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Starting next Friday, I will be giving out and going over a new online business ideas for you to utilize as you see fit.  Their is nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay, nothing being asked in return for the exception of telling your family and friends to take a look at this site.  Most of the business ideas can be started from your own home while you are working at your day to day job.  With these business ideas, their is no guarantee to becoming rich overnight.  These are businesses you can start in your spare time and make them grow into something much larger.

I will cover the basic concept behind each business idea as well as an execution plan to get it off of the ground for you.  As stated before their is no guarantee that they will be a success, if every business idea was a success then everyone would be successful in life.  With reward, their are always risk’s being taken in the business world.  Many people fail several times before they succeed with an idea and they grow from those failures over time.  I am a firm believer in the belief that if you never fail, you will never succeed.

These business ideas will be built around the concept of websites that you can start yourself, or with some money upfront if you do not know how to design a site yourself.  I will even be laying out a marketing plan of attack for some of these business ideas I have.  Some might be asking, why would I give away these ideas?  The answer is simple, I want to help others succeed in growing an online business to help support those people financially who take this opportunity.

Some people just need a little light shed on a business idea to get them on the right path.  Other’s are simply afraid to try and do not feel they have the time.  I will do my best in laying these ideas out in a simple and understandable way for everyone to execute on their own time.  I hope to see success stories from readers of this site who took an idea I gave out and turned it into their full time business.  In the end that is what I am looking for, to see people succeed in something they otherwise would never have tried without a little push in the right direction.

Take the time to sign up with my RSS feed or follow me on twitter (@imaccess) to get the latest updates every Friday for these free business ideas.

You have read countless stories online how the latest internet marketer has become rich off of selling his ebook. So you go out and create your own ebook, thinking it will be the next big thing. They either create a small website in an attempt to promote the ebook, or they try and sell it on their blog that receives little traffic. Getting discouraged, they give up the idea of that ebook making them any money online and wonder what other people are doing to sell their ebooks.

Like I have said before in the past, it is all about the internet hustle and making it work for you. Unless you have a subscriber list of thousands of people all ready to buy your latest and greatest product, you are going to have to work to get your ebook sold. Let me run you through some things you can do that will help you in your efforts.

1. Word Of Mouth Marketing

Using places like facebook, twitter or even myspace is a great way for word of mouth marketing to take over for you. Interact with people, respond to their questions and build a relationship with them. This will not happen overnight, but in the long run you will be glad you did this. When it comes time to release your next great idea, you will already have a good list of friends to easily advertise it to with a few keystrokes and a click of the mouse button.

2. Give The Ebook Away For A Free Review

Contact other bloggers and see if they would be interested in reading over your ebook and offering a free review of the product. Many people would gladly do a free review since you are giving them the ebook to begin with. Use their reader base to help promote your ebook, it only thing you are doing is contacting these blog owners via email, instant message or even twitter. I would not contact any of the bigger bloggers unless you already are on speaking terms with them. They do not like to be bothered with emails pitching a product to them as they get so many each week. They will do nothing but delete that email and move on to the next in line.

3. Paid Review Of Your Ebook

If offering a free copy of your ebook for a review does not work, you can always purchase a review from sites. Some SEO’s will argue that this is link buying and will suggest in not doing this. Buying links is against Google’s rules, however with a paid review you can always have the link go to a separate site if you are worried about it. If you do not care, then simply have the review link right to your landing page or purchase page. If the ebook has good information and not just full of fluff, you can see a good increase in sales from larger sites who offer paid reviews.

4. Create And Utilize A Good Landing Page

This landing page can be used in conjunction with several of the tips throughout this article. You want the landing page for your ebook to look professional and not give away to much information to the viewer. Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating a landing page for your ebook.

