This is why you need to make use of Social Media.  And guys, if you were not thinking about catering to Female clients, you are nuts!

And yes, MySpace still rocks if that is your demographic. But Twitter seems to rule if you want people that make over $100,000.

It is why we push it with our clients. Contact me if you want to learn how to super charge you Social Media for as little as little as $70 per month.

Can you really afford not to?

Not sure where to start, check out the Blog post, Twitter Explained in 5 Minutes.

Cheers,

Andrew “Easy” Anderson

A Profitable Website

I will be doing another video going over the basics of what you need and of course, WordPress is the only content managements system that I recommend these days.

WordPress currently powers 8.7% of all Websites.
WordPress currently powers 56% of all Websites that have CMS or a Content Management System.

You need to be using CMS and WordPress. This should be your Website if you want to make money. If you don’t have a Blog and update your content on a regular basis, you are losing customers, money, and you are getting killed on Search Engine Placement.

Here is the link to the Tour Page with the Buttons That I speak about in the Video as well as a few other sites.

• 
  Click Here Or On Image To See
• 
  Click Here Or On Image
• 
  Click Here Or On Image To See
• 
  Click Here Or On Image To See

And if you are willing to be a Guinea Pig, you can pre-order the Software that we used to build the sites for only $77 a month and you get a 30 day free trial. No contracts, no commitments. Not only that, but you will get a Shopping Cart, an Affiliate Program, and an Auto-Responder built in as well. Plus other great good surprises. (and yes, I will get around to putting in a fancy button here too, but the most important thing is to have a way for people to give you money.

OK, I am going to go over some of the basics that you need to have no matter what, as well as a number of things that I see big companies and even well know Web Gurus are doing wrong with their Websites in the next video.

These are easily correctable but often overlooked.

Also, for those of you interested, if you don’t feel up to doing a site like the ones I show you in the video, we can do ones like them from turn key (you have to provide the content, although we can for more money) from $499 to about $2,470 for most small business sites. Larger sites are more of course. But typically, we are 1/2 to 1/3rd the cost of other solutions. We can also provide turnkey solutions on a monthly basis as well. If you are interested, just contact me and we will get you taken care of for sure.

Cheers,
Anderson

Is a Chameleon In Your Future?

There are a lot of choices today in the world of Websites and Blogs for your business.   The tough part is choosing the right one for your business that will make you money and not cost you an arm and a leg.

Having worked the nearly every platform out there today, the choice has gotten easier than ever before and there has been a clear winner for quite sometime now and the general business world is finally finding out about it and the winner is……

WordPress by half a lap!

With the latest release of WordPress 3.0, WordPress has extended it’s lead far ahead of the other platforms out there.  Even with the heavy duty expert system like Vignette that would cost around $250,000 to build a full blown site, you can now duplicate the same functions for 1/2 to 1/5 the price and have a much easier user interface and do it in 1/3rd the time.

As we have been working with Drupal, Joomla, TypePad, Posterous and others in that past and still support customers that us them, we are fast seeing how they are slipping away in comparison to what WordPress can do.  It is not just getting better a little bit, it is fast becoming 10x better not just for Blogs, but full blown Websites of any shape or size for business.

The plug-ins and widgets are becoming better as well although they are a good 6 months to a year behind of what the core of WordPress 3.0 capable of because of the nature of how they are put together.

What is going to leap-frog whole process though is that we are getting ready to launch one of the first “Chameleons” for WordPress that takes over the functionality of widgets, plug-ins and theme, all in one.

This will be a large shift in giving someone that only knows how to check their email with zero tech skills to build a fully richly featured Business website of unmatched functionality.

It is being called a Chameleon because it can mimic the look, feel, and functionality of nearly any site, running on any of the other platforms more quickly, easily, and better than anything else out there up until now.

Imagine being able to build a Website that looks like any of the best ones out there in a mater a few hours or days.  Now imaging being able to do it yourself our have someone do it for you and not break the bank or have to be a rocket scientist to ad any content you want from text, to graphics, to audio and video.  Or to be able to set up a completely functioning eCommerce site within an hour or two complete with Affiliate programs and upsells and downsells and in place.

Well, the wait is nearly over and it is going to blow everything else right out of the water.

The end result is that you have a Website that not only costs less to put together, but to maintain, add data and content too, and keep fresh and up-to-date without being a tech genius.

