Toms Skyline Design » Affiliate Programs

Just a Quick Update

skyline — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:48:36 +0000

So what have I been doing lately?

I have been busy and noticed I hadn’t got around to posting to this site in several months. Of course, unless I post some information on here nobody that stops by this site will know if I am still here or not.

Its Another Portland Skyline

Also, several months ago I converted this site over to a Wordpress site and also have my old Rants, Raves & Insights blog up and running on this site, too; notwithstanding that I have not posted to it in almost forever it seems. What I noticed was that I had grown tired of the theme I had been using and decided to build a new Wordpress theme from the ground up. You are looking at it. I call this Wordpress theme, Skyline Two. Website design, coding, Photoshop design and slicing, Flash design and a bunch of PHP coding all go into developing something like this.

This is the second Wordpress theme I have built from scratch in the past few weeks. You can see the other theme at Portlands Foreclosures. I also created a landing page for them too. Check out the “Coming Soon” link on that site to see a Real Estate Listings mockup with a nifty Flash intro.

Speaking of Flash … if you haven’t clicked on the PLAY INTRO link on the header image above … do so now. That’s another Flash intro that I am using here; because I Flash adds to a site, but an entire Flash Driven site is not so good for most sites, because Flash still is not as search engine friendly as standard XHTML and CSS driven sites. Nonetheless, Flash still looks cool and adds some pizazz to a site. In fact, I have recently put together a couple other sites that include Flash banners. Check out Just Settle My Debts and Renegotiate My Home Loan websites.

Rather than run on a bunch on this post, I will keep it short by saying that I have also been doing some social media marketing with Facebook and Twitter, some online classified marketing, developed some landing pages, tying some of them to lists and autoresponders. I also put together a few ebooks and done a little bit of work with Joomla, too. I will write more later to update the site.

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FTC to monitor blog claims and endorsements

skyline — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:36:19 +0000

Trust and ethics are ingredients of traditional advertising wherein consumers have grown to expect acceptable levels of compliance; and not tolerate deceptive advertising practices. The Federal Trade Commission [FTC] is one of the government agencies responsible for monitoring and policing violators of the public trust in this arena. Blogging and tweeting, on the other hand, have escaped the scrutiny of the FTC, until now. Soon, the FTC will be monitoring claims and endorsements in blogs. In the future, will representations that are non-typical be given safe harbor in blogs and social media? It looks like tainted endorsements and claims about products and services that are not typical will be considered deceptive; and bloggers making these claims or endorsements may soon be under the scrutiny of the FTC.

Clamping down on blogs and bloggers who post tainted endorsements and who make incredible claims, will be quite a task, in and of itself. Enforcement should prove interesting, especially with many blogs being written by people not residing in the United States. Monitoring and addressing deceptive advertising in other forms of social media presents other interesting questions and dilemmas. For example, on Twitter, how can a twit make an incredible claim and disclaim it; plus add a clickable link; all in a 140 characters or less? That would be the challenge for tweets; should they fall under the new scrutiny of the FTC. Once the FTC identifies violators, then what will they do and how will they be able to eradicate the problems?

Although I am opposed to censoring personal expression, I am supportive of maintaining ethics in advertising of all types. To that extent, I believe claims and endorsements in blogs and tweets need to be truthful and forthright; no different than in traditional forms of advertising. If you make claims about your personal results, first and foremost, those claims need to be factual. If you say you are making $50,000 per day, you need to be able to prove you are consistently making $50,000 per day. If you say you have a system that will generate a gazillion users, followers, clicks, or whatever, then you need to be able to prove you have been able to consistently produce those results. If, however, that statement is not factual and provable and you benefited due to actions of others in reliance upon your claims; then you should be liable for all damages sustained by those who relied upon the deceptive statements. Second, in this same example, in the event you are actually realized the results claimed and this realization is not a typical result, then the typical results need to also be stated conspicuously. A simple disclaimer saying these results are not typical is not enough. Ideally, these two rules would be applied similarly to other endorsements and claims; whether they are for weight loss, improved health, or any other quantifiable results. Additional comments relative hereto were recently solicited by the FTC, as noted in the FTC Endorsement Guide

As a side note, although beyond the scope of the newly planned monitoring of blogs by the FTC, this author believes that equally important to consumers and taxpayers, are elections, ballot measures and political campaigns; some of the biggest violators of deception in advertising in this country. Truth in advertising, because of the gravity and magnitude of the potential damage in the election and campaign process, transcends civil damages. Deception at this level should be prosecuted criminally; as egregious felonies or acts of treason.