• Create an attractive header with the product name and even a catch phrase if you have one for the ebook.
• Have your call to action above the fold, this will allow the viewer to see what they need to do next to buy your ebook or view any free chapters.
• Show the cover on your ebook above the fold, this will allow the viewer to see what it is they are purchasing.
• Be descriptive in the first paragraph, but do not make it sound like a sales pitch.
• Use bullet points to show the reader what your ebook has to offer and why they should buy it.
• Try and get testimonials from people who have reviewed your ebook, if you do not have any, make sure to get them and add them as soon as possible. You need to establish trust with your landing page, solid testimonials only help build that trust with the viewer.
• Refund and Privacy Policy information should be shown to the viewer, they want reassurance that you are not going to just steal their money or information.
• Make sure that not matter where they are on your landing page, the option to buy the product is one click away.

5. Create Teaser Chapters

Take pieces from your ebook and offer them to be read right on your site, this is just like giving someone a piece of candy with the hopes they can buy the whole bag from you. After the teaser excerpts, give the viewer the option to buy your ebook to read it in full. You can include one teaser on your landing page, or several teasers from multiple chapters if you have a multi page website.

6. Forum Marketing

Join forums that are related to what your ebook is about, add that link in your signature if the forum allows it. Interact with the members of any forum you join, this can take some time as with using social media, but it can work. You will not sell hundreds of copies of your ebook, but if you do sell it to the right person they can tell their friends or leave positive feedback on the forum for others to potentially buy. This can be slow going, so do not expect any great results right away.

7. Article Marketing

You can write articles related to your ebook and submit to places like Ezinearticles. Remember the article is about your niche or related to it, do not make it sound like a sales pitch to sell your product. Use the bio box to tell the reader about you and link to your site using keyword phrases you are trying to target. All it takes is one article a day and over time they will bring you traffic and sales if the articles contain good information. If you are not comfortable writing articles, you could always outsource this for just a few dollars per article. Make sure to proof read any articles before submitting and double check with a service like Copyscape to make sure it is not just a copied article.

8. Offer Your Ebook on Clickbank

With Clickbank you can post your ebook in their system for other website owners to market and sell for you. You will have to give out a % of each sale to those website owners, but they are doing all of the work for you. Keep your eyes out for a full post regarding Clickbank, how it works and what you can do to use it to your advantage.

9. Do Not Over Price Your Ebook

This is where a lot of people go wrong, they price their ebook well over what people will actually pay for it thinking they are going to get rich. Think if you were the buyer, would you spend $80 for an ebook? How about $70? I didn’t think so, unless your ebook is always being updated and well known, you will not see that much money. Then again, if your ebook is already well known, why would you be reading this? Keep your price range between $10 and $40, depending on how many pages your ebook contains and how good the information is in it.

10. Run A PPC Campaign

When thinking starting a PPC campaign for your ebook, look to see how much the keywords you want to target is going to cost you. If they are running $3/click and your ebook is only $15 you might want to either find other keywords or just forget about running a PPC. However if the keyword is only $1/click and your ebook is $30 then I would be using PPC to your advantage. This is one of the quickest ways to see sales come in for your ebook.

Remember your ebook will not sell itself, you need to do the leg work to get the ball rolling. Do not expect to sell hundreds of books right away, the reality is their are so many ebooks online. What makes your ebook better? Patience is key for anyone new to marketing, you need to keep your patience when marketing your ebook. If you lose your patience right away for whatever reason, you are hurting your own efforts to make this work for you. Stay focused and work hard, you will see results if the niche is not over saturated and you have a good product. Make sure you keep a list of every person who has bought your ebook, you can offer them new products in the future or even offer an updated ebook with more information for a discounted price.

Many of you have thought about making an ebook, either to give away for signing up for your newsletter or to sell it online. Some will say that their is no money to be made with selling ebooks, which is true for some niche’s. However, if you find the right niche and write a good ebook, the profits can show with the right marketing. So lets say you are unsure on how to make an ebook, where to start or what it really takes. Instead of looking more into the idea, you instead brush it off and continue to do your daily routine. Here I will show how to put the puzzle together in creating your own ebook.

What Do You Know?

