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Internet Marketing Tweet Digest 2009-05-31

May 31, 2009

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Internet Marketing Tweets 2009-05-29

May 29, 2009

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Internet Marketing Tweets 2009-05-27

May 27, 2009

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Internet Marketing Tweets 2009-05-26

May 26, 2009

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Internet Marketing Tweets 2009-05-25

May 25, 2009

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50 Twitter Tips for Conversion

May 22, 2009

So here it is: Twit­ter.  It’s every­where being hyped as the next great thing, but what can it do for your business?

Like any emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy the uses are some­what open ended and there are still many ques­tions.
A few things are absolutely certain:

  1. Twit­ter offers you an oppor­tu­nity to engage a large num­ber of peo­ple who are com­fort­able online. Which means they will either pur­chase online or talk a lot online.
  2. Twit­ter is grow­ing dra­mat­i­cally. How long that growth will last is up for debate but the real­ity is that it is here now and bar­ri­ers to entry are very low. It’s free and only requires and strat­egy which is embracing.
  3. Twit­ter can ben­e­fit your com­pany through cus­tomer ser­vice, prod­uct pro­mo­tion, mar­ket­ing and PR just to name a few.

I’ve put this guide together to get you started on your Twit­ter cam­paign and strat­egy. It is our hope that you find this guide use­ful. Please for­ward this to your friends, col­leagues and relatives!

Also I’m look­ing for­ward to your com­ments, addi­tions, thoughts, and gen­eral input on any of this.

