Blog Marketing

After a while everyone with any kind of success can tell you that they have created a toolbox of blog marketing applications that they use. These are the applications that either help them with marketing or help them with advertising. I am no exception to this! My toolbox contains my favorite twitter marketing applications, my favorite myspace applications, and my favorite social marketing programs. Today I decided I am going to bring my toolbox of tools to you.

Below thats exactly what you are going to find, my list of tools in the order of importance to me. Please note some of these tools have multiple functions like making money on twitter and making money on myspace. I have included a brief description with each application or program.

1. Friend Blaster Pro: Friend blaster pro is the most brilliant application I have ever used. This is a complete myspace advertising solution all in one package. Whether you just want to do some myspace marketing or whether you plan to fully utilize the social marketing platform to make money on myspace this program is my highest recommendation. This does everything from build your friends list to post bulletins and its all completely automated! If it were not for this application I would not even attempt to make money with myspace.
2. The Twitter Bot This is one of my most useful finds ever! It helps with twitter marketing and making money on twitter. It does automated twitter followings, automated tweets, automated retweets, hashtag monitoring, and a ton of other useful things! Again I say if you plan to do any twitter advertising or plan on making money with twitter you want this program!! Trust me. Even if you use twitter to talk to others, when you are not at your computer this program works wonders!!
3. Tweetlater I cannot recommend creating an account here enough. A free account just doesn’t cut it. In fact take the one week trial of a paid tweetdeck account and you will see why. I pay for a monthly subscription to this program for one reason and one reason only, it can do what the tweet bot can’t do. It can stay running no matter what I do or where I go! I don’t even have to have my computer running and this program works great! I can post for months and months by setting up tweets for later dates and times. Where tweetbot can do the same, it also uses a lot more resources so their are definitely times I need to turn it off. Making money with twitter has never been easier then it is with this program. Its only downfall as I have noticed it is can’t auto retweet.
4. Free Viral Tweets This program is the best at getting people to retweet your message. It is also used by websites all across the net that claim to “grow your twitter following” on autopilot. This program works and gets others to tweet your website. Check out what the paid vcersion offers and think of how many times you have clicked such links that others have posted. Its hard to explain this program but its definately one I can’t live without!
5. WebCeo I would have crap search results if it were not for this program. Its totally free and comes as my one and only SEO recommendation. In fact just using the analysis reports from this software you can effectively offer paid advice to companies! This software is no joke. Companies like IBM even trust this software. There are paid services and seminars offered through the company that makes this software and I do recommend them highly, but the software itself is priceless… yet its free!!!
6. Instant Article Wizard Pro Simply put, I can’t survive as a blogger without this program. It takes to much time to do the correct research involved on any number of topics and this program automates the program for me. Of all the programs I use I actually use this one the most. To see my full review of it check Getting Free Articles for your Blog
7. Easy comment 1.1 Although this program no longer works for firefox as of firefox 3.5 it still works perfectly with the flock web browser. This cuts down the time it takes to comment on blogs greatly! I posted an article about using this plugin with greyhat blog marketing practices to build a lot of backlinks in a hurry. Its worth check out!
8. Link Referral This is a free web based program used to build traffic, find other blogs, and build links. This is the easiest traffic to come by and the program is one of the few of its kind that I have found actually works!
9. lavalinx This is a program I haven’t explained yet on this blog. Its for social bookmark trading. I won’t go into details yet but if you can figure it out, its hundreds of free one way links!!
10. flock Web Browser Its kind of funny the a web browser made it into my toolbox but in this day and age of being social, it seemed the only real way to go. The toolbars and features it offers are uncompairable and thats especially true of a blogger. I can’t even get into half the features of this blog without making a full manual so all I say is try it for yourself.

If you have REALLY helpful tools that do things my tools don’t, please feel free to share. Make sure however they are not just a link to a program that does something my toolbox can already do!

So today I am going to move away from twitter and into the topic of myspace. First of all I want to settle the dispute, myspace is a much better platform for marketing then facebook is. I have asked countless people about this and I settled on this answer for a few reasons.

First of all myspace gives you a very customizable profile. This within itself can be used to market products and services (be very careful or you can get your account canceled for spam). It also gives you a place to introduce yourself to all the friends you don’t yet have. Unlike facebook, myspace is all about meeting people you don’t know and thats why I really believe its better for marketing.

People on facebook want to know you off of facebook before they add you to their facebook. Well if you already have their attention off facebook, why do you need facebook at all? Myspace is different. People you don’t know are more likely to request you as a friend even if they don’t know you just because you may have similar interests.

Myspace also gives you the lovely comment board. You can log into most peoples myspace pages and leave comments, pictures, and links to almost anywhere. Again be careful because myspace will cancel you for spamming comment boards. As if that’s not enough myspace also has bulletin boards. This allows yet another means of keeping in touch with friends and posting links to various places (ie your blog posts).