This is the first question you should ask yourself before creating an ebook. What do you know, what are you passionate about? It is much easier for you to write on something you know more about then something you know nothing about. If this is in fact your first ebook, I suggest picking a topic that you are knowledgeable about. You will have to do less research in the creation process and it will be easier for you.

The Importance Of Research

Before you even starting writing your ebook, you will want to research first to see if anyone is even searching for the topic you are about to write on. You can use Google to see how many results are showing for certain keywords that pertain to your ebook. This should show you the people you are competing against, see what they are offering and how much their ebook is selling for. Scope them out, even buy an ebook to see what it contains so you know what you need to do better. You could take it a step further and create a google adwods account and use the keyword tool to research the monthly search volume for your targeted keywords.

Questions To Ask Yourself

Here is a simple list of things you can ask yourself and answer before you begin writing your ebook. If this is your first time then I suggest you not skip over anything, do it right the first time and not try to take short cuts to be done quicker. If you rush things, you are more prone to make mistakes.

• What is the purpose of your ebook?
• Why would someone buy this ebook?
• What will this ebook contain?
• What key elements will you be focusing on?
• What will make this ebook different from the rest?
• Who are you trying to target to sell this ebook to?
• Why should someone buy your ebook?
• How much do you want to sell it for?

More Research

If you know a lot about your topic, but feel uncomfortable in just how much you know, take the time and do some research on it. Their is no shame in having to go back and educate yourself a little more to make your ebook that much better. You will benefit yourself in the long run by doing this due to the fact you are putting more information into your ebook.

Putting Your Ebook Together

So you have researched your topic, looked at the competitor websites, maybe even bought one to see how it was laid out. You now feel comfortable with what you know and have your word processing software open. Do not start typing paragraphs just yet, instead I want you to think of every major point you want to talk about in your ebook. This will eventually make up your table of contents, but for now you are going to use it as an outline when writing your ebook.

With this outline completed, you can start writing for each chapter your ebook is going to consist of. Remember you can always alter the order at any time by simply cutting and pasting the chapters in any order you see fit. Adding images, graphs, etc is a great way to add more life to your ebook. Giving the readers visual references is better at times then just plain text. When you think you are completed with your ebook, make sure to spell check it and reread it at least twice. Give the ebook to a friend or relative to read over as well, getting as much feedback as possible is important before publishing the final product.

Publishing Your Ebook

Now it is time to publish your ebook and make it ready to sell on the internet. The most common form you will find an ebook published in is that of a PDF file. You can use CutePDF which offers a free tool at the time of this writing this to easily convert your word document. The other option would be that of a simple .exe file and using an ebook compiler software which you can find several by searching Google. A third option is that of DLGuard which will compile your ebook and track customer information, times downloaded, ability to ban a customer or IP address as well as a built in shopping cart and more.

To keep things simple, you can use CutePDF to convert your document in a matter of seconds and have your ebook completed and ready to sell. Tomorrow I will be covering ways you can market your newly created ebook online. Some of the methods discussed will be free, other methods will cost a little bit of money. Either way, you will be ready to market your ebook effectively online and be ready for the next challenge of making sales.

If you do not already know, Qwitter is a service that will notify you when someone has stopped following you on twitter. Another popular service is Twitterless, which does pretty much the same thing as Qwitter.  Some might see this as a beneficial service so they can see who is no longer following them after you tweeted about something. Does it really matter who is longer following you on twitter? Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog had this tweet to me and I agree fully.

When you start caring more about why people are no longer following you on twitter, some will hold back on what they tweet about. They are afraid they might lose more followers and at the same time they have lost the concept of twitter. Twitter is a place for you to express yourself to the world and to the people that follow you. When you start holding back on what you tweet about, you are no longer telling the world what you think. It is an empty shell of you who is tweeting only bits and pieces if your thoughts and opinions. You might as well be tweeting with a sock in your mouth or a self appointed gag order.

