Twitter: How to be followed, retweeted, mentioned by a celebrity!

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeTwitter is one of the most powerful marketing & promotion tools anyone could think of! But for using it as a powerful tool, you have to accumulate thousands of followers and interact with hundreds of them. Otherwise you will end up with followers who are not responsive at all to your own tweets. But building up such a huge follower base is a time consuming job and could even get your account suspended by Twitter if you follow and unfollow too fast too many other members!

The easiest way to get noticed your tweets would be to get a Retweet or a Follow from a member with many followers (which would be a celebrity, another possibility for free is mentioned at the end of the post).

My experience in getting a retweet from Alyssa Milano

In March 2010 i found an extraordinary website which combined music and beautiful animations while you moved your mouse to the music! And Alyssa Milano found it so cool that she gave me a Retweet for it.

The first preparation should be to take care

• how many @-replies the celebrity gets at the moment.
  REASON: As soon as the celebrity made a tweet, hundred of fans will do a retweet of it. This would mess up with your intention that your tweet will be seen by your celebrity in the mentioning-Timeline.
  The best time to send your celebrity a tweet would be when the retweets are dying down to just one per minute (Can take 1/2 - 1 hour after the previous tweet depending on the tweet).

Now you should just tweet your celebrity something like

• outstanding news,
• beautiful animations/music or
• cute videos
• funny graphics
• helpful advice for other members
• funny comment on one of the celeb's tweets.
• or you take part in

The TwitChange-Celebrity-Charity-Auction

Getting more than a Retweet is possible until Saturday 25th September by a charity event called Twitchange.

Twitchange did setup an Ebay-Account "TwitChange-Auction" and is auctioning the following items of more than 100 celebrities (358 auctions to take part in).

You can bid on

• Twitter MEGA packages which include a single mention, follow for at least 90 days and a retweet.

For the smaller budget you can bid on

• a single mention,
• a retweet or
• following you for at least 90 days.

At the moment the cheapest prices for

• a Twitter MEGA Package is around 35$. (The celebrity @liltwist has 350.000+ followers, this might be a great bargain!)
• a Retweet may be around 40 - 50 $
• a mention could be 52 - 65$
• a follow is at 56$

If you have a fat pocket, you might enjoy to bid on these three TOP auctions for a Twitter MEGA Package:

1. Dana White
2. Zachary Levi
3. Jewel Staite
4. Eva Longoria

You may ask why are there not the celebrities with the most followers on TOP of this list?

The cause for this order in the list is that these celebrities offer a special bonus for the winner of their MEGA Package auction. Most celebrities offer additionally a phone or Skype call, tickets for their shows/events, backstage meetings, signed DVDs/Books/autograms or fashion tips.

For example Dana White offers additionally the complete costs of a journey to his next fight that's why he seems to be ahead with the highest bid of more than 15.000 $.

The Background for this TwitChange-Celebrity-Auction is to raise money for a good cause!

The TwitChange-Auction is for a good cause, that's why so many celebrities take part in it. When you bid and win the auction the spent money will be donated to aHomeInHaiti.org.

This is a charity who takes care that the Miriam Center can be finished to be rebuild. It's a Home for orphans with major life challenges like cerebral palsy or severe autism.

Do you think it's worthwhile to take part in this kind of auction and do you think it will be beneficial to grow your own Twitter account when you buy a mention, retweet or a follow from a celebrity?

Tomorrow you can read on The One Minute Guide - How to get Retweets to thousands of Twitter followers for FREE! (even when you have just 1 Twitter follower)

Sponsored Tweets: How NOT to make money

Sometimes you keep on wondering how "intelligent" some members of these Sponsored Tweets companies must be, just to get a few cents for a click on their ads - not thinking about the consequences. In the end they might loose out not only the clicks they received on this particular sponsored offer but most likely be banned if they are repeated offenders of these programs.

Just watch out for this tweet (to clarify: It's about my campaign which i advertised in Sponsored Tweets two days ago!)

With these programs you can earn money on Twitter & your websites/blogs

• MyLikes (weekly payout from 2$ on, earn for each click),
• Sponsored Tweets (set your own price/tweet or earn for each click),
• Ad.ly (pays per tweet),
• Revtwt (earn for each click),
• Twittad (get an ad on your twitter profile background and get paid to show it for up to one month)
• Twivert (get money for each click)
• Paid-to-promote (get money for each valid visitor to your blog)

Another case are - if you select to approve ads before they are tweeted out - that you can already reject tweets which clearly ask for Tweets or which don't have anything to do with the product you want to advertise like these Tweets:

asking for clicks

Wrong or too short product description

No description at all, just the disclosure.

I saw these tweets in some profiles who only tweeted out tweets like this. It seems like the other advertisers just selected auto-approval which might result in a ZERO result for them.

Some even ask in their Sponsored Tweets for Retweets to gain more exposure and clicks for their Sponsored Tweet.

CMF ADS: Infected by a superbug!

One month ago i started again to buy for several dollars campaign ads in CMF Ads Network instead of buying one of their low-cost Network ads (which by the way exploit just the CMF ADS publishers!).

As there are not many campaign ads running anymore in CMF Ads because they missed out that low-cost Network ads will harm their monetary system and as we can see leads to a severe recession with deflationary tendencies in their CMF ADS economy (a blog post about the devastating economical situation in the CMF ADS Network is prepared for Monday. There i will bring some light into their newly announced changes and "improvements").