This is not to be confused with all of the cheap or free website builders out there.  You know the ones that are free or only cost $10 – $100 bucks a month.  The time for those if you really want to make money on the Web is long past and those business that stick with them are suddenly going to find their business drying up over the next year or so to business that are using WordPress and a Chameleon.

I will be able to show you a demo video of what can actually be done and just how fast you can do it here before the end of the month.  This will be an exclusive and you can say that you saw the future of Business Websites here first before anyone else.

Cheers,

Do Pop Ups Annoy You Too?

OK, Pop Ups annoy me.  I know that they can used to make you money but I am not convinced they do any more. Because as I have noted, when I go to a site, usually as sales site, I try and leave the page. If they have one, I don’t bother ready the rest of it accept on very rare occasions.

I put them on my you just wasted a couple seconds of my life list and I don’t want to have anything to do with whatever you are selling list.

Pop Ups are kind of like the Disco Balls, they were really cool for a little while, but if you put them everywhere they are a bit annoying and it is like having one in your office to show how “cool” you are.

So, if you visit a site that has one, please post a comment with a link to it here.  Some of them are more annoying than others.  The ones that you have to keep clicking to leave.

Here is one I got via email.  Lovely…

Jeff Paul  $1,805 in 10 daysl

Will post more as they come in and you do the same!

Cheers,

Believe it or not, you really can get a complete eCommerce website done for under $2.500 these days.  And no we are not talking about those out of the box template monstrosities that you only pay $5 per month for or are from a template that 10,000 other business have that look exactly the same.

I am talking about having a full blown custom design that does not look like it comes from the 80′s.  I am not talking about a Website that is not centered in your browser.  That is the surest sign I know of these days to quickly ascertain if a company has their act together on the web.  If it is left justified and not centered on your screen, be careful about doing business with them.    Just saying… 

Today, you really need to have the following.

1. A Centered Website that lets people know how your product or service can help solve their problem or pain, or make their liver easier or more enjoyable.
2. You need to have an integrated design to the site which include a look and feel that is consistent throughout the site.
3. You must have a Blog, even if you don’t want to write in it, have someone else do it.
4. You must have RSS feeds and social media integration.  While I have not heard too much about this from the so called Gurus, your RSS feed can be your most important traffic source.  The same goes for your Social Media.
5. If you have products or services to sell, ( I mean why else would you be in business) then you need a way for your customers to purchase them. You need buttons and a shopping cart.   Here are some examples of some pretty cool buttons. Note the buy now button and the sign up for twitter button.

• Click Here Or On Image To See The Button In Action

Most companies can get a great looking Website, Blog, online Social Media Framework, and Shopping Cart/Way to collect money, Video Integration, and all done for your including graphics for $2,477. Where? Right here with www.21to21.com and www.MadFunMarketing.com.

So what are you waiting for? It does not matter if you are a just starting out, or need a serious rehaul of your Website. You don’t need to spend more in 85% of the cases.

In 99.99% of all of the sites that we have looked at, most can be done for under $10,000 using our new tools. 94% can be done for under $5,000 and of those, 88% can be done for under $2,500.

And putting money in your Web Presence is by far the best money you can spend for Marketing/Sales and in practically any other category you can think of for sure. Simply because in case you have not noticed, people go to your Website First!

Plus, you can keep it up-to-date and humming for less than $200 with hosting and fresh content for your blog. You don’t even have to write it yourself!

Why are we doing it so inexpensively?

Well, because we are tired of seeing crappy looking Websites for one. Secondly, we are tired of coming in after the fact when a client has spent $5,000 to $50,00 and still has a site the will not make them money and then having to convince them that it can be done form $2,400 or in the larger ones, for only $10,000 and that it can bring in 5 x the business they are bringing in now. It is painful to watch. And frankly, just silly and totally unnecessary.

If you would like to take advantage of this offer, and get access to our new tools, plus a whole lot of other bonuses such as marketing and SEO assistance then just click on the Button below to get started.

Oh, and you will be able to easily maintain, change, and update your site as well. Complete training on how to do this is provided as well.

Add 50% Or More To Your Sales….. An interview with the author of the new book “Personality Language” Marilyne Woodsmall.

I did this interview when this book first came out and I see that there a few people have picked on just how valuable this really is and are starting to teach it.  But, why not get it from the Horse’s mouth so to speak instead.