The Right Attitude To Have

Some people like the idea of knowing who is no longer following them for whatever the reason may be.  Cyandle of Web Entrapments uses twitterless for this reason.

nahh i can careless about that…i like knowing if they don’t think i’m worth following…if i’m not then they aren’t either…

Currently I do not use either service, if someone stops following me for whatever reason, then so be it.  If you use either service, or plan on using one of them in the future then I would go with twitterless.  Pat Strader (@matterhornpat) informed me that twitterless is in fact faster then qwitter when it comes to sending notifications of people no longer following you on twitter.

Do you currently use either service?  If so, why do you use it? Do you tweet these people back asking why they no longer are following you? In the end just be yourself, do not limit your opinions or comments on twitter in fear of losing any followers.  That is just a number, if care more about that number then anything else, you are using twitter for the wrong reasons. It is about communicating and networking with other people online.  Having 15,000 followers means nothing if you push out crap for tweets, always advertising your Squidoo or Blogger junk.

If you run a weekly or monthly newsletter then you want to get the best results possible from your efforts. If you sell ad placement in your newsletter, you will want to test the placement of those ads for maximum exposure for your advertisers. Many people make the mistake of what I call set and send. They setup their newsletter, do not bother tweaking it and just send it out. Some go as far as to not even test the results of the newsletter, they are happy to just have people subscribing to it. Here I will break down a few key components and show you what you can change to help maximize the effectiveness of your newsletter.

Split Testing Subject Lines

This one is not as important as the others on this list, your subscribers know you are going to send them something every week or every month. Make it visible that this is your “Company X Newsletter For The Week Of/Month Of”. These people willing subscribed to receive your newsletter, so in most cases stating that this is your newsletter that will be enough to have them open and read it.

Split Testing Your Ad Placement

This is important not only for your advertisers, but for you as well. You want your advertisers to sign up to advertise with you again to make you some extra money. You should be testing your ad size in your email newsletter to see which sizes fit best in certain sections. Does a 468×60 get more clicks at the top, middle or bottom of your newsletter? Are the 125×125 ads to bunched up on the side? Try experimenting with a 160×600 vertical banner on either the left or right side of your newsletter.

Some people like to place ads in the middle of the content of their newsletter, this can put some readers off as they wish to continue reading what you wrote and not have to see a huge ad in the middle. Many people might just skip right over the ad and keep reading, you will want to test the CTR of those ads if you decide to place them in the middle of your content.

Split Testing Your Layout

The layout of your newsletter is important for any future success it may have. Some may disagree and say it does not matter on how it looks, it is more about the content it provides. The content is very important, if not the most important thing for your newsletter. The layout however determines how your content is laid out, where your ads or product offers are placed and the colors you use. You want your content to be easily readable and spaced out, cramming your content together makes it harder for the reader and for your messages to clearly stand out. You can also test different color schemes to see which are more appealing to your readers, you can even go as far as to ask them which they like better. This gives you the chance to interact with your readers, get their input and get closer with them.

Split Testing Your Call To Action

Many website owners use a newsletter to further promote their products/services or showcase products that are on sale. Placing your call to action or the message that says “hey click here to buy this” is crucial in not only helping you increase your sales, but to keeping your readers as well. If readers get your newsletter and find it plastered with your call to action over and over again, you will find your readership numbers fall. By placing your call to action in different areas each week, this will give you the stats of which spot produced more clicks and then you can track your sales. If you sell several products on your site, try having a small section of the newsletter devoted to those items with a small thumbnail and name. Viewers will then be able to physically look at those items and it increases the chance of them clicking on it.

In The End

At the end of the day it is truly beneficial for you to test different newsletter to see which changes are making the biggest impact not only for you, but your advertisers. When you have found the best results, you can then sit back and watch how effective an email newsletter can be. You have optimized it to the best of your ability and have increased your chances of more sales and feedback from your readers. Keep the layout clean and always have more content then ads. If you are not offering any ad placement, you can focus on advertising your own products or service to increase your profit stream.

