We’re only 3 weeks into 2012 and we’re already seeing these 7 Marketing Trends of 2012:

1. Noise Reduction – Being more mindful of what we share to reduce the numbness oversharing can create
2. Commitment - “Commit” is a word you’ll hear a lot more going forward and you’ll be expected to do so
3. High Value Content - This ties into Noise Reduction and Content Marketing, but means that what you create must have value
4. Humanization - This is not ‘corporations are people’, but a realization that corporations are not monolithic, but run by people
5. Case Studies - Showing how your company or product overcame obstacles and solved a problem is both High Value Content and Humanization
6. Stories - Storytelling has been around a long time, but the art of weaving it into everything from your About page to your office decor is a new trend
7. Do Something Great – Similar to High Value Content and a cousin to Committment, this is a push to use 2012 as a moment to make something great

Noise Reduction – I wrote about noise last week, but now that Social Media and Internet access has become somewhat ubiquitous a new rule has emerged: As the ease of sharing increases, the value of sharing decreases. Let’s call this Stauffer’s Law. You probably are already aware of this law even if you didn’t know what to call it because the people who post the most, often get read the least or blocked completely. It’s not enough to be creating great content, you also have to temper when you share it. This applies to your personal Facebook wall/newsfeed/timeline, your Twitter feed, or your company newsletter. Decrease what you share and increase the value of what you are sharing to keep your content from being filtered out like noise.

Commitment – Have you noticed feelings of drift? People saying they feel lost? Do you know people who can’t make up their mind or make a decision about what to do next? We hate it when politicians waffle back and forth, but most people and companies are no different. HP dropped computers, picked them back up again, and changed CEOs in 2011. 2012 will be looking for HP to commit to a goal – long term dedication to a cause beyond the next quarter’s estimates. And 2012 wants to see you commit to making something work, not looking for excuses for why it failed. This doesn’t mean you can’t pivot, but you must commit to something.

High Value Content – I recently wrote about writing what matters which talked about writing about solutions for your customer’s problems versus writing about your products. Very few companies can make a product that people care enough to buy for the products sake – even companies like Apple originally had to solve a customer’s problem by allowing them to carry all of their songs in their pocket. We used to call this type of writing a “white paper” and in 2011 we may have called it “content marketing”, but in 2012 it’s not enough to write content, you have to write what matters to people. Be impactful or risk irrelevance.

Humanization – Unless you’re using a computer to write your content, you need to show your human-ness. Humans make mistakes. Even the mistakes computers make are actually mistakes made by the humans who programmed them. In 2012 people are going to be looking to do business with other people like them – a.k.a. humans who have made similar mistakes. If 2011 was about being transparent about who you were, 2012 is taking that a step further by admitting your mistake and what you’ve done or are going to do to fix it.

Case Studies - Showing the customer how you’ve solved a problem like theirs in the past is a great way to “sell the hole”. It’s also a great way to show your human-ness by admitting your mistakes and how you overcame them. No one expects you to be perfect and those who think they are risk losing business. People like to root for the underdog and if you sell yourself in that light, it can help. There is a whole other piece of case studies that include customer interviews and solution interviews, which is a great way to write what matters, but that’s a separate topic for another day.

Stories - If you’ve ever had someone explain what a song means to you, you know the power of a story. Every time you hear that song you’ll remember what that person said and think of that moment. I’ve heard advice on how to tell a great story like, “Make the listener the hero”, but this is harder than it sounds. I’ve been trying to do it for the last 6 months. What I’ve found is that by practicing telling stories in non-marketing settings like blogs and emails to friends and family, you can practice the storytelling arts so that when you do pitch to a client, you can turn their use of your product into a story that makes them the hero in 2012.

Do Something Great - It’s never been easier to start something than it is right now. You have more resources at your fingertips than ever before. So why is it that the best we came up with in 2011 was a new timeline for Facebook and a new way to stream music (Spotify)? Sure, there are people in France trying to get fusion to work and others trying to find the Higgs Boson particle. And Bill Gates is both trying to eradicate malaria and create ways to reduce nuclear waste by reusing it in a new type of reactor in China, but what about the rest of us? Some would argue that the low-hanging fruit is already picked. We can’t just sit down and invent a paperclip before our benefactor comes back from lunch, but there are still big problems to solve – like how to replace Middle-Eastern oil, how to improve energy distribution and creation, how to standardize and distribute medical records, and of course, flying cars.

In searching for a way to close this article, I ran across this quote from Catchers in the Rye:

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Recently one of my board members commented on the sheer volume of posts I was making on Twitter. He recommended I review what Michael Hyatt said about how to post frequently without flooding your followers, “I use Buffer to spread these throughout the day, so I don’t overwhelm my followers.

Matt O'Dell, New Worship, image courtesy galerie Schleicher+Lange, Paris

I started using it and it’s been great, but I started to wonder if just tweeting links to my followers was actually helping anyone (including myself). I love to share things, but do people really care? And what does it mean to the messages I do want them to care about?

Chris Brogan, entrepreneur and social media expert, recently wrote a post entitled Our Responsibility as Media Channels where Brogan talks about how we are all media channels – no different than TV or radio stations – and we have a responsibility to our ‘viewers’ and ‘listeners’ to pay attention to both the content and the rate of what we are presenting.

You may not think that you are helping to curate the web, but every time you share something, you are categorizing it and sharing it with someone the same way a museum director takes a bone from the earth, identifies it, and displays it in a case.

Brogan says, “Attention is a currency, and if we spend too much of other people’s attention on frivolous posts and shares, we risk losing that attention…What if you look at this as your responsibility? What if you looked at all we just outlined with an eye towards making something bigger than just noise?”

Noise

Noise. That’s the word I’d been searching for to describe that feeling I had about sharing content that while useful, may be just, well – noisy.

Brogan encouraged me to “[not] just push the stumble, the retweet, etc, but give some value to the share by giving your points, adding your two cents, blogging a piece around it, etc.,” which is what I’m doing here.

Seth Godin, entrepreneur and marketing expert, recently wrote an article entitled, The trap of social media noise, “More noise is not better noise,” says Godin, who strategizes, “Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that’s worth owning and an audience that cares.”

That was one of my initial questions: Do people really care what I’m sharing? Does less noise equate with more attention? Is less really more?

What Other People Are Doing About It

While Buffer is a Chrome app that allows you to spread out what you are sharing throughout the day, Handpick, which Jon Mitchell, a writer for ReadWriteWeb and former editor of NewsTrust, recently wrote about in Handpick: Selective Social Sharing Without The Noise, is an app that allows you to sum it all up in one email.

