LinkMoney.org

Archive for the ‘social’ Category

In case you have just awaken from your Rip Van Winkle 20 year nap and have not heard of Twitter, you are missing out on one of the best social linking tools and traffic builders out there.

I have had a Twitter account for almost two years but until about two weeks ago I never tried to use it to its full advantage. When you sign up there are about 20 followers that you can get immediately just by clicking the accept button, and you can also let Twitter into your email address book to find others that are on Twitter, which I refuse to do, and then you start adding followers to your account by writing lots of good posts.

Hold on, you say. “Who will see my posts if I don’t have any followers?” Well you must eat your meat or you can’t have any pudding! Its the old chicken or the egg problem isn’t it?

Here is one way that I started to use recently to find birds of a feather.  At the bottom of the Twitter page is a “search” tab.  Use that to search for keywords that you want to use to find like minded Twitterers, Tweets, Tweeties, Twotes, Twats..  If you really want to zero in on some users that are “In the know,” use the hash tag symbol (otherwise known as the pound sign or “#”).  So lets say you want to find articles about “Make Money Online” or “MMO”.  The hash tag search would be #makemoneyonline or #mmo.  This will return all articles that use those specific hash tags.  These tweets will also be more apt to be from tweeters that are advanced and may have many followers themselves.

Then here is what I did to get followers.  When I find a tweet that I like, first I “follow” the writer, then I select, copy and paste the article into the “What are you doing” box and use the “retweet” feature with a reply notice to the writer.  To make a reply notification you include the @ sign in front of their name like @linkmoneydotorg.  Then you put the retweet symbol which is the two letters RT and then the copied message.  Now you have accomplished two things.  You have notified the writer that you are following him or her, and you also thought enough of one of their posts to retweet it.  Nothing gets attention better than retweets because that is what everyone is hoping for all the time and what helps to make certain messages go viral.  This person will no doubt follow you and they might even return the favor some time and retweet some of your posts.

Now here is an even better way to find high quality tweeters that are in your niche.  go to Alltop.com and select a category of interest.  Alltop calls themselves a magazine of the Internet but I look at them as one of the very best sources of Blogs that are in high standing.  Not everyone’s Blog is accepted into Alltop and if they are there then you have no fear of ever being scammed or spammed by any of them because Alltop actually vets every single applicant before they are approved.

Now for instance if you select Green, or mmo, or cars, or whatever, as your category of interest you will find dozens or hundreds or thousands of Blogs listed that are in your niche.  Click on some of them that interest you and read their Blog posts and if they are in your groove, then look for their Twitter name and go to Twitter and subscribe to their Twitter posts, then follow, then retweet, then rinse and repeat.

You will start building a very high quality list of followers that are in your niche.  By the way, take a look at the followers of your new found friends because they are probably interested in what you have to say also.

Don’t forget to add links to your own Blog posts or your website of interest or affiliate product landing page, or whatever you want to promote.  In the last two weeks I have added about 700 new followers using these methods and you can too.

You no doubt know the power of Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and several other Social Networking Websites online.

This writer has made many nice connections in the past year through the use of these social networking websites.  Probably my all time favorite is Twitter because it causes you to think and react in short bursts of creativity.  Sometimes just a simple little bit of humor, one liners, so to speak, are enough to bring people to your profile and then that creates traffic to your website.

When I write a post for one of my Blogs that I feel is worthy of some attention, I just post a tiny description of the post on Twitter with a link to the site and traffic builds.  The more traffic you get and if you have good content, the visitors will subscribe to either your email or rss feed and you have a potential customer.

Twitter is very easy to use, just get an account and start reading some of the tweets, and “Follow” some of the fellow posters that you are interested in and then maybe they will follow you back.  Soon you will have a hundred followers and then more keep coming.  Try to make your 140 character posts of interest or exciting and you will soon find many new friends.

I must admit that of all the social networking sites online I probably spend more time on Twitter then all the others put together.  I read in a recent report that Twitter’s subscriber rate more than doubled last year.  So if you are not a fellow tweet, then hurry on over and join the other rare birds.  They say that birds of a feather flock together.

You will want to get yourself a handle that is easily recognized and in some way will represent you at a glance.  Mine is linkmoneydotorg for obvious reasons, and my image is actually a favorite photo of my Dad when he finished digging the cellar for our house with a pick, a shovel and a wheelbarrow.  Dad would get a kick out of knowing that his picture is scattered all over the world.

If you have a website and you want to put a cute graphical link on it, then you can go to http://www.twitterbuttons.com/ and just put in your Twitter name and select from many of the nice designs available.

One really handy site that will help you keep up on the messages that your friends are posting as well as your @replies and direct messages is to use TweetDeck.  The normal Twitter page scrolls by quickly when you have many followers and people you are following.  TweetDeck handles this problem nicely.  http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

Our next post is going to tell you about a place where you can go and see a list of social networking sites and also see if your handle of choice is available on all of them at one time.