Split testing is about making variations of your advertising material and testing the results against each other.  Instead of just launching one landing page, create two or three of them to see which one converts better for you.  The same method applies for banners, PPC text ads, email subject lines, email message body, form submission fields and even ad placement on your sites.  Split testing requires more work because you are not only creating multiple items, you are then testing the results from each of them.  To get the best results possible for your marketing campaign, it is crucial to split test.  Many people think they have created the perfect landing page and do not want to do the extra work to create another one and test the results.  You are saving yourself time by not doing it, but you are potentially taking money out of your pocket by choosing not to split test.

Split Test Your PPC Ads

If you are using PPC to generate traffic to a site then you might have already created a few ad variations to use.  Are you looking at the results of those ad variations though and seeing where you can improve?  Get rid of the ads that have a very low CTR (click through ratio) compared to your other ads.  If you see a CTR of 2% on one ad and 0.07% on another ad, it is time to change the second ad for the CTR is over half as low as the first.  Writing good ad copy comes natural for some people, while others will need to experiment more often.  I know some of you are saying you will be wasting money by testing, but I want you to think long term.  In a few weeks you will have the best ad variations for your niche, these ads have a higher CTR then your originals.  By having this higher CTR, you are getting more valuable clicks to your site.  These clicks will hopefully turn into more sign ups or sales for you and generate more money.  So the money you originally thought you were wasting on testing is now paying off more then if you had not tested at all.

Split Test Your Landing Pages

This one might be harder to do for people who pay to have their landing pages made for them, but is still crucial in optimizing your marketing campaign for the best results possible.  Take site1 and site2, two different layouts, color schemes and even wording and run them for a week.  During this week, look at the conversion rate, bounce rate, and even the time spent on each site.  This will give you an idea as to which landing page is performing better for you.

Conversion rate is an easy stat to look at.  If site2 is converting a lot better then site1, ditch site1 or change site1 to compete with site2’s stats.  Imagine if you never started split testing your landing pages, you would have never known that site2 was better then site1.  Site1 would not have made you as much money and in some cases you would have left the niche to collect dust since your first site never worked out.

Bounce Rate is confusing for some people, it is just a percentage they know nothing about.  When a viewer comes to your site, does not stay very long or click on other links they will leave.  This is a bounce by that viewer.  The higher your bounce rate is, the less effective that landing page is for your marketing campaign.  Try to shoot for a bounce rate of 25%-35% for most niche’s.  This boils down to your site design and the content you are providing.  If the site looks unprofessional, cluttered and full of ads then chances are your bounce rate is higher then what it could be.  Your content is also important in lower your bounce rate, people will leave your site if they do not find what they are looking for right away.  Landing pages should be clean and have the most important content and call to action above the fold.  Above the fold simply means the user does not have to scroll down to view your important information.

Time spent is often times over looked by many marketers because they want conversion’s and sales.  They do not care if the visitor was there for 15 seconds or 5 minutes.  Do not overlook this stat though, by increasing the viewers average time they spend on your site, you are increasing the chances of a sale or conversion.  This goes back to the quality of content and even the design of your landing page.

Split Testing Banner Ads

If you are using banner advertising to market a website, you might be confined to one size of the banner.  That is fine, but you are not always confined to the color’s you can use or making it animated or not.  You want your banner to pop on the site is resides on, if it doesn’t pop, it is simply just another square box on the screen for the viewer to ignore.  Their a few different ways to track your banner ads, but I will go into greater detail another time for this.  When split testing your banner ads, make sure you are tracking the hits from each website you are advertising on.  If a site is not driving traffic for you, even after testing multiple banner ads, it is time to cut ties and move on.

In The End

It is crucial for any internet marketing campaign to split test the advertising material to find the best possible results.  With better results comes more traffic and conversion.  This traffic and higher conversion rates will bring more money into your pocket and make your marketing campaign that much more of a success.  It does take more time, creating more marketing materials and research research research.  Without spending the time on researching your results, your split testing efforts will not be as accurate.  Yes you could split test two things and see which one brings in more sales or conversions.  However, if you study your stats for each site, you can make changes and tweak them to have them convert better for you.