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Harvard, Twitter and the Pareto Principle

skyline — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:38:10 +0000

A Harvard Business School study, as reported by Reuters, raises a serious question on the value of Twitter for businesses. Relying upon research by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, results show greater than 50% of Twitter users will tweet less than one time every ten to eleven weeks. Along with that, many have witnessed Twitter struggling to keep their system running, due to an overload of tweets, apparently by 10% of all Twitter users; who are responsible for blasting out 90% of all tweets. What an interesting twist on the Pareto principle.

Fail Whale says Twitter is Over Capacity

Notwithstanding there are some companies utilizing the social value of Twitter, one would have to question whether or not tweeting holds much value for smaller companies. The Harvard study seems to indicate that of all Twitter users they will tweet on average only once during their Twitter lifetime.

What do the ten percent that are responsible for 90% of the tweeting, tweet about? Although there are some tweets about news events, there are also some who simply troll for followers, by repeatedly tweeting a rotated set of keywords. However, the bulk of the tweets I have seen are MLM related, or attempting to sell their information or services. The same tweets are repeated over and over again; many of which, are too incredible to be true. Obviously, all of the people who say they are making twenty gazillion dollars per month; or who can show you how to get 50,000 followers in 90 days on autopilot, are not making the money they say, nor is it possible to build these empires on autopilot. It is, however, possible to send out thousands of tweets making these claims.

Twitter needs to figure out a way to minimize the SPAM that is flowing in the tweets; otherwise the value to businesses and to individuals will quickly diminish; and the only sustainability will be the smell of Hormel on Pareto;s plate.

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Response to the Nielsen Twitter Quitter Story

skyline — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:48:28 +0000

The Nielsen Wire initially purported that the about 60% of Twitter users failed to stick around after the first month. Following some feedback from the Twitter community, Nielsen added ancillary websites and applications that feed into Twitter and recompiled their data. What they came up with is that their original numbers were correct. They did not see any substantial difference in their numbers. The focus of the original article points to this retention rate in comparison to MySpace and Facebook, as a basis to conclude that the low retention is an impediment, or more directly, a road block to long term growth. I had planned to comment on their blog, however, I believe the topic had been closed. So, I will respond here.

Since there are no exit polls for Twitter users I am not sure how Nielsen quantified their data. Nonetheless, compiling data is part of what they do. So, I imagine they had valid data. From all the debate back and forth on the topics, it seems that limited factors are being associated to Twitter’s dismal retention rate; which some choose not to accept or question. One of those factors is that some people are just too clueless to get it; and another is that Twitter is too difficult for some people to grasp; or a combination thereof. In other words, if you are a Twitter Quitter it is probably because you lack intelligence. That may not be the best PR approach, but who am I to say.

From what I have seen, I see other issues factoring in to the large number of Twitter Quitters. Let me point out that this is speculation; because I do not have any way to quantify the data. First and maybe foremost, if you do have an issue, Twitter simply does not provide support. Their biggest support feature is a forum. However, support from Twitter is essentially non-existent. Twitter users may complain of the same issues for months and those complaints are virtually ignored, or in some instances, they simply say the issue has been resolved. From a customer service standpoint, you simply cannot ignore customer issues and expect them to go away. Let me clarify that.. you cannot expect the issues to go away. You can expect the customers to go away. Another negative is that Twitter appears to be a breeding ground for MLM programs with some incredible claims; of which, some cannot be supported, or are clearly false, or could be the basis to get your account deleted after using some of their tools or applications. Without regulating the dissemination of this type of content, what happens is that Twitter users are inundated with hundreds of repetitive MLM-hype tweets. I imagine that some people simply get tired of it. I have also seen complaints about receiving unwanted porn. The same applies here. These two examples represent only a couple scenarios. To address some of these type of issues, there is a process to unfollow someone. You can opt to block other users. However, processes do not always work; and sometimes basic functions do not work for various users. There appears to be no fix for these issues when they arise. When these processes and functions do not work properly, Twitter fails miserably on addressing these type of customer complaints. Allowing itself to be exploited and failing to handle customer issues will only continue to contribute to high Twitter Quitter rates; consistent with your projections about the unlikelihood of Twitter’s long term sustainability.