So for all these reasons and a few more I haven’t yet gotten into I prefer myspace. I keep warning you have to be careful with myspace because they will cancel accounts for spamming and I can’t stress that enough. There are however tips and tricks you can use to market with myspace that won’t get you in trouble.

Now please understand everything I am going to discuss here relies on the myspace marketing application called Myspace friend Blaster Pro. Despite its name of friend blaster, this program is not just for adding friends but is a fully automated myspace marketing application. However if you are going to market, its always nice to have people to market towards!

Thats the first thing I am going to discuss. Building your friends list. The truth is its getting harder and harder to build your myspace friends list. So many people don’t want to add random strangers. There are a couple tricks to avoid this. First if you open up friend Blaster Pro and log into your account you should see the gather id’s screen. If thats not the screen your on, you want to be on it.

Next you want to goto the browser users page listed under the “friends” menu on myspace. Type in any search criteria at all. Then click the checkbox for new to myspace and click enter. On the gather I’d page make sure the option “gather id’s from all pages” is checked and the option full gather is checked. The click start. This should go through page by page adding profile id’s into the list.

After you have a few hundred ID’s click stop. Now you want to goto the “friend requester” page. Click the option to send a short note with your friend request. In the note you want to type something similar to the following: “Hi I found you searching profiles on myspace and saw you are somewhat new so I figured I send a request. Send me an email after you accept this I’d love to chat.”.

Now after you get your first few followers, do the above procedure to your friends friend lists and change the message to say something to the effect of “Hi I keep seeing your name popup from myspace as us having friends in common so I figured I would send a friend request”. After your message is typed in just click send. Do make note to this You do not want to send more then 125 friend requests a day or myspace will flag your account as a spam account!.

After you have a friend following going its time to send out some auto messages. Now I want to stress this, your auto messages need to make you seem like a very real person. Do not advertise or market using this option. Instead send a message like “Hi there just wanted to drop you a line and say thanks for accepting me as a friend. I was wondering if you use any myspace game apps or want to chat sometime. Please feel free to drop me a line. Although my profile mentions I have a website I am not a spammer I am a real person”.

These types of messages get great responses. It tells the person in question you are real, and you have a website. Because you were so polite and friendly about it they may start a conversation with you AND check your site out!

This method also works for posting comments on myspace comment boards however you want to use links with comment boards. It works great for search results and gets a high amount of clicks. However you still have to be careful how you do it. This is where graphics come in great. Leave a graphic on each of your friends comment boards that says “have a great day from your website name” and have it link to your website! This is FULLY acceptable. Also to avoid the bot detectors what you can do is send 25 comments on auto, then switch the message and do 25 more.

Now the last marketing feature of this great myspace marketing package is the auto bulletins. You can post a bulletin that all your friends can read and include links. This is a GREAT feature. You can use this to take a small piece of your latest blog post and have a “read more” link in with it. Friend Blaster Pro also lets you set up a multiple amount of bulletins and send them out at various times. This means you can have your top blog posts rotating with “read more of this at” links in each one. Its not spam because each post is different!

In case you have not already figured it out, I swear by this program. In fact I not only swear by it its also the only myspace marketing program I use and I believe its fully worth its weight in gold! This program within itself can increase your blog presence and your sales if you use it effectively.

My father worked in the corporate world for most of my life. He was one of those men who wore a suit coat and tie and worked behind a computer desk all day. I learned a lot of what I know about computers because of him. My mother however, she owned her own business. When it came to advertising and marketing a business, I learned that from her.

My mother owned a painting business and for her only one means of advertising worked, social advertising. One of the best ways for her to advertise believe it or not was by going to local church functions. What I learned was that people who go to church want to help other members of their church. So they started recommending my mothers services to their friends and acquaintances. In less then one year of her starting her business, she had so many customers she started refusing some.

The truth is this is the best method of advertising a business, but its also the hardest. As a blogger who wants to make money social marketing is everything! Why? Because you are effectively a writer on your given topic and your audience are people who want to hear what you say. A blog is within itself a social networking medium! However effective social marketing is different for every situation and this is what makes it so hard.

First their is offline social marketing. This type of social networking always works best. Whenever you can sit with like minded people, you are marketing yourself socially. MLM marketing professionals know this method well. That’s why it has become a common practice for MLM marketers to meet offline to try to build up their down lines.

The problem is its hard to target an audience offline and no one can give perfect details. For example if you own a blog about dogs, pet care, and pet services going to dog shows, pet walks, and other pet events is going to be a great way to network socially. If you have a blog about music you may want to go to concerts and music events to do your networking. If you have a fashion blog going to local avon and makeup parties and other fashion events are great for social marketing. The thing is each topic in life has its own audience. Its a matter of figuring that audience out and being social with them.