When Network Ads (NA) got introduced, they've been running equally side by side with Campaign ads (CA).

This meant when you had SINGLE Ad widget and 2 CA, each CA got 50% of the available page views.

From end of January 2010 on around 8 - 12 NA have been running additionally each month which reduced the visibility for CA, especially on single ad widgets.

ONE CA would get now only -> 100% page views/(10-14 Ads) = 7 - 10 % of the available page views.

For a blog with 10.000 page views, your ad views would have been reduced from 5.000 to just 700 - 1.000 ad views. Most likely you paid up to 1 $ for that ad spot! Now the return in ad views would have been just like a low traffic blog on which you could advertise for 0.25 $ or less!

One week after the introduction of their Network Ads CMF ADS announced that the equal sharing will be changed and NA will show up only 30% of the time when they are running. This should mean CA could get 70% of the available page views - theoretically!

In the last weeks i had some extreme examples in which this was and still is completely NOT THE CASE. There have been some high-traffic blogs which get several thousand page views and my Campaign ad should get at least 1.000 page views after 10 days but instead of getting 100 ad views/day, the ad showed up just 35 - 45 times daily (in other cases up to 75% less views).

The behavior of the Campaign ad is just like before their announced change to a 30% reservation for Network ads. It had to share the page views EQUALLY with the Network Ads and didn't get 70% of the available page views!

Taking as example Ben Barden's Blog (CMF Ads Admin). This blog gets roughly 1.400 page views/month.

30% would be around 400 page views reserved for all running Network Ads, so a Campaign Ad should be exposed 1.000 times/month.

In my case i got just 170 ad views within 20 days instead of 500 ad views (excluding the surge in the first 5 days)!

In an email conversation in which i told Ben about this matter with the two "high-traffic" blogs, he replied me as if there is NO WEIGHTING and that the page views i received are the correct numbers even when Network ads should just get 30% of the available page views.

For a better view of the e-mail click on the screenshot!

Hopefully this superbug in their code could be changed to an algorithm in which Campaign ads are favored with 70% as they give paying advertisers a bigger portion of exposure when you want to buy an ad individually and publishers can earn again more money because they deliver the ad views an advertiser deserves!

I'm sorry for the members which ads got cancelled in the last days and weeks as their CPM was -due to this superbug - much higher than the 10 cents which i'm usually calculating to pay for my ad views.

Finally - The payment proof of LinkShowOff.com

When you look on the upper left corner, you can see the LinkShowOff.com widget. The LinkShowOff.com widget lets other advertiser place a text link with description (visible when you hover over the links) for a set amount (starting from 1 $, on my blog you would pay 2 $). You can show between 5 and 10 text links on their widget. When the widget is completely filled with your set amount of text links, the following advertiser will replace the first advertiser.

In my case it would take between 8 and 12 months (with 5 text links) until your purchased Text link would be replaced. In this time your text link ad would have been shown off between 25.000 and 40.000 times on a TOP location to my visitors! Here you can buy directly a text link ad from LinkShowOff.com on my blog.

Last week LinkShowOff.com paid me for the first time 11,34$ after almost 13 months (click on the payment proof for more details!). In the end it's kind of hassle-free earned money as you have almost no time to invest!

You have full control over the displayed text link ads. You can approve or disapprove every single ad which advertisers place on your widget. If you disapprove an ad, the paid money will be returned to the advertiser.
Payout is usually when you reach 10$ but they deduct 3$ as service fee before you can cash out. So you have to earn at least 13 $ to be able to get paid.

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Make money with Twitter: Be a magpie or not?

Image via CrunchBase

Be a Magpie is another company who claims that you can make a lot of money by posting advertisements to Twitter. Before you register with them they give you an estimate of how much you could earn per month from their tweets.

In my case their estimate was more than 1.000 EURO / month as i had six months ago around 10.000 followers. But they don't tell you how they calculate this income because in my case it was 0.00 EURO even after 6 months and several tweets from them.

Why you don't earn much with Be a magpie?

Most of my offered tweets have been affiliate links to website on which the interested clicker has to buy the offered item. Only in this case you would earn real good money (up to 10% of the sales price). In my case it was mostly for Web Hosting, holiday flights and software. But you could choose as well that you don't want to tweet such offers. In this case you have to wait a very long time until you would get a Pay-per-Tweet offer (or perhaps this was only in my case as the price might be more expensive for an advertiser to show up in my timeline).

Another reason why you have to take care when you are member of Be-a-Magpie!

Your account can get easily terminated (which happened to mine yesterday) because of violating their terms. You will get the following Account Suspension notice 4 weeks before they may terminate your account if you don't follow their rules:

At Magpie we are committed to providing a quality service for Twitterers, Followers and Clients. To ensure we deliver on this commitment, Magpie periodically monitors our accounts for compliance with the Magpie & Friends Ltd. Terms and Conditions which can be looked up at http://be-a-magpie.com/twitterers/terms-and-conditions.

Our system has flagged your account @cornyman as in violation of clause 4 - Misuse and Fraud – the posting of tweets in an automated manner e.g. by aggregating one or more RSS feeds. As per these terms and conditions, this sort of Twitter account does not qualify for participation in the Magpie Network and as a result, your account has been suspended.

