Archive for June, 2009

First of all I am not promoting any automated giddy gadget and this will not cost you one red cent.  This post is straight up as to how I added 5,000 plus followers on Twitter in two months.

I wrote a post last month about how I had started to build my Twitter followers list from a paltry 200 to 300 followers using @ALLTOP for locating quality tweeple to follow.  You can read the previous post here:
How to Get Targeted Quality Followers on Twitter

Well I still do that because ALLTOP.com is a directory of high quality websites in all fields of interest and once your site is accepted into their directory they grab your RSS feed and keep updating every time you post.  They do not accept everyone but if you want good ranking and to see your site improving with more subscribers you should submit to ALLTOP if you think you have what it takes.  They are looking for a few good Blogs.  Because an actual human being goes out and verifies each website for content quality you can be assured that these sites are the best in their field.  So find their Twitter name, follow them, retweet some of their posts and then most important, follow their followers.

So lately I am using another well known resource to find things to tweet about.  I use StumbleUpon regularly to find things that interest me and then I copy the title of an article from the Stumbled website and paste it into the Twitter message box, go back and make a tinyURL from the address line and copy that in to Twitter and there you have it.  You have just tweeted something of interest to your followers and very often many of them will retweet that post to their followers and suddenly you will have new tweeple following you.  Not to mention that you often get a thank you from the original article poster when they get a message that you tweeted about them.

Now how to break through some of the Twitter built in stumbling blocks.  Twitter likes to see your twitter messages as being of value.  Following the above they will be.  Then they do not want to see automated programs trying to game the system, though many of these do work you stand the chance of doing one wrong move and suddenly you will be banned.  Not worth the chance to me, so I use manual tried and true methods.

I usually follow anywhere from 50 to 200 new tweeps a day, selected with care from other followers lists.  If they are using the default image I usually do not follow them, not that I am elite or anything it is just that they are not likely to be a sophisticated Twitter user yet.  If they do not bother to upload an image than I usually pass them by unless I know them.

By selecting your followers manually you can avoid “some” of the spammers and porn idiots.  If you use an automated follower tool they will be in your list and then your followers might be apt to place you in the ranks of the crappy tweeples and you do not want that.

When you get up near 2,000 followers you want to go in and drop your list of people that you are following down below your followers count.  That way Twitter will not hold you back from going beyond 2,000.

Once you have over 2,000 and less than 4,000 followers you will do best to keep the ratio of following to followers to about + 10% or less.  Then once you are over 4,000 it seems as though Twitter will let you follow as many as you want every day, but I still keep to my 50 to 200 and my list just keep growing and growing.  I am now over 5,500 and many of them come in organically on their own.

Please Stumble this post:

Oh and with the StumbleUpon trick your followers will think you are a genius.  So go for it.

I’m Rich

Blogging Make Money using Cybers eBay Plugin for WordPress.  Cybercoder who we discussed at length in a previous post makes a lot of money using automated eBay affiliate offers on some of his niche blogs.  He created this out of raw PHP code for himself and then recently released the code in the form of a plugin that you can download and get started right away making money with eBay.

You do not have a dog in the fight so to speak because the plugin just goes out to eBay and finds appropriate offers to match your keywords and you receive instant PayPal income when the reader makes the purchase.  No pain, no strain, no shipping, no handling, no work at all on your part.  How sweet is that?

Here is a screenshot image of how the Blog post would look:

It really is pretty cool and is absolutely a perfect money maker for all you niche marketers.

It is available at the very low price of only $17.00 which will be a mere pittance compared to the income it can make for you.

Just go ahead and click the “Buy Now” button and you will be up and running in a few minutes.

When I was a kid I grew up in dairy farming country.  The people that owned and operated these family businesses were the true salt of the earth in my opinion.  There are not many businesses where you get to work 7 days a week, 365 days a year with backbreaking labor, toil and sweat just for the opportunity to have some bulk milk buyer pay you what ever he wants at a rate that he sets according to the butter fat content of your milk delivery for the day.

Image courtesy flickr CC

At age 13 I worked on one local farm, boarded out as they say, for one summer season and decided I would have a career in electronics.  One thing that I remember vividly was when a man in a suit and hat stopped at the farm one day, suits and hats were a rarity around those parts, and he made a deal with the farmer to paint a huge advertising sign for his clothing company in the nearby city on the end of the barn.  My farmer boss was very excited to gain $20.00 per year in payment and he chuckled to think that from now on he would never have to paint that end of the barn.

Well that was a paid ad wasn’t it?  There were also little Burma Shave advertising signs along the road that you could read one sign after the other as you were moving and they were cute little rhymes which ended with the Burma Shave sign.  You might also remember seeing handbills or posters plastered all over blank wall spaces around construction projects.  Well those were free ads weren’t they?  You might have seen a sign that said “Post No Bills !”  Well what that meant was the property owner was sick and tired of offering his real estate to non-paying handbill advertisers.