“The social Web is noisy,” writes Mitchell, who reviewed Handpick, a social Web app that collects things you want to share throughout the day and emails them to the contacts of your choosing in one email at the end of the day.

Pete Williams, entrepreneur, author, and marketer, created NOISE RE/DUCTION, which aims to, “remove all the noise [in the business and marketing space] to find the stuff that’s actually valuable.” In other words, they are curating content.

What are you going to do about it?

I’ve been building sites with the thought process that content matters more than SEO. I’ve been doing that by solving peoples problems. I look for those problems by finding sticky posts on forums, reviewing Yahoo Answers questions, and reviewing search terms for people finding my site (only works after you have content).

Here are some recent graphs of sites once I started using this method:

What I’ve learned from that is that there are direct search results related to doing this strategy and I spend very little time backlinking because I don’t have to. They customers find me because I’m solving a problem for them – they look for me instead of me trying to bait Google to make them find me over someone else.

After reading what this sales guy, Frank Rumbauskas of Never Cold Call (Again), has written and listening to his webinar, I’ve realized that the crux of his premise is that by creating content on your blog or in an email or fax that you send, you’re answering a problem, fixing something that your customers care about.

The result is that you’re spending more of your time finding out what problems your customers are having, solving those problems and publishing the results so that other people who are looking for the same solutions find you and hire you. You’re no longer selling, you’re taking business as it comes to you, and it will.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is not useless. In fact it can be often be very useful as 70-80% of all traffic is organic vs. paid. I make part of my living from SEO web design, but I also make part of my income from affiliate marketing. Those are somewhat in juxtaposition as I make money from people who want more organic results and from people buying ads that display on my sites.

Andrew Hansen says he maintains 20 mini-sites that make anywhere from $300 to $3000 a month and together they make him “5 figures a month”. Lets assume that one site is making $300 and one is making $3000 and “5 figures” means $10K a month. That would mean that the other 18 sites would be making $373 on average a month or to put it another way, all 20 sites are averaging $500 a month (this is where averages really skew things).

In order to do this, Andrew follows a fairly easy process:

1. Find high traffic keywords with low competition that is something he can sell – this is a ‘go with the flow’ method where you go where everyone already is searching for something they want, but they can’t find it – and then sell it to them.
A. Use Wordtracker’s keyword tool and search for “does work” to find things that people say works or other phrases like this
B. Determine if any of the keyword results are products that you could sell as an affiliate
C. Use the normal due diligence to vett a keyword and competition.
2. Write 5-10 pages of original content and then build up to 10-20 pages AND backlink OVER TIME.
A. The 5-10 pages includes the home page (1), which should have no ads ‘above the fold’, the about page (2) – which should be a sales page as well, and 3 to 8 articles to begin (3-10). They should all contain original content and each page should be backlinked to, not just the home page.
B. Post one more article a week and backlink to the new article each week until you have 5 to 10 more articles (5 to 10 weeks). This does two things: matches what Google expects as far as backlink growth and site growth AND shows Google that your site is growing and therefore can be trusted.
Ideas for the about page: use this area to write about things like “how [your product] works” – stuff that isn’t sales keywords, but can grab traffic. You can also write about secondary (cousin) keywords here by saying how your product is like this other product and if you monitor your analytics you might see a desire for one of those other products, which could become another site for you.

Ideas for Blog Posts

If you have multiple affiliate vendors then you could make a post for each such as “Top 10 [Products] at Wal-Mart.com” and “Top 10 [Products] at Amazon” and on down the line. For products that overlap, you could compare affiliates and get paid either way, for example, “Compare [Product] at Wal-Mart.com to Amazon – Which is Cheaper, Faster, and Has a better Refund”. Basically what you want to do is mix and match, compare and contrast. Another example is to make categories that Amazon or Wal-Mart aren’t willing to do. For example, the retailer might just have a category for flashlights, but you run a flashlight mini-site so you have posts about LED flash lights, camping lights, pocket lights, and hand-crank lights.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Andrew’s goal is not to just earn money – he says there are easier ways to make more money. What he’s interested in is the amount of money he can make for the least amount of work because what he is interested in is traveling. Affiliate marketing allows him to travel one week a month so in essence he makes at least $10K a month by only working 3 of those weeks finding good keyword, low competition niches, developing original content, and backlinking it. That’s essentially what I’d like to do both with product marketing and app development. I like the freedom and the work-to-income ratio it has the possiblity to provide.

I believe that I can do this by pursuing a profession in Internet marketing and app development, which is a field of digital content creation and marketing that I call “niche publishing.”

Niche publishing has a lifestyle that can free me from the burdens (security) of a 8-5, office job and a traditional ‘boss’. Even self-employed service businesses like computer repair or web design involve bosses – the customer. Although niche publishing has customers, they are much more passive.

Digital content has the advantage of ‘build it and forget it’, ‘asset building’, and ‘multiple streams of income’, which service industries and typical 8-5 jobs do not provide. Imagine if every report or function you built at your 8-5 job would continue to pay you money over time and the more things you made for your job, the more money you made over time. That’s how Internet marketing and app development can work.

I’ve written about my meetup experiences here in the past so those who read my website may know I’m a member of the Indianapolis Affiliate Meetup hosted by Affiliate Summit. In the last meeting, I spoke about how to get started in affiliate marketing, but I was feeling bad because my site about nook covers was not doing so hot. Now part of this because demand in general was down, but part of it was because of duplication of content, Google put me in the sandbox for three months. The good news is I’m out now and the site is performing better, which makes me feel better about being an Indianapolis web designer and Internet marketer.

This morning I met a lady at the Carmel, Indiana BNI chapter who was interested in creating affiliate marketing relationships with local vendors so I invited her to the Indianapolis Affiliate Summit meeting. She didn’t know about it and was excited to come. The group has a good mix of seasoned affiliate marketers, those learning about it for the first time, and those with other related skill sets like copyrighting, authors, and web designers. There was also interest from a printing company out of Kokomo that has recently opened up an Indianapolis office in Fletcher Park near the old Indianapolis airport.

The last Affiliate Summit meeting was about how to start an Internet marketing business where I went through the 6 steps to making money online, but I didn’t go into how to find a niche or keyword metrics for success.  The next meeting will be about the Internet tax looming in Indiana and what we can do to stop it. We’re meeting at Buca di Beppo in Castleton and although most meetups don’t require you to buy food, the arrangement we made with the restaurant requires each person to pay $12 for a meal. This is not the norm, but if you’re coming for the first time this month, know what to expect.