On the flip side, I believe that if MySpace were to add a similar method of mobile messaging they would recover from their 31 point dive and blow Twitter out of the water. Facebook has already added mobile messaging. Time will tell how that impacts their growth and sustainability.

Now that I have posted this, I see that a mildly different version of this post is awaiting moderation on the Nielsen site. For some reason, my post did not appear when I submitted it. Oh well, it has not yet been reviewed and accepted yet, either.

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Social Media Networks: Which Ones For Me?

skyline — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:16:59 +0000

Looking for a place to expand your social media network reach?

There are numerous social networks where your message(s) can be seen. Visibility is important; however, you want to be visible in the right marketplace. Rather than spending time blasting your message and ads to the wrong market, or to thousands of others whom you are competing with, try to locate social networks appropriate to your target audience. This methodology employs the same tactics as keyword usage and SEO/SEM. Broad based keywords will have the effect of generating more traffic than narrowly based keywords. However, narrowly defined keywords will generate higher conversion rates. Being more specific and less generalized in your targeting is an important factor to consider when preparing and delivering your message.

Types of Networks

In addition to the well-known multi-purpose networks like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter; depending on your product, service or niche, consider employing vertical markets, social bookmarking sites, recommendation engines, social shopping networks, horizontal markets, virtual worlds, photo sharing and video sharing networks, mobile networks and if appropriate, international networks.

Of the more hotly discussed social media networks, Twitter is so hot now due in part to the fact that it transcends the multi-purpose market and encompasses the mobile empowered network. Even though the majority of the social network options do not share this empowerment, they can nonetheless, be valuable to your campaign(s).

To keep this post short, I will list some of the many other social network options in a soon to follow post. Go ahead and subscribe to this blog so you do not miss out on valuable information and important news.

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Twitter Ad Sites: Who Makes the Money?

skyline — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:17:21 +0000

There are some brokers on Twitter that will charge an advertiser for exposure on Twitter. Then they find publishers (Twitter users) that will allow the ads or links to be displayed on their respective Twitter page(s). I have seen one or more of these broker sites that do not say what they pay the publishers (or if they do, it is difficult information to locate) … I suppose you find out after you sign up. In my research I stumbled across one of these broker sites that had cultivated about 1,000 followers and with their related traffic they were able make a case for selling the domain. They ended up selling the domain to someone at auction, for $6,000. Actually, they sold it early with a Buy-It-Now-Bid. There’s another idea there. What I found interesting about this particular Twitter business sales pitch, were some of the comments they made about the site, the revenues and the payouts, during their attempt to sell it.

They tell the potential buyer that with their traffic that the new owner should be able to bring in $10,000 a month, but rarely ever have to pay anything out to the publishers, due to the $20 threshold and the CPC rate of $.025 (50% split of the amount charged). So I clicked on the link to this Twitter Ads site; and it took me to a page with a couple of banner ads; giving another page to follow to. When I clicked on that link and went to the new site, I discovered that yes it was a Twitter Ad Broker Site and guess what? This site listed a $.04 CPC and had the $20 monthly threshold policy for publishers, too. It sounds like they are following the same pattern.

This is another program on Twitter to make money, but I have to ask myself, “Is is a good one?” One thing I have seen with these sites is that I may see advertiser testimonials, but do not see any publisher testimonials. You do the research and see what you think. Caveat Emptor seems to be appropriate here.

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