To automatically have your account reactivated, please reduce the number of automated tweets to less than 15% of your total tweets. Your Twitter account will be monitored over the next four weeks to gauge compliance with our terms and conditions. If compliance is achieved during this period, your account will automatically be reinstated. Continual non-compliance will result in account termination and forfeiting of your earnings.

I just had no time to post that much to my Twitter account on my own as i moved back to Germany and had much more important things to do than to think about a certain percentage.

I guess if you are on several months holidays but have scheduled blog posts, you could get in trouble, too. The same will be when you might be sick but inject some RSS-Feeds from other blogs without posting yourself...

Not a very nice move from Be-a-magpie but as i didn't loose any money (just wasted my time with it), i can say

Hopefully everyone else has more luck with Be-a-magpie!

I'm much more happy with

• MyLikes (weekly payout from 2$ on, earn for each click),
• Sponsored Tweets (set your own price/tweet or earn for each click),
• Ad.ly (pays per tweet),
• Revtwt (earn for each click),
• Twittad (get an ad on your twitter profile background and get paid to show it for up to one month)
• Twivert (get money for each click)
• Paid-to-promote (get money for each valid visitor to your blog)

Adgitize: Special Summer Promotion until 31st July 2010!

Adgitize announced today in their blog a Special Summer Promotion in which every member who is a paid advertiser will earn back their monthly advertising fees of 14$ if you score daily 300 points or more.

This means Adgitize will add each day a minimum amount of 47 cents in your account when you reach the 300 points goal which earns you 14.57 $ within 31 days + you'll get between 1.200 - 2.500 visitors/31 days!

With the Special Summer Promotion Adgitize wants to reach the goal to attract 25 new (or former) advertisers and exceed again the level of 200 advertisers (currently just 176).

A comparison to the previous earnings for the 300 points tier - it has been around 33 - 36 cents.

I guess now we can drop our excuses in saying "i will loose some $" as this promotion is valid until 31st July 2010 and might be extended until the end of the year 2010 - in this time you will definitely earn more money than in the last few months and get additional ("free") traffic!

You can read my

• Tips on how to reach the 300 points easily and earn more money with Adgitize (on the One Minute Guide) and
• on this blog The Secret of getting an Ad paid by Adgitize.

If you're not yet a member of Adgitize -which earned me in the last 12 months more than 110 $ (ad fees deducted)- simply sign up using my Referral-Link by clicking on the Special Summer Promotion link or button at the top of this post and you will receive after Adgitize's approval a ONE WEEK AD VOUCHER (7$) for FREE to start your own successful Adgitize ad campaign without any risks attached!

Have a great time enjoying more traffic and earning more money with Adgitize in the coming days, weeks and months!

Update: It's enough during weekdays (Monday - Thursday) to achieve just 300 points, even with 350 - 370 points on these days, you won't earn more than the promoted 47 cents.

Simply check how many points you achieve without dropping cards (100 points - blog post, 100 points - advertiser, xx points - page + ad views) and then add the amount of points needed to reach 300 points (with 60 page / ad view points the amount is 260 points - 40 points needed for 300 points => click 25/50 ads depending if you're advertiser or only publisher - add 5 extra clicks as page / ad view points can fluctuate).

Is Twitter killing Get Paid to Tweet companies? Ban on third party ads!

Image via Wikipedia

Twitter announced yesterday that they will ban tweets of third party applications which inject ads in a user's timeline in the near future through their API.

This 3rd party ad ban affects everyone who works together with Sponsored Tweets, Ad.ly, Revtwt, MyLikes, Twivert, Twittad, Magpie and many other advertising companies who connected advertisers and Twitter users to promote their product in Twitter.

Twitter announced this step for several reasons:

1. Third party application companies don't have to deal directly with problems that are caused by their tweets. Twitter will get the support tickets of the other users who complain about it, may it be spammy accounts (only ads) or virus infected links and so on.
   
   
2. Twitter's own Promoted Tweets won't be so effective when other third party applications want to monetize user profiles and make themselves a lot of cash with the fees they collect from the advertisers without sharing the earned $ with Twitter (Twitter itself doesn't share their income with users, too!)
   
   
3. Twitter's unique user experience may get lost because of hundred similar tweets from these ad networks which annoys in the long run a lot of users and could minimize the number of active users over the time.

My Opinion:

It will be interesting to see how the above mentioned ad companies react as they have only 30 days to change the way their third party programs work.

I could imagine that several ad companies might let the users tweet the ads manually or a two click-action similar to the Retweet-Button which takes you to your Twitter account and you press then the "Tweet"-Button to tweet it into your timeline. Sponsored Tweets already announced this kind of change in their latest blog post.

The problem with this method is that the companies can't detect easily how often a tweet will be tweeted within a day (many of the companies permit only between one - six tweets/day) and advertisers might not get a their required diversified audience for their spent budget of the paid tweets.

Another problem will arouse when advertisers give you a certain time frame in which the paid tweet should be published. As most advertisers are from the United States this could get difficult if Asians or European have to tweet it manually at sleeping times ;)

Another interesting aspect might be what will happen to the earned money which the members of these 3rd party ad companies hold in their account?

Will they get paid even when the minimum amount is not yet reached because their business is no more available?