Get comfortable and take a listen to an interview I did with the author of the new book Personality Language.  Listen in as we discuss how using Personality Language can dramatically boost your profits.

This is a totally new way to reach not only new customers, but get a lot more sales from your existing customers.

I hope to have more chats with her about this mind-blowing new way to communicate with your customers and increase your profits.

We talk about how Personality Language and you will find out why you want to layout all of your Blog posts, Sales Letters, and Information Products this way if you want to have the most success with them and become profitable.

Marilyne Woodsmall and Wyatt Woodsmall, who are Human Success Modelers  wrote  this as a primer to introduce this new way of thinking.

While you may not have ever heard of them before, I can bet that you have heard of, or seen on TV, or on the Internet, or read the books of some of the many people that either one or both of them have coached.  People like Anthony “Tony” Robbins, Eben Pagan of Internet Marketing fame (if you have never heard of him before, under the pen name David DeAngelo who sells over $20,000,000 of Dating eBooks and Advice on the Internet every year and doesn’t even have a published “real book”) , Joe Polish of Piranha Marketing, world-class Marketer and Joint Venture specialist extraordinaire, and finally a host of Olympic Athletes and Coaches that brought home oodles of Medals, and quite a few other people that you have heard or seen as well.

Again the Woodsmall’s don’t go out of their way to mention them as they don’t like to talk about the people that they have worked or are working with all that much. It is just the way they operate, and I can respect that.

The only reason that I bring these people up is help you give some weight to what I am about to share with you.  The folks that I mentioned have used what they learned from Marilyne and Wyatt to help make themselves tens of millions of dollars and to achieve success at a world class level that very few people are ever able to obtain.

Part of what those individuals did to obtain those ultra-high levels of success was to Leverage, with a capital L, what Marilyne and Wyatt gave to them to propel themselves to higher levels of success faster than they could have done on their own.

Now imagine if you had access to that same type of information that you could use to Leverage yourself to those ultra-high levels of success and profitability?  Now you can.

Take a listen and let me know what you think.

Press the play button and find out how to improve your sales with Personality Language.

Click below on the book cover to order the book and type in 21 to get a $5.00 discount.  I can’t recommend this book enough.  It is a game changer.  I will also be posting other interviews with Marilyne and Wyatt as soon I can talk them into giving up more information.

Even if you don’t buy the book, go and sign up for their newsletter at www.PersonalityLanguage.com as it is well worth it.

Here are 2 Twitter Rules that you must use on Twitter if you want to be successful on it.

Rule #1 Try and help, don’t try and sell.

Rule #2 See rule 1.

Cheers,

Oil Spill Gulf Of Mexico 2010

If the expected  moratorium on offshore drilling is placed by the administration as rumored, nearly every expert agrees that we could see $5.00+ gas prices at the pump and diesel could shoot up to $7.00.

Why should this matter to you other than it is going to make going to the pump painful and the price of everything you purchase could go up 10-15%, and heating a home could double this coming Winter?

Well, because it will drive even more people to the Web for services and products.   When even close trips cost $5 to get there and back, most people will be looking for even more things they can purchase without using their car and they will be looking to save money as the average consumer in America and Worldwide for that matter is going to get hit hard.

This is even without the proposed Cap and Tax bill on energy that Congress has said they are going to pass that will add a 25% tax to all energy costs including electricity.

So there has never been a better time to make sure that your Website is up and running and profitable.  I know we are getting busier than we have ever been.

How Is Your Business Going To Handle $5.00 Per Gallon Gas and $7.00 Gallon Diesel Fuel?

Just make sure you do not wait too long.  Gas prices are guaranteed to go up. Will they hit $5.00 per gallon?   Depends if they do put a moratorium on drilling.  But, I would say there is a 99% that you will see a 40% spike in prices even if they don’t.    With over 84% of all oil reserves in the US placed off limits to drilling by the Government and even tighter restrictions on coal and other normal energy sources with no real alternatives in site, it is pretty much assured that prices will continue to rise unless someone in Washington grows some brain cells.

But I have more faith in the Easter Bunny showing up at my door along with Santa Clause with a bottle of good Scotch asking me to sit down for a drink to discuss the Evil of Progressives than the DC crowd to get things right. 