50 TWITTER TIPS FOR CONVERSION

  1. Engage your fol­low­ers. Sim­ply throw­ing pro­mo­tional offers at peo­ple will only add to the white noise on Twit­ter and you will not stand out. Send @ replies, help out, dis­cuss and be real.
  2. Ref­er­ence your site fre­quently. You don’t even need to always ref­er­ence your newest con­tent, ref­er­ence your most use­ful con­tent. With the stream of mes­sages on Twit­ter. There is noth­ing wrong with referencing.
  3. Cre­ate a cus­tom Twit­ter land­ing page and direct users there. Use the KISS approach, one offer specif­i­cally for Twit­ter users, you’ll notice a huge difference.
  4. Do not be afraid to unfol­low peo­ple who are adding to your white noise. Like any list you want to tar­get your audi­ence, some affil­i­ate mar­keters out there will only Tweet offers and junk. Lose them.
  5. ReTweet valu­able tweets from your fol­low­ers. This is a huge thing and extremely com­ple­men­tary. I find on my lists that there are about 5% if the users that I ReTweet mul­ti­ple times. Is that a new rule 95/5? 95% of your ReTweets come from 5% of your users.
  6. Ask your users ques­tions. There are two ways to do it. Infor­mally by sim­ply throw­ing it out there and ask­ing for a response. For­mally by using Twt­Poll, which will track responses. Either way ask engag­ing ques­tions of your users, some­thing that will incite debate and opinion.
  7. Exclu­sive offers. When I say exclu­sive I mean exclu­sive, don’t just regur­gi­tate another offer, make it exclu­sive and time lim­ited to Twit­ter users oth­er­wise you risk being in the “white noise” category.
  8. Incen­tives for fol­low­ers. We effec­tively use $50 Cash Cards for the nth Twit­ter fol­lower for doing noth­ing more than sim­ply fol­low­ing. We do it every thou­sand fol­low­ers but pick your met­ric and follow-up on it.
  9. Mon­i­tor Twit­ter Search. You would be amazed at how many active dis­cus­sions you can miss if you don’t watch the buzz. Get in there!
  10. Join Twit­ter Busi­ness Direc­to­ries. Two good exam­ples are WeFollow.com and Twellow.com, add your­self to rel­e­vant cat­e­gories and search out poten­tial leads on a reg­u­lar basis.
  11. Engage a key indi­vid­ual in the Twit­ter dia­log. A good strat­egy is join­ing your CEO’s pro­file to your cor­po­rate pro­file. Not only will you gain a wider fol­low­ing, you’ll have the abil­ity to chan­nel directly to your “go to guy (or girl)”.
  12. Fol­low PR and News Sources. You’ll cre­ate a direct dia­log to the peo­ple who can get your mes­sage out there.
  13. Engage Anger. If you’re a busi­ness there is likely some­one ready get annoyed with you. Don’t shy away from them, embrace and com­mu­ni­cate them, you may have your next great advo­cate out there scream­ing good things about you.
  14. Live Updates from Events or Con­fer­ences. This will cre­ate buzz and excite­ment from your user base. No one cares if “it’s a hot day here in Glen­dale Ari­zona” but they might care about “The boss just gave a great tip on our newest prod­uct release”.
  15. Fol­low peo­ple. Alot. I can’t stress this enough. Some peo­ple think it is a badge of honor to have sig­nif­i­cantly more peo­ple fol­low­ing you than you fol­low. Not true. What you are really say­ing is I want a one way con­ver­sa­tion, not very social at all.
  16. Fig­ure out “Social Engage­ment”. How do you engage social media? You be social and engage. Why many peo­ple don’t under­stand this I will never know.
  17. Twit­ter about your com­pe­ti­tion. Why not? Even link to them, if you are con­fi­dent in your prod­uct then you have an oppor­tu­nity to show the world you have the supe­rior product.
  18. Com­ple­ment your com­pe­ti­tion. When your com­peti­tors do some­thing right then do not shy away from it. Give them a shout out. It shows strength and confidence.
  19. Send use­ful links which may not be directly related to your busi­ness. It could be a news event or some­thing you found use­ful. Peo­ple appre­ci­ate tips and advice.
  20. Cre­ate a cus­tom back­ground for your Twit­ter page with your con­tact infor­ma­tion. You would be amazed at how many peo­ple will reach out to you directly. Check out the Hon­ey­pot Mar­ket­ing Twit­ter page, noth­ing fancy but it works.
  21. Add your Twit­ter pro­file to your email sig­na­ture. Sounds basic enough but emails get passed around quite a bit.
  22. Add Twit­ter­Counter and Twit­ter badges to your site. Not rocket sci­ence but highly effec­tive. Inter­net mar­ket­ing is a two way street, go both ways.
  23. Engage in polar­iz­ing dis­cus­sion. Is @oprah adding noth­ing of value? Tell her, it will polar­ize but it will get you engaged.
  24. Auto Fol­low peo­ple who fol­low you. I use Tweetlater.com to auto­mate this process but it is (to me) a com­mon cour­tesy and I just think it works well, saves a ton of time too. You can purge lists once a month or so to keep your list up to date.
  25. Pro­vide cus­tomer sup­port. What­ever you do or sell, peo­ple will have a prob­lem. Uti­liz­ing Twit­ter as a rapid response tool is incred­i­bly effec­tive and gen­er­ally peo­ple only need a minor tip to get on track.
  26. Cre­ate a daily digest of your tweets for your blog. This not only incites the search engines into rank­ing you quickly (more cus­tomers!) but it pro­vides a his­tory and a sense that your com­pany has fully engaged the com­mu­nity. That’s a good thing right?
  27. Twit­ter your knowl­edge. No mat­ter who you are and what you know, your back­ground and expe­ri­ence will help those and could posi­tion you as a thought leader. Cheesy term but true. You’ll become an expert and peo­ple will respect that and as such respect your company.