Image courtesy flickr CC

So I am sort of wondering if we in the Internet Marketing business can gain anything from these older but similar situations.  You as a publisher own real estate.  Your real estate consists of from say 200 to 300 square inches of space on a video terminal.  You generally have some appropriate graphics and images that fit the theme of your website design, and then you have a body area where you write articles and include images or graphs and such.  Then on one or two sidebars you have some column advertisements that you provide “Free” real estate for, as in no cost to the advertiser, and the only way you can make any money is if someone clicks on that banner and then makes a purchase, and then trusting upon the integrity of the affiliate advertising manager, and sometimes I wonder, you will be paid a paltry sum of a commission for the transaction.

Well I do this on over a hundred websites, but I am not happy with it.  We are giving up space on our sites to increase the brand awareness of the advertiser even if no one buys, don’t we?  A better method would be to charge a minimal insertion fee that could be equated to a value compiled from say your traffic metrics or number of average views per month.  Would the advertisers be apt to go along with this?  Not a chance!  Not a chance that is unless we could all join in and start demanding at least some type of compensation for furthering the advertisers brand awareness.  It is only fair even though I doubt will ever happen.

Image courtesy flickr CC

So if you are torqued off about this you might want to consider inserting ads for your own products and kick the cheapskate squatters off your property.  Evict them for non-payment of rent.  Come up with an eBook,or sell crafts you make, or the Brooklyn Bridge, something, anything at all that you can call your own and that you will make 100% of the profit on.  Maybe if enough publishers started doing this to enough of the freeloading advertisers they might get the message.  What say you?

CSS Text Size is set in your WordPress theme to whatever size and type style the theme designer decided to use.  In most cases the only thing that you can do to call attention to a specific word or sentence is to highlight the word/s and use either “bold” or “italic” from the toolbar.  In your Blogging Make Money effort there will be times that you will want to use these instructions.

Have you ever wondered how to mix various sizes within the same post? Well I have and have also searched a few times on Google for how to do this but never came across the right answer, or rather never found one that I could understand.

So this morning I was on a Skype chat with my friend, and PHP / WordPress guru, @Cybecoder otherwise known in the world as David Cooley.  I posed this question to him and got simple one or two word answers, he likes to kid around, and then I realized he really was telling me how, but he wanted me to discover it for myself.

Dashboard View

At first I was not asking the question properly and he was instructing me how to go into the CSS and change things like:   font-family:Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; but then I explained that no, I meant how to “mix” font sizes, now that’s a different story.

So the words went from something like this; “CSS,” “visual editor,” “pick them,” … yeah, then what? “Highlight text,” “use toolbar,”  “format”…  Crap, I still didn’t get it.  So after clicking everything I could find on the toolbar it suddenly dawned on me that if you click on the kitchen sink, farthest icon to the right, a drop down box shows up that you can select the font size in by selecting from the examples shown, such as Heading 1 through Heading 6.

So in the two pictures you will see how easy it is to change or mix the “CSS Text Size” in a WordPress Post.
1 – visual editor
2 – toolbar – kitchen sink
3 – highlight text
4 – dropdown box, select Header size.

Final Published View

So after finally learning this I figured I would share it because I doubt that I am the only non-programmer programmer that has to be forced into learning all this goofy junk just to get their words across to their readers.  If you have read other articles on this Linkmoney.org Blog you will realize that I am “NOT” a programmer.  I hate programming!  But I must admit it is kinda fun when you do learn some new little tricks like this one.

Now if any of you readers need help with your WordPress Blog or theme just ask David.  You can follow him on Twitter @cybercoder or go to his website at www.cybercoded.net/ , where his byline is “Helping others with their WordPress, PHP and Online Presence.” Cybercoder is the best and if he only works on your problem for five or ten minutes that is all he charges you for.

Let’s hear from you readers.  Does Blogging Make Money for you?  If it does you will need to know some of these little tweaks along the way to make your point.  Do you have anything that you can add to this subject?  Even if you just want to tell me how much of a programming idiot I am that’s OK too.  Please leave your comments and suggestions.

After all we only can learn from people like you that know how.

I’m Rich

You ask, How can Blogging Make Money?

It’s a lot easier than you might think.

In these uncertain times, people who blog professionally
are more certain of their security than people who work
for someone else.

You can make part-time or full-time income from blogging!

(Even if you don’t know the first thing about it)

Learn how to set yourself up to earn a great living as a
popular blogger on the following page:

Click here for Blog Success

You have my word that this works!
Rich Hill – Linkmoney.org

P.S. – One of the bloggers you will be learning about makes
over $40,000.00 per year blogging about her daily life and
family!

Don’t miss out on your Blog Success