Then again though, if you open your eyes to what is going to be happening shortly and you get your Website and marketing humming, you can do really well. That, and buying oil futures.

Those that don’t, will probably go out of business or at least be in for a really, really rough time of things.  It is as simple as that.

Call me if you need help and even if you don’t do that, get your Website and your Marketing in order ASAP.

Cheers,

This is an interview that I just did with Dave Olson over at HootSuite which is one of the best tools you can use for Social Media and your business.

They just released a team collaboration tool to manage a Businesses Social Media that frankly, just totally rocks and you need to get it.  I allows you to have several people use your Social Media and collaborate while limiting permissions.

Below the interview, I have  a video showing you what it can do.

If you are using not using this great Social Media tool (and it is free) and your competition is, at least you will now know why you are losing your customers to the them!    I am sure the blog will get hammered so be patient while the audio loads!

You can download the interview here in MP3 format.

Below is a raw transcript of the interview.  I wanted to get this posted ASAP.   HootSuite really gets it unlike so many companies out there.  Keep an eye on them for sure and go get HootSuite for criminy sakes.  Here is a link,  HootSuite.

Hope you enjoy this!

Cheers,

Interview of Dave Olson with HootSuite by Andrew Anderson.

AA is for Andrew and DO is for Dave of course.

A.A: I’ve got Dave with HootSuite on the line here, and of course this is Andrew Andersen. Dave, you want to introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are and what you do?

D.O: Yup. My name’s Dave Olson, and I work for HootSuite as the community director. I oversee all the marketing and support related task as well as spend a lot of time out just spreading the message to our passionate user-base.

A.A: I happen to be one of those passionate users, which is why we’re having this conversation today. I’ve noticed that you’ve got a really cool product that is honing in on businesses, which really need to use Twitter, and I’m just gonna kinda let you go off on your riff and tell us about HootSuite, and tell us why you think Twitter is good, and go for it.

D.O: What HootSuite tries to excel in is using Twitter and other social media platforms within groups – It’s all about the teams for us. And really, from the very first iteration, HootSuite was built to solve the problem of how do you manage multiple Twitter accounts with multiple editors. It kinda came out of that agency background. But as we built this product, we’ve listened to users and really saw where the future trends are leading, which is more social networks – people don’t just hang out on one. It’s not either or with Facebook and Twitter, it’s both in most cases, especially so in marketing. But now we’ve taken it a step further to create a context of owner and team members. Which allow groups to control their different social networks at a very granular level where they can have owners, advanced team members, and basic team members – they can all be created ad hoc so you can create a group around a topic, a project, a client account. All without revealing confidential password information which is really great especially considering the transitory nature of a lot of work environments where you might have interns or people moving on, people changing jobs, changing departments, and so on.

A.A: Right. And the value of that account is becoming higher and higher as more people depend on it too.

D.O: Oh, absolutely. We find, by listening to what people are talking about out there – and I spend a lot of time on the road talking to agencies and enterprises, and consultants and so on – they really think of HootSuite as a destination. This is their dashboard that they open up first thing in the day, even before their email, to listen to the pulse of what people are saying about their pertinent brand names out there. It’s tremendously important, and I would say, to businesses who aren’t using Twitter yet, even more so that talking to the people, it’s even more important to be listening to what people are talking about right now about. They’re talking about your brand even if you’re not listening. If you’re not involved in the conversation, you’re not getting in front of potential PR disasters, and you’re not out there prospecting and gaining more customers by being out there, listening to the people, and responding and reacting to their comments. [00:02:58] your own company, but certainly your competitors as well

A.A: And it can if you’re out in front of it, and I just wanna give a real brief example: I had made a Twitter comment, I’d used a product that I wasn’t happy with. They’re well known, I don’t wanna mention them in here. I made a Tweet about it, and I wasn’t being mean about it, I’ve learned never to do that because I have problems too, and I don’t know any company that has these issues but they had seen the Tweet, I had the CEO and their VP of marketing get a hold of me within 15 or 20 minutes of that and take care of the problem. I was amazed. And I’m not sure if that could have happened without Twitter and everything else

D.O: No certainly not, and I think where Twitter is really powerful is in its limitations. The whole ‘It has to be a short message’ allows you to digest these little dim sum sized morsels really quickly and respond and react to them. When sending an email, which just gets lost in the shuffle and people write an email and there’ll be 6 different topics in there – so it’s like “Oh geeze, I can’t respond to all of this”. But if you can fit something into 140 characters, usually it can be answered in a fairly straightforward manner. So it kinda creates this back channel into the offices all around the world of these people who [00:04:15] are very difficult to get a hold of.