  28. Stay on Tar­get. You want to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple and lead them to and end goal. Never lose sight of that. Sketch out your con­ver­sion path (what­ever it might be) and make sure you are achiev­ing that goal. You will be sur­prised at how quickly results will happen.
  29. Don’t nec­es­sar­ily try to sell “stuff”. Sell­ing “things” may or may not work for you on Twit­ter. Be real­is­tic about your end goal, brand­ing, cus­tomer ser­vice, lead gen­er­a­tion. Gen­er­ally using Twit­ter as a con­duit makes it a great lead gen­er­a­tor, not a closer.
  30. Talk about how your prod­uct helped a cus­tomer. If they are on Twit­ter ask them to par­tic­i­pate in the dia­log and back you up. Bring­ing it full cir­cle will pro­vide you incred­i­ble benefits.
  31. Cre­ate a Twit­ter Inter­view. I refuse to engage in the man­gling of the Eng­lish lan­guage for the pur­poses of brand­ing Twit­ter. Some peo­ple call them Twin­ter­views — hor­ri­ble. Set up a series of 10–15 ques­tions and ask the your inter­vie­wee to @ reply them. You can even ask your fol­low­ers to DM you spe­cific open ques­tions. Works like a charm.
  32. Ask peo­ple to ReTweet but not every­day. Ask­ing peo­ple to ReTweet directly on occa­sion will indi­cate that this is an impor­tant mes­sage. With a good fol­low­ing you’ll get help.
  33. Don’t be afraid to go offline. Some­times you can’t engage com­pletely on Twit­ter so take it to phone, email or face to face (if pos­si­ble). Only so much can be com­mu­ni­cated in 140 characters.
  34. Ask your fol­low­ers what they think of your offers. It’s a form of Direct Mar­ket Research. Exam­ple: “Would you rather get 20% off or a free movie pass for two? Let us know!”.
  35. Use Twit­Pic. Post pic­tures of your events, office, peo­ple in your office. Be human! No likes a mar­ket­ing driod Twit­ter pro­file. You can *really* con­nect with peo­ple by being just like every­one else.
  36. Tweet com­pany events. Did Joy in Account­ing just have her first child? Tell every­one about it and how happy you all are for her. Unless of course your com­pany is a sweat­shop, which I highly doubt it is.
  37. Tweet the suc­cess of your cus­tomers. If you are B2B Con­grat­u­late your clients on a suc­cess­ful promo or cam­paign. Spread the love.
  38. Don’t insult peo­ple. Unless this your per­sonal account and you’ll do what­ever you want then fine. But never insult a client or com­peti­tor, you’ll look bad for ages and you can dam­age your own future rep­u­ta­tion. Trust me there can be an idiot fac­tor on Twit­ter and it can be dif­fi­cult some­times. I know I’ve lashed out a few times on my per­sonal account. Oopsie.
  39. Con­duct Web­site Test­ing. If you have a new promo or land­ing page ask your users which they like bet­ter. You are after all try­ing to appeal to them are you not?
  40. Define your objec­tives. I have alluded to it ear­lier but make sure every­one in your com­pany under­stands what you are try­ing to do. Maybe directly sell­ing your prod­uct won’t be suc­cess­ful but sell­ing your ser­vice will be.
  41. Test, test, test. Twit­ter is an emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy; to be hon­est no one quite knows what to do with it just yet. That makes test­ing your mes­sage and con­ver­sion flow critical.
  42. Don’t be afraid to change course. Things change and you should change with them, if you found a sweet spot for com­mu­ni­ca­tion or sales try to move in that direc­tion with­out being scared to do so.
  43. Auto­mate your blog and Twit­ter accounts in both direc­tions. We love Word­press so it’s a no brainer for us. Every post gets an auto­matic tweet which will drive your cus­tomers to you. Simple.
  44. Inte­grate Twit­ter into your online strat­egy. We are huge pro­po­nents of inte­grated mar­ket­ing. That includes Tra­di­tional and Emerg­ing Mar­ket­ing with the same mes­sage. Tip: when going online don’t change the mes­sage just go a bit more grass roots style.
  45. Tell peo­ple who exactly is Tweet­ing. You may have a cor­po­rate pro­file like http://twit­ter.com/honeypot_mkting but start out by say­ing “Morn­ing All, @dannomatic is here this morn­ing”. Peo­ple like to know who you are and will be far more will­ing to engage you.
  46. Cre­ate a cor­po­rate Twit­ter Meetup. Admit­tedly this is a bit nerdy but it doesn’t have to be. Have an open house meet­ing to invite your Twit­ter fol­low­ers to the office, then Tweet about it. Buzz is amazing.
  47. Cre­ate time lim­ited pro­mo­tions and update it on Twit­ter. Real and effec­tive time lim­ited pro­mo­tions could include giv­ing out a free whitepa­per or case study for a lim­ited time. Link via DM to a PDF but only keep access open for a few hours. When it’s over redi­rect the link to a thank you and reg­is­tra­tion for email down­load. Then you’ll cap­ture the traf­fic, which is bound to hap­pen after time has expired.
  48. Cre­ate a Twit­ter only con­test. Be cre­ative but run it exclu­sively on Twit­ter and give away your prod­uct as priz­ing. It doesn’t need to be fancy, just fun.
  49. Cre­ate a tone of help­ful infor­ma­tion. Exam­ple: “Did you know that the Magic Bul­let can slice and dice? Check out the top fea­tures here…” and link to a blog post or infor­ma­tion sheet — prod­uct knowl­edge is impor­tant and leads to the con­ver­sion or sale.
  50. Deep link peo­ple into your web­site and blog. You’ve likely invested heav­ily in that glitzy shiny web­site. Point out use­ful com­pany infor­ma­tion, employee pro­files, prod­uct infor­ma­tion, review, and news. It sur­prises us to see Twit­ter being used to link to one page on a web­site. Deep link­ing encour­ages peo­ple to dig deep into your site, increas­ing the oppor­tu­nity for the conversion.
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Words of Wisdom