Thanks to Affiliate Summit for the free pass to Affiliate Summit West 2012 in Las Vegas. I can’t wait to learn more about Affiliate Marketing, but in the mean time, I’m watching Affiliate Summit videos with Blake from Blaze Communications in Carmel, Indiana. Blake runs Blaze Communications as a creative marketing firm and BS&T as a business strategy and technology forum in Carmel. The BS&T forum has a sub-group of member who also attend the affiliate marketing group in Indianapolis, which is how I first met Blake. Thanks to Blake for sharing the DVDs he won from Affiliate Summit.

I recently wrote a blog post on my Indianapolis web design site about how to start your own web design business. I shared a little bit about how I got started, but I wanted to go into more detail here on my own blog, An Entrepreneurial Mind. When I first started, I had just quit my job (much like today, but more on that later) and had started working at a call center for a textbook publisher company (hey, at least I was closer to my dream of being a publisher there than while balancing transactions at the bank). While in training on how to interact with customers over the phone, I became friends with another new employee who had some web design experience. I explained to him how I’d had a couple of people ask me to make web sites with them and asked him if he’d like to help build a new web design company with me. Neither one of us had any experience doing so, but that also meant we weren’t afraid to try. When the call center gig ran out, we both started working on the web design business, Watershawl, full time. It was a blast, but our lack of experience caught up with us and I had to let him go. I was now on my own, sustaining the business by myself. I would meet with clients, pitch them websites, and about half of the time, get turned down. Eventually I branched into computer repair, but over time, moved into more of a consulting role.

Today, I can safely look back and say that I’m glad that I did it, that I learned alot, but it ultimately was just a stepping stone for what I really liked doing, which was building web sites to promote products for a commission, otherwise known as affiliate marketing. I write all about affiliate marketing success at my eRich Online blog. The things I learned about web design, SEO, marketing, and promotion for my customers I’ve been able to apply for my Internet marketing business where I get paid to promote products. One of the funnest parts for me is discovering profitable micro-niches, which are subsets of a niche, which is a subset of a market. The key is to find a product with high interest and traffic, but low competition. I know you’re probably thinking that all of the niches have been explored and exploited, but there are millions of micro-niches out there and new ones being created every day. For example, Farmville, the flash game on Facebook, wasn’t around 5 years ago, but it’s a huge niche market now. It even has it’s own magazine! You can learn on your own and sometimes that’s the best way, but if you’re like me, you’ll want help in learning how to do Internet marketing.

Oh, one more thing, I mentioned that I quit my job today. I did, actually, which really scared my wife, but we have been planning for this day for a long time, we know what it takes to be successful, and we trust in God to provide for our needs. Before I start the day or begin to work, I pray for guidance from the Lord. God is the foundation of my life, my family, and my business. Before I started this work session, I searched for a bible verse about work. I came across Collossians 3:23-24 which says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” In other words, Jesus is my boss – whether I work for a major corporation or myself I need to be working as if for the Lord. And just as I have meetings with my earthly bosses to get guidance and feedback, I am having meetings, through prayer and meditation, with the Lord, my boss.

Here are my Internet Marketing heroes:

• Ed Dale – Australian; started 30 day challenge; convinced Dan Raine to cash out all of his websites for millions
• Dan Raine – British; runs Immediate Edge with help from Ed Dale; male yeast infection guy
• Trey Smith – American; Internet marketer who recently started iOS app training business; friends with Ed Dale
• Matt Carter – the other Australian; not associated with Ed Dale; runs most popular Internet marketing blog; the beta fish guy
• Carey Bergeron – American; friends with Matt Carter; makes money from Adsense; runs Adsense Guild
• Ryan Lee – American; known for being a millionaire Internet marketer; starts out promoting other products, then makes his own versions to sell
• Greg Jacobs – Mage Monster, millionaire
• Mark Ling – known for Traffic Travis
• Andrew Hansen – online entrepreneur originally from Queensland, Australia – now living in London, known for his Affiliate Mini Site Strategy

By the way, I just finished reading The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandingo. It’s pretty good.

How to find a profitable niche to start blogging about on your new mini-site

In a previous post I wrote about how to monetize your blog, but I didn’t mention how to find a niche market to promote. There are many ‘rules’ about this, but while I may point out some, not all are going to apply. One rule you can keep in mind though is that 7 out of 8 attempts may fail. If you’re willing to seek against those kinds of odds, keep reading.

When choosing a new micro-niche, there are three things to keep in mind:

1. Competition for the keyword – when you do a Google search for your keywords, how many root, top-level domains show up in the top ten search results? It’s very hard to break into the pack when competing directly with a home page of an aged domain, but if the search results show deep page listings instead you’ve got a shot.

2. The product – First of all, is there a product to promote? Goods are easier to sell, but some service industries like lawyers and business consultants can make more – much more. Second, what are the commissions on the product? You have to be comfortable with the commission level, which varies greatly between products, to Make sure it is worth your while.

3. Traffic (Visitors) – Even if you have low competition and a great product, if no one is looking for it then you’re dead in the water. You want to have enough traffic to sustain your business and make it profitable, but to not be in competition with the bigger niche market. The sweet spot seems to be around 20,000 daily searches for a given set of keywords. You can find this info out using Google’s External Keyword Tool or Market Samurai.

You want some competition. This is a sign that the micro-niche is profitable. You just don’t want TOO much competition.

How to Start

Knowing how to do the research is one thing, but what if you can’t think of anything to start with? What if you can’t think of any ideas to search for? Some advice I heard once was to browse a magazine aisle and look at the ads in the back. If vendors can afford to advertise there they must be making money and so you can too. Be careful not to chase a niche just because you like it. Do the research and be willing to say ‘no’ to yourself if it doesn’t pan out.

How to make money from a blog or mini-site

Previously I wrote about blogging for profit, but didn’t go into detail about how to monetize the content. In other words, how do you make money from a blog?

There are three primary ways to make money from a blog:

1. Ads – this is the easiest, but lowest-paying form of revenue. However, it can be a good way to get started and prove viability. Popular ad networks include Google Adsense and Chitka. Ads like these are pay-per-click or PPC which means you get paid regardless of if the advertiser makes a sale.

