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When you decide Internet marketing is one of your ways to earn extra money do you always mean what you say?

Integrity is one of the key ways to earn extra money

Being an Internet marketer means you are entering a competitive market. With the growth of Facebook and Twitter everyone thinks of the Internet as one of the easier ways to earn extra money.

The truth is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. We read of overnight successes caused by a YouTube video going ‘viral’. Going viral means your content gets seen by many people who then tell other people who tell other people etc. So traffic to your content grows at the rate of a virus.

That is the best way to market and what you should be aiming for. However there is another form of ‘virus’ in Internet marketing that is on the increase. It’s called the ‘daily email’. Now this can be in your Inbox or now just as frequently on your social network such as Facebook.

I have now taken a clear stand on this new virus. If I subscribe to a Blog or connect to someone on a Social Network I will count daily messages from them as unwanted ‘spam’. The fact I have accepted a request to become a Friend is no licence to ‘pester’ me on a daily basis. One message is week fine.

This ‘battering ram’ approach to Internet marketing is ultimately self defeating. The key to Internet marketing is knowing your target audience and providing solutions.

If you doubt the wisdom of my stance imagine this. You go into your favourite Grocery store and they ask you for say your phone number ‘just for promotional information’. You like the store and they have given you good service so you give your phone number. Then every day after that last visit you get a phone call from the store with ‘special offers’. I guarantee you will soon add that number to your ‘blocked callers’ no matter how good their product.

When people subscribe to your Ezine or connect with you on Facebook they expect you to treat that connection with integrity. This means no abuse of the information and their lifestyle.

So if you currently have daily emails set up or send a daily Ezine or event to people on Facebook do so very carefully. Be honest with people who go to your Fan Page and say you will be sending daily tips and events. Also give people the chance to opt out of daily messages yet still remain connected.

Remember when a person gives you their personal details this is your first test of your integrity. If you use an email autoresponder then your emails will automatically have an ‘unsubscribe’ option. Using the unsubscribe option only takes a mouse click and you have lost a potential client. Email and messages are a great way to develop a relationship with potential clients; they are also the easiest way to lose their trust.

Andrew Peel

I was recently asked to do a post on how to use Twitter effectively as one of your ways to earn extra money.

This post is about how you can build Twitter into your Blogging strategy. To cover the whole subject of using Twitter would (and does) take a book. Twitter is growing faster than Facebook did when Facebook was at the same stage in its lifecycle.

Originally people referred to Facebook and Twitter as Social Networks. After being on Twitter for over a year and having c13k Followers, I have refined my views on Twitter. Facebook is a social network yet Twitter is a social party. Facebook has ground-rules and generally accepted ways of behaving. Twitter is much more dynamic, some would say chaotic.

Up to now the social media marketing (SMM) gurus have said is all about making relationships. I went along with that. However the practicalities of developing a relationship with more than the normal number of people a person would know offline leads to people misusing SMM. (This is supported by the fact many gurus are extremely choosy who they Follow however are happy to have tens of thousands of Followers.) Average users end up shouting their message at their SMM connections and hope the message sticks. This has been referred to as ‘the jelly (jello) effect’. If you throw enough jelly at the wall some of it will stick. As a method of communication it is inefficient. It takes a lot of jelly and a lot of effort and you are unaware how much will ‘stick’ to your audience.

Now imagine becoming a Follower of mine on Twitter. Your tweets will become mixed up with all my other Followers plus people you are Following, the number of updates every 30 seconds becomes large (about 126 in my case). In fact I never read Direct Messages in Twitter now. There is just so much spam. I do respond to an @Andrew_Peel which is a tweet directed to me because a person has taken the trouble to try and ‘talk’ to me.

The use of Lists does help now. I am beginning the process of putting my Followers in different Lists, this will be a long process for me. However if you are new to Twitter I encourage you to use Lists and add each new Follower to a List. Then you can listen to the conversation in each List.

The art of using SMM is to ‘listen’ first. You need to see what your target audience is talking about. Then you can think how your expertise would help them. Now you have a system for aiming your ‘jelly’ at a specific section of the audience and you can be sure they will get much more of your ‘jelly’ on them.

Your aim is to become an expert, a micro-celebrity if you like, by producing quality content that will help people. Link your Blog, Video Marketing and Article Marketing sites to Twitter. Set them up to tweet about any new content you produce. This means your titles have to be good enough to catch a Twitterer’s eye so they feel compelled to click on it. This all has to happen in 30 seconds.

Bringing it all together Twitter is the place you get people to ‘know about’ you. I am firmly convinced your Twitter following can get so big there is no way you can have a meaningful relationship with all those Followers. This is if you define a relationship as a two way process. However if you define a relationship as accepting your expertise and using it to provide valuable content/information then you can provide a meaningful experience for your Followers. I welcome your comments.

So you have chosen to Blog as one of the ways to earn extra money. How do you CAPTCHA quality comments?

I decided to make this Blog a DoFollow on the basis that givers gain. I have made some good contacts since I made the change. One thing you need to bear in mind when doing the same thing is what DoFollow really means. It means that because Google have slapped a lot of standard sales pages people have moved to using a Blog as their made ‘hub’. Now I have a Page Rank 3 Blog with higher than average traffic. So if you place a comment on my Blog that means you get a ‘backlink.

A backlink is good for you because it helps raise your Page Rank. I am happy to do this where people are taking a genuine interest in what I have written. That’s how the DoFollow community works. You leave a valid comment on a DoFollow Blog and I give you a valid backlink.

The issue of spamming has become a problem. There are two issues:

• Automatic spammers using scripts to post rubbish comments
• Human commenters who clearly have failed to read the actual post and add no value to the Post

The aim is to capture genuine comments. Spam filters have a problem because the major one Askimet works on the basis of people marking comments as spammers. People’s definitions of spam vary. I have defined what I think a spam comment is in my Comment Policy. So I have decided to moderate every comment myself. This does take some time and I find that 90 – 95% of the comments are spam.

I have come across a CAPTCHA system for my comments that is based on objects instead of that weird writing so many CAPTCHA systems use. It’s called Ironclad CAPTCHA and I will be monitoring how well it works.

My advice for Bloggers who have concerns about how Askimet inappropriately marks Spam then try using a CAPTCHA system to improve the quality of your DoFollow Comments.