Twitter is one of the most popular of all of the social networking websites, but in the next few posts we will be explaining what some of the others are and give our opinion of what the benefits of each are.

Come follow me on Twitter @linkmoneydotorg and I will follow you back.

Please feel free to comment here on this Blog about this Twitter post.

Here is a new social networking site, Echodemic dot com, that allows you to cross-post your Blog articles and have them voted (echoed) on.

Echodemic dot com is in Beta and by the number of Blog posts it must have just started recently. It is sort of a DIGG like experience except that you post your whole article on their site and their readers and members get to read it and give it an “Echo” vote.

The articles that receive the most echoes move to the front page of Echodemic and you will get interested parties coming back to your website to see what else you have to offer.

This could be a great free traffic generator and will bring the type of visitor that is interested in what you have to say.

I just posted my first article and it does not have any echoes yet, but it should be fairly easy to move to the front page because it is so new that the highest echo count for most of the “best of” are only around seven (now 15) echoes or so.

I would really appreciate it if you readers of this Blog would go there and check it out. Click on the tab for “Most recent” posts and find mine that is titled “The Niche Doctor Cures WordPress Code,” and give it an “Echo.” I did alter the text a tiny bit from my Blog post of the same subject, but I don’t know if that is really necessary or not.

If you want to keep track of my posts, my user name is “linkmoneydotorg.”

Thanks much and you will no doubt want to register and become an Echodemic.com member also.

Everything is FREE of course.

I’m Rich !

ps:  This is an addition to this post.  I am asking three things of you readers.

1st – Please subscribe to this Blog with either the RSS or Email buttons.  (For six months I had them set up wrong and am just now rebuilding my subscriber base.)

2nd – Please give this post a thumbs up Stumble.  (I am not a big fan of StumbleUpon but did recieve a ton of new traffic from there today.)

3rd – Please visit Echodemic and give my post an echo (vote)  Only six more echoes needed to be in 1st place!  Thank you all so much.
http://www.echodemic.com/index.php?q=node/1357

I’m Rich !

First off, this is about me, but I do NOT do any of the aforementioned things.

However I made a major snafu recently, late at night, that has changed my latest plan to become the next Kevin Rose. Hmm, wonder if he ever did?

Any way here’s what happened. I had this idea of setting up a social circle, you know friends helping friends, wink, wink. Sort of a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Well this crashed into a not so happy ending, (pun intended.)

I was going to set up a site where registered mail list members could post their site or article url and then other members would hump it, oops, I mean help promote it with various social networking tools. I wanted a cool name, so during the night I got up thinking about it and said, something like “social.”… Easy to remember…. Hmmm…

Eureka! I got it. “sosso dot com”! It’s cute, rhymes sort of with social, easy to remember, and I could get it out as a Buzz word. You know what I mean?

Great! I had just read a Blog about how NAME dot com was the cheapest registrar and so I went there and bought it and a dozen other domains all in one day. Then I read another Blog about how great Hostgator was, and though I have sites on three other domain hosting companies already, I wanted to try out Hostgator.

So I said to myself, self, this is going to be HOT! He he he… Can’t afford a private server, not yet, so I purchased the high end shared account for 13 bucks a month, with the first month only costing a penny. Pretty good deal right?

So I set up sosso dot com as my primary account on Hostgator and then read the instructions on how to point the DNS on NAME dot com to my shiny new hard disks at Hostgator. Did that and saw the warning that this may take 24 to 48 hours to resolve. No problem. It isn’t like I don’t have anything to do in the meantime.

So I checked it the next day and the next day and it still had not resolved. What’s up with that? Forget it, I’m already into a dozen new projects, will fix it later. Well that was August 3, 4 & 5. Now this morning I said I’m going to find out what the Hell is wrong.

I checked sosso again and it was coming up on a GoDaddy parked domain website. Huh? This didn’t have anything to do with GD, or so I thought. I checked again with Hostgator tech support and they said it was NAME’s problem. Checked with NAME but had to wait two and a half hours because they don’t get out of bed until 9am mountain time, and they don’t offer 24/7 phone tech support.

Finally it turns out that I did not OWN sosso. I owned a domain named “sossol.” Naturally I got a little testy and said what do you mean, I registered sosso. So sorry, we only have sossol.

I finally figured out what happened. Remember when I said I did this during the night after I had woken up thinking about it? Take a look at where the “L” key is, right next to the “O” key. I did not purchase the right domain and it was ALL my fault! Turns out GD had registered that name years ago, and it was not even available.

So here’s my point boys and girls. Make absolutely SURE just what you are typing during domain registrations and hosting setups. If you screw up, it can’t be fixed. Now I just went through the procedure of taking sosso off my Hostgator account and setting up a different domain as my primary account. It is mostly done but has been a few hours and there is still a little more BS that I have to do to get the damned thing working.