Tomorrow I will go into split testing for an email marketing campaign, what to do and what not do to.  What are your thoughts on split testing?  Do you split test any of your marketing material or do you just throw it out and there and wait for the results?

Word of mouth advertising has been around for a very long and is with out a doubt the best means of advertising any company could ask for. If you need to see the dentist, most people ask a relative, friend or co-worker who they go to and are comfortable with. This is a classic example of word of mouth advertising, and one that will never go away. In todays fast pace world, many people do not want to be bothered with having to call around or grab a phone book for services they may need. They simply pick up the phone and call someone they know or they may remember a conversation they had in the past with someone regarding what they now need.

No need to talk trash on my stick figure awesomeness, they have feelings to you know.

As you can see, word of mouth advertising can have a big impact on a company which can be either very good for them or very detrimental. A company has control to a certain extent as to the effect of word of mouth advertising. If the product or service they offer just sucks, well then you can imagine the public will be speaking poorly about you. Let’s take a look at a few things that makes word of mouth advertising really tick.

People Are In Control

When someone speaks on about your product or service, they are in control of what they say. If they had a great experience with you or enjoyed what you had to offer, they surely will say positive things about your business. As a business you can not control what people have to say about you, you can only help push them to say good things by offering a great product or service.

People Love To Talk

In today’s world people talk more now then they did 20 years ago. Cell phones, PDA’s, wireless internet and instant messaging services make it much easier for us to talk on a more frequent basis. On a lunch or even a smoke break, co-workers can talk about what they did the night before. If someone ate at a restaurant and loved it, they will more then likely talk about it the next day. A friend could be going on a date and asking for a nice place to go to, word of mouth will kick in and you will refer what you thought was a great restaurant. As long as people are talking, word of mouth advertising will never die.

Word Of Mouth On Nitrous Oxide

Now take the same situation shown above and push the nitrous button on your word of mouth campaign. Look at Facebook or Twitter as good examples, each have the ability to add friends to your list. You can then post messages for all of your friends to read as well as read what they have to say. If you have 2,000 followers on Twitter, you simply tweet out a message and they will all have the ability to see it right then and their in real time. The same with Facebook, you post something on your board and all of your friends have the ability to read it. This is what I call word of mouth advertising on nitrous and it can be one hell of a boost for you. Traditional word of mouth advertising can not give you that much exposure in such a short amount of time. It relies on single individuals to slowly speak about your product or service, one person at a time.

With a boost of nitrous, you can not only tell your 2,000 followers on Twitter, they in return can tell their 800 followers and some of their followers can tell their followers about your website or product launch. With all of those followers getting a tweet in real time, your word of mouth campaign has blown up well beyond the traditional means. Instead of Bob in Ochitaka, Montana talking about you to his friend’s one at a time, the internet world can talk to thousands and thousands of people with a few keystrokes and a click of a mouse button.

Many companies fail to realize the true power behind the new age of word of mouth advertising, and even worse, how to use it properly. Maybe the CEO’s or marketing manager’s of companies still think old school marketing techniques are the way to go since they have worked for the past 20 years. They are afraid to embrace social media as a way to advertise themselves online, with a little education, willingness to change and a shot of NOS, it can take them further then they ever dreamed. Word of mouth is not going anywhere, people just need to realize the internet is changing the way it operates and how fast the word can be spread.

Twitter has become more popular as a way to not only keep in touch with friends, but also as a way to meet new people that you otherwise would not talk to. Twitter is a combination of a micro blogging platform and instant messenger built into one. In this post I want to show you some examples of how not to use twitter and what the reason’s are.

Mass Following People

Their have been post’s written in regards to easily getting more people to follow you on twitter. In most cases it is the same scenario each time, follow a mass amount of people at one time and hope they follow you back. You might not have anything in common with these people, but you do not care, you just want your follower number to go up quickly. Some even will stop following the people who have followed them back. It can work for you, but are those the types of people you want to try and talk to? It is a tag, your it kind of method. You tag a person to follow and hope they follow you back. In this screen shot you can see an example of a twitter accounts that are using this technique in an effort to get more twitter followers.

