The Industry Review

 
Originally I intended to write a summary of “my 2009”. But after reevaluating this, I decided to make it shorter.. or better phrased, easier to digest. Just share some of the lessons I learned this year. I’m mixing both the personal and the professional here, though items are generally grouped together.

 
Overall, 2009 was a great year. There were some rough moments, both personal and professional, but the positives far outweigh the negatives.

 
In 2009 I learned:

• That as suspected, having no boss and being self employed would result in (easily) more than twice the amount of hours that I worked when I had a boss. Even when considering investment banking (notorious for demanding a lot of hours).
  
   

• That even though I am smart, an excellent planner and a hard worker… I sometimes lack focus. And focus matters more than I realized. This one was a very valuable lesson.
  
   

• That working insane hours but having much more time to spend with your family is SOOOOOOO worth it.
  
   

• That working after 4am can cause you the equivalent of a hangover. Since then I try (and often fail) not to do so.
  
   

• That “Do No Evil” is just something that Google says, but nothing more than that.
• .. and that things can change in a way you’d never expect: Who knew I would ever be rooting for Microsoft?
  
   

• That twitter is not just about sharing “what I just ate” (admittedly, I used to think so too) but rather a wonderful, albeit addictive, medium for meeting friends and making business connections.
• …yet sharing “what I just ate” occasionally results in the most fascinating discussions.
  
   

• That Twitter includes the entire range of the human spectrum: the best, kindest and most wonderful people you’ll ever meet, and also some of the worst. And that “Block” is a wonderful option for the latter.
  
   

• That Twitter allows one to find many people who need help but don’t know how to ask for it.
• … but also that it’s wise to draw lines, otherwise you may get pulled in and (at times) blamed for some of their troubles. A lesson I learned the hard way.
  
   

• That some celebrities are extremely friendly, and yet other people at times act like the worst celebrities regardless of the fact they’re no different than you and I (often less, actually).
  
   

• That being a Twitter ex-con makes you tougher… kind of. Okay, it just makes you less talkative which may make you appear tougher (see my blog post on Twitter Jail).
  
   

• That blogging about “professional subjects” leaves enough room for humor and self expression (until this year I’ve only had personal blogs).
  
   

• That some spammers have a well honed sense of humor (see my two posts on spammers: spammers types, and spammers jokes).
  
   

• That a good affiliate manager is worth his/her weight in gold (and if we’re talking about a really thin one, then platinum).
  
   

• That sometimes you really need to listen to your instincts, but other times you really need to ignore them. Both professionally (in this case, talking CPA offers/Landing pages/Ad copy), and personally.
  
   

• That due to the secretive nature of affiliate marketing, the good ideas usually stay with you, while the bad ideas get rehashed, repackaged, and resold.
• …and I wish I could say more about the former…
  
   

• That PPV is just awesome.
• … but other times it’s not fun watching your entire budget evaporate in 20 minutes without any positive results.
  
   

• That the most successful people – at least in affiliate marketing – are usually the most modest ones (or the most silent ones – sometimes it’s easy to confuse the two).
  
   

• That it’s hard finding people who truly want to collaborate as a team. But when you do… it’s the best thing.
  
   

• That quotes are a great way of saying what you want to say without saying it. And that sometimes this is very important (yes, being cryptic is part of the point here 😉 )
  
   

• That some friends don’t even give the tiniest of warnings before they decide this world is not for them. Kaya, I wish I got to know you better before you left us. I hope you are at peace, wherever you are. (I intended for this to be the last item, but I don’t want the last one to be sad… and the next one relates in a way Kaya would have found amusing, I think).
  
   

• That being deprived of cupcakes is extremely dangerous (more about that in future posts).
  
   

• That I can survive on my own cooking (who knew?).
  
   

• That having a character named after you in a book is, like, the coolest gift ever.

 
Can you believe it’s already 2010? I feel it was just 2000 maybe 2 years ago… how did a whole decade pass so quickly? Personally, I think 2010 is going to be fantastic – I just know it.

 
Happy new year everyone!

 

I know I haven’t been here for a while. Things were incredibly busy for me, and I kept postponing updating my blog. However, when the third person asked me whether I’ve abandoned it, I realized it is time to post something.

 
Unlike other posts, I’ll just write what I’ve been up to. I have several posts I intend to publish soon, but they’ll have to wait a bit.