Google reveals Adsense revenue share

Google revealed yesterday their Adsense revenue share with the publishers of their content ads and Adsense for Search queries. Google is taking 32% of the Adwords revenue for the Content ads and 49% for the Adsense for Search.
For us publishers will be 68% left when we display the Google Adsense ads on our blogs and websites and 51% when someone searches from our own Google search box.

Google disclosed that large websites have a different revenue share percentage (they earn a bigger amount of cash). This means Google wants to keep good costumers happy with this method.

It was not disclosed if these percentages are averages for every publisher or if there are regional differences. Usually advertisers have to pay a higher amount per click if you select specific countries like USA, Canada, Western Europe instead of worldwide advertisement. With worldwide advertisement the "cheap" pay per click costs are usually generated from Asian and African countries and you'll generate only little traffic from Western countries.

Google will make further disclosure of these percentages directly inside of your Google Adsense account in the following months.

More information can be found in this post from the Google Adsense blog.

What are your thoughts about Google Adsense and its revenue share?

How to lower the risk in your portfolio!

Image by Cold Cut via Flickr

As soon as you start trading stock and build up your own stock market portfolio, you will recognize that there are several factors which influence the risk of your portfolio.

If we look at the previous trading weeks, we saw a lot of ups and downs even within one trading day. The worst time came as the US stock market got it's flash crash two weeks ago. There several of the Blue chips (biggest stock market companies) lost up to 46% of its value within 30 minutes. But most of them recovered throughout the trading session and closed the day with a much smaller percentage loss (e.g. Procter & Gamble, McDonalds).

In case you have been invested in these companies, you would probably have "lost" them when you set a stop-loss limit to secure your existing gains or to avoid a bigger loss from a further decline of your stocks.

Setting a stop-loss limit is always a good choice but it doesn't lower the risk of your portfolio. It just helps you like i wrote in the last paragraph to cash in some of the existing gains or to stop losing more money.

Lowering the risk of your portfolio can be accomplished by

Investing less than 5% in a specific stock or even only in a specific sector

The reason:

If you invest your money in similar companies of the same sector it's most likely that one bad earning report or a slump in that sector will hurt the price of every stock in this sector.

• Dell can be influenced by AMD or Intel's earning report in case the sale of CPUs and internal graphic cards show a decline in their sales.
  
  
• Nokia can be influenced by Motorola, Samsung or SonyEricsson's sale reports and vice versa.
  
  
• Different sectors move differently during a stock market plunge if you look at gold mining, car makers, technology or pharma companies.

Taking long and short positions of stocks

Long positions are good for the strongest companies in the strongest sectors and short positions should be taken for weak companies in actual weak sectors. If we look at two sectors in the last weeks you could see that the Gold mining sector has been strong but the banking sector has been weak (both are related to the Greek debt crisis).

Diversify and enrich your portfolio with currencies and commodities

Commodities and currencies will reduce the risk and the volatility of your portfolio and you can use currencies for hedging purposes, too (in case your own currency gets weaker against the $, you will gain not only the interests if you buy bonds but a monetary gain due to the better exchange rate). These trades are only for experienced traders, you really should have a certain knowledge of the circumstances for Forex, currency and commodity trading.

Adjusting your Stop-Loss limits from time to time

By adjusting your stop-loss limits you will have more of your gains left, in case a plunge happens. This money can be invested in new and better opportunities or invested in the same stock for a lower price. Sitting out a plunge can make you more nervous and it most of the times you definitely loose more money than by setting a stop-loss limit.

What are your methods of reducing the risks of your portfolio?

The six keys to a Millionaire Mindset

Image by ul_Marga via Flickr

No matter if you just want to live a happy life, an extraordinary life or even a wealthy life with all luxuries available, the first thing to understand will be how we can achieve this stage in our life. The easiest way is by following other persons who achieved this a special kind of Millionaire's Mindset which lead them to become Millionaires (if they didn't inherit the money from their parents).

None of the actual wealthiest person on earths like Carlos Slim, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or the Internet Billionaires from Facebook achieved their success without working hard in their very beginning. Their success didn't come overnight. It took several months and years until their results showed up as a success and could make cash with their businesses.

Each of the following six proven steps for achieving a Millionaire's Mindset will be explained over the next two months.

The Six Success Factors of a Millionaire Mindset

RESULTS

come from your

ACTIONS

come from your

ATTITUDE

come from your

FEELINGS

come from your

THOUGHTS

come from your

PROGRAMMING

come from your

ENVIRONMENT

By using these 6 keys in this Millionaire's Mindset series,

• you will achieve not only success online (and could make big cash ;) )
• you will simply live a much better life offline, too!

How to earn 900$ each minute with Goldman Sachs!

Image via Wikipedia

Are you curious how YOU could achieve to earn 900$ each minute with one of the biggest banks world wide? Let's say it from the beginning it's possible!

In case you followed the business and stock market news in the last two or three years, you might know already what's the secret behind this post. If not, it will be revealed to you within the next five minutes.

Going into the year 2008, we saw big problems arousing from the housing markets which started in the USA by giving customers mortgages which they couldn't afford anymore. These customers couldn't afford the mortgages because the interest rates went up steadily each quarter from 2004 on. In 2003 many of the house owners could get mortgages with interest rates of as low as 1 or 2%. But the interest rates have been connected to the fed's interest rate's decision. Which means a rise of the Fed fund rate, gave the mortgage owner a rise of their interest rates, too.

