A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about Follow Friday. Just to recap, Follow Friday is a movement that started on Twitter in January by @micah. The way it works is that you send a tweetto your followers and recommend to them some people that they should be following. I do not want into how it works on this post, I instead want to offer a bit of commentary. I have been reading a lot of posts about this lately and have seen an unfollow friday campaign begin. I want to go on record as saying that I support Follow Friday100%. To me it is the epitome of what social networking is all about and what it should be. This is networking in its purest form. To me it is like a cocktail party where there are hundreds of people. You may know only ten people, and one of your friends may know ten other people and he introduces you to them. Now you know twenty people at the party. Chances are that if you are friends with that guy then you will probably hit it off with his other friends. As a blogger trying to build a brand, the more people I can meet and interact with the better. The reality is that most people agree to me. Whether you like it or not the Follow Friday hash tag is one of the most popular hash tags on Twitter. This Friday in all likelihood there will be over 200,000 tweets that have the tag. I hope at least a couple have the @tycoonblogger attached to them. 
There is a real cool new tool for tracking your Follow Friday stats. It is called TopFollowFriday.com and you can see who endorses you and who you have endorsed. I have had 9 endorsements so far!
Lets help each other out with this. I will be checking to see if anyone endorses me on Fridays and I will certainly return the favor.
Best Twitter tool for follower management
There are dozens of tools available for managing your Twitter followers. I have discovered the best in class tool and the only follower management tool you will ever need. The site is Tweepulr and it is brand new (launched on April, 1). Tweepular combines many elements to help keep track of your tweeps. This should make your life a lot easier as you no longer have to jump from app to app to manage your twitter account.
The site is broken down into 5 main components:
1. Mutual Follows- This shows who you are following and who is following you back. The best part about this is that they provide a visual; each of your followers is graphically displayed in a box which contains vital stats.
2. No Follow Love- This will graphically display the people that you are following that are not following you back. They then allow you to either pick and choose who to unfollow or they provide an option to unfollow everyone with the click of a button.
3. People following you- Again, these profiles will be shown in an info box and you can decide if you want to add them individually or all at once. This is extremely useful to me, because last week I created an account to generate as many followers as possible. My hook is that I promise to follow every person that follows me. This allows me to stay good on that promise with the click of a button.
4. Tweepularity- This is the game changer, this is the app that makes all the difference in my opinion. The system will generate a report of recommended people to follow. From there you can then add them in bulk. I have found that close to 70% of those people who I followed have already followed me back. This has proven to be the best Twitter follower builder that I have used.
5. Recent Unfollows- This is still in development and according to the lead designer should be completed in a week or so. This will allow you to see who recently unfollowed you. What you do after that is up to you.
I discovered this tool yesterday and utilized the Tweepularity app and I was amazed at the amount of new followers. I ended the day with 252 new followers. I just checked my stats today and I am +176. If I keep adding followers at this pace, I will be over 5,ooo in a month.
Follow me @tycoonblogger
If you are looking for even more Twitter followers – I personally recommend TweetAdder – click on the banner below to learn more:
Most of the blogs that I follow are doing something to try to monetize their blogs. Most are using adsense or affiliate marketing programs. Some are selling direct advertising, and others are involved in advertising networks like Entrecard or CMF ads. A majority of the bloggers are missing out on what I see as the best opportunity to make money from your blog; Selling Services.
Most bloggers choose to specialize in a niche because that is where their expertise and interests lie. If you write unique and useful content then others will start perceiving you as an expert in your field. Why not offer consulting services in this area? As an example, I run a career advice blog and through that blog I offer resume writing services and interviewing preparation consulting. My earning from that blog are averaging between $1,400-$1,800 a month, with 90% of that money coming from resume writing. I am lucky if I make $10 a month through adsense on that blog.
Most of my readers are blog owners or people that are interested in starting a blog. One of the best services to offer as a blogger, is writing services. There are many webmasters and other blog masters that will pay good money for high quality content. Last month, I created a page on this blog called, “Hire Me,” and on that page I have a brief paragraph that informs the reader that I am available to hire for content creation through my writing company, Juicy Content . In the past week I have had three new clients and over $250 dollars as a direct result of advertising my own services on my blog. The best part is that I did not have to pay anyone a percentage, the entire amount was pure profit. I love getting these kinds of emails:
Other services that you can offer as a blogger, in addition to writing are:
Give it a try, go ahead and add a “hire me” button on your navigation bar, what do you have to lose?