Who in their right mind can actually follow and keep up with 26,000 or even 17,000 different people? Then again, by looking at the amount of updates they have, chances are they do not even talk to most of those people. They just want to increase their follower count quickly so they can then tweet about a new blog post or product they are selling. This method can work for some easy traffic to your site, I would just rather use twitter to build up my friend’s whom I actually talk to and not just hit them with my new posts every day.

Mass Auto Tweet (aka auto spam your followers)

For those of you who do not know, you can find application’s out that will allow you to auto tweet for you at certain timed intervals. This can come in handy if you are not in front of your computer for an extended period of time and want to keep your followers up to date on things. Well here is a case of it going wrong and just flat out spamming your followers with a bunch of links.

This image was taken from TwailerTwash, which is run by Edward Lewis @pageoneresults who gave me permission to straight up steal his image. This is only a small image of the auto tweet by bhartzer in a single day, you can see the others on twailertwash. Look at the times of each tweet, they are back to back to back and repeating themselves. Doing this will ensure a loss of twitter followers as you are just filling their tweet window with a bunch of crap.

Only Tweet About Your Posts And Submissions

Twitter should be used as a tool to actually communicate with other people on the network, not just to link bomb followers with your posts or social media submissions. For the month of October, the above user did nothing but drop links to his posts, social media site submissions, etc in an effort to have people vote up his submissions. I just noticed this as I was looking back at his previous tweets, do not use twitter as a platform to only drop your links. Yes you might have a few thousand followers, but how many of them are active on twitter?

Tweet About EVERYTHING

Twitter is a communication tool, a way of telling your friends and followers about what it is you are currently doing. A good example that just happened recently was on Halloween night with @TheNanny612. Shana is the author behind Social Desire and has a 5 yr. old son was bit in the face by the family dog and was rushed to the hospital to get stitches. While waiting at the hospital she decided to tweet about what was going on. At least a dozen people had tweeted back with their gratitude and if they could help in anyway. This was a good example of using twitter to tweet about what is going on for you, she got reassurance knowing her online friends were there to help get her through this. Grant it, I think her son did a better job then she did, he took the stitches like a champ and was ready to show them off in school on Monday. Having kids of my own, I was also concerned that her son did not get to go out and trick or treat, so I had a few pounds of candy left over and was ready to ship it out Saturday morning. He had done his trick or treating two days prior, so he had his candy stash ready to go. If you were a child and did not get to go out for candy, you would be pissed I am sure. Shana went on to make a video talking about the experience and the online community.

Now in a different situation, tweeting about every move you make is just annoying. Do your followers care that you are pouring yourself a bowl of cereal, drinking the milk, rinsing out the bowl, putting the bowl in the sink, going to the bathroom, forgetting to wipe, tweeting about not caring about forgetting to wipe, blah blah blah blah blah. That is just overkill and you will lose followers by talking about every breathing moment of your life. Yes I understand twitter is a great social tool, but going overboard like that is more of a holy shit that person needs to go.

Wrong…Seriously Just Wrong

This is not as serious as the headline reads, just busting on @djpasiley who had sent me a DM regarding a Halloween party where clothing was optional, how he found them, invited, them etc. So I told him I wanted pictures for proof…and I got this instead.

A Halloween party where clothing is optional, that would have made for some creative costume designs. Yet he FAILED on the pictures. We are still on speaking terms, somewhat that is for now…If you like listening to music while you work, he is always blipping his music to his twitter followers.

(*Update) Bonus Method

@AndyBeard sent me a tweet with another thing people do that can have you lose your followers. Having your links go to a 404 error page. Before sending your tweets, at least make sure the link works properly. I have seen this time and time again and does get annoying. It is like crying wolf, where after a while people will stop running to your aid because their is no damn wolf. In this case the links just never works, so why am I going to keep clicking on them? For those of you who do not know Andy, please climb out from your underground cave, the man is full of knowledge. Check out his niche marketing blog and Collective Thoughts which he also helps write.