 
In the past few weeks I’ve:

1. Finally turned my company, U Labs, into a legal entity. This meant (finally) forming an LLC, getting it a bank account, a credit card, commissioning a logo, commissioning a professional looking website (not that the one I created using WordPress is bad, but well, it did take me around 30 minutes to make – I want to make a better impression than that). This is still not complete.
   
    

2. Had to comply with the new FTC regulations regarding affiliates. This meant going one by one to every single site I have and adding certain disclaimers and making changes where this makes sense. Since I have no sponsored posts in this blog, I actually didn’t add any here. I did receive several offers in the past to do so, but I always thought they would stick out and felt I had to reject them. Of course, I’ll be honest, if the price was more, uhm, tempting, I might’ve made a different decision, but for now every single post I have written was initiated by myself – I’ve sponsored nothing here for money.
   
    

3. Started participating in a weekly series of webinar events as a panelist. In the past few months I’ve joined a fantastic mastermind group that consists of seasoned internet marketers who share their wisdom in weekly calls. This series of webinars is but one of our joint projects. Last week we had our first (and test) session: despite some technical hiccups, it went extremely well. Our goal is to share our expertise on various subjects. In this session I discussed basic aspects of SEO and intend to do this a lot more in the coming weeks. More information soon. I’ll just say this was phenomenally fun – I had a blast!
   
    

4. Started a massive hunt of ad networks. From various reasons, I’m looking for good ad networks, particularly those that provide decent traffic volume, easy to configure campaigns (without requiring to go through an account manager) and (ideally) international traffic as well. Fortunately, ad:tech occurred pretty recently and was a good source of those, so I started going one by one and testing every network I found. In addition, I posted some questions in forums and tried these sources as well. This takes time. Unfortunately, money too – but no pain no gain. Any suggestions would be welcome, by the way!
   
    

5. Had my mother as a guest for 10 days. ’nuff said, no? 🙂

 
I expect to have more time soon and then I’ll return to blogging more consistently.

 

As I wrote in my previous post which dealt with my personal experiences at ad:tech, I set up quite a lot of meetings with companies who contacted me. This turned out to be a very positive experience because many – if not most – would’ve been companies that I would’ve been interested in chatting with anyway, so rather than me having to chase them, a meeting was set up with allocated time. I never played the journalist until this conference but really enjoyed this.

 
Here are some of the companies I met with. The vast majority were very relevant to what I currently do or my background, but not all were. Those I felt I have nothing to write about I omitted.

 
If anyone spots any mistakes I’ve made – which is possible, since I didn’t take notes but rather counted on the brochures I diligently collected, please do let me know!

 
2ergo has a technology that enables conducting marketing campaigns on mobile platforms. Interestingly, this strongly resonates with a session I attended the next day (which I’ll describe in the next post) that says teens prefer SMS texting to any medium, really: email, chat, etc. Although I (currently) don’t do anything that involves mobile advertising I can’t help but think that maybe I can utilize this somehow.

 
BurstMedia: my first question to Jarvis Coffin of BurstMedia is “what does your motto ‘Discover the Long Tail’ mean?”. His response was that they specialize in niche websites – even those that focus on extremely specific subjects. They own a large network of niche sites and enable very targeted advertising on these sites. An example he gave me – and I don’t remember the exact site – was something along the lines of SquirrelRehab.com. Apparently this site, despite the fact it’s extremely nichy, not only gets traffic, but a very respectable amount as well. Quite surprised me! This is useful both for potential publishers as well as potential advertisers.

 
I’m thinking of submitting my, ehm, nichiest site there, which gets very decent traffic but monetizes very poorly.

 


 
Elephant Traffic: although I’m very familiar with the concept of domain parking, which refers to domains that are not actively used but rather instead show relevant ads, Elephant Traffic tackles it in a rather unusual method – by simply taking the search query from a search engine and matching it to a parked domain. i.e. if someone searches for “buying toothbrushes” they’ll take him to a domain they park buyingtoothbrushes.com (this is a made up example – I doubt they have this domain). This offers very cheap and yet very targeted traffic – since it is extremely likely that those who type search query this would in fact be interested in buying toothbrushes. Again, very useful for both potential advertisers and publishers.

