Why WickedFire is a Great Forum to Learn Online Business and Marketing

Look, if you’re interested in joining a forum where everyone is polite but nobody is making serious money, try WarriorForum or DigitalPoint. Those two, for example, have very strict etiquette rules but only one “minor” problem. Simply put, lots of WarriorForum and DigitalPoint members talk the talk but few of them walk the walk.

Do you know why most people are extremely polite over there? The answer is almost obvious: it’s because a lot of them are trying to sell you something. Maybe an e-book, maybe a coaching problem, maybe some other semi-useless product.

WickedFire is different. Nobody’s there to sell you anything. Well, almost nobody and those who are just trying to sell you on something you don’t need, usually get “loved tenderly” (a commonly used WickedFire term, just like “making monies”, that represents anything but the pleasant idea the phrase conveys) by the community. This forum is what it is and there’s no other community out there that’s even remotely similar. Let’s try to look beneath the surface and determine what exactly makes WickedFire so special. [Read more]

Would You Pay to Read Someone’s Tweets?

Would you pay to read someone’s tweets? For some time now, enterprising individuals have been trying to find the holy grail of Twitter monetization. Some have been blatantly spamming advertisements through @replies. Some have indirectly monetized their Twitter accounts by using it as a viral marketing tool. Still, others have created Twitter clients that are funded by advertisements.

Will you dare to venture into Twitter monetization by limiting your audience to paying subscribers? This is what TwitPub aims to do. It’s supposed to be a

marketplace made for Twitter so users can buy and sell premium tweets.

Is this a viable business model? It could be, if you are in the business of dispensing important, expensive advice.

While TwitPub’s activity may not be all that impressive, their service may have potential within the political and financial realms (as people would pay to access gossip and financial advice, especially in this economy).

I come from a school of thought that says the moment you set a price to your content, you would have already devalued it. For one, you are limiting your audience severely. Secondly, you won’t have as much interactivity and viral marketing potential if your content is closed. Of course, this may not necessarily be true in all cases, but unless you’re really famous and powerful, I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in paying to read your tweets. And if you’re already famous and powerful, you probably don’t need anyone paying a few bucks to read your tweets or to send you direct messages.

Would you pay to read someone’s tweets? And would you pay to get your direct message sent into someone’s inbox?

How to Find People to Follow on Twitter

We’ve all heard of how awesome Twitter is for social media marketing, but you may not know how to get started. One of the most important and basic things for Twitter marketing is finding people to follow.

Here are a couple ways to do that, so you can start networking with active people in your industry.

1. Search Twellow.

With the popularity of Twitter, Twitter profile directories have started popping up. Twellow is my favorite one. It’s pretty easy to use. Just enter the name of your niche in the search box and you’ll get a list of profiles that are interested in your niche. The profiles will be ordered by followers so you can easily follow the most popular ones.

2. Search Twitter itself.

You can use Twitter’s search function to see which people are currently talking about your industry. Simply search for the name of your industry or other related keywords. Then, check out the profiles and see how often they actually tweet about your niche. The ones that are big fans of your industry are great candidates to follow.

3. Check out bloggers.

Check the active blogs in your niche to see if they have a Twitter feed or a link to a Twitter account. Many bloggers have become active on Twitter, so this method is an easy way to find people to follow.

4. Find out who other people follow.

Once you’ve found some quality Twitter profiles, browse through their friends and see who they follow. I’ve found great people through this technique. Oftentimes, there are quality Twitterers that are under the radar because they don’t follow a lot of people. However, you can find out about them with this technique since many people usually follow them.

If someone follows a lot of people and you don’t want to wade through all their friends, you can ask them for the top 10 people they like to follow.

Over to You

How have you found people to follow on Twitter?

This is a guest post from TwitQA.com, a twitter tool where you can ask and answer questions.