May 21, 2009

Can any­one guess who said this? Please com­ment and take a shot at it:

The para­dox of our time in his­tory is that we have taller build­ings
but shorter tem­pers, wider Free­ways , but nar­rower view­points. We
spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have big­ger
houses and smaller fam­i­lies, more con­ve­niences, but less time. We have
more degrees but less sense, more knowl­edge, but less judg­ment, more
experts, yet more prob­lems, more med­i­cine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too reck­lessly, laugh too
lit­tle, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too
tired, read too lit­tle, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have mul­ti­plied our pos­ses­sions, but reduced our val­ues. We talk
too much, love too sel­dom, and hate too often.

We’ve learned how to make a liv­ing, but not a life. We’ve added years
to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and
back, but have trou­ble cross­ing the street to meet a new neigh­bor. We
con­quered outer space but not inner space. We’ve done larger things,
but not bet­ter things.

We’ve cleaned up the air, but pol­luted the soul. We’ve con­quered the
atom, but not our prej­u­dice. We write more, but learn less. We plan
more, but accom­plish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We
build more com­put­ers to hold more infor­ma­tion, to pro­duce more copies
than ever, but we com­mu­ni­cate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow diges­tion, big men and
small char­ac­ter, steep prof­its and shal­low rela­tion­ships. These are
the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but bro­ken
homes. These are days of quick trips, dis­pos­able dia­pers, throw­away
moral­ity, one night stands, over­weight bod­ies, and pills that do
every­thing from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is
much in the show­room win­dow and noth­ing in the stock­room. A time when
tech­nol­ogy can bring this let­ter to you, and a time when you can
choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete…

Remem­ber; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not
going to be around forever.

Remem­ber, say a kind word to some­one who looks up to you in awe,
because that lit­tle per­son soon will grow up and leave your side.

Remem­ber, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is
the only trea­sure you can give with your heart and it doesn’t cost a
cent.

Remem­ber, to say, ’ I love you ’ to your part­ner and your loved ones,
but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it
comes from deep inside of you.

Remem­ber to hold hands and cher­ish the moment for some­day that per­son
will not be there again.

Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the
pre­cious thoughts in your mind.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:

Life is not mea­sured by the num­ber of breaths we take, but by the
moments that take our breath away.

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Wordpress Backup Plugins

May 14, 2009

In the last few days the Gum­blar mal­ware injec­tion attack has been mak­ing the rounds and hope­fully you’ve taken pre­ven­ti­tive mea­sures to ensure that you are as safe as you can be from this annoy­ing injec­tion attack.

Just so you’re aware the rea­son for this attack is Black­hat SEO spam­mers are attempt­ing to insert a hid­den link on your site for the pur­poses of link build­ing. The prob­lem is it’s not only ille­gal, it’s incred­i­bly lame.

Here’s another sce­nario, let’s assume for a sec­ond that your site did in fact get hijacked. Likely what you will be left with is an annoy­ing script in a tond of your Word­press site pages. Not just in your theme but in any­thing beneath wp-content that they could inject.

This might include:

  1. Your theme files.
  2. Your plug-ins (a very good case for lim­it­ing and audit­ing new plu­g­ins you add).
  3. Your wp-admin files (this is extremely annoy­ing as well).

Your only solu­tion at that point is to rein­stall WP (thus over writ­ing the com­pro­mised files), re upload­ing your theme (backup!) and rein­stalling all of your plu­g­ins. That would then get every file restored.

Now that’s a time con­sum­ing and lengthy pain in the ass process to be hon­est. So let’s be a bit proac­tive and add some func­tion­al­ity to your Word­press site that will auto­mate some of these things for you.

Here’s a list of trusted man­age­ment, backup and reso­ra­tion plu­g­ins I use on all my sites:

  1. WP-DBManager — this is a great plu­gin by the pro­lific Lester Chan (one of my favorite plu­gin authors). It will let you do data­base work and back­ups directly from your Word­press Admin. Very handy.
  2. Word­press Backup — this is also a highly rec­om­mended plug in that will backup more than just your post data. Run it reg­u­larly and bet­ter yet, auto­mate it. My rule of thumb is that if it can be for­got­ten it will be for­got­ten. I’m the worst case of that.
  3. WP-DBBackup — this will help you auto­mate that process and keep a nice fresh copy of your data­base on hand for that dis­as­ter­ous moment.
  4. eFiles Backup — this is a good one for a smaller site. In gen­eral any injec­tion attack won’t hurt your data­base, just the con­tent files. This lit­tle guy puts your files on eFiles.com — I haven’t tested it but I might actu­ally give it a whirl.
  5. Word­press Auto­matic Online Backup — this is another promis­ing ser­vice which I have not tried out but am think­ing of giv­ing a whirl. Like I said automa­tion is key.

