A few months ago I did a post about how to make a Twitter bot with php. The post is currently ranking number one for making a Twitter bot and I was getting tons of emails on tyler.tc on how to make the script more functional, and basically just do more. I put some ideas down and sent them to a few friends and got a great response. After putting some code together and releasing it online, TwitterBotScript or “TBS” has become a hit.

The reason being: Its simple to use, its constantly evolving, it allows you to expand your Twitter account (and marketing efforts) extremely fast, and its FREE. Think of TBS as an open source twitter bot script. Not only can you download it but its easy to build on with your own ideas and a little PHP experience.

Twitter Bot Script comes with what has been dubbed the TBS Toolkit, lets look at some features:

• Full GUI tweet management including “Show Status” which allows you to pause that tweet from appearing in your activities.
• Import tweets via a CSV file with the ability to set their status and type on the fly.
• Create globally used tweets, or create special tweets to be used only for replies and direct messages.
• The Mention Reply Tool will allow you to see all the recent @your tweets and automatically respond to them using the bulk responder option, or quickly write up a custom response. TBS will also keep track of the tweets you respond to so you don’t continually send duplicate responses like with other bot scripts.
• The Make Friends Tool is another awesome tool only available from TwitterBotScript. This tool will give you a bunch of new ways to make friends on Twitter. Account sourcing will allow you to randomly follow users from your friends or followers (toggle) while allowing you to reselect the target, and the required amount of followers for each person you try to follow on the fly. You can also find new friends via keyword searching, or by directly inputting lists of user names.
• TBS of course includes a status update tool that works just like your Twitter homepage.
• Sleep Mode will allow you to randomize the time at which your tweets appear on Twitter. When you automate with CRON, your script is run at the same time interval every time. By using sleep mode, the script will essentially sleep for a random amount of time making your tweeting look more natural to Twitter users.
• Tweet counter. So lets say you don’t have a larger number of tweets to work with and you don’t want to keep repeating them. You can globally set a tweet limit in TwitterBotScript limiting the number of times each message can be used.
• API Rate Limiting integration.

Another bonus is Twitter bot script requires almost nothing to run... A basic installation of Apache, MySQL, and PHP (and cURL of course) will do the job. But you will need CRON in order to use automation. In the next release, Twitter Bot Script will have a synthetic version of CRON like what WordPress uses.

Twitter Bot Script has been installed 598 times since it was released four days ago. I think with a little push Twitter Bot Script could easily become the king. I looked around today at the competition and most of the stuff out there is either very basic or very expensive.  This puts Twitter Bot Script at a distinct advantage as users get an advanced tool set that is constantly seeing additions and revisions, for free. Yeah, there is definitely work to be done but that’s the point. As I get more and more emails for I’ll know what direction to move in.

So go download Twitter Bot Script and play around with it. You don’t have to be marketing your Micheal Jackson t-shirts to have fun with Twitter Bot Script. Its great for easily finding new friends and exposure.

Also: If your handy with PHP and working with APIs, shoot me an email if your interested in working on this project.

This is a problem you will face when going to work for one of the largest social networking applications online. Facebook’s datacenters store more than 40 billion photos, and users upload over 40 million new photos each day.

Facebook has recently surpassed 200 million users and is reportedly seeking up to $100 million for additional servers.

The other day I was setting up a Wordpress sandbox to do some theme testing and I ran into a small snag. I wanted to populate the blog with data from smmguru.com and the Wordpress export feature is a bit flawed. For many reasons (mainly security) I did not want the sandbox blog running off the same database so a backup/import was the way to go. Unless you can upload a 6mb export to your site (highly unlikely) then you cant import any data.

The first route I took was manually trying to split the file but I quickly realized it would take forever with that many lines of code. I took my problem to Google and found a nice little gem called “Shoes.” Its a WXR file splitter written in ruby by  mvManila. The program is very easy to use and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and there’s also a command line version for the nerds. You can get the latest version here (just pick the latest version number for whichever platform you are running.) The program will then install itself and your ready to roll.

Select the local copy of your WXR file, then pick how small you would like each chunk to be. You can even append a name that will automatically be ordered in number. For example entering “backup-part-” will create WXR files labeled “backup-part-1″, “backup-part-2″, etc. Then all you have to do is import all the files through WordPress and your good to go.