In 2008 these interest rates for mortgages went to over 6% for many house owners. The installments had already been bigger and bigger each month and reached now their climax for these house owners. Many of them hadn't the money already months ago and tried to find second or third jobs, some paid these bills even with their credit cards (with much higher interest rates of up to 25%) just for not getting the red letter of a foreclosure of their house from their bank!

In 2008 several big banks and investment banks collapsed and got bought from other banks or got big cash infusions from the government and the FED. The collapse began in March/April 2008 as Bear Sterns - a big player in CDO's - made too risky investments without backing them up with "real" money (actually none of these big banks have backed up these bets with real money). The other big player in the CDO game is Goldman Sachs which was/is on the other side of the bet(since late 2006) and won big $$ with it during this financial crisis.

In September 2008 the government and the Fed didn't help Lehman Brothers to survive. They simply let them go bankrupt. This caused Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to change on 21st September 2008 from a Investment Bank model to a Business Bank because in this case they could receive help from the Fed and the government.

Two days later it was time for Goldman Sachs as the credit market tightened and the money supply stopped nearly to ask several investors and the government for a cash infusion of several billion $. A smart person came all the way from Omaha, Nebraska to offer Goldman Sachs 5 Billion US-$ in exchange of a favorable offer. He even gets the option for giving Goldman Sachs another 5 billion in exchange for these preferred stocks. These preferred stocks have been not only given to him and his company with a discounted price, they yield him each year with a 10% interest rate (or dividend).

10% from 5 Billion $ = 500 Million $ / 525.600 minutes (one year) = 951 $/minute

Ok, it's only possible if you have 5 Billion $ in your account ;-)

Coming back to the banks, Goldman Sachs bought a lot of these different type of mortgages, mixed them together and sold them as CDO with an AAA-Rating (as the rating of the issuer overrides the rating of the included mortgages) to their investors knowing that some of the mortgages will fail soon. Goldman Sachs even bet against its own created CDOs which led to the actual fraud claims from the SEC against Goldman Sachs.

But for sure Warren Buffet the person who closed this great deal said yesterday on the Shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha that he still stands by the Goldman Sachs transaction. But he and the Advisory board will consider another move if the fraud claims develop in a direction which wouldn't be supportable by him and for his shareholders.

What would you tell your investors when you are invested with such a massive amount of money and the stock (Goldman Sachs) already declined over 15%? If Buffet would have told that he might sell it now, the share price would move immediately downwards on Monday's trading day.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Warren Buffett disappoints over Goldman Sachs (blogs.ft.com)
• The Oracle is on the side of Goldman Sachs (blogs.ft.com)
• Buffett: Nothing Improper in Goldman Transaction (abcnews.go.com)
• Buffett Has 'Great Confidence' in Goldman Sachs, Murphy Says (businessweek.com)
• "NY pensions are losing Money on Goldman Sachs" and related posts (nalert.blogspot.com)

MyLikes: How to advertise in Twitter!

Earn money on Twitter

Today i would have reached my 2nd payout in MyLikes (1st payment proof Mylikes) with around 3 $. I reached this payout with just one Likes which i tweeted almost everyday. You can say 3$ earned for 5 Minutes work as you can schedule one Likes for 4 days.If they still have enough funds, you can re-post your Likes again for four days and so on (with a slightly different tweet). I guess as long as their budget does not run out of funds, i might go along with them throughout May 2010 :)

What did i do now with my earnings from the 2nd "payout"?

I transferred it into a MyLikes Advertiser account. The minimum balance to advertise in MyLikes is 20$ and you just add up the difference to your earnings via PayPal or directly with your credit card.

The first step in creating a MyLikes campaign is by choosing which kind of campaign you want to start.

Since a few days MyLikes added the possibility to make a Pay-per-video Campaign. The Pay-per-video campaign gives advertisers the opportunity to let a popular Youtube member create a video and this Youtube member will broadcast it to their subscribers for the advertiser I guess it will take some days/weeks until advertiser offer this kind of campaigns.
Pay-per-Tweet Campaigns haven't been used at the moment by advertisers within my selected MyLikes categories as i believe the price is too high for the common Twitter member. The price of the pay-per-Tweet campaign is similar to Sponsored Tweets suggested price but it can't be changed by the MyLikes-member.

Only if you want to advertise with some real influencer e.g. Stars, Problogger a pay-per-Tweet campaign could be an alternative to the Pay-per-Click campaign. The possibility that fans keep an eye on the profiles of these famous members even hours or days later and click on the ad link, could bleed out some Pay-per-Click campaign advertiser ;-)

The setup of a pay-per-click campaign is easy and fast to manage like you can see in this screenshot:

• Simply type in the name of the campaign (Title)
• Link to the advertised website/blog/affiliate program
• Select from which location the clicks can get paid (for now the choice is only between United States or worldwide)

The third step is the final step before you make the payment and then your campaign will be already live available for the other MyLikes' members to be tweeted, posted or embedded.
You have to choose the maximum pay-per-click amount (min. 0.05 $) and your initial budget (min. 20$ can always be increased in the future by adding funds). Additionally you can choose in which categories your campaign will be displayed. These settings can be changed during the duration of an active campaign (you can decrease / raise the PPC amount, add or delete categories).
The last action to do will be uploading a picture (This is the "edit campaign" screen shot, in the "create campaign" procedure wasn't the possibility to upload a picture!)