A.A: Right. You’ve nailed it ‘round the head. What happens is it’s the ultimate in direct marketing. You have to be very precise, as you said, to get your message out there so that it’s understandable.

D.O: Yeah, and I think direct marketing sometimes has this connotation that it’s very indirect, it’s kind of spreading the message too far and wide. Now with Twitter by setting up a listening column and HootSuite for example, where you can listen for everyone talking about llama feed because you’re in the llama feed business, And every time you see someone saying ‘I have to go feed my llama’, or something to that effect, you can be chiming into them saying “Hey, I’m interested in your llama’s too. [00:04:56]. How many do you have?” When it comes time for feed, they’re more likely to contact you. Although I don’t know what the shipping cost is for llama feed across the country, so I should probably come up with a better example – maybe fly fishing.

A.A: It doesn’t matter what it is though. It doesn’t have to be a world away. That conversation could be taking place right in your community, and you would never know about it without twitter.

D.O: Yeah, absolutely. People do forget about the power of – and you see this a lot with tweetups and such where it’s local people. People that might be working just down the street from each other, or hanging out at the same coffee shop, all of a sudden are able to build relationships because they have this Twitter tool, this social media tool sort of bridging that divide of awkwardness that sometimes is between we human beings.

A.A: Yeah, absolutely. It’s obviously added a few zero’s to your guy’s bottom line. It can do that for anyone else too. I know it has in mine, in my consulting business, and everything else that I do. It’s absolutely added a complete zero to our profit this year.

D.O: Bear in mind too that HootSuite is a free tool. While there’s a premium version of the mobile versions for both Android and iPhone at $299. There’s also free versions for Android, iPhones, there’s the web version which is free, enjoy it. And there’s also three flavors of standalone applications that a lot of people don’t realize. People that are accustomed to using a standalone Twitter or social media tool, and they prefer that rather than running it in the web. There’s some versions that you can run it as a standalone application too, and at this point there’s no cost for any of those.

A.A: And $2.99, you don’t mean $299, right?

D.O: No, no. Although if you do want to pay $299, we’ll make sure that we spend the money to feed the developers tasty beverages on a Friday.

A.A: Ok. You’re talking about 2 dollars and 99 cents.

D.O: That’s correct.

A.A: Ok. Just wanted to make that clear for everyone else. What’s amazing Dave is, and we had this in our brief, previous conversation – I don’t know what your numbers are as far as penetration of people actually using Twitter for their businesses. But in my own experience in dealing with clients, I would say it’s really less than 3-4%, if that high, are really using it to their full advantage. It’s kind of amazing.

D.O: Yeah well a lot of companies get on and they don’t think of it holistically involved in their whole marketing and outreach in public media relations strategy. They think of social media as the red headed stepchild that’s sort of stuck in the corner. Sometimes within companies, they sort of randomly assign someone to manage this stuff. But really, this is just another tool in your marketing tool kit and once people start understanding the power of listening and talking in almost real time. It gets over that ‘Oh this is just a fad’ phase real quick if they do it right. The problem is a lot of people sign up for an account, they’re just using Twitter Web and they’re spending their time thinking about what to write rather than how to listen. When they do write, it’s talking about something like – maybe sending out a coupon offer, and they’re talking about themselves, when really you have to be out there building relationships which means talking about what other people are interested in. It’s not about being transparent; it’s about being translucent and sharing the interesting bits about you and your company.

A.A: Very well put. You guys definitely have a handle on it. It’s a powerful medium and I think that if a lot of companies would spend half the money that they spend on PR and advertising, and put in a social media like Twitter and everything else, they would get 10x return they’re getting now.

D.O: [00:08:46] return with spending 10% of the money. When I talk to people who are heavily invested in this kind of traditional advertising forms. I’m like how many people converted because of that billboard ad, or how many people converted because of that radio ad? And those numbers are really hard to quantify, whereas using Twitter and using HootSuite specifically with our onboard statistics, you can see immediately what Twitters generated clicks, how many clicks there where, where the people came from, and kind of the long tail of that – well there was a whole bunch here in the first couple hours, but look at that, it kept on going for another week. How many people re-tweeted that message – it’s real easy to find out. You can very quickly and efficiently generate metrics to justify the success and adjust your campaigns to fine tune them based on what you find is really working and what your audience is responding to. With a billboard once it’s up there, you can’t go in the next day and say “what we meant to do is”- you can’t do that.

