Archives for March 2009

I’m very excited about two things – one is that it’s finally spring, even if it’s only about 36 degrees in New Jersey.

The other good thing is that I bounced back from a weekly weight gain after going to South by Southwest. While I picked up two pounds for the weigh-in last week, I ended up dropping four for this week.

But this week brings a new challenge, as I have another conference – Search Engine Strategies in New York City.

The plan is to exercise some discipline with the eating and drinking, and actually incorporate some exercise this time around.

But back to springtime, I am excited about a break in the weather, so I can get out to shoot hoops and take walks.

One thing from my affiliate fatblogging video last week, Tim Jones of TheRealTimJones.com mentioned in a comment that he started at about the same time and weight as I did, and he’s down to 213.

So I’m just going to say it here and now – I’m gunning for you, Tim Jones. And I’m going to win.

Anyhow, I currently work out at a gym called Lifetime Fitness, and it’s a great place to go, but there are days when I just can’t find the time to get over there.

We do have an elliptical in the house that my wife uses, but since I use one at the gym, I’d rather do something else at home. Also, we ended up putting it in a room where the drop ceiling is sort of low, and I’d literally have to take a panel out of the ceiling to use it – and the few would be horrible.

I’ve never really worked with weights, so maybe it’s time to get started with them. But I don’t have the first idea about the various brands and whatever, so if there are any affiliates that can recommend some sort of basic setup for me to buy (with their affiliate link) in the comments, I’ll go and buy it through you.

Just some free weights – nothing crazy. I figure I can set it up in the garage, which is next to my office, and then I can go in there sometimes to blast music, grunt, and pump some iron.

Starting weight: 225
Last week: 221
This week: 217

The keynote address from Guy Kawasaki, “Nobodies are the New Somebodies,” at SESNY 2009 was about how Twitter can be used as a marketing tool.

Here are the key points from Guy’s talk…

1. Forget the A-list – it is vastly overrated.
2. De-focus – you don’t know who will be your most important followers.
3. Get lots of followers

   Guy related how Robert Scoble told him to auto-follow anybody that follows him, and he uses SocialToo to do this. He never unfollows people.

   He explained that the reason he auto-follows everybody is his lack of arrogance, and so that everybody can direct message him.

   But then he went into a sanctimonious rant, which seems to be common with the preachers of auto-follow, that it’s somehow wrong to only follow certain people vs. all.

   He went on to say that he doesn’t actually read the full Twitter-stream of those followers, but does respond to all DM’s and @ replies.

   So, he follows everybody out of a lack of arrogance, but can’t be bothered to read what they are Tweeting unless it involves him? So why is that morally superior to following a smaller core of people and actually reading all their Tweets?

   Whatever.

   Some tools he mentioned to keep score of his follower tally: TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and Twitter Penis.

   Guy cites a steady stream of useful content as key to continually bring on new followers.

   One of his strategies is to go to StumbleUpon and Alltop to find stuff there to Tweet. He uses Adjix to shorten and track his URLs. In addition to tracking, it has a scheduling function and a Firefox bookmarklet.

   This helps to get people to ReTweet posts, and he also uses Retweetist to monitor RT’s.

4. Monitor what people are saying about you

   Guy monitors the following query on Twitter search: guykawasaki OR alltop -alltop.com

5. Copy

   Watch what other companies are doing and emulate their success on Twitter. But how to figure out who to copy? See twibs to track what companies are doing on Twitter.

   Some examples of good corporate accounts on Twitter:
   @comcastcares
   @jetblue
   @amazondeals
   @cirquelasvegas

6. Search

   Guy talked about how he didn’t really get Twitter until somebody showed him Summize and the ability to search.

   Examples of finding people in certain geographic areas for business leads:
   scion near:10019 within:100mi
   seo near:10019 within:100mi

7. Get the tools

   TweetDeck, though he doesn’t like the limitation of monitoring one account at a time. So, he also uses Twhirl, so he can monitor and post with two accounts: @guykawasaki and @alltop.

   He explained that @alltop is for him to spam and @guykawasaki is for him to push good links.

   Also, CoTweet for companies where multiple people need to be in a Twitter account.

8. Squeeze the trigger

   He prefaced this one by saying it was bound to be controversial… TwitterHawk.com, which enables you to set up searches and then automatically post tweets to respond to other Tweets with your keywords in them.

   He joked that it is the “ultimate spamming tool”. Not sure what the joke is there – that’s exactly what it is.

   Guy gave an example where whenever there is a search for Britney Spears, he auto-posts to tell people to go to a page on Alltop about Britney.