Getting Links to your Blog

Is your blog not experiencing the volume of traffic that you would like to see? One of the major flaws that many blog owners do not consider is the importance of links and linking. Links are to a blog, what highways are to the automotive world. Without highways, information, people, and goods cannot reach their destination. The same is true when talking about links. You can post the most credible or well written blog on the internet, but without proper linking from your post, or to it, the information you have provided is simply that: yours.

Links take readers of other blogs and different miscellaneous websites to areas of the internet that they normally would never have gone. Your blog might just be one of the areas that are outside of their comfort zone. These internet users are crucial to your blog’s survival. One of the most important reasons why it is essential to build a large linking network to your blog is how much higher you rank in search engines.

One of the methods that search engines like Google and Yahoo! use to rank their pages is how many other websites link to it. For example, a site that has fifty sites linking to it is more likely to be higher on a search engine list than a website that has ten. Keep in mind that this is not always the case, but this is definitely a good rule of thumb.

Another element that is crucial to the growth of your blog is the quality of the links that you provide. While gaining reputation through other websites, you have to ask yourself if the websites that are linking to you are doing you any good. If your blog is on the best Super Nintendo games of all time and you are getting links from sites that focus on the poverty of developing nations, then search engines are not going to take your blog seriously. If, however, you can find a way to talk to Nintendo itself and convince them to link to your blog, then your credibility and influence is going to be greatly affected in a positive way. It takes a combination of quality and quantity for your blog to gain strength on multiple search engines.

Again, it is the goal of a successful website or blog to be first on a search engine’s results, or at least on the first page. While this process may take a while, if you produce quality content, then you can be sure that you will succeed.

The most important part about linking is actually convincing someone to link to you. There are two methods that almost all blog owners use, due to their ease and effectiveness. One method is to actually write on someone else’s blog; a quick article is usually sufficient. This is a quick and easy way to simply show the bloggers on that site that you exist, and as long as you produce great content, then many of them will stop at your blog regularly. The more direct route that many blog owners use is to just simply ask another website’s owner if he/she would be willing to link to you. Sometimes this method works beautifully.

Sometimes the person you asked may want to barter with you, such as an exchange of links. Just remember, the worst thing that can happen to you if you ask someone is that they will just say no. Simply thank them for their time and move on.

Eventually, your blog will begin to contain multiple links to and from many websites. Keep in mind that linking is equally affected by the quality and quantity of your linking potential.

How much traffic is Bing sending to your blog?

I thought it would be interesting, a couple of weeks in, to see how much traffic Microsoft’s new Bing search engine was sending to a range of blogs I have stats access to.

While it’s very early days and the sample size I have access to is fairly limited compared to the web statistics collection companies, it does suggest that Microsoft has a long way to go to begin challenging Yahoo, let alone Google.

Bing’s highest share was on my personal blog, which covers a range of topics including technology and current affairs. Even there it mustered just 2.35%, putting it in second place behind Google’s massive 93% lead. It seems to have taken some market share from Yahoo and AOL.

On a site about families and relationships, Bing accrued 0.5% of the share in the past two weeks. Here it possibly took a little share from Google, though the giant still had over 90%.

On a large general consumer technology site, Bing managed 0.67%, putting it in fourth place, though it took no share from Google or Yahoo.

Bing did less well, accruing just 0.46%, on an iPhone-related blog, while on a blog about high definition TVs it scraped 0.69%.

Hardly anything to write home about.

iTWire reports that StatCounter search engine market share data also showed Bing got just a fraction of a percentage point.

It’s hard to get an idea of the keywords and phrases someone uses to find each site differs between Google and Bing because Bing’s sample size is so small. The fact is, with such a huge market share and history of crawl, the list of keywords from Google is huge and far more varied.

When it comes to how many pages have been indexed and listed (using the “site:” modifier, which isn’t perfect), Google often seems to return more results than Bing, though some larger sites have more returns from Microsoft’s engine.

It’s unfair to draw conclusions just a fortnight after Bing launched. At one level, I’d like to see Google’s dominance challenged just a bit by some other players, as it reduces our reliance on one company to send visitors to our sites. At the moment, though, Microsoft is playing catchup with everyone else.

