter tool making the rounds called Tweeter Getter. The idea is when you send out a Tweet to your followers promoting this tool, you’ll automatically be added to the followers list for the 6 people in front of you. This puts you on the list for any of your followers who also send out the Tweet, for any of their followers who do, and so one down to 6 levels deep. Whenever they send out the message, they get added to your followers list. In other words, a classic pyramid scheme. In theory, if 5 people on each level send out the message, you could add 19,530 followers to your account. Those are the numbers used on the website, which I’m not going to link to. If you really want to find it, Google it or use Twitter search.

But here’s how it breaks down: Level 1 (you) – 5 followers Level 2 – 5×5 = 25 followers Level 3 – 25×5 = 125 followers Level 4 – 125×5 = 625 followers Level 5 – 625×5 = 3125 followers Level 6 – 3125×5 = 15625 followers

Add them all up and you have 19,530 followers.

Let’s just assume for a minute that those numbers are actually realistic. And let’s assume that it takes you a month to reach that level. So 30 days from now, you’ve got almost 20,000 followers on your Twitter account. Now what? You might want to send out a promotion of some sort. You’ve got 20,000 eyeballs going to see it. Fantastic, right? Not really. Let’s examine why: Most of those people won’t even see your Tweet. They’re trying to follow so many people that they just can’t keep up with the huge stream of information coming from Twitter. If they’ve been trying for more than a few days, chances are good they’ve already quit trying to read it all. Even if they do see your message, they probably don’t know you, don’t know if you can be trusted or know what you’re talking about, and are highly unlikely to take action on your offer. But if you sent that same offer out to 200 people that you have been building a relationship with, that trust you and believe you know what you’re talking about, and have already taken the action of choosing to follow you, chances are most of them would read it and a certain percentage would take the action you want them to. It’s not about the size of your list, it’s about the quality. It’s unfortunate that whenever somebody builds a useful tool on the internet, people looking for ways to eliminate actual work come up with a way to take advantage of it. I expect this Tweeter Getter thing will burn out in a few weeks, maybe months, when all the people who use it to build a quick list of followers get disillusioned because they’re not suddenly making a bucketload of money from their “Twitter list”. Then the people who use Twitter properly can get back to building relationships through old-fashioned hard work. It might not be easy, fast or glamorous, but it works.

Occam’s Razor is a theory that basically states when faced with several choices, all things being equal, the simplest choice is usually the right one. In other words, rather than trying to overanalyze or overthink something, it’s usually best to choose the simplest of the options you’re faced with. This is something that is highly applicable in the internet marketing business. There are so many products out there claiming to show you the “best” way to make money that it’s easy to spend all your time reading, learning and analyzing what you want to do to make money. But never actually getting around to making any. But in most cases the simplest things are the ones that will make you money. And 99.9% of the time, the simplest thing is to just do something to do with business consultants birmingham. If you do something – even if it’s not done right – you’re infinitely closer to making money than if you just read, study and plan, but never implement. If you’ve been around internet marketing for any length of time, you’ve no doubt heard of Marlon Sanders. He’s one of the earliest “gurus” in this business, and has been doing it longer than most of the other big names you see these days. Most of those guys learned a lot of what they do from Marlon, in fact. Marlon has just released a new product called the Ockham’s Razor Income System, that claims to help you turn “ordinary” infoproducts into $150,000 cash cows. Note: If you’re wondering about the spelling of “Ockham” you’re not alone. I thought he’d messed it up too since I’ve always seen it spelled “Occam”. I was going to send him a smart-ass email, pointing out how all his marketing materials, his URL, the PDF and everything had this big glaring mistake. Until I looked it up on Wikipedia and saw that the original spelling is in fact Ockham. I guess Marlon did his homework after all… I don’t buy a lot of ebooks these days, but I was in the mood to read something new last night and this one came close enough to my “impulse buy” threshold of $50 (it was $55) to make me pick it up. I’ve read enough direct marketing books and ebooks that there tends to be a lot of repetitive stuff in them for me, but I usually pick up a few nuggets that make them worthwhile. I was pleasantly surprised by this Ockham’s Razor Income System. The first thing was that it was almost 300 pages. Enough that I debated on whether to print it out, something I normally do to make it easier to read comfortably. I’ve bought a few of Marlon’s products and expected there to be a lot of meat in there. He’s not one to waste time with a bunch of fluff that just serves as filler content. And he didn’t disappoint – I had already picked up several good ideas by the time I’d read through the first 25-30 pages. That’s not to say they were groundbreaking things I’d never heard before, just that the ideas were put together in a way that made a light go on for me about a couple of things. One of those things was the idea of self-liquidating leads. Marlon doesn’t call it that – he calls it “How to erase the cost of advertising so you can promote heavily” – but it’s the same thing. The basic idea is to offer something to subscribers immediately following an optin, in an effort to make some money from them to pay for the cost of getting them to your site in the first place. I’ve heard this idea many times before, but something about the way Marlon approached it just clicked for me. I’ve only had the product for a day, so I certainly can’t say whether or not Marlon’s result of creating a $150,000 cash cow is duplicatable, but I can vouch for the quality of the information in the book. If you’re selling your own infoproducts, whether original stuff, reseller rights or PLR products, Ockham’s Razor Income System will help you improve your sales funnel, without a doubt. I highly recommend picking up a copy, something I don’t do all that often. And if you want to see what other people think, check out the Ockham’s Razor post on Marlon’s blog. There are lots of comments on there, and one of the things that impresses me about Marlon is he responds to darn near every one of th