One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone emails me with an advertising offer and then when I give them a fair quote they go and change everything up to try and push the limits. For instance, this particular advertiser was interested in purchasing an undisclosed number of text links ads within content. After giving them a quote, they came back with a totally different offer and tried to low ball me on the price. Not only is this annoying because it takes time to price everything out, but automatically I don’t even want to be bothered in sending them an updated quote because it tells me they are cheap asses and I am here to make money.

Their new offer consisted of paragraphs of text that would be inserted across Smmguru.com and contain no more than three links per paragraph. How we got from text links to paragraphs of links I don’t know but why they would think a text link and a paragraph should be the same price I do not know. Don’t get the nature of this post confused. I am simply saying that most likely the people who are going to email you offers will try to get as much as they possibly can for nothing. That’s why its important to know the value of your ad spaces, what you can get from other advertisers, and what affects the ads could potentially have on your site and its visitors.

Don’t be afraid to reject an offer, if you sell your self short you will be kicking yourself in the ass later when you realize that selling lifetime paragraphs of text for $10 a pop was not nearly worth it lol. My favorite technique for dealing with these situations is to reply with the highest amount I see fit and see how the advertiser reacts. Surprisingly they will often take the deal (within reason) or give you another offer slightly below what you requested. Its a tricky game but when played well you can easily get ten fold what you would have otherwise if you settled for the quick payment.

Also keep in mind that not every ad space you sell has to be a “lifetime link.” You will find that most offers that involve big bucks will come in monthly or quarterly packages. Personally when I see people asking to buy a lifetime link I want to respond with an “lol are you serious?” I find it funny that people think they can put a value on a “lifetime link” as the exact value will most likely change dramatically over the lifespan of your website or blog. Because of this I will give the following tip: Instead of jacking up the price for a lifetime offer, instead give them a fair monthly rate knowing that later on you can make changes. Not only will you make more coin, but you can adjust the price as your site grows.

Just a few things to think about while you are stuffing your faces for the next days. I bet if you took this coming weekend to re-evaluate all of your advertising relations you will see that you could easily start to fine tune prices and increase your ad income.

When it comes to online marketing, a lot of it is just adapted from traditional methods of marketing to include the new technology. The three levels of product is about as Marketing 101 as the four P’s and can easily be adapted to many marketing situations were you need to figure out what exactly your product is. What if you wanted to adapt this methodology to social media marketing with perhaps a blog as the product in mind.

Level 1 – Core Product. This is going to be your main benefit or core offering of your product. In the case of a blog or website this could be your company brand, the content itself, or whatever the main benefit is of what you are trying to sell. In other words a consumer who purchases a photo printer does not buy just a printer, they are buying memories.

Level 2 – Actual Product. There are a lot of blogs out there so the idea here is you want people to come to yours. To do this you have to offer an advantage of some sort over your competition by introducing something like new features, better content, wider selection, better price, etc..

Level 3 – Augmented Product. This is where you go the extra mile to show to value in choosing you. This includes additional non-tangible benefits you can provide like after sales services, delivery, warranties, phone support, etc. This could include RSS feeds, exclusive newsletters, or ebooks for subscribers.

By going through the three levels of product you can easily pin point what it is your main focus is or should be, and lets you brainstorm for areas were you could create added value. Take ten minuets or so and take your blog or website through the three levels of product and see what you come up with. Are you offering enough benefits… Are you pushing the right idea to the consumer… Do you offer an advantage over your competition… Just a few ideas of things to look for.

One of the odd things people seem to have a problem with is tracking their buzz on Twitter. So, I figured I will take all the guess work out of it and give you an easy way to do it. When it comes to marketing a brand on Twitter, this is something you must be able to do and its actually very easy. Just keep in mind that regardless of what results you end up with, you need to keep tweeting and building your account before real results are possible.

Lets take a look at this technique. All you need for this is Twitter’s own search engine at search.twitter.com. By using the Boolean search features mixed with a few of Twitter’s search operators we can construct a query to see all the tweets that mention your name, but keep out tweets that where made by you.

The Query: smmguru OR “tyler colwell” -from:smmguru

This will show me all of the tweets containing my username or real name on Twitter. Once you have the query set up to our liking you could even take your monitoring a step further and build some type of widget to aggregate the RSS feed from the Twitter search into… something like your Wordpress dashboard. Over all this will just give you a much better idea of all the mentions you are missing in your regular usage.

Another great use for this technique is finding new people to build into your community. A lot of the people you find in your search could be those who are not yet followers. By replying to them and following those that you like they will most likely return the favor as they have already come into contact with your content (at least on Twitter.)

I have already showed you how to own Fark and now it’s time to own Facebook, using Twitter. If you tweet a lot or you have some type of auto-tweeting going on (hello API!) then this will already be an easy task for you. By taking advantage of the Twitter App for Facebook you can easily start to drive traffic that’s generated from your Facebook page.

The way the application works, every time you make a tweet on Twitter your Facebook status is updated. Why is this good? Whenever one of your friends on Facebook logs in they see the people who have most recently updated their status. So if you are constantly tweeting or have a Twitter Bot to do it for you, you will always be at the top of your friends’ Facebook page.

Traffic benefits aside, there are also other aspects to this technique. As more and more people see that you are tweeting away, they may become curious about Twitter and join. Using your account as the catalyst means they are very likely to follow you if they create an account increasing your network and power. And because the new accounts already know you or have some type of relationship with you on Facebook, you have built a stronger social network around yourself.

Go try it and by the end of next week I guarantee you will have an increased followship on Twitter.