My first impression of the MyLikes campaign setup:

• Only little descriptions and no introduction about minimum cost per click or minimum budget available, only after you type in a too low amount you get a red warning with the minimum amounts
• No approval of tweets for influencer required if you create a pay-per-click campaign (so far i didn't see a possibility to disapprove a created sponsored Likes)
• No scheduled time of the sponsored Likes visible (guess will be posted after the tweet has been analyzed)
• Approval of tweets possible with Pay-per-Tweet campaign (Step 2 - additional option to choose at which time the influencer shall tweet and if approval is required)
• It seems that for each new created campaign a budget with at least 20 $ is necessary as there is no delete button for your "old" campaigns

In case you would like to earn from these MyLikes campaigns, you can easily sign-up with MyLikes and start liking products or Sponsored Likes and earn for each click/tweet or video a small, big or great amount of money. In my previous article MyLikes: Make money with Twitter i explained how to start, which earnings opportunity are available and which steps you should take to succeed in MyLikes.

Earn money on Twitter

In the next few days i will write a second part about the success of Twitter Advertising in MyLikes.

Did you advertise in the past in Twitter? With which programs did you sign-up? Which campaigns have been successful for you?

Spam from support@twitter.com!! Viagra Spammer on the way

Just received a strange sounding e-mail from support@twitter.com (screen shot) with the title Undelivered Message 22-318.

The screen shot looks like this



The problem is that the real link for this mysterious delayed message doesn't lead you to your Twitter account!



Be aware of E-Mails coming from support@twitter.com - They are not really from Twitter.

In Twitter they talk that if you click through to the Reported Attack Page you might get a visit from malicious software, trojans or a Viagra website will be displayed!

UPDATE: On 29th April 2010 i got a second email from support@twitter.com - with a slightly different message (You have 3 unread messages) which means you should take care - it's not over yet (the redirected URL changed, too!).

MyLikes: Make money with Twitter

MyLikes is another way to get new followers on twitter and earn additional money from sponsored Likes. The company is already several months old but MyLikes offers one of the best earnings opportunities. You will get paid for each click a certain amount which MyLikes calculates after you signed up. This price is fixed until your score moves up/down. Payout is every Friday as soon as you reach 2$.

Influence your CPC-Score


To move your score, the ads have to be relevant for your Twitter audience. If you get a nice amount of clicks which might result in purchases or activities on the advertised websites, your CPC will move up after adjusting your account (done every two or three weeks). Posting irrelevant ads might lead in the future to a lower CPC for your MyLikes account.
The score is NOT depending on the amount of Twitter-Followers you have as i saw several MyLikes members (with less followers) who have a higher CPC than myself with more than 11.900 followers (mine is 0.43 $/click). It seems important, too, that you have more followers than you are following.

Become an MyLikes Influencer and win additional cash prizes for your recommendations!

Inside of MyLikes are different levels to become a better influencer. The more points you get (higher level you reach), the more often your Likes will be shown on the front page and after other members submit their Likes to the same topic.
There are several competitions running every month which highlight usually the best lists (for a specific topic - at the moment e.g. Best restaurants list and 8 other lists). To increase your chances in winning a 10$ cash prize, you should do the following actions

• achieve the level of a Fiery pro (300+ points) in MyLikes, it just gives you better chances in winning one of the additional competition prizes (as they see you are active and helpful)
• follow other members inside of MyLikes
• recommend not only sponsored Likes (your paid ads) but what else you like (Pizza brand, Fast food chain, restaurants, movies, actors, mobile phones, computer, cars, clothes and so on), so that you can create some of the competition lists ;-)
• comment on other followers Likes to encourage them to comment on your likes as well
• write good recommendations for the Likes which you include in your competition lists

More opportunities to earn money with MyLikes

You can

1. send a tweet to your followers on Twitter,
2. make a blog post about the sponsored Likes and/or
3. put a widget with the active sponsored Likes on your blog/website (similar to Google Adsense, only the MyLikes-CPC might be more lucrative)

and get paid by MyLikes every time they count a valid click for one of your sponsored Likes!

My first payment proof of MyLikes

Is Hubze a Scam? Fishy, Fishy or How to build a big list fast!

On 5th April it was time to listen again to a webinar of founder and CEO David Foster of Hubze.

Most of the points mentioned in my previous post about a possible Hubze-Scam or the new Hype in Social media turned out to become reality.
I'm wondering what you are thinking about his message and the e-mails they send us in the last week.

New customized Facebook Fan Page-Application

First, the affiliate program for their new customized Facebook Fan Page-Application is only available for you if you BUY the Facebook Fan Page Application. Referrals who signed up under your Hubze Card are not reflected as your referrals for this Facebook affiliate program.

He said, it might be perhaps connected in the future when they have finished their Hubze Card. I can only say in this case they could have linked it up directly with your username which they are not doing!

So how do they link it up in the future with no connection to your Hubze Card account now? Do you really think you would get $$ in a few months for your referrals who bought now the Facebook Fan Page Application (1. if you didn't buy it 2. Nobody gives months later commissions when they cashed it in now)?

Advertising around Hubze Cards

Second, he announced there would be advertising spots available around the Hubze Card only from members of the community which will be most likely Internet marketers. Lots of advertising for E-Books and Get Rich Schemes, Diets and so on will be coming.