2. Affiliations – Affiliate ads are potentially more profitable, but require a well defined niche or else it is too hard to attract visitors that will actually buy the products you are promoting. Affiliate ads are pay-per-purchase or PPP, which means you only get paid when the merchant advertiser makes a sale.

3. Direct selling – This is when you are directly selling something on your site that you are responsible for fulfilling. This has more potential for profit than affiliate advertising since you can make higher margins, but its more risky and you have to do fulfillment yourself. Examples of this can be anything from ebooks to beef jerky.

4. (Bonus) Transform – the pinnacle of a website is when it can be converted into a book or television show. This means you have hit the big time, but its because your site has the two major ingredients listed below.

What do all four of those revenue sources have in common?

1. Original Content – some estimates say to post up to eight times a day. If you are just starting out, shoot for once a week, then move it up to once a day per blog.

2. Visitors – Don’t stop writing content until you have at least 200 visitors a day (track with Google Analytics). If you already have 50 or more posts, but are lacking in traffic, start promoting your sites.

Promotion

The easiest way to promote your site, like with SEO, is to start with your site. Make sure you are linking to previous posts with appropriate keywords (I call this ‘threading the needle’, but its also known as ‘siloing’) and displaying navigation correctly. Visitors should be able to find more content they want to browse easily, but remember the goal is to monetize by either promoting other people’s goods and services or by selling something yourself so don’t get too carried away in internal self-promotion.

Once you have fixed any issues on your site and made internal linking a habit, begin bookmarking your posts on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, and Delicious. After that is done, look to join a relevant forum to join and comment often. Soon you will be able to add a signature that will show up on all of your forum posts with backlinks to your site.

If you do all of these things and you are still not successful, try a different micro-niche.

Hate the Game, Not the Player

I set out to create a new “Home” brand of Professional Technology Consulting so that I could offer Indianapolis computer repair in homes without damaging the brand I was establishing with business customers.  I came up with “PTC Home,” but the domain was taken so I started looking around and trying different keywords.  I found that “codageek.com – The last geek you’ll ever need,” was available, but I kept looking.  I eventually stumbled upon “geekhand.com” after looking up synonyms for ‘friendly’ (handy).

I liked GeekHand enough to consider grabbing it, but I wanted to do a little bit of research on the name and domain first.  I found that it had been used prior by another person for personal use and had since been abandoned.  I liked that there were already a lot of backlinks to it from other sites, but because much of the links were from sites about gaming, I wondered if it was the right fit for my in-home computer repair business product I was developing for Indianapolis business consulting firm, Watershawl, Inc., where I am CEO.  It seemed like it might be better off as a part of my blog network at Cost Publishing Media Group as a board game micro-site.

I went ahead and picked up the domain, setup WordPress, the theme, the plugins, and the SEO.  I created a logo for it which consisted of a 0 and 1 which has both game and binary code meanings.  I used this logo as a background on Twitter and as it’s icon.  By the way, I don’t hardly purchase domains unless the username is also available on Twitter.  In this case, both were available and I took that as a sign before purchasing the domain.  While all of this setup is going on I’m thinking about content and products to sell or promote.  I did a quick search on Amazon and determine that board games, video games, and card games would be my primary products with the “news” of the site being centered around the geek culture of movies, television, and conventions like Comic-Con.

To promote the site automatically I did two things: I setup a Tumblr account to pull in WordPress posts automatically push tweets out to Twitter and a Facebook page to push out to Twitter anything I post there.  So I only really have to post in WordPress, then copy the link to the post to Facebook to post on what is now the Settler’s League‘ page there in order to have coverage to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter all at once.  Sometimes I’ll bounce those around on my Facebook wall and on other Twitter accounts I manage for different brands.

The next step was to add content and put the promotional procedure into place, which I did.  I had a minor problem with links overflowing in the footer, but a quick CSS tweak fixed that.  I have a WordPress theme that I use as a base for most of my Cost Pub sites.  I also make custom WordPress themes and do web design and SEO for the Indianapolis area using Watershawl’s Growmotion marketing where we Growmote web sites–first we build them then we promote them; don’t just promote your business, grow your business with Growmotion.

Update: I have since converted Geek Hand into more of it’s original role of personal computer repair, but with a slant towards mobile phones – a play on the ‘hand’ in the title.  Here’s the link to the new Geek Hand Facebook page in case you’re interested and a link to Settler’s League’s home page.

An Entrepreneurial Mind is about Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Marketing; the personal blog of Erich Stauffer.

I’d like to propose an equation that I believe is a new way forward: Traffic + Conversion = $

If you’re still interested, keep reading.  I have written this guide based on things that I have learned over the last couple of months.

Using proven, repeatable techniques there is little risk and great rewards involved in marketing products for profit.  Much work has already been done for us in the form of processes and software tools.

There are two key phases to this process:

Research and Analysis – Identify a micro-niche inside a penetrable market that has profitable products that people are already selling.
Marketing and Testing – Promote the products and test the results.  If the traffic and/or conversions do not meet thresholds in a given time, start over.

The rate of success with this method is anywhere between 1 in 6 to 1 in 10 and marketing and testing can take anywhere from 1 to 30 days.  Success is defined as more money coming in than is going out each month and that includes all opportunity costs (time that could have been spent making money in other activities).  Tracking is critical not only with the data of the results, but with the finances and time spent.  If you are comfortable with this, keep reading.

Metrics and Rules of Phase ! – Research and Analysis

Micro-niches are identified as the #1 keyword receiving at least 80 clicks per day and websites containing that keyword being less than 30,000 globally.

Top-10 competition for the top 4 keywords has to be penetrable within the time allowed.  Metrics to consider are:

• Domain age
• # of back-links to domain
• # of back-links to page mentioning the keyword
• # of back-links from .gov or .edu domains
• Exists in Yahoo! Directory?
• Exists in BOTW (Best of the Web) Directory?
• Exists in DMOZ (ODP) Directory?

Check to see that related products are both available to be sold and are being sold by others.  If either is not true, stop and start over.

(All of the above can be done using the Market Samurai tool semi-automatically, but can also be done manually.)

You now have products in a penetrable micro-niche that are profitable to sell.  Move on to Phase II – Marketing and Testing.

Phase II – Marketing and Testing

Begin by setting up a place to place your products.  This is where your marketing efforts will point back to.  It can be a Squidoo page, a Blogspot Blog, or WordPress running on your own domain.