So lately there has been a lot of crying over Apple introducing variable pricing in the iTunes music store. Soon after both Wal-Mart and Amazon raised their prices following a similar pricing structure as Apple. A lot of the top tracks have been raised 30 cents to $1.29 for new hits while recent songs will still cost 99 cents and older tracks will cost 69 cents. While the music industry is always pushing for more pennies I think the raise on Amazon’s end came purely out of pricing strategy. As the fourth (Amazon) and second (Wal-Mart) biggest online music retailers it does not come as a surprise to me. If Apple is charging $1.29 for latest hits then they too can jump on the bandwagon charging the same amount or even a little less to appeal as a better value.

Although there is a recession I don’t think it will have much effect on music downloads. The people who pay for music now will continue to pay for it until it becomes ridiculously high. Personally I don’t see the incentive of download music online for the same price it costs to buy the CD without getting the CD or anything that comes with it. Especially when you can still find all the music you want online for free. It won’t be long for others to follow suite. Best Buy and Target where listed as the 3rd and 5th largest online music sellers my bet is they will change their pricing structures by the end of the year. Cant wait to see the numbers that Apple posts from its iTunes sales this year.

The artists seem to be making plenty of cash… I don’t see any rappers complaining about their Bently’s and bitches which says something. I think the music industry has seen a sift in consumer use like watching videos online or using online radio services. While im not a huge fan of Little Wayne his success is a perfect example. Up to the release of “Tha Carter III” album he flooded online mixtape outlets with music. Not only did this create an amazing hype train, it combated the leaking of his album material. Putting out over 80 tracks and remixes before putting out an album will make it so people really dont know what to expect on the album. And if the content is good, the hype and interest of whats on the album does the rest of the work. Some of the tracks on the album were songs released on mixtapes that were later extended or remixed.

The industry is not the problem. You just have to make the right records.

NPD Data.

Looks like Facebook ads is down again. I noticed they have been having issues for the last view days. Around Sunday or Monday I started noticing some whack ass CTRs and click prices… Later that day I was unable to create or modify any ads and the service seems to be tottaly down. Not sure if this has been an issue previous to this incident but I’m sure it wont be the last with the growing pains they are facing being a new player in this market.

I have not gotten any response back from Facebook as to what the issue is but I really hope they get this shit ironed out soon… I cant even get to my Ads Manager to pause my campaigns… Which really sucks because I happen to be doing loads of split testing right now. If you know anything drop a comment or shoot me an email.

Note: If you can still manage your ads I would recommend pausing them if you will need constant access to them.

You may have noticed lately a new trend in search engine technology. Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI, has become one of the new favorite ways to rank websites within search results. Following suit, SEOs are adapting techniques and creating new strategies to rank well using the new technology. To gain a coveted top 10 ranking you will now need to focus on keyword density or theme density. In the good old days you could simply stuff your content with keywords (keyword stuffing) and it would not take long before you were on the front page of SERPS. I have already shown why LSI came about and how it thwarts keyword stuffers. What all of this means is that you now need to understand how to use your unique content correctly incorporating themes for the best possible results.

Sounds great… But how do I masterfully theme all of my unique content? Simply put, it’s done by strategically placing expert verbiage and theme related words into your content. It’s really quite simple. People are so used to doing shady things to make their content rank and now that search engines have a more natural LSI technology; ranking will become a more natural process. The expert verbiage (synonyms) are search engine proven synonyms known as “SEPS.” Consider these SEPS your new best friends. So how do I find good SEPS to use for my content?

How To Find Good SEPS:

It’s really easy and Google actually does most of the work for you. Simply enter a tilde “~” in front of your keyword within the Google search box and the synonyms will be automatically highlighted in bold within the search result pages.

Ex: http://www.google.com/#q=~car+parts Notice how different synonyms are bold within these search results. These search engine proven synonyms are what you want to work into your content. So if you are making a niche site for example, these SEPS will give you the basics of what search engines are looking for and what they place value on. These SEPS are also a great way to develop themes, sub-themes, and topics for your site.

Another great tool for finding awesome SEPS is the adCenter Keyword Group Detection Tool. Simply enter your keyword or keyphrase and it will spit out all kinds of goodies to get you started.