So point number two is. I did this totally clean, honest! Other than being sleepy I should not have made such a stupid mistake. I wonder what people do that have a few beers before going through this procedure?

Oh well, I only lost about a half a month’s worth of my first penny right?

I’m Rich

(New info:  Here is a new website where you can purchase currently owned

domain names for sale.)

There, I’ve said it. No apologies.

A year ago you would not have been able to force any level of computer programming down my craw. That is actually still the case. I HATE programming!

I was a Blogger Blogging Blog aficionado. I owned a full featured authority website in a certain field that had been active for many years, that was built by a professional company using Joomla! I had a strong user base and still do. That site led me to wanting to be able to have a more casual connection with my fans and users, so therefore I Blogged using Google’s Blogger.

I never thought about actually being able to make money off this thing called the Internet. Man, what a mistake. I will tell you that I am not one of those Eureka Kids that made a gazillion dollars, er, not yet anyway, but there is a steady stream now that I never dreamed would happen in my life time. It can only get better.

So I forced myself to learn how to install WordPress, purchase domains and hosting and build websites. You will recall that I wrote about this previously in another post: Make Money Create Blogs for your Neighbors

Well this is an update. I have built way over a hundred websites and with each one there are new challenges and new things to learn and accomplish. It seems to me that Matt at automattic probably knew what he was doing when he unleashed this fabulous free software to the world, but I could not see it at the time. Now I get it.

The old way of creating a website page by page in an editor, then uploading and debugging it are over. This Content Management System (CMS) that is open source, (as in Free,) is something that almost anyone that can dial a telephone is able to learn a little at a time. This is causing a world changing event that is progressing even as you read this.

I still figure that it takes about 40 hours to bring a site to it’s full value with all the little features and goodies that you would want, but it actually only takes a couple of hours to install the rough content of a website that even if someone were to fall off a barstool and come up on this domain by accident, it would still look like a real web site.

I have set up sites now in fields that I know almost nothing about, but they can be populated by the new owners in just a matter of minutes, well OK hours. I have built sites in cars, sports, health, history, medicine, saw mills, machine tools, hunting, camping, scouting, sales, bargains, credit, wine, geo based (like city names,) travel, dogs, weddings, antiques, art work, collecting… Get the picture?

You can do this too. Make a few bucks setting up sites for your friends, families, neighbors, and local businesses. You can do it!

First and foremost, in my opinion, is get yourself comfortable with using an ftp program. I held out on that one, and realize that was my weak point. I had played around a little with file transfer protocol in the late 1980′s. That is when I grew to hate programming. Well the ftp programs of today are not your typical father’s ftp program. There’s dozens of them and I’m not going to try to influence you with one over the other. They all do the same thing. Join a forum. Google the Hell out of any questions you might have. The ftp program will be your new best friend.

If you are just starting, pick a domain registering hosting company, (not GoDaddy,) buy one of their cheap programs, and get started. Sure the cheap ones will have you parked on a Tinker Toy server, but you get what you pay for. You can always upgrade, which you will soon do.

I now pay for hosting with three companies, two average ones with average services and bandwidth, and one super duper one that costs more that I ever thought I would pay anyone for anything, almost. But the Damn thing works and never is down. I recently struck gold with setting up a news story related website that I was able to get in on the first floor with. As an early adopter with a keyword rich url and dozens of posts, I am on the first page of you know who in just one week. I haven’t started to monetize this site yet, but I will after a while. With any luck you will be reading future posts, say in a year or so, from the South Sea Island pictured above.

Most of all, read good Blogs in the mmo field to get the impetus to get off your butt and get going. Join some forums, take some online courses, and learn from those that have been successful. I have been doing all of the above for only eight months. Now I are not quite an expurt, but I’m gaining on it.

Here is my recommendation for one of the very best programs on the Internet, and I am not even going to use my affiliate link, I believe in this man and what he does so much that I want you all to join. Like TODAY!

Yaro Starak! What a great name! This guy is unforgettable by having a name that is so like poetry that it will make you want to change your name. But that is not the reason to remember him best by. You absolutely MUST join his Blog Mastermind program! He just started one up again a few sessions ago. You will not have missed anything because all of his mentoring sessions are recorded and downloadable to the students.

You will be tied in to a Blog Mastermind forum, where you can post questions and get real excellent answers from those that know their stuff. You will be tied into a major group with a well known company, that will give you a way to help other students with social networking and to receive the same in return. That in itself is almost worth the price of admission. You want traffic? You can’t handle traffic…! (Oh no, that was from an old movie, I think.)

How’s that for a rant?

It all starts by learning WordPress. It’s not just for Bloggers you know.

I’m Rich!

(Oh by the way, in case you were wondering, you have my permission to give this post a little Link Luv by using your social networking tool listed below.)