Do you sell services on your blog? What types of services do you offer through your blog?
So you kick up Google Analytics, as I do nearly every day, and take a
look at the myriad of stats provided to you. You get visits,
pageviews, time on site, etc., all with pretty straightforward
meanings. But what about bounce rate? This measures the percentage of
people who go to your site, look at one page, then leave. This is a
confusing stat for most people, who either a) misinterpret it or b)
disregard it as useless. It is, however, an extremely important stat
that you must take into account as a measure of your advertising
strategies and the quality of your blog’s content.
When we examine bounce rate, we must consider it in two different
places: the home page or other navigation pages, and actual content
pages. The former is where the true analysis lies. When people arrive
at the latter, that is pages with actual posts on them, the bounce
rate will be high merely because people will visit your site from
Google or other sources for the content itself, and nothing else. They
therefore will be less likely to navigate anywhere else on your site.
However, on navigation pages, people are looking to find content on
your site specifically, and if they don’t find any and leave, this can
tell you a lot about your website.
One thing this tells you is that your advertising strategies are bad,
meaning the way you try and drive visitors to your website fails in
getting readers and merely generates what is called “bad traffic”. You
want readers in the end, and this stat tells you they are not coming
in. Common reasons advertising would fail in this regard is with
traffic generation sites, which force or provide benefit for visiting
sites or not much else (Entrecard, Blogexplosion, etc.), or a
mistargeted ad scheme. If you believe this may be the case, adjust
your strategy to get what you want, or you’re just wasting money or
time. Another thing this may tell you is that your content is just
bad. If people are looking for content on your site, and are
dissatisfied with what they see, they will leave. This could be either
due to the above effects, that of bad advertising strategies, bad
titling, or bad writing. This means you must improve your style or
topic choices to better entice readers to look for more and eventually
come back.
To conclude, though bounce rate is a confusing stat, it is important.
It tells you a lot about how you try and market your site and how your
site is in and of itself. Low bounce rate means more pageviews, which
means more ad impressions, which, even for those bloggers which are
not driven by the passion for writing but a desire for income, is a
good thing also. When you look at your analytics page, don’t dismiss
bounce rate, embrace it.
What is your bounce rate? What do you do to help lower your bounce rate?
Last month, I mentioned that I was going to try Adgitize out, what a waste! Bottom line, do not even bother.
As you all know, I am active in the EntreCard community but that may be coming to a close. I wrote a post a couple of weeks back about the paid ads system and how much of a mess it was. The latest blunder of the juvenille management team is that they are now censoring the forum.
They are only allowing a “select few” to join and post on their “community forum.” All the while they continue to treat the backbone of their company (the bloggers) like second class citizens. Those kids over there need a lesson in business 101. You will notice that I still have a EC widget on this blog and that is due to the fact that I have a bunch of credits that I still need to spend in the marketplace. I did not want this post to be about bashing EntreCard, rather I wanted to let everyone know that I joined the CMF Ads community today and I am very pleased with what I am seeing so far.
For those that are not familiar with CMF, the are a blogging/ad network that helps bloggers promote and monetize their blog. They are similar to EC in the sense that you earn credits and use credits to advertise on other members’ blogs. That is where the similarities end. Unlike EC, CMF is a stable economy and there is none of the dropping that EC is built around. That is good for me because I do not waste my time dropping. My time is much more valuable than 30 cents for a half hours worth of work.
I would love to see CMF start a marketplace because I think that is the most valuable part of the EC experience. I currently spend all my credits on getting my posts digged, stumbled and retweeted.
The sign up process was easy and much more strait forward than EntreCard. I remember when I first joined EC it took me a week until I knew what I was doing. The biggest difference that I noticed is the company is actually run by people that really care about their company. The administrators are active on the forums and approved my blog in less than an hour. I also had a question about the size of my ad and I sent an alert to the admin. My question was answered in less than 5 minutes. I have questions that have never been answered over at EC. From what I can see, CMF has their act together and is run by adults who get it rather than a bunch of kids pretending that they know what they are doing. I guess the real test will be to see if I can actually make a few bucks from the ads and more importantly increase traffic from my ads and exposure in the community. I will keep you posted….
Is anyone else made the switch to CMF? Anyone else fed up with EC?