Have you noticed any significant influx of visitors from Bing or is Google still your main search engine traffic driver?

Do You Tweet to Read or Do You Tweet to Write?

I’ve observed several celebrity Twitter users to have a friend/follower ratio that is heavily skewed toward the follower side. This means they have a huge following, but follow only a very few people. While most do reply to tweets related to them or directly sent to them as @replies, a lot are probably just using Twitter to post updates about themselves (which is understandable, especially for folks with a very public life). Some others are most likely marketers. They don’t engage in conversation much, but they do post a lot of quotes, retweets and links.

On the other hand, some Twitter users I know are more of readers rather than writers. They seem to have a lot of followed folks, but only a few followers. And they mostly engage in conversation when the topic interests them.

I’m part of the second group. I must admit I’m not too fond of tweeting out of the blue, about what I ate for breakfast, musing about the weather, or complaining about the chores I’m currently doing. I mostly scan and read updates from my Twitter friends–mostly on my mobile phone using Gravity–and reply to or retweet interesting messages. I also try to get ideas for blog posts or articles from my friends’ feed or from searches relevant to my interests. For me, Twitter is not a platform for simply shouting out my ideas, but rather a community with a rich cloud of information ready to be harvested and processed.

What about you? Do you tweet to read? Or do tweet to write?

How Long Should a Twitter @reply Take?

If you were to reply to an email message, it’s generally acceptable practice to respond at your convenience, as you are able, or at the very least during the same business day. Email is not instant messaging after all. It’s like an exchange of letters. You send a message and you expect your correspondent to write you an answer in a similar fashion. Maybe the recipient needs to better digest the contents of your email. Maybe he’s researching and studying how to best respond.

Instant messaging, on the other hand, is different. It’s like a phone call–you expect the person you’re chatting with to answer as soon as you hit the “send” button. If we further compare to other modes of online communication, blogs handle it differently, because you write a message meant to be read, but you don’t exactly expect the reader to respond.

In a way, Twitter features these different characteristics from email, IM and blogging–of course, in 140 characters or less. You can write a tweet meant for consumption by the general public. You can write a direct message or a @reply directed at someone. And you can even have these exchanges of @replies on an instant basis, like being in a public chatroom where people can listen in.

Just this evening, after reviewing the day’s tweets by my contacts, I sent replies to a few. When I looked at the timestamps of the original messages, most were posted about 30 minutes to about an hour prior. But one of the tweets I replied to was already six hours old. In that case, was my @reply already too late? Was the original tweet stale already? What was the point of replying to an old tweet when twitter posts were supposed to be about “what [you are] doing right now?”

It’s like your neighbor asking you about the weather in the morning, and you get back to him later that evening that it’s a lovely moonlit evening, without a cloud in the sky. Where’d the rest of the day go?

In a way, Tweets are like blog posts, as they have time stamps and permalinks. And they’re sticky. Once you post a tweet, it’s public record and is searchable (unless you delete it), and so users looking for relevant material on the search engines or even Twitter’s own #search feature can chance upon your tweet, no matter how old it is. And whenever someone posts a reply, Twitter does have a record of which particular post that @reply was directed towards, and even links to the original tweet in the “this post was in reply to …”

Still, not all Twitter clients cite the tweet being referenced. And so sometimes the context is lost.

How long after a tweet should you reply? In the Twitterverse, what is considered fresh? How old is considered old?

I think for me, it’s reasonable to publicly reply to a tweet that’s at most one hour old. Otherwise, I insert a few keywords from the original tweet just to make sure the recipient and everyone else listening in would not be lost.

Yahoo! 360 Closing Shop. How Confident Are You With Your Blogging Service Provider?

Yahoo! has announced that its 360! service will be shutting down by July 12, 2009.

Though 360 gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo! 360 and transition users to profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo! 360 users until we officially shut down 360.