A.A: Absolutely. As you said, you can track the links. If you set up your link to specifically deal with those people that were coming in from Twitter and the other social media, you can further leverage that as well and measure it. It just takes a little bit of common sense to get that put together.

D.O: Yeah, and if there’s some analytic stat geeks listening out there, they probably have discovered our custom URL parameters. It’s one of those features that we added, that we’re really excited about. This maybe 2-5% of our total user base understands or cares what this is. But this allows you to attach a whole bunch of information to your shortened URL that will tell you specifically what campaign, where it was sent from, who send it, and so on, so you can really slice and dice and compare – well what kind of conversions did we get from Twitter messaging as compared to Facebook messaging as compared to Myspace messaging, and you can slice and dice those statistics by campaign, which is a great way to turn in reports to your client. Or else for your internal use to hone your tactics. It’s a really powerful tool.

A.A: Can I rephrase what you just said? What he basically just said was “It’s gonna help you make more money”.

D.O: Yes. And spend less money to make more money.

A.A: Exactly.

D.O: And spend more time chilling out because rather than experimenting over and over and over again, you figure out real quick which platforms are working for you, which time of day is the best time to send messages out. You’re not caught in a spiral. You can adjust each campaign very specifically and very deliberately.

A.A: Very well said Dave. I know that you’re in on a tight schedule now. Do you guys track those metrics that you just spoke about? And do you guys have some ideas for that? You don’t have to give me all the information now, maybe perhaps we can talk again because I’m sure the audience is gonna be interested in this.

D.O: In other words, do we eat our own dog food?

A.A: Yes.

D.O: Absolutely. Like this morning when our new release came out, I had everything staged from yesterday to blog posts and the releases, and the videos and all the stuff goes out at a certain time. All of us here in the office, the developers included, released it, because it’s kind of a big deal, they’ll be able to keep an eye on all the conversation and all the chatter going on about HootSuite. Various terms about it, certainly we look at what people are clicking through, where people are coming from, and so on. Mostly the main thing that we look at is the sentiment. Who’s excited about it. Who’s talking about it. Who’s sharing it with their networks. What people are writing about it. We know about that kind of stuff in real time because we pay very close attention to it.

A.A: Good deal. As far as I can tell and as far as my use, it is the best social media product that I know from a business standpoint. And that’s why I wanted to talk to you guys, and I wanted to get the word out there. Great job on the new release there, it’s a fantastic tool. Everybody that’s listening or reading this definitely needs to go and get it. And the price is right, Dave.

D.O: The price is indeed right. And if anyone out there has ideas for features that they’d like to see added to HootSuite, we have a feedback channel: feedback.hootsuite.com

You can go there and put in your ideas for new features. Plus you’re allocated a handful of votes so you can go apply to other features that other uses have suggested that you’d really like to see on HootSuite as well. It’s another tool we use to pay attention to what the community cares about and where the passion is. I encourage you to use those tools.

If you need a little help getting started, check our help desk. There’s all sorts of ways to get in touch with us to get a helping hand to get you rolling with this tool.

A.A: I can attest that HootSuite is very responsive. I’m definitely impressed.

D.O: We try our best anyway.

A.A: Dave listen, I really appreciate you taking the time to have this chat. I know it’s gonna help a lot of people get their act together with social media, and hopefully get a bunch more users for an absolutely fantastic product that I can’t say enough about.

D.O: Appreciate the call and to all the HootSuite users out there, we truly appreciate your support of our product. And to all that aren’t out there using it, give it a try and I think you’ll be pretty happy.

A.A: Alright, thanks a lot Dave.

D.O: Bye for now.

A.A: Bye.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Cheers again,

It is well past 2:00 AM  and I am about bushed.  Started at 8:00 this morning and yet I am still pumped and in a bit of a contemplative mood and tired and wired at the same time  But I have found that in these moments that I have some of my best insights, right before my battery runs totally out.

All of the clutter and noise of the day is gone and it seems like my fore brain and subconscious meld.