Once you have a place to put your products, begin writing copy for the site.  You will need to write the following:

• About Us page – use keywords and talk about the product
• Ad copy for the products – if using Market Samurai, there are built-in features for helping with this, but you can do it manually too
• Create posts about the keyword subject matter within the micro-niche

Next, begin to create back-links to your site by placing links to the domain, the blog posts, and the the product pages on social bookmarking, social media, and in blog comments in your related market.  Be sure to add links from .edu and .gov domains. You can search Google specifically for blogs on those domains manually, but you can do this semi-automatically with Market Samurai too.
Track the incoming page hits.  Testing for viability can begin only after your product’s page is receiving at least 200 hits per day.  If you are not getting 200 hits per day, then try these things first:

• Increase the number of blog posts on and off the site using other services like hubpages and squidoo – then promote all of the new posts again
• Make sure you are promoting on at least 30 different sites for each post – you can use services like ping.fm or trafficbug to assist with this task
• Pay to have your site listed in the Yahoo! Directory
• Pay for Google Adwords or Bing (Microsoft) AdCenter
• Add pictures with descriptive text to get hits from search engine’s image searches
• Add video to Youtube with links and comment on other videos in your micro-niche
• Make sure you are posting to Twitter and Facebook regularly and engaging in conversation, not just promoting

If after 30 days or at your own set threshold, you are still not receiving 200 hits or more per day, your product is not viable.  Quit and start over.  You have just found one of your 6 to 10 failures.
If you do have over 200 hits per day, but are not getting conversions, first try changing out your ad copy, images of the products, and/or placement of the two on the page.  Refer to Dan Kennedy’s sales letter technique.
If after changing all three of these variables and still your conversion rate (revenue) is below your expenses, then start over.  If not, you have a profitable business.  Consider selling it for ten times it’s worth and starting over.

References:

The Thirty Day Challenge
http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/

The Immediate Edge
http://www.immediateedge.com/

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Napkin-Solving-Problems-Pictures/dp/1591841992

Turn $150 into $15,000 in 30 Days
http://www.15kchallenge.com/blog/

How to Make Money From Your Blog (61 page PDF printout attached)
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/

Insiders Circle
http://dankennedy.com/

I will help anyone make money online. If you’ve ever thought about having a blog for fun and profit, I can teach you how to make money through pay-per-click advertising or by vamping a product in order to earn kickbacks.

Whether you have a blog on Blogspot.com or through WordPress on your own domain, I want to help you get to the next level by adding ads to your site through Google Adsense.  The first step is to sign up for an account using your Google Account here:

http://www.google.com/adsense/

Once you have an account setup, you can start to add the code to your blog, which serves up the ads.  When people click on the ads, you make money.  The more content you write and the more promotion you do, the more people will come to your web site, which increases the chance that someone will want to click on an ad.

I login to Google Adsense each day to see how much I’ve made from ad clicks and I can see how much I’ve made across all time, last month, last week, yesterday, and today.  It’s updated nearly real-time so it’s a very nice motivator.

I can also help you setup Google Analytics and start to do analysis on your blogs to help you focus more traffic to a particular niche, which you can use to start promoting products. In this way, you can start to make more money in different ways – in addition to the ad revenue from Google Adsense.

Please let me know if you or anyone else is interested in learning how to make money online by blogging for free.

Google ® is a registered trademark of Google.

Managing Actions, February 2009

We have gone through several changes in the last year including a major facelift, a name change, an identity crisis, and now a new way forward.  It’s time we stop managing our thoughts and start to manage our actions.

From now on you can expect to find fresh content daily on subjects ranging from self-development to happiness, from management to marketing, and from pop-culture to programming.  Where else can you find out how to delete a Digg submission and how to live a purpose-filled life in the same blog?

Zac and I are passionate about life and we want to help you become more of a success than you already are.  If you’re reading this article right now you have already chosen the first step in learning more about yourself, your purpose, and your life.

We want to inspire you, motivate you, and lift you up so that you can go do whatever it is that makes you feel strong.  Be better tomorrow than you were today.  Move up in the world.  Get exited about life.  Find your spirit and develop it.

Thank you for reading Managing Actions.  We are glad that you are a part of our life and look forward to bringing you great content for a long time.  Cheers.

How to Identify Strengths and Revenue Streams

I need to make $8,000 to $10,000 (depending on what measurements, more on that later) in 2-4 weeks. This is how much I need in order to get back on my feet, financially. I have a day-job as a business analyst, but it doesn’t bring in enough to pay for my daily expenses, let alone the other events like car insurance, BMV taxes, speeding tickets, hospital visits, and car wrecks that happen along life’s path. This also leaves out any fun, gift giving, or getaways that a normal person might want to do. I decided to do something impactful on the bottom line. I needed to stop the cycle of overdrafts, late fees, and the risk of losing my cars, home, and other assets. I needed a plan.

Triage

The first thing I did was to get organized.  Personally, this is how I solve every problem.  I continue to organize it until there are no more problems within the problem.  In essence, I create a system.  The system then solves the problem.  This may not be the most effective way to solve a problem, but it is how my mind works and it is one of my strengths.  I feel strong whenever I am categorizing things, especially when I have to name or rename things in order to categorize them.  As a side note, I encourage you to ask yourself what makes you feel strong, then to write that down.  In the same way, notice what makes you feel weak (this is a weakness) and write that down too.  Then, start to do more of what makes you feel strong (your strengths) and less of what makes you feel weak.

Getting back to the problem at hand, I began by simply listing out all of my daily expenses in a Google Spreadsheet (by the way, if you ever need help setting up Google Apps or using Google Docs, I am your man, just leave a comment and I’ll be able to contact you from there).  Amazingly, I had not been doing this, but instead, paying bills as they came.  I had no idea how much money was coming in or how much money was going out.  If I wanted to know how much money I had, I logged into online banking and whatever the balance was, that was how much money I had.  I’m astounded about how many people manage their finances this way, or maybe it was just the people I was hanging around (more on that later).

Analysis

Once I had all of the bills, debts, and income listed out on a spreadsheet, I could start to do my analysis.  It wasn’t pretty.  I was getting snapped by late fees, overdue fees, and loads of interest charges.  I could save a boatload of money just by getting my bills caught up and paid on time.  And if I could get debt free, I could save even more on minimum payments, not to mention the interest.  In general, the faster you pay something off, the less interest you pay.  I had listened to enough Dave Ramsey to know that I needed to have a budget, start an emergency fund, and begin the debt snowball.  The question I had was how to do all of this when your budget is already negative?  One idea is to rotate the late payments so no one payment gets so late that you are either sued, leaned, garnished, or repossessed from.  I noted this as a possible solution, but saw it as more feeble than just trying to increase revenue, while keeping expenses low.  And that is exactly what I decided to do.