This might not exactly be big news to most of the world, but for regions where 360 is the preferred blogging and social networking application of choice, like in Vietnam, this could be cause for concern and headache. Yahoo! will provide a way to migrate blog content to a Yahoo! profile. But of course, it’s not the same thing. The functionality will likely be different. Also, if your blog has already been optimized on the search engines and saved on peoples’ bookmarks and RSS readers, you will definitely lose readership.

This makes me wonder: how sure are you with your service providers like blogging applications, lifestreaming services, and the like? Many of us rely on WordPress.com, Twitter.com and other free or paid hosted services to run our blogs, save our thoughts, and practically store our memories. Maybe the bigger, more popular companies don’t run the risk of folding up. But the smaller, niche service providers might be riskier. Does this mean everyone should just go with one service like everyone else? Or maybe it’s best to run a self-hosted blog.

Yahoo! 360 will not be missed, except perhaps in Vietnam. Maybe this is one big reason Yahoo! has decided (since 2007) to end support and ultimately pull the plug. It’s probably not cost-effective to maintain a big service when it’s only patronized in one niche or regional market. But then again, Yahoo! could have probably just focused its resources on that particular market, just like how other services like Friendster are doing. The only consolation of big users, at least, is that content can be migrated into a Yahoo! account, and this should likely be hassle-free.

Are your web apps future-proof? Or is there no such thing?

Via Blog Herald and @yahoo.

Ubiquity on the Internet

There’s a saying that you only exist if you can be found on the first or even second page of Google. I want to go as far as saying that on the Internet, your brand (meaning the product you market, or even something as personal as your blog) should be ubiquitous. In trying to explain to a friend who does marketing his company, I tried removing him from the paradigm that “we want people to come to our site and maybe use online ads as a drive to site effort.”

Sure, that may be a sound strategy … 5 years ago. The age of social media has allowed brands to be as ubiquitous as the bloggers who advocate them. So yeah, a good old corporate site won’t hurt, but why aren’t brand managers using services like Twitter, Plurk, Flickr, Facebook to full advantage? As a marketer, one good piece of advice to remember is that these tools — social media, web 2.0 or what have you, should be used as landing pages for your main site. Develop these tools well, and you will see your main site grow. I find it funny that advertisers still don’t make best use of these FREE tools and decide instead to spend ad dollars. I’m not saying these guys shouldn’t be advertising — I’m just saying that they aren’t being ubiquitous.

What Lies Beneath Social Media?

As a Performancing reader, you probably blog. You probably have social networking profiles, too, with several friends and groups. Most likely, you are on Twitter, and you exchange short messages with friends and contacts. What are these web apps anyway? They’re social media, right? But what’s underneath social media?

I’d say we have social networks as the foundation of social media. By a social “network” I don’t mean Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace. Those are actually just the mediums that facilitate social networking. Social networks are actual people who know each other, and who talk to each other. In the olden days, people networked by writing letters, posting on bulletin boards, and calling on the telephone. People even met face to face (imagine that!). Later on, we had online services, email, IRC, forums, and the like. Of course, email is a staple, and has become a de facto standard in communicating online.

This is a realization I just had quite recently. Maybe as someone whose job involves social media, I get engrossed in using these online applications everyday that I don’t realize the foundations that are more important. I only see skin-deep. I usually become so focused on using the application rather than connecting with the other people who use the app. I’m no longer socially networking. But I’m just using the social networking app.

This is important, as I’ve also looked into social media apps I’ve used before, but have changed and evolved through the years. Take for instance ICQ. It was the first ever IM client and network I used, back in the ’90s. Now it’s evolved into some sort of social networking, blogging and online dating site. This makes me wonder what of Twitter? What of WordPress? What Facebook and MySpace? Five years down the road, we would probably see a different social media landscape.

But still the social networks would remain the same. People you know would still be people you know. Friends should still be friends (unless, of course, they are only friends by convenience, meaning you are friends because of shared social media apps). By then, perhaps the most basic social mediums would be those that survive the test of time. Like the good old telephone call. Or postcards. Or email.

And maybe one day, we would all get to meet face to face. How’s that for social media?