In gen­eral peo­ple do not like to think about things like back­ups. It’s not a very sexy sub­ject to say the least. But from my expe­ri­ence there is noth­ing worse than hav­ing to weed through a mass of files, down­time, and just the frus­tra­tion of repair­ing things.

These back­ups can make a bad expe­ri­ence like get­ting injected rel­a­tively pain­less. It’s a bit of a “set it and for­get it” scenario.

If this is your first visit here you might want to have a look at my other Word­press Secu­rity and SEO Posts

All the best,

Dan

In

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Wordpress Exploit Gumblar .cn

May 12, 2009

Looks like there is another Word­press exploit out there dubbed Gum­blar .cn — I was actu­ally made aware of it through a ping­back from Growmap.com on their: Watch Out for Recent Word­Press Gum­blar PHP Exploit post.

These attacks are extremely time con­sum­ing to clean up, trust me I’ve had to do it before in the past. It’s not a quick or easy thing to have to deal with at all.

There is also an excel­lent expla­na­tion of Gum­blar here: Gum­blar .cn Exploit — 12 Facts About This Injected Script

Please proac­tively pro­tect your­self against this exploit!

Update: I’m quot­ing a bit from Scansafe’s excel­lent Q&A about the exploit:

Is this a cross-site script­ing (XSS) attack?

No. The com­pro­mises appear to be the result of stolen FTP cre­den­tials and direct manip­u­la­tion of files on the Web server.

What is the intent of the mal­ware dis­trib­uted through the Gum­blar com­pro­mised websites?

The mal­code dis­trib­uted via the com­pro­mised web­sites attempts to exploit PDF and Flash exploits in order to deliver mal­ware that redi­rects infected users’ search engine results. In these par­tic­u­lar attacks, the mal­code appears to be tar­get­ing Inter­net Explorer users and Google search. In addi­tion, the gumblar.cn mal­code installs a back­door that con­nects to 78.109.29.112 – an IP address of a known bot­net com­mand and con­trol that has his­tor­i­cally been asso­ci­ated with mal­ware engaged in mali­cious redirections.

Ref­er­ence blog post: http://blog.scansafe.com/journal/2009/5/8/google-serps-redirections-turn-to-bots.html

How do these mali­cious redi­rec­tions work?

Sim­i­lar to a man-in-the-middle attack, these redi­rec­tions occur as a result of a man-in-the-browser attack. The mal­code injects itself into the browser process, mon­i­tors the requests processed by the browser, and injects fraud­u­lent traf­fic. In the case of the Google SERPs redi­rects, the mal­code replaces legit­i­mate Google SERPs results with links point­ing to mali­cious or fraud­u­lent websites.

Mil­lions of web­sites have been com­pro­mised over the past year; what makes these par­tic­u­lar com­pro­mises unique?

A typ­i­cal series of web­site com­pro­mises reaches peak within the first week or so and sub­se­quently begins declin­ing in inten­sity as detec­tion is added by sig­na­ture ven­dors, user aware­ness increases, and web­site oper­a­tors begin clean­ing the affected sites. (This is why attack­ers are con­stantly push­ing new waves of compromise).

In the gumblar.cn attacks, the oppo­site is occur­ring. As web­site oper­a­tors attempt to clean up the orig­i­nal com­pro­mise or oth­er­wise make changes to the orig­i­nal source code of the .htm, .php, and .asp pages on their sites, the gumblar.cn com­pro­mise is injected. The gumblar.cn mal-script appears to be dynam­i­cally gen­er­ated and thus varies not only from site to site, but also from page to page on the same site. In addi­tion, the result­ing mal-script is heav­ily obfus­cated, fur­ther ham­per­ing sig­na­ture detec­tion meth­ods. As a result, the gumblar.cn com­pro­mises are increas­ing – up 188% from last week and a 61% increase from yes­ter­day.

Here are some related arti­cles I’ve writ­ten that might be helpful:

Word­press Injec­tion Attack

Block­ing Spam with Wordpress

Word­press Secu­rity Plugins

Best of Luck,

Dan

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Jaxson Daniel Nedelko

May 7, 2009

Well it’s been a rough 2 weeks but Nicole and I are now the proud par­ents of Jax­son Daniel Nedelko. Nicole was in labor for 23 hours, then 2 hours in the OR giv­ing birth then 2 hours in surgery after it was all said and done.

It looks like Nicole will be recov­er­ing for 4–6 weeks from the birth and surgery. Poor girl.

I’ll be post­ing pic­tures here from Flickr today.

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