Not every market is so easy to figure out though. Take this blog for example. Its a blog teaching others about blogging. How does one market a blog like this offline? Well honestly I reach out to bloggers! They have blogger meets where bloggers talk about the newest and best marketing methods and get to meet others who also blog. Also places like job fairs are a great place. Honestly everyone has an offline market its just a matter of figuring out who your market is.

Now I said earlier that offline social marketing is the hardest. The truth is its the hardest for one reason and one reason only. Your personality is everything. You see with online social marketing is easy to fake a personality however offline its not so easy. You actually have to be a likable person and a social butterfly. Others have to want you around.

However online social marketing has its twists and turns also. Online is both easier and harder to network socially. For example its easier for a person to glue on a smiley face and pretend to be a nice likable person even if they are really a rude crude unlikable jerk, however its much harder to find people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. Whereas offline all you have to do is make a presence at the social events you are targeting and talk to a few people, online you have to not only talk to people but you have to convince them that out of the millions of people online, you have something original to say and something original to promote.

The truth and reality is that the internet is one giant advertisement after another. Because of this people have become very accustomed to seeing advertising and hearing people talk about their great new websites and website services especially in the social network realms. Now when a person online has a friend who out says “hey I have a blog” or “I have a website” they look at that friend and say “oh so you want to sell me something”. With online social marketing you have to convince them that you are not trying to sell them anything, that they will be genuinely interesting in your offers, or you must somehow give them some other reason to visit your site over all the millions that are also marketing!

So far I have talked a lot about the online social market known as twitter. I have told you about auto tweet services like Tweet Later (I highly recommend this service and will make an official post about it at some point) and I have told you how to build your following up. I also have recommended that for myspace people use the program friend blaster pro to build up a following and to market their blog posts and articles (another program highly recommend I will go into full detail about sometime soon).

What I havn’t really talked about is your actual socializing. This is where 99% of online social marketing fails. You must be social on a social site. You must build real interaction with your friends. For example on myspace, its great if you have 10,000 followers. Its great if you play all the little myspace apps with them. However its not really productive. You want to be even more real to your clients then that. You want to email them and say “hey I noticed you were interested in blah blah blah and thought I’d drop you a line because of it. Honestly I LOVE to talk about stuff like that.” …. etc. You get the idea.

You can also use little things like, visit the profiles of the people on your friends list. When your friend adds new things, comment them telling them what you think. When they add new pictures comment them and tell them which ones you like best least, etc. The more real you become to these people, the more likely they will consider you a real cyber friend, not just someone they follow/returned request of.

This is also true with twitter. Sure you can just use it as a news ticker for your favorite topics and you may find great success with that, but I also promise you something else. It will be a short lived success. If instead you read the tweets of those you follow and you talk back and forth with them, you get them to see you are different and not just another person marketing something. You become real and they become interested. As a blogger this is exactly what you want! This is also exactly what social networking and social marketing is all about.

This is the practice commonly known as branding. It does take time but as I have tried to show over and over again, you can still cheat the system and do things a lot quicker. Hopefully this little bit of information can help those out their who are misinformed about social marketing. Hopefully someone will read this and say to themselves that perhaps they can be a bit more social and a bit less marketing to make a business name for themselves.

Just remember unlike paid marketing, social marketing is something unique and different

My blog is one month old today. This is my 16th post. I have over 100 comments. This article explains how!

I get asked it all the time, how am I so successful. Why is it others are using my tips and not finding the same level of success as I am. Is there a secret not being shared?

The answer is yes there is a secret not being shared. Its not being shared because its so simple people over look it all the time.

Lets say for example you just started your blog, and have made a few posts, but you want to get someone other then you to look at it. What do you think the fastest way to get traffic is? Any idea?

The absolute fastest way is by picking up the phone and calling up your friends and saying “hey check this out I started my own blog, tell me what you think?”. Who of your friends is going to refuse to check your blog out?

So what does this have to do with marketing online? Everything!

See the trick to marketing on the internet is simple. Stop trying to get traffic to your blog. Use tools that help you make friends! Build internet relationships with people. Rather then trying to get on top of google, try to make new friends using websites like myspace, twitter, and facebook.

When I say make new friends, I mean make friends not get friends on your friends lists! Interact with people, email them, get them on instant messangers, follow what they do, make comments to them, ask questions about the things they do, take a real interest in your friends!

You should treat every relationship you develop as a new potential client. You should treat every new potential client the same way you would treat a new boyfriend/girlfriend! Would you ignore the things your potential partner says and expect they will still listen to you, trust you, or pay you any attention at all?

Treat you potential clients the same way!

Yes I send out mass friend requests on myspace. Yes I send out mass twitter follows. However I also follow up on all of them and start conversations and build relationships!