Start

I did not wait to do anything.  I knew that time was of the essence to as soon as I identified the next step, the next step was taken as soon as I was able to take it.  This sounds easy, but it is highly contingent on your motivation, your energy, and your measurements.  You might know what you need to do, but not want to do it.  This is a motivation issue.  Or you might want to do something you know you need to, but you don’t have the energy because there is only so much time in a day.  Then there is measurement, which shows what you value.  You can’t manage what you’re not measuring and whatever you are measuring will grow, so picking the right metrics and the right measurements is crucial to managing and growing your personal finances.

Motivation

I am using a variety of sources to help motivate me towards my goal of achieving $8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks.  One resource is TED Talks.  TED is a website of inspiring videos of entrepreneurs, teachers, futurists, and writers.  When I am feeling less motivated, I simply browse to ted.com and watch a video or two until I am sufficiently motivated to be more like that person, whom I view as successful.  In the same way, Karl Moore videos also inspire me to take action.  I discovered Karl Moore while doing the Thirty Day Challenge where he does “Mindset with Karl.”  The motivational videos mention the Thirty Day Challenge, but can stand alone on their own merit as truly helpful videos.  Karl Moore also writes books on happiness and self-development like The 18 Rules of Happiness and The Secret Art of Self-Development.

My children, or more specifically, my children’s desires are another source of motivation.  As I wrote in 4 Steps from Wanting to Receiving, having to decide what I can and can’t buy my children at the gas station is not a good feeling for me.  I would like to be able to choose what candy to buy them for health reasons rather than financial ones.  For some reason, this exercise motivates me more than any late fee ever will.

Energy

We all get the same amount of time each day, but because of our body’s limitations, energy is finite.  This means that energy must be spent in the most useful way as much as possible.  At my day job we would call this “utilization”.  While production is the sheer amount produced, utilization is production mapped against time, in other words it is how much was produced (how productive were you) in a given amount of time.  That is your utilization rate, which energy (and motivation) can play a large part in.  Managers wanting to more fully utilize their employees might want to invoke actions that either increase energy levels (by say rearranging a department based on strengths, not just needs) or increasing incentives (positive or negative). I have written a post on Ways to Stay Alert and Focused, but there is an entire site called Stay Alert, which has ways to stay alert and keep you energized.

After approximately 10 hours of working and drive times, I had approximately 3 hours of energy left to do work at home or somewhere else each day.  In order to be successful, I am going to use motivation in order to spend an additional hour each day in order to achieve this goal in 2 to 4 weeks.  To do this, after reading Stay Alert, I am going to be eating more fruits in the morning, more whole grains at night, and less or no meat for supper in order to stay energetic as I can throughout the day.

Measurement

The Law of Focus states that whatever you are focusing on (measuring) will grow.  In Management, Measurement, and Value I note that there is a clear link between value and measurement in that what you measure you also value.  You could say that a measurement of your values is in what you are measuring.  If you, as a manager, are only tracking stats on whether or not your staff shows up on time or not, then your staff will probably show up on time daily.  It shows that you only care (value) about whether or not they are there, but past that point, you are out of the loop.  Contrast that with the manager who tracks personal performance daily to get the utilization rate of each individual staff member, which he can do after implementing the staffing model I developed for his department.  Each staff member is now performing highly and if they come in late, it doesn’t matter, so long as they maintain their personal productivity numbers.

So what did I decide to measure? Remembering that what you measure will grow, I decided not to measure how much debt I owed.  Instead, I measured net worth, income (revenue), profit, and savings.  I also made another Google Spreadsheet which listed all of my assets, all revenue streams, the profit of each revenue stream, and savings from reducing a debt.  Every day, I would log into the various websites which contained information about my metrics and update the spreadsheet with new values.  Because my mind was focused on net worth, revenue, profit, and savings, I consciously and subconsciously began taking actions to increase those numbers.  In the same way that a manager sees improvement in whatever he or she measures in their  department, I would see improvement in my net worth, revenue, profit, and savings simply by measuring them.

Actions

Now that I have identified the problem ($8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks), identified the tools I have available (time, motivation, and energy),  and identified what metrics we are going to use to measure success, the first phase of this goal is complete.  You might call the first phase of research and discovery, “Analysis,” and this next phase, “Execution.”  In the same way that an idea is first created in the mind of man, then written down, and finally designed; it does not take shape until it is developed, manufactured, or implemented.  This second phase is what most people would consider the meat, the actions, the specifics.  It is where you actually do what you say you are going to do.  It’s the “fire” part of “ready, aim, fire.”

I began by doing a cost-benefit analysis of what activities would net the most gain in the metrics I had chosen.  I identified the resources I had available (the tools), which were my day job, a business that does business consulting in Indiana, an Indianapolis web design company, an Indianapolis coworking group, a DVD conversion blog and an Indiana VHS to DVD business, a blog about query string parameters, doing Indianapolis computer repair, helping my wife with her custom hand-knit wool clothes business or her blog about breastfeeding and Motivated Moms, helping Zac with his cognitive psychology training and discussion on what it means to be human, promoting the Erich Stauffer figurines web site, getting another side job, or having a garage sale.  My wife or children could also get a job or create more revenue for the family.  All options would be considered in order to achieve the goal.  This was a brainstorming exercise, which I’ll discuss with you later on to help you decide what activities you could do in order to achieve your goals, but first I’ll discuss how I did my cost-benefit analysis.

Costs and Benefits

It is easiest sometimes to decide what you are not going to do so I first struck the last choices having to do with my children and wife working.  My wife is a stay-at-home mom, but she also home-schools our three children, is a member of La Leche League, and the president of her local Alpha Chi Omega chapter – in addition to knitting for her Cloth Beginnings business.  I also decided not to help other people with their businesses because they don’t care about my goal as much as I do.  This strikes out my day job, computer repair, Zac’s business, and my wife’s business.  While one may want to support a business that is already doing well (defined as profitable – having more revenue than expenses) in the same way that you have the greatest chance at developing a strength you already have than by fixing a weakness, knowing the following information helped me with my decision.  While my day job is a profitable business, it just gave me a raise in July for the year and so is not likely to give me another one and it is not currently allowing any overtime.  Therefore, this opportunity is maxed out.  If I find an opportunity that reaps more revenue than this avenue in my cost-benefit analysis, I may scrap this job altogether.  The other businesses are either not profitable or are sole proprietor shops where the owner wields much influence.  The time it would take to both motivate the owner and get decisions made is longer than the time I have allotted for my goal (if ever).