I’ll say this again also, there is nothing new about these techniques. Theme density, interlinking your pages, and using SEPS has been around for a while. Until LSI came into the lime light these were just well kept secrets amongst the elite who know that when used properly, can easily put a site in the top10 of any engines SERPS.

With LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) being the latest tool in the belt to thwart spammers, LSI has not only changed the way content is looked at but incoming links as well. While having incoming links is important, their effect is now lessened as not just any link will help your rankings anymore. The idea is to build a theme of links to all of your pages, or deep link them.

For example, deep linking to many pages within a website using anchor text that relates to the “theme” of the page is much more crucial than having a bunch of links back to your homepage. Anchor text keywords must also be thematically altered for inbound links to any one page. If this sounds confusing let me try and clear this shit up. Lets say the page you are linking to is about the “flu.” Right off the bat, LSI would determine if the phrase “naturally” occurs within the domain name [ie. www.fluhelp.com]. Next, LSI would look for some variations of related key phrases that could/should be used within the anchor text of the links:

“stomach flu”
“flu symptoms”
“bird flu”
“common cold”
“flu treatments”
“flu vaccine”
etc…

This is not a new practice by any means. Any real, decent SEO has probably been using themed strategies to achieve top rankings for years as the natural theming builds much stronger rankings and content. Most people who are new to the game think these new techniques have derived from the introduction of LSI technology when in fact “themed websites” have just been a closely guarded secret.

As always, the information and questions you find on forums can be highly inaccurate and misleading. When it comes to Google’s ranking algorithm there are a few known tidbits and a huge amount of speculation and rumors that although sometimes true can be highly misleading.

In the beginning search engine spiders would look only for the presence and frequency of keywords on a web page to determine that pages relevancy. As search began to grow it became clear that this type of approach would yield poor search results. A good example is the engine could match “car” and “automobile” but fail to recognize homonym (words with multiple meanings) such as “mouse” and “keyboard.” Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a new approach at understanding not only keywords, but the context in which they are used on the entire web page.

Using statistical analysis (LSI) can look at pages that have words which are often used in the same context. Lets say “apple” and “computer” are keywords, “Mac OS” is also there and are therefore also relevant. Another way to look at this is determining whether a page is about “windows” the operating system, or an invention to throw things out of your car. LSI technology is about looking more into the context of indexed content, and allowing a more natural method of search to happen. Consequently, the technology is not only used by Google but other search engines as well.

An excerpt from Google’s LSI Patent that gives the basic key requirements of their LSI technology:
“The system is further adapted to identify phrases that are
related to each other, based on a phrase’s ability to predict
the presence of other phrases in a document. More specifically,
a prediction measure is used that relates the actual co-occurrence
rate of two phrases to an expected co-occurrence rate
of the two phrases. Information gain, as the ratio of actual
co-occurrence rate to expected co-occurrence rate, is one such
prediction measure. Two phrases are related where the prediction
measure exceeds a predetermined threshold. In that case, the
second phrase has significant information gain with respect to
the first phrase. Semantically, related phrases will be those
that are commonly used to discuss or describe a given topic or
concept, such as “President of the United States” and “White
House.” For a given phrase, the related phrases can be ordered
according to their relevance or significance based on their
respective prediction measures.”

From a webmasters perspective there’s not much to worry about. If you are creating quality content with a theme, your rankings will most likely just improve. Those at risk as always are those looking to game the indexing system with keyword stuffing, or over working their keyword density until the page is no longer natural context. Randomly inserting keywords into an article / website will no longer get you those top rankings. In fact, over optimizing and duplicate content could not only hurt your rankings but be the death of them.  This this big change in search, its likely to have an effect on the way people create content. Again, the idea is to theme your content (more coming soon.)

That should give you the overview of what exactly LSI technology is. The general idea as always from the search engine’s end is a new way to bring natural search to the table, cut down on spam,  and those who are faking their way to the top. If you want more information on LSI I recommend reading through that patent up above. There’s a crap load of information in it.

Enough is enough, there are tons of SEOs, affiliate marketers, and online gurus talking the talk but there are few who walk the walk in this industry. Through various lists I have put together the best entrepreneurs on Twitter. Personal views need not apply, these people made this list because they know their shit, and most likely will be able to teach you something. 