Today, I spoke with members of my team scattered all across the globe.  From Europe, to America, and Canada, to the South Pacific and Asia.

I also did an interview with Dave Olson from HootSuite today as well.  Should have it posted later yet this morning.  Awesome interview with a super nice and cool guy who is with one of my favorite companies right now.  They know how to do software and services right.  Wait until you hear the interview.  They absolutely get it, it being Social Media.   Plus, they get Direct Marketing too, which most of the big boys don’t.  Hell, not only big boys, but, medium and small boys, and or girls for that matter do not get the fact that Social Media and the Web is nothing but direct marketing. 

Which reminds me, I am overdue for an update on Drayton Bird’s Common Sense Social Media Challenge.  OK, get that done later today there Anderson.  Yes, you know you are definitely tired when you start referring to yourself in the third person in a Blog post.

On top of that, I am working on some fantastically fun and exciting projects and working with some of the sharpest people I have ever had the pleasure to bump elbows with on a daily basis in my career.

It is because of these people that with all of the projects that are going on,  someone, somewhere in the World, 24 hours a day is working on one or more of the parts and pieces of the puzzle.

This has not only allowed me to finish projects so far ahead of estimates that I am flabbergasted, but even the ones that are running behind, are running behind because of the caliber of the team that has enables us to  increase the functionality, features, and usability of the project drastically beyond what we had first envisioned.

Because we are now truly plugged into the World, I am finding that mountains can be moved overnight.

If you ever get a chance to experience this, it is truly something to behold if you are a builder and creator of things.  I will be doing and in-depth examination of this process later on so that you can glimpse inside and I can explain how it was put together and hopefully recreate it yourself.

Now if I could only find an editor that kept the same crazy hours I do, or just maybe I will hire a few more to cover all of the shifts. 

Cheers,
Andrew (sleepy) Anderson

Understanding Twitter in 5 minutes:

• Why you need it for your business

• What it is

• How it works

• How you can make money from it

By: Andrew Andersen

In order to help you understand Twitter, you just need to understand and think about it as the ultimate direct marketing tool because Twitter users voluntarily sign up to receive you messages or your tweets.

I’m not gonna mention any other special jargon, we’re gonna bring it down to the basic terms so you can understand the power of Twitter and why you need to understand it and start using it immediately.

This poll and survey was just taken about 3 or 4 days ago and I want to read something of it for you. Are you more likely to buy since becoming a fan or follower? Now, 67% of the Twitter respondents said yes. Are you more likely to recommend since becoming a fan or follower? 79% of the Twitter followers said yes. So if someone’s following you on Twitter and you have a Twitter account and you’re tweeting and sending out messages, 79% of the respondents said they’re more likely to recommend your product or service to someone else that they know.

Those are huge fantastically large numbers and if you follow through with it and understand Twitter, you can make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even in some cases, millions of dollars from it if you use it correctly and understand what’s going on with it. I wanna dive into it and show you the components of it. This happens to be Drayton Birds Twitter account page, and I want to explain a couple of things that are going on here. He’s done it correctly in that he’s got a picture of himself because people aren’t interested in logos.

They want to follow other people. And they want to put a face to that brand. He’s got his phone number, his email address, and his website, which are all requirements for a Twitter page if you’re doing this for your business. Some of the numbers we’re gonna look at here; he is following 283 people, which means in this time line here, 283 people will show up there. And he has 411 people that have voluntarily signed up to get everything that he sends out to them.

Now this is huge, it bypasses spam filters and secretaries and everything else. They will get his messages showing up on his Twitter page.

Now this is one of my twitter pages and you can see here, this is the time line that we’re talking about, and these are the messages from other people. This person here is not following the rules and sending out a bunch of tweets and what happens is I’m gonna unfollow this guy and so he won’t be able to do that anymore. That’s the power of it. If you put out great information, you’re gonna get a ton of people to follow you voluntarily because they can opt out at any time.

This happens to be my Twitter page, and I’ve got 12,969 followers on it currently. And that means whenever I send anything out, I’ve got almost 13 thousand people that have the potential to pay attention to it and have voluntarily signed up to get my information about my products and services and what I put out there. Now It’s not just one way communication, you can do 2-way communications with Twitter.