When it comes to social media, building a relationship with your users is the first step. Naturally CRM or Customer Relationship Management should be a part of your campaign if not a major part of it. A perfect example of the power a well managed social media campaign along with CRM is Obama becoming America’s 44th President.

The Obama camp took advantage of many social media outlets to increase their influence amongst the younger generations and obviously it worked. They developed relationships on networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, and others. The Barack Obama website also played a large role in connecting people with Obama. While it is obvious that Barack himself does not manage, reply, and update these accounts on his own you can still see what a major role social media marketing can play. I think that without leveraging social media the way that the Obama camp has, their early victory may have been delayed or possibly never happened at all.

By focusing on creating a more one on one relationships with citizens, the Obama camp developed a highly scalable social media campaign that proves SMM is not just for bloggers and affiliate marketers. Their campaign was designed to:

• Get the message out, more importantly to the young people.
• Keep the message fresh.
• Stick to their story and let the truth be known.
• Track and stay in touch with interested visitors.
• Develop a worthwhile, engaging relationship with voters.

Non the less it was interesting to see what a major difference the online presence made. While social media played a large role in Barack’s win, I still think John Mccain would have won if he campaigned the way he did his concession speech. I think they went the wrong direction trying to make Mccain appeal to an audience he should not have and it cost him the election.

For some reason people think Digg is the only website that can send them traffic in their social media campaign. I am here to tell you a secret so devious, so true in nature that it may be shocking: Digg is not the only source of social media traffic. Whether you have been unpleasantly banned from Digg, or you are looking for a new network to establish yourself in, it’s time to start looking.

I am not an SEO and have no formal SEO training (who needs it?) but I do know that relying on Digg alone is pretty much like relying just on organic search rankings. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket, certainly not when it comes to social media marketing.

Digg as a time waster.
Obviously reaching the front page of Digg can bring a lot of goodies but let’s look at something else for once. The time and effort you spend trying to get there. For most Digg users trying to make the front page may seem like luck while for some it seems like every post becomes popular. While there is a small bit of luck involved it’s more Digg itself that has become the problem. The community is full of highly volatile users who love to bury content at even the slightest hint of linkbait.

Which is better in the end?
You can spend countless hours trying to get the immature Digg audience to promote your content, or you can move on. Move on to a variety of new networks that not only drive traffic and backlinks but help build a more targeted audience. For most, if you put the amount of time into other networks that you do at Digg, you will reap much larger rewards.

Design Float [Design]
A network focusing on design across many mediums, Design Float does not send much traffic but gives you access to many bloggers in the niche.

Bazooka Buzz [General News]
This is a Swedish network that sends a few thousands hits per popular story. The great part, stories can be written and submitted in English.

eBaumsWorld eLinks [Offbeat]
eBaums world has been around for a long time and has the power to drive a lot of traffic and links. Funny images and videos are the norm so if that’s your niche you are good to go. On another note the kid who started the site (Eric Bauman) went to my high school and turned the website into a multi-million dollar giant over the course of 2 years. The website started with videos of teachers getting pissed off in class at him for pulling pranks.

Cracked Pipeline [Offbeat]
This is more of a humor based network that you can exploit like Fark. If you are taking an offbeat approach to your linkbait, this is a network you defiantly want to try.

Meneame [General News]
A popular Spanish social media site that can easily send you a few thousand hits per submission, and even more links to go with it.

Lipstick [Celebrity]
Think of Lipstick as the Reddit of celebrity news. It won’t be crashing your server but a decent post can bring targeted traffic and great backlinks.

SugarLoving [General News]
By submitting your content here, you run the chance of having it pushed to other blogs in the Sugar Inc. network.

Keep in mind that I left out a few that you should already know like Mixx, Sphinn, Shoutwire, and Fark as I have covered them in various posts. Also don’t forget about all of these social networks as well.

Now that you know how to make a Twitter bot you may be looking to add some more functionality to it. One problem you may run into after some time is that you keep recycling or re-sending the same messages to Twitter. For example, you have 100 facts about your self and you don’t want any of them to appear twice but you want everything to be automated. How do you do this? Easy, just add a status field to your `tweets` table.

Step 1 – Add the field.
To add the field you can use the simple graphical interface in phpMyAdmin or use the SQL tab (or alternative) to run this code:

ALTER TABLE `tweets` ADD `status` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL;

What this will do is create a new field in your tweets table with 10 characters of space for that messages status. We will be setting them all to “ready”, and later changing our PHP code to update them as we go along.

Step 2 – Set all tweets to ready.
After you have the new field added to your database you will need to set all of the tweets you want to use to ‘ready’ status. In this example, only tweets with the status set to ‘ready’ can be randomly selected.

While inside of phpMyAdmin (SQL tab) or what ever tool you use, go to the page that allows you to run MySQL commands on your tables and enter this code:

UPDATE `tweets` SET `status` = ‘ready’

Alternatively you can pick which ones you want to use if you already have some tweets that you wish not to recycle. This SQL command will update every tweet/message you have in your database so use it wisely.

Step 3 – Modify PHP to update tweet status in database.
Our third an final step is to modify the php script so it will change the status of every used tweet. To do this, we will make a few simple changes to our original code.

First off, we have to change the MySQL query so it will only pull random messages with “ready” status:

For our second change, we will need to get the ID number of the tweet from the database and pass it to the sendTweet() function we will modify in a moment:

Then we modify our sendTweet() function to handle the tweet’s ID, and then change its status if the message is successfully sent to Twitter:

Now it’s all ready to role. Now every time a message is pulled from the database and sent to Twitter (successfully) it will have it’s status changed to “used” taking it out of the possible messages to send. Just upload your new php file, re-activate your CRON job and have some fun.