After striking those choices, I could then analyze what was left over much easier.  This is the same technique used in the TLC show, Clean Sweep, where the first step in the organizational process is figuring out what you don’t need.  In Clean Sweep, the first step was dividing everything in their house into two piles: trash or keep.  This was the first sort.  The next sort moved everything from the keep pile onto a keep pile or a sell pile.  Only the things left in the keep pile went back into the house.  Even if items did not sell, if it went to the sell pile, it didn’t come back in the house.  Troubleshooting can work the same way.  Let’s say you are troubleshooting a broken computer.  One “pile” would be hardware problems, the other “pile” would be software problems.  Once you decide the problem is hardware and not software related, you then do a fine sort to find out whether the problem is with the hard drive or RAM (memory), for example.  In this case, the following choices remain, which must be analyzed using the fine sort method:

1. Watershawl, Inc. – business consulting, computer (technology) consulting, Internet marketing, graphic design, web development, web design, hosting, SEO, and online advertising.
2. Nook Share – a website about Nook covers.

I created two units of criteria in order to decide which pile the above revenue streams would be placed in.  Remembering the goal to make $8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks, I made the following rules: 1) it must be currently making revenue and 2) it must have the potential to make more revenue than it is currently making.  Again, we strike those activities which don’t meet the criteria.  Watershawl, Inc. and Nook Share both failed the first criteria and Erich Stauffer doesn’t have enough global search traffic in order to make more revenue than it is already making so that left Watershawl, DVD Conversion, Turn Film, and Query String Parameters.  The next criteria is time.  What is the sales cycle on revenue? Will the money be able to come within the next 2-4 weeks? Watershawl’s sale cycle is on average, 2 months, whereas DVD Conversion, Turn Film, and Query String Parameters are all Internet marketing businesses, which rely on affiliate marketing or pay-per-click advertising for revenue.  As soon as ad account levels reach certain levels ($100 on average) they pay out within 2 weeks.  I had just exited the business consulting, computer repair, and web design business for the Internet marketing business.

Identifying Strengths and Streams

I realize that since you are not in the same situation as me that the above-mentioned example may not be of good use so I wanted to explain to you how you can brainstorm to find your “strengths and streams.” “Strengths” are the opposite of weaknesses.  Weaknesses make you feel weak, whereas strengths make you feel strong.  “Streams” refers to revenue streams, which is any and all the ways in which you can or have made money in the past.  Brainstorming is the act of recording as many different ideas as possible in a short time without criticizing them as you go.  Save the criticizing (analysis) for after the brainstorming session.  Sometimes bad ideas can help you think of good ideas, so write down any idea that comes to you during this time.  Ready? Here we go. Answer the following questions in order to help you identify your “strengths and streams”:

What makes you feel strong? What makes you feel weak?

What activities are you not just good at, but also feel good doing?

What revenue streams do you have, no matter how large or small?

What are some ways you have made money in the past, which you no longer do?

What are some areas or ideas of things you have thought of doing, but for one reason or another never got around to doing?

Have you noticed any changes in technology lately that would make something easier for someone to do something?

Have you noticed a change in the demographics around where you live that might open a possibility for a new product or service?

Have you noticed any “cuckoos in the nest” where something that wasn’t supposed to happen did, or something was an unexpected success?

Have you noticed any examples of something that was supposed to succeed, but didn’t? What could you do to adapt to this new reality?

When I was young I used to collect aluminum cans to recycle for money.  As I got older I collected antiques to resell.  Later on I bought books to resell online or through local book dealers.  These were all retail activities which involved both labor and a product.  Eventually I started trading labor for revenue, which is called service.  I began doing computer repair and web design.  Eventually people began paying me for my advice and I became a business analyst.  Internet marketing is a mix of product and service because you are using your labor to help sell a product that you yourself do not deliver.  The service is in the promotion, marketing, and advertising of the product.  Anyone can do this using the free tools like the Thirty Day Challenge and other websites like Managing Actions which teach you how to be more effective by first changing how you think, in order to change how you act.

Limiting Factors

In order to be successful, you’ll need to overcome obstacles.  The first obstacle you’ll face is your own limiting thoughts so you’ll need to know how to deal with those right away.  An example of a negative thought is, “I can’t raise $8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks.  That’s impossible.” The first step is to realize that you are having a limiting thought, acknowledge it, then let it go.  Just because your brain creates a thought, doesn’t make it true.  Learn to manage your thoughts in order to manage your actions.

The second factor is the people you associate with.  In the same way that you have a greater chance of smoking if you live or hang around smokers or that you have a greater chance of gaining weight if the person or people you live with or work around are already overweight, if the people you hang around or not successful, are not following their dreams, or do not have multiple streams of income, then they are a limiting factor.  If you want to change, then you’ll need to spend less time with these people.

Next Steps

Every meeting should have two things: minutes and action items.  We have just had a meeting here.  This article is our minutes.  The action items are as follows:

Erich: use all available tools and resources to build and promote the identified websites in order to profit from Internet Marketing.

You: take some time to define the problems you are having, where you want to go, and what you want to accomplish, this will become your goal.

Erich: measure the success or failure of the Internet Marketing campaign, determined by the metric, revenue per man-hour.

You: brainstorm to identify your “strengths and streams” – find what makes you strong and what makes you weak, then write down all forms of income past and present.

Erich: update the personal finance measurements with increased net worth, revenue, profit, and savings from the Internet Marketing campaign.

You: manage your thoughts in order to better manage your actions. Notice when you are having a limiting thought, acknowledge it, then let it go.

Summary

This is not a get rich quick scheme.  This is about how to set a goal, make a plan, and execute (ready, aim, fire).  There is no “thing” that can make you rich, if that is your goal.  There is only you.  Mitch Hedberg said it best when he joked, “I bought a jump rope — but man, that thing’s just a rope. You have to do the jump part yourself.” [Thanks, Johnny] No blog, no self-help book, and no business can help you succeed more than a determination and drive within yourself.  If that is missing, everything else is just a rope.

