That’s right I said it, your a tool Twitter… When Twitter came out I didn’t really see the appeal. It may seem a little pointless especially with the advanced text messaging you can do with cell phones. But of course I ended up creating an account (smmguru) and I can already tell how useful it would be to some people.

Now keep in mind that in order for Twitter to be of any use your account will have to have some level of followers… If no one is reading your tweets then you cant expect much. I only have around 30 + followers so the traffic is nothing special (about 40 hits a day.) However if you take in to account what a base of 3K followers does to your visibility, you can easily push decent traffic that also tends to convert well in terms of subscribers. The trends I’m seeing is that many see large increases in RSS subscribers when they receive visibility on Twitter.

To start off, find some people on Twitter that fit into the overall topic of your blog. In the next step you can take two very different paths:

1) You can continue to follow people relevant in your niche and keep your follow list shortened to people you actually want to see tweets from. Pick this option if you plan on using the service for something more than getting as much visibility as you can from it. This will give you visibility but your followers will be much more organic and build up slower.

2) You follow every person you can find relevant, and continue to follow everyone that they are following so on and so forth. This will totally work but it will take some time to kick in. As long as you post quality tweets the visibility of being on all of those people’s pages will draw new followers. The more people that can find you, the better your chances.

Once you have all of your followers it’s time to start pushing links. There are a number of different plugins for auto-updating your Twitter page with new posts from WordPress. There are also various Twitter clients for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac, and Windows desktop applications. Give it a try, chances are if you put some work in you shouldn’t have any problems.

If you have a new blog you may be facing a common problem. You got all amped up with your original idea and before you know it you are all out of ideas for posts. Chances are your blog is going to have others like it… Why not use your competition for inspiration?

AideRSS is a tool that analyzes a given RSS feed and then determines a ‘PostRank’ on the given posts in the feed. Each post will also get some other info drawn such as how many comments it had, number of Diggs, number of Tweets, and more. What this will do is give you the top performing content on the site. Go and read some of their top posts and while reading be looking for ideas that you can expand on or build on… Keep in mind your not copying them, rather looking for ideas that have not be touched upon. Staying up to date and current within your niche is also very important. Be on top of new delvelopments that may be taking place in your industry, read the news, and keep tabs on various related blogs.

Using these ideas you should be able to keep the ideas going. Another method that works is guest posting. As long as your site is of some sort worth being featured on, finding people to write a relevant post with a plug to them in it should not be too hard. Just make sure you are posting as well, after all your readers are there for your content and that’s why they come back. Your persona and view combined with the information you give is why your readers essentially do (or don’t) return.

I have been doing some commenting over on Shoemoney.com and today there was a post about getting users to your site. In in he mentioned some stuff about getting traffic from forums which is definitely some SMM stuff you should check out. More importantly however was a link to my site. It’s pretty cool to see a high profile site pull a relevant blog out of the comments and plug it.

Now if only I could finish this dam about me page…

Okay people, I managed to put together yet another post for Facebook Ads. Now you will learn about testing campaigns and how to tell whether or not you should increase your budget and let your ads loose. The most important factor in this lesson will be how much you are paid for each lead / sale for the item or w/e it is you are promoting.

The first step is to go ahead find your offers, get some ads together, and set a budget to test with. I would say $10 or $15 should be enough for you to get your feet wet… This again will be determined by the offer you are promoting and here is why: Lets say you have an offer that converts at $2.50 a lead for migraine pills and another offer that converts at $22.00 a lead for baby diapers. You get your ads set up and within an hour your test budget has been used for both campaigns and you have some data to work with. If your CPC was an average $.28 cents per click we walk away with around 35 clicks. Lets say that in each campaign, only 2 clicks converted. Offer 1 only made us $5.00 so we ended up loosing $5 on that offer. On our second offer however, those two clicks converted into $44.00, a $34 profit from a $10 test. Not bad!

If you have not figured it out yet, Facebook traffic is very finicky. You can get 100+ clicks a day and only see 1 conversion for a $3.00 lead that cost you $25+ to generate. The big tip here is TEST, TEST, TEST! I have had much more success with offers that take more to complete than simple zip-submit offers. If anyone has questions or ideas for another “MMWF” post let me know!

About four weeks ago I decided to try running a diet offer on Facebook and it ended up working pretty dam good. I promoted the “Pure Acai Berry” offer from NeverBlueAds that converted at $30.00 a sale. Not to shabby.

For the first five or six days I was making upwards of $750 a day. When the second week rolled around it jumped up to around $900 a day and then started to decline very fast. By the end of the third week it dropped to about $200 a day. Average spending on Facebook was around $180 a day for this offer. I woke up Friday to find my ads deactivated and a stern warning from Facebook that these offers are not to be promoted again or risk my account being disabled. After doing some scouring on my other profiles, I noticed a large number of Acai related diet ads were gone… Are they nuking these offers regardless?

The thing is I was sending all the traffic (through my affiliate url cloak) directly to the landing page of the offer. I took an hour or two to get my own landing page and domain together and I now have ads running on Facebook again. They are converting about the same but holding better throughout the day. While I have not seen high spikes in conversions, it has also not gone below $300 since Friday.

I think Facebook is just very picky when it comes to the grey area that is being “deceptive.” Granted the default landing page was a little shady lookin’ but Facebook is just as picky if not more picky than your girlfriend. I recommend to anyone who has trouble getting ads through to invest some time in making your own landing pages.

Anyone else getting anything like this? I noticed there is still an amazingly large amount of diet ads going but I think Facebook might be cracking down after that Muffin Top b.s.

In my last post about making money with Facebook I gave you guys some info about cloaking your affiliate URLs and how important it is to keeping your ads live. If Facebook notices a direct affiliate link your chances of getting your ad approved are slim to none.

I just read a post by Shoemoney about Google drastically decreasing people’s AdWords quality score for direct linking their affiliate URLs. There are hundreds of places that you can cloak affiliate URLs with short, better looking, unsuspecting links. What this all comes down to is being smart with where you are sending your traffic (if you want your CPC to remain low…) This is kind of good timing because the next Facebook money maker will be all about landing pages and how they can increase your conversions. Aside from that I am also trying to get some feedback on what people need help with when it comes to making money with Facebook so feel free to comment and ill work it in to the next post.

I would also like to hear from people on whether or not they are having any success on Facebook as I have put some decent information into these posts and anyone who reads them could easily be making some cash money.

A lot of the time you may want to promote an offer such as a nice e-mail submit that requires some type of program fulfillment in order to receive a ‘free’ gift or whatever. Chances are Facebook will not let it through so how can you slip it by them? Well, why not create an ad that would work with two different offers and then switch the link? It turns out this is a very effective way of sticking it to Facebook.

So now I’m going to get into more of the possibly “Blackhat” techniques. Chances are you already have some type of method set up for masking / redirecting links to your affiliate URLs. The key for this technique to work is you must be able to change were the link is redirected to. So using a service that you cannot change the redirection location on will be of no help to you. Best bet is to use .htaccess or your own redirect scripts.

Once again I will give you an EXAMPLE THAT WORKED 100%. I was trying to promote a simple e-mail submit car insurance offer that Facebook would simply not allow through. So, after some thinking I wrote up an add for saving money on car insurace and set my masked link to redirect to Geico’s information page. As it turns out the ad I made coincidentally worked for an offer I had. First page e-mail submit for car insurance quotes. Facebook of course approved the straight up non affiliate link to Geico and then I quickly changed the redirect from Geico to my affiliate link for the other offer.

Simple enough huh? Once again the whole idea is quite simple. All you need to do is think outside the box people and the money will jump right into your pockets.