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.

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.

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.

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.