I do the EXACT same thing on website forums. Sure I could go and post just for the link, but I find it more beneficial to not only post, but reach out to the person I am posting to.

I tell them if they need help with anything they can contact my private email. I find certain people on forums and follow what they say and comment to them over and over on multiple threads so a relationship is built. I am not just making random posts I am directing them at someone so they notice me and become interested in what I do because we become online friends!

So do I use programs to automate my success, yes! Its the only way to get fast traffic and a fast following! But I follow up with those people to ensure they follow me and don’t just add me and forget me!

First let me explain what black and white hat marketing is.

Blackhat marketing is an online method of marketing that involves breaking the rules. Whose rules are you breaking? Depends on the sites you want listed on!

If you are using myspace for example, its considered blackhat marketing if you are using a program like FriendBlasterPro to mass friend requests, make mass mailings, and add mass comments.

Whitehat marketing is following the rules to a tee. Using the same myspace example a whitehat marketer would never use a program like FriendBlasterPro on myspace because they say any automated software is against the rules.

The whitehat marketer instead slowly hand selects his friends list. He builds a relationship with them. They grow to know and trust that person. The image of the person remains flawless. A great network of people is built this way. Your friends are interested in what you have to say because they are real friends not just a random person at the other end of a screen you have never even chatted with.

So for a long time running now there has been a debate over which method is better to use. Whitehat marketers argue they build a company brand and become well known and trusted businesses and this is why they are successful.

Blackhat marketers argue that their method is based on a numbers game and can therefore be achieved quickly. If you spam 2,000,000 people it may not be the right thing to do, but its two million people who may have never heard of your company had you not spammed (not all spam revolves around email or is illegal).

What the top professionals are not telling anyone is that both methods are right and both methods are losing out because of it!

I use a method called greyhat marketing. Its called greyhat marketing because in the world there are three ways to live. Live in the white never breaking any laws, living in the black always breaking laws, or living in the grey and usually not breaking laws but when you do, its done so tactfully. Greyhat marketing follows that same logic.

This is the method professional marketing firms use! This is what the self proclaimed SEO guys don’t understand. Go to a major corporation like coca cola or pepsi, their paid marketing teams are using these methods. The guys you hire who claim to be SEO experts are fake!!!!!

So now its time to teach you about greyhat marketing. Greyhat marketing takes the best of both worlds, blackhat and whitehat, and uses the knowledge to its advantage.

For this example I am going to use twitter because its where I have currently been doing the most greyhat marketing.

First I created free account with tweetlater. This program/account allows me to do a lot of things but I only use it for 2 very basic things.

I use it to auto follow anyone who follows me. This means I don’t have to go through my list each day and check who is following me and return the favor. Its automated.

I also use it to send a direct messages to anyone who follows me thanking them for following me and recommending them to link exploder, my free traffic building program.

I am not entirely sure yet if this program is considered blackhat or whitehat. However when I team it up with the next program I have to show you, it definitely becomes a blackhat method!

I use a program called hummingbird. Hummingbird is a program used to mass follow people and mass unfollow those who don’t follow back. This builds a huge twitter list of followers in a big hurry if you use it to its full potential. This program is not allowed by twitter and is definitely blackhat!

Because I am doing greyhat marketing I don’t use hummingbird to its full potential. I have added a little over 850 people in a couple days with this program, but then I stopped using it for a while. Why? Because its time to work on the whitehat side of things.

This is where I sit back and make comments and start conversations back and forth with the new people on my follower list. I help them solve problems if I can. I talk to them about everyday things. For example I just talked to one guy about how to open a beer bottle without a bottle opener.

I am building relationships with people in a hurry because of this. I get to know a massive amount of people all at once rather then a few at time. After a few days of talking with various new people on my list, I will do the process all over again and start talking to even more people.

This way people get to know me on a personal basis and my image gets a brand just like those big corporations. People trust me very much because they see I am real! They see I not only know what I am talking about, but I also know when to kick back and be friendly and real.

This is greyhat marketing at its finest. Its using the tools of a blackhat marketer that allows a quick presence and following with the tactics of white hat marketing to build the business reputation only a quality business can build.

Now for all you twitters out there wondering about the $200 twitter application known as hummingbird, I can get the exact same software to you for $7.00! This is NOT pirated software and it IS legal!

How? I tell you the download link of the free 35 hour free trial. Then I send you a small file with some instructions on how to keep that trial software forever without registering. Its not pirated software. I am not sending you a crack for the software. I and not sending you a serial/registration number. You will not have an unlimited copy of this softtware. You will have a free for life trial copy. (which has very little if any limitations)

If you want this software for $7.00 leave a comment on this post with your email address and I will get back to you as soon as I can! You must have a paypal account to get the software for $7.00!