Launch of the real Hubze Cards postponed

Third, doesn't it look fishy now as they announced in one of their first webinar in early March the Hubze Card will be launched for the Beta-Tester (more than 4.000 members) in the first week of April. But all you can hear and read now are Internet marketing strategies like

• look for new members who shall sign up under you, it's a great and FREE program and you might earn some commissions if they will buy some of our programs in the future
• sign up and buy this Facebook Fanpage Application now and start earning commissions before we sent the e-mails to the BIG Internet marketers

He even mentioned that his graphic designer is on holiday right now. Hmm, what the heck has he to do in holidays? The real big deal, the Hubze Card, would attract much more persons to sign-up, if it would be online right now (even when you have only a few social media sites available but that why it's called BETA-version!).

I forgot to mention, in this webinar David Foster said "We are not even in Beta, we are just in the Alpha-Version. We have only the Skeleton of the Hubze Card. But it looks great better than he thought it would look in the Alpha-Version".

Is the FREE Hubze Card only a marketing gag for building a BIG LIST to sell products to several 10.000 members?

I could bet in the next weeks, all members get flooded with more e-mails/webinars about new marketing programs and opportunities to sell them as affiliates (if you buy it first) instead of a further progress of the Hubze Card. It seems they use the FREE Hubze Card argument for sign-ups to build a BIG E-MAIL LIST and throw programs from their friends (he said it's one member from the community, difficult to check as you can't access the Hubze Cards :-) )

All you can do is wait for the real deal and not letting you irritating by the pitchy sales e-mails in which the Hubze Squad might promote over the next weeks several new programs!
What do you think about it as the time went by?

Is Moneza (now: Hubze) a scam or THE new hype in Social Media?

Hubze is a newcomer - who claims to connect the most famous Social media networking websites & Instant messengers under one umbrella for free. Hubze has started to promote its website just by recruiting new members with the help of its members.

At the moment there are just a few webinar videos available and promotional material. The videos sound very attractive (yeah, it's a commercial, won't hear anything bad in it, mind you) to a lot of members which reflects itself in the fast rising number of members (after 1 week more than 4.000 members, after 2 1/2 weeks already 13.000 members, goal of the website owner is 100.000 members in late May).

Here are some reasons why you should kind of critical towards their website.

1. In the first week the name of the website was announced with Moneza, they changed it after the second week to Hubze. Their reason written in their blog was to reflect that the website is more a hub for all other Social media networking websites than a money-making opportunity without any additional information how to make money with their system (which was reflected by the word Moneza and with which they could attract 4.000 members in the beginning).
   
   
   
2. Only screenshots are available from their Hubze cards which shall include the famous social media websites + Instant Messengers (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FlickR, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, WordPress, Blogger, Feedburner, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and many more!).
   
   You will find on your Hubze card the recent live status updates from your registered social media websites. The feature of Geo-targeting will be available, too (famous from Foursquare).
   
   
3. No word about the safety of your data if you allow them to post your status updates from these Social Media networks to your Hubze cards. We just have to remember which problems Twitter and Facebook had in the last weeks with hacked accounts, fake e-mails, trojans and virus which have been sent to us by DM or e-mail.
   
   
4. When i signed up in the second week, i didn't use a referral link but i still got referred to Hubze by David Foster. Only after the sign-up process i saw in the blog posts that David Foster is the CEO of this new company. This was one of the signs for me that it's not such an ethical company when the CEO tries to get as much referrals as possible in his private account. Later they told in one of the webinar videos about their Affiliate program which shall be a 2-Tier program. This means you might get a commission from your direct referral and a portion from the referral of your direct referral. At the moment this practice has stopped but he definitely got a lot of sign-ups under his name from the first weeks.
   
   
5. It seems more to be a website for Internet and Affiliate marketers as the founders are from this business sector and most of the comments on the blog are from those marketers, too. Another reason why you could get swamped over with this kind of persons will be because Hubze will only allow advertisement from within their community.
   The question is if their calculation for their premium membership for 29,97$/month (additional a blog inside their Hubze card + Auto responder service) + for 37, 67 & 297 $ (one time fees) a fully customized Facebook Fan page will be enough to cover the costs for 100.000s of FREE Hubze cards or if they have to turn additional towards paid advertisement around the Hubze cards.
   
   
6. Their affiliate program could be not so member-friendly like promised in the first weeks. At the end of the webinar of 29th March 2010 Mike Healy answered to a question "who would be eligible for a commission from the affiliate programs". His answer was that it's most likely that you have to upgrade for some services to enjoy a commission from that particular service from your referrals.
   This means you could "loose" a big amount of income as for the monthly premium membership the commission will be between 15% (4.49 $/month) and 45% (13.48 $/month) for the direct referrals and 5 - 9% (1.49 - 2.69 $) for their referrals (this depends how many of your referrals upgrade to premium, 45% is only achievable if 100 referrals upgrade in that particular month!).
   For the customized Facebook page you would earn 10% (3.70 - 29.70 $ - direct referral) or 5% (1.85 - 14.85 $ - referral of your direct referral) of the sales prices (37 - 297$)

My Conclusion:

If they can fulfill what they promise in their video commercial by taking care of safety risks and advertisements, it could get a great website to share your status updates in ONE place & connect with a lot of new persons (and simply forget about earning a bunch of money like Mike Healy announces on his blog with 10.000 $ weekly *lol*)!