This is a tool called HootSuite, it doesn’t matter, I just want to show you that you can do this. And we’ll talk more about this later and explain it to you. Basically, this is a 2-way conversation I had with Patrice, and I responded to a message that she sent out that said

“I’m gonna choose wisely who I follow. I hate my time line being flooded with stupidness.” – Patrice

So what she’s saying is if you’re stupid, she’s gonna unfollow you. So you gotta make sure that you use common sense when you’re doing your marketing. It’s the way to use twitter. And common sense marketers need Twitter, and Twitter needs common sense marketers. And if you think of it as a direct mail campaign and send out timely information that’s helpful and people wanna read, and it can solve an issue or problem for them, you’re going to do fantastic on Twitter.

What you wanna do is connect it with the rest of your information that you have online, if you have a blog like I do, I’ve got my Twitter counter here and it says “Follow me on Twitter”. So when people read my blog they can also follow me on Twitter. Now you don’t have to have thousands and thousands of followers to make money.

You just need to get started and connect with those potential clients. One of the things that you need to be aware of is I don’t claim to be the worlds best Twitter expert or guru.

What I do know is how to get Twitter to help make you money and if you follow what I just told you, you communicate correctly with them, you get your account set up and you only give out good common sense marketing information, you’re going to do fantastic and you can pick up a customer every week, every day, every month and it just will snowball.

Hope this helps. We’ll talk to you soon. Andrew Andersen signing out.

Best viewed full screen. How to unfollow someone that is not using Common Sense.

People that sign up to follow the Twitter Challenge will get the videos and updates at least a one or two days in advance. So, sign up and you will be given a special link to get them before everyone else!

I just wanted to do a follow up post to the one I did yesterday concerning my experience with Dim Dim.  Well, not too long afterward I was contacted via comments on the Blog by their community manager and their CEO did a follow up.

OK guys, I am impressed. They wanted to go over the issues I was having and find out what the scoop was. While I am flat out booked on time to go back over everything with them on my issues today, the fact that they are monitoring their social media is a great lesson in how to use Social Media correctly for Brand Monitoring.

While the verdict is still out on the Software, and it really could be there was something hinckey going on, they have there shit together when it comes to brand monitoring and how they responded is a very good positive lesson on how powerful a tool Social Media can be when used correctly.

So, hats off to Dim Dim for jumping on this, and when I get a chance to go over things with them I will let you know the scoop.

Cheers,
Andrew

I normally don’t like to knock other people’s products but I just used, or I should say I tried to use Dim Dim to do a Webinar and it was Dumb, Dumb. Not only that but it auto-loaded itself at start up and it took me four tries to uninstall it.

The only reason I am putting this out there is I have seen a ton of ads in my email for a free 30 day trial for lately for it. While I am truly not happy with the pricing for the other products out there, as all of them have raised their prices without any improvement in service, Dim Dim is not ready for prime time yet.

Inc. Magazine even supposedly said is was the best Web Conferencing.  For whom? Ex-crack heads?  Whoops, I had better be careful about saying that, as there are too many politicians that had admitted to using crack. Or maybe that explains it!

Seriously though, I think they need to spend another month or two in development before they go out again. But then again, perhaps they are following the Microsoft model of, let’s get it out the door and fix it later.

Dim Diim has more bugs in it than a dog at a flea circus. Looks like it has potential, but don’t use it unless you want to be frustrated and to have your attendees have a bad experience. It is not intuitive, and the” show screen option” is not re-sizable and the recording of Webinar is clugey. If they fix it, I will gladly repost.  Dim Dim, if you want to contact me to help fix it, please let me know.  I will give you the friends and family rate.  Seriously, I do think it could be a great product once they get the bugs fixed. But it is not there now.

In the meantime, they should pay you to try their free 30 day trial.  Arghh…

Cheers,
Andrew

Common Sense Marketing Using Twitter Video 1.

This is the first in a series of video of the Common Sense Marketing Challenge on how to use Common Sense Marketing with Twitter.

In it, I layout the Framework for you to use Common Sense Marketing to get more customers and connect with the ones you already have. I also layout the new ground rules so that your business can succeed using Twitter and other Social Media as well as, take some the mystery out of the whole process if you have been baffled so far or less than happy with your results.

Please let me know your thoughts and if you are doing any of the above. Also, you can follow this at www.CommonSenseMarketing.org.
Cheers,
Andrew Anderson