1. Guy Kawasaki- Has authored numerous books and he contributes a
   monthly column to Entrepreneur Magazine. Guy is also a top entrepreneur, blogger, and venture capitalist.
2. Rand Fishkin – CEO of SEOmoz, a Seattle based Internet marketing and search engine optimization firm. At 29 years old, Rand is a great example to young entrepreneurs.
3. Dave Snyder- A leading expert in search and social media marketing. He is a Co-Founder of Search and Social.
4. Jay Neely- Boston-based entrepreneur working on a news-related startup.
5. Rajesh Pancholi- Owner and operator of R27 Creativelab—a creative UK studio.
6. Sean Lindsay- Technologist, Entrepreneur, Builder, Creator, Connector.
7. Marcelo Calbucci- Founder and CTO of Sampa. Moved to the US in 1998, and now runs his own business.
8. Beverly Davis- Runs a cosmetic company with uplifting, motivating, and inspiring products.
9. Chris Pund- A young entrepreneur running 2 web-based companies. Also, manages a blog for young entrepreneurs.
10. Jeremy Schooley- Internet marketer and young entrepreneur. COO at Digital Labz.
11. Thomson Chemmanoor- A social media marketing expert from Houston,TX. Founder of Digital Labz.
12. Maiken Jepsen- Designer, work-at-home-mom, and owner of custom boutique clothing shop.
13. Blaine Moore- Operates a coaching and publishing business in the running and fitness niche.
14. Daniel McClintock- Graphic designer, entrepreneur, internet marketer, and business owner.
15. Wes Wilson- Founder of IncSpring, a social marketplace for designers and entrepreneurs.
16. Sumaya Kazi- Founding and Executive Director of The Cultural Connect. Recognized by Business Week as one of the top young entrepreneurs.
17. Joann Sondy- Entrepreneur since 2000. Owner of Creative Aces, a design and digital imaging studio.
18. Daniel Kehoe- Consultant for entrepreneurs that need a temporary/freelance CTO and blog.
19. Rick Myers- Founder/CEO of Talent Zoo, an online database where marketing and communications firms connect with talent.
20. JeanAnnVK- Entrepreneur, blogger, author, and social media consultant, among other things. The “Edgy Entrepreneur.”

Are you an entrepreneur on Twitter and think you belong on this list? Post a quick comment about yourself, your background, and your Tiwtter user name and if you fit the mold (or break it…) you can join the list.

Luckily I started to notice the nuking of the Accai Berry promotions pretty early on so I had a shit load of dating promos and ad copy ready to role. For the month of January NeverBlueAds is holding an affiliate showdown for any affiliate on the network. The affiliate that gets the most eHarmony subscriptions (in certain countries) will win a 50″ Samsung LCD HDTV. I decided to try out some of the offers and pit them against some of my other dating ads to see what would happen. Without even running landing pages and using the provided creatives from NeverBlueAds the offers were converting without much work. They have a bunch of sick offers that can be greatly enhanced with landing pages etc.

One thing I do want to point out is you may have a problem getting your ads through because of the URL redirection. For me, some of the foreign ads kept redirecting to an “international offer” if the traffic was not seen as coming from that specific targeted country. The problem is Facebook Interns could not get to the real landing page so they kept blocking the ads. You may have to use a redirection service that allows you to modify the link after the ad is accepted. Use the eHarmony landing page for your specific country (ex: eharmony .ca, .co.uk, .whatever) as the redirection URL from your redirection service. After the ad is accepted by Facebook, go back to the redirection service and change the end URL to the tracking code provided by NeverBlueAds. As long as your targeted your ads right, you should be in business. Also keep in mind you may want to set a really low bid for your cpc so the ads are not actually showing and costing you money when they are first accepted and don’t have any tracking.

Another weird thing I noticed is that no matter how much you increase your cpc, your impressions don’t seem to climb much in the other countries. Just for fun I set one of my ads at $1.25 cost per click and it got only 1,000 more impressions than an ad I ran at $.55 a click. I most likely wont win the TV, I’m only promoting through Facebook. Make a bunch of money, and win a sick TV.