   He opts to manually approve the Tweets, so they don’t go to people that are Tweeting negatively about a given subject, because these posts cost $0.05 each.

   Guy mentioned that Twitterhawk records when you’ve sent a Tweet to somebody, so you don’t send more than one to them.

9. Make it easy to share

   Have a link on your site to share content on Twitter – he has these on AllTop.

   Also, he uses Twitterfeed to enable people to sign up to have his Alltop News Feed posts appear in their Twitter account. So far, 590 people have opted for this feature.

   And Guy claims lots of people have told him that they have more conversations going on, because of his auto-Tweets, as they are more interesting than their own Tweets. Sad.

   He mentioned that he got a custom setup from Twitterfeed, and thinks it is a good option if you have lots of evangelists.

10. Take the heat: UFM

    Guy finished with his perspective that if somebody doesn’t like your tweets, tell them: UFM = unfollow me.

    And lastly, his take on spam is that if he does it, it’s clever marketing. If somebody does it to him, it’s spam.

    LOL. Unfollow.

The American International Group Inc. (AIG) bonuses from bailout money have folks all over the country outraged. That’s all understandable, I suppose, though Senator Chris Dodd should probably be the face of this issue.

But that’s a whole other story.

Personally, I didn’t favor any bailouts, which brings me to the recent changes for the Small Business Administration’s loan programs.

In a continuation of bailout mania, President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner recently announced big changes for the SBA’s loan programs.

The plan will also require that the largest 21 banks—that received federal bailout money—will now have to detail their small business loans on a monthly basis. Additional banks may be required to do this quarterly. In other words, this measure is meant to pressure lenders to make more loans.

Now I think this is needed for many small businesses, but I am concerned about the part where lenders are being pressured to make more loans.

I can’t help but think of the mortgage mess where banks were pressured to make more loans. And we saw how that ended.

The reality is that there are many, many businesses that shouldn’t get loans – their ideas and people don’t have what it takes to bring things to the next level.

I’m proud to say I’ve had many failures as an entrepreneur. I thought they were all good ideas at the time, but the market didn’t support them.

When I was in that mode, I was sure I had great affiliate ideas that would be huge if only I could get some funding. But in retrospect, they were flawed sites, plans, and ideas.

I sure hope the changes with SBA loans don’t work out to be bailouts of lousy affiliate ideas, and other companies that deserve to die quietly.

I have been linking to all sorts of sites for many years with my blogs. Sometimes there are affiliate links and other times they are direct links – no rhyme or reason to it, I just don’t think about it sometimes, but I’d prefer that they were all affiliate links.

But how to retroactively remedy the situation? After all, I’ve got nearly 3,000 posts, dating back to early 2004, on this blog alone.

One solution is Skimlinks, where you paste a snippet of code to your site, and they can then convert your existing links to affiliate links for you.

I caught up with Joe Stepniewski, Co-founder of Skimlinks, at SXSWi, and he elaborated, “Skimlinks is an innovative technology that lets publishers monetize their content via affiliate marketing in a simple and user-friendly way. It aggregates the affiliate programs of 16 affiliate networks and over 8000 merchant programs, and automates the creation and maintenance of affiliate links by converting normal, existing links within publisher’s content into their equivalent affiliate link, on-the-fly when clicked.”

It’s a pretty seamless process, as the new links through Skimlinks are independent of other affiliate relationships you may already have going on.

Per their site on how affiliates get paid with Skimlinks…

We keep a small portion of the commissions paid to us by the networks. We retain between 15-25% of network/merchant payments, depending on the revenues you generate. And because of our scale and the deals we negotiate, it means you can earn up to 110% of what you would have earned if you did it yourself. Its free to sign-up and to use Skimlinks reporting services, and we only get paid when you make money.

More details at http://skimlinks.com/.

I am ashamed to say that I just got back Sunday from the SXSW conference in Austin, TX, and I was a total failure when it came to being disciplined and exercising.

I went there with the intention of maintaining a healthy diet and ended up having fried calamari, cheeseburgers, and Pop Tarts. Just a horrible diet, combined with no exercise, lack of sleep.

On the positive side, I came back with lots of good information, new contacts, and ideas for some projects. But there was a negative, too – a net gain of two pounds for the week.

However, I am planning to redeem myself. I am heading to NYC next week for SES and the plan is to eat well and exercise during the conference – for real this time.

For now, it’s a week of detox, sweat and catch-up for work.

Starting weight: 225
Last week: 219
This week: 221