New connections & friends might be more worth for your future than a few missed bucks.

In case you like what you saw in the video, feel free to register with Hubze, so that you are one of the first to enjoy their service when they will launch their Hubze cards!

Google Adsense: How to make money off their ads!

Most of the bloggers know already that you can monetize your blog in one easy step by using Google Adsense ad service. You simply register one (or more of your) blog(s) and wait some days until Google Adsense accepts your blog to publish their ads or if they (temporarily) reject it until your blog's content is within their terms of service.

After you get the approval e-mail from Google, you can start using their Adsense ads on your blogs and websites. Adsense uses Keyword sensitive ads which means Google tries to publish ads which fit to your actual blog posts or your overall blog topic. The ads which Google Adsense serves on our blogs and websites are coming from other blog & website owners, from famous brands who promote their new products / contests or from affiliate programs.

As you build up your blog posts week by week, you'll notice that there are often the same Google Adsense ads displayed when you visit your own blog. This happens because your content is relevant to their keywords which they are using in their Google Adwords campaign. Most of these ads will show you an URL to their real website (when you use the sky scraper or banner ads - the URL won't be displayed if you use only the Text link ads). On my blog there have been a lot of "Grab a free report", "sign up for my list", "new advertising program", 50 Ways to make money online! ads which include an affiliate program.

If you use now these kind of ads not only by displaying them in your Adsense ads but by choosing to join their affiliate programs (and make money off Google Adsense ads) you could make not just a few cents for the click - you could make between 2 - 50 $ (between 10% and 75% of the product price) in case the visitor who clicks your affiliate link, joins the program and buys the book or the service. Every blogger will have other ads like Mommy blogger might have the ones for baby cloths for which several companies offer partner programs with a certain percentage of the sales price as a commission or the Amazon Associate program which you can use easily inside your own blog posts when you write about certain products which are distributed by Amazon!

Most important factor to remember with affiliate links is NOT to cluster your whole sidebars with different ad banners and text link ads as they won't be always relevant to your actual blog posts. Instead you could use your affiliate banners selectively in relevant blog posts as a picture on the left/right of your blog post, between or at the end of your blog post.

You should only put certain affiliate links in your sidebars which are always useful for your visitors to see. Put other affiliate links at the bottom of your sidebars, in this case new visitors who are interested in your posts and read more than the recent one still can notice some of your affiliate links and will make you money but not annoy your regular visitors!

What's your experience with Google Adsense (earnings, success, ban, payout)?

Which experience can you share about affiliate programs, earnings and your success with them?

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to sign up for a Google AdSense account? (earnblogger.com)
• iAd Will be Apple's Response to Google AdSense? (teabreak.pk)
• What is Google AdSense? (earnblogger.com)
• AdSense Ads in Google Buzz (crazzycool.blogspot.com)

Stock market: These trading strategies are essential for your success!

Image by Ahmad Nawawi via Flickr

The stock market is a powerful way to increase your wealth. With many different strategies out there which people can use to take full advantage of it, it will be your choice to look for the best match. Here are five major trading strategies in which every trader can find its place.

1. Buy and Hold

Most people preach the buy and hold strategy because it is simple, passive and most people can do it without much effort. How long does it really take to buy a couple of mutual funds or ETFs and forget about it after all? Because stocks historically go up over the long term this can be a relatively safe way of investing (Example: Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway).

2. Following the Trend

Another strategy which is similar to buy and hold which can be much more powerful is following trends. This strategy involves buying stocks that are trending up and holding onto them until they are no longer going up. This way you can get into stocks that are making the big moves and get out of them as they start to pullback or trend sideways. Most traders use a tight stop-loss of 5% or 10% under the actual stock prices to secure recent gains. It may sound simple, but sometimes simplicity works.

3. Short Term Swing Trading

Swing trading is the process of using technical indicators (charts, 200 day average price lines) to give traders buy and sell signals for a short term trade. The idea is to constantly monitor your positions, cutting your looser earlier and letting your winners move up in order to maximize your gains over the long term. Any trade with a profit target, a stop loss and hold longer than one day is basically a swing trade.

4. Options

If you want to leverage your gains in the stock market, traders are using options. A 10% move in the price of a stock could mean a 100% move or more in the price of an option. While option trading is very powerful and you can gain quick money even with a small bet it isn't something to start off with. The best traders only consider option trading after they have already mastered short term trading as it is a risky investment when the market suddenly change in the other direction!

5. Short Term Day Trading

Day trading has been given a bad name by professional buy and hold trader, but the truth is it can be very profitable. It even gives the stock market the fuel to trade stocks. Without day trading there wouldn't be much to report from the stock market. Any trade that was bought and sold before the end of the trading day is considered to be a day trade. Day traders may have their ups and downs, but overall they can be very profitable.

Each strategy offers traders something different. Buying and holding is better for passive investors who can't follow the daily swings and news. Day trading is better for traders who have the time and willingness to play a very active role in their investing. Risk-oriented persons will like the power of option trading which occasionally needs really strong nerves.

Learning the different strategies and experimenting with it can certainly be worthwhile and might help you in recognizing which strategy fits you the best. One way to learn it without losing money would be taking part in virtual stock market games, some offer even weekly/monthly prizes for the best performance of your "play" account!

Do you trade stocks, funds or options?

Which kind of trader are you, risky or conservative?

Which experience did you make with these/your trading strategies?