1. Ultra-Local Marketing – direct communication between business owners and their local markets allows for business large and small to add a personal touch and an heir of transparency to give them a human edge in an increasingly no-touch technology world awash with noise.
2. Networking Old-World Advertising – the still-successful outdoor advertising and television commercials are now being used in conjunction with Twitter to give businesses more ROI and feedback on ad placements and their effectiveness. Even without tie-ins, searches for responses on Twitter can sometimes be just as revealing.
3. Uprooting Wall Street – think of the “Mad Money Effect” on steroids.  When people start talking about a stock and that it should be bought, it gets bought, and conversely, talk about selling leads to selling.  This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, but nevertheless is an effect of Twitter on business stocks.
4. Making Blogs Relevant – blogs entered the scene in a huge way a few years back, but have since become mainstream and a bit of a victim of their own success.  Because of the ease of making blogs, their overall saturation is high and readership has suffered.  Enter Twitter: hyper-focused followings with links to blog posts of interests have made blogs more powerful than ever before.  Call it the SEO effect or not – Twitter is shaping how blogs are viewed as a resource around the world.
5. New Ways to Gather Data – never before has there been a literal tap into the stream of consciousness as there is on Twitter.  A quick search on Twitter’s real-time search engine at http://search.twitter.com reveals whatever anyone was last thinking.  Businesses have an amazingly powerful research tool like never before.
6. Helps TV, Radio, and Print Interact – when you see CNN co-anchoring Twitter side-by-side with the host of the show, you know Twitter has hit mainstream.  Twitter allows live television shows,  radio stations, and magazines get feedback on what they are doing, know what people think, and how they feel.
7. Channeling Micropayments – Twitpay and services like it facilitate small loans or payments to companies or between individuals  and will extend the reach of operations like eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal. eBay, Amazon (AMZN) and other e-commerce companies will get a financial benefit from real-time micropayments.
8. Changing Telecommunications – Telecom companies have chosen to manage user behavior by forcing customers to transfer voice, video and data on platforms that they can track. Twitter will force telecoms into a position similar to the one cable companies find themselves in.
9. Government Interaction – Large government agencies will quickly realize that Twitter may be one of the single best ways to communicate with the public and may even mandate that Twitter participate in some programs to distribute emergency notices to citizens quickly like with the Emergency Broadcast System that was used to reach the public over radio and TV starting in 1963.
10. Enhancing Charity – The Internet and the major products set up to use it are changing at a remarkable speed, permanently altering the way we live. Twitter could have as large a role in this transformation as Google and Facebook have had in the past decade.

I’m going to use Twitter as a marketing tool. I’m going to search for “wish there was a way to” “i would pay for” “i want but” and see what I come up with for possible products or services for a business.

“wish there was a way to”

twitter feature: stop following people for certain parts of the day
wish there was a way to send one casting to all my model friends
wish there was a way to download the “Dont stop believin” version from Glee!
wish there was a way to connect my Flickr with my Twitter
wish there was a way to pump gas without getting out of the car
Wish there was a way to send you some of the heat here
wish there was a way to “detect” the tweets of people near you.
I like the Picnik editor on flickr, just wish there was a way to do a whole set at once
Wish there was a way to convince people that we just need to keep offices at a normal temp when it’s hot. Not at absolute zero
wish there was a way to mute the commentators without the background noise
wish there was a way to create ‘groups’ of people to follow on twitter
wish there was a way to order Showtime and HBO and nothing else.
wish there was a way to really be as indestructable as i felt last week
wish there was a way to sleep longer.
wish there was a way to transfer a custom Google map you created (pins and all) to the iPhone Google map app
WISH there was a way to permanently hide any news feed info relating to those “What kind of blah blah are you” quizzes on facebook.
wish there was a way to download iTunes Pass content onto the iPhone.
Wish there was a way to remote into a computer to enable vnc remote management
wish there was a way to opt out of getting messages from some people in facebook. Seems like whey need a spam filter.
wish there was a way to convert guitar tabs to ukulele tabs!
wish there was a way to transport my Pandora stations to my car. Bump “the networks” lol
wish there was a way to turn device updates off except for @ replies
Wish there was a way to make that txt face with a fat lip
wish there was a way to post PDFs in #Facebook messages…
wish there was a way to store up my morning energy and use it when Jude has his nap in the afternoon. So tired and so much to do.

“i would pay for”

I would pay for the NYT and did.
@JetBlue, I would pay for WiFi! (As long as you also have outlets.)
I would LOVE for a man to do that for me! I would pay for it lol Romance is dead in these dudes eyes because no many women are
I would pay for some of them to come home and do nothing. Just to get them out of office
#ubertwitter is best bb app I’ve used twitberry bbtweet yatca and tinytweet. I would pay for uber and will when beta is over
i think i’m ready to start paying something for #twitter not alot, yet, but who wants to spend for fun? I would pay for technical support
I would pay for an audio copy of the conversation that accompanied these actions. =D http://tise.io/7a60c2
I would pay for 8 hours of uninterrupted snoozy times.
@hodgman I wouldn’t pay for a song, but I would pay for you to record the message on my answering machine.
@TweetDeck I so wish my settings/groups were Global and updated the app no matter where I signed in… I would pay for that
might let the s15 go the insurance/repayments on it is about the same as what I would pay for a wrx with a secured loan
I would pay for the data plan.
is there anyway to win backstage passes? cos i really wanna see enrique so bad, or i would pay for them?
You know, I just had that same thought! I would PAY for a better Twitter to stamp out spam & crap! lol!
I would pay for my college
I love my xm! Never thought I would pay for radio but boy do I love it!:)
lol true but i don’t know if I would pay for twitter though…
it’s days like this i would pay for someone to bath me.
I would pay for content online. Frankly, I’m surprised that it has been “free” this long! Make it easy and really QUICK to pay.
It is free, and really good, so can’t complain. They have to monetize somehow. I would pay for no ads TwitterFon.
i would pay for a megavideo subscription if i wasn’t 10000% sure that they’d spam my inbox & usps mailbox with crap.
tanning rocks..i would pay for it but i like the sun..cheaper ahah
I take it back – TwittedFon app update starts with last 20 tweets and stores everything from there. Ads still blow. I would pay for pro ver

“I want but”

Working on my book list…so many I want but how many do I need?
Buy all the T-Shirt Hell shirts I want but can afford and then spend the rest on a strippers and booze.
I know what i want but dont know how to get it.
Thinking about things I want but cant have… Because life is just that way?
Dont know what i want but i know its not you. I know in my heart its not.     <<<—-OUCH!