 
I liked the concept and think I’ll attempt to use it from both ends: both use some of the domains I’m not using with them (unfortunately for me there are about 30 of those!) – and also explore getting some of their traffic for the offers I promote.

 
eZanga is another one of those companies that I would’ve gone to talk to regardless of my being press or not. They are offer a PPC search platform that enables high quality, high volume, traffic for competitive prices. Definitely on my list (for a while, actually) of companies to try.

 
Looksmart is a second tier PPC search engine network that offers competitive prices. Second tier refers to the fact that they are not Google, Yahoo or Bing. I was actually familiar with Looksmart before I spoke to them and heard good things – though I’ve never used them myself. I definitely intend to give them a shot. Until now, the only second tier PPC search engine that I liked has been 7search (and I still want to kick myself for forgetting to visit their booth!)

 
As a side note: From what I heard – and sadly, based on my own experience as well – many of the second tier search engines offer really low quality traffic (and often fraudulent traffic – traffic that never converts).

 


 
MyPRGenie enables submitting your own press releases. The cool thing is they offer many free yet still useful services. There are, of course, paid subscriptions which offer more, but for the starting entrepreneur this could be very useful.

 
Netezza was different from other companies I spoke to in the sense that what they do is not really relevant for me now, but would’ve been tremendously relevant for me in the past. They offer a hardware implementation of a data warehousing relational database (such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase, etc). As you can imagine, this offers a significant performance boost (if I recall correctly – and I may not remember correctly – a boost that offers 100 times speed performance). I was really surprised to hear such a technology existed let alone utilized as this could have been extremely useful for me in my last workplace (I worked at a hedge fund and our major bottleneck was analyzing data – even a 5 time speed boost would’ve been significantly useful for us). I can think of three of my friends that can benefit from this technology and might have not heard of it, so will let them know.

 

Although I was not sure I’ll be attending ad:tech NY 2009 until the last moment (because of various family and personal illnesses), I’m certainly glad I did. Overall, I can say it was a blast! Bigger than the last conference I attended, Affiliate Summit East (ASE), but somehow less overwhelming too – perhaps because there were more companies that really did not relate to anything I am doing.

 
After thinking about this for a while, I’ve decided to break my ad:tech summary into three separate posts. One describing my personal experiences, the other describing a few companies I got a chance to talk to, and the last describing the (few) sessions I attended. This is a good point to mention that unlike in ASE, this time I came as press.

 


 

 
Where shall I begin? Ad:tech took place at the Javits conference center and was enormous. It took me about 15 minutes to just find where I can obtain my press badge. But it was well worth the effort, since after getting it, I saw the monstrous line for ‘standard’ passes – there must have been hundreds of people waiting in line!
 


 
Since this was the first time I came as press, I was very determined to do my job properly. About 1-2 weeks before the conference started, I started getting requests from companies to interview them. Since I got so many, I tried to only pick those that are relevant to me/my background in a way. Despite this filtering I must’ve set meetings with about 15 companies.

 
I started walking the exhibitor booths. The first person I bumped into was Eric Schechter, Clickbooth‘s Social Media Manager and a really great guy. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with Eric’s videos (here’s one for example), but he makes the most hilarious videos for Clickbooth. I politely asked him to participate in one of the videos and when he hesitated I resorted to begging. Hopefully I’ll participate in one of those – when crazy is required, I’m always the first to raise my hand ;).

 
Later I bumped into my ex-boss and CEO from 7 years ago (in my previous career as a technical lead/software architect, I created/redesigned almost all of the company’s products). Since both of us changed industries during this time, we were both quite shocked to see each other. Certainly a surreal experience for me. I also bumped into a friend I haven’t seen since 1992 (another surprising incident). Considering several friends of mine attended ad:tech and I didn’t see them even once since the place was so big, I consider the former occurrences one of those weird coincidences that occasionally happen.

 
Although I had a press pass and was really eager to attend some of the sessions, I spent the entire first day almost exclusively running from one meeting to another. Almost surprisingly, this was actually a lot of fun! My first instinct was to ‘pat myself on the shoulder’ for setting meetings with so many companies that are truly interesting and relevant for me, but after talking to several company executives, I realize that the filtering was mutual: it seems many – if not all – contacted me because my background was relevant to them. Most were familiar with my blog and background.

 
I’ll describe those companies in the next post.

 
Although I did get to attend a few sessions, I simply didn’t have enough time to attend as many as I wanted. Fortunately the third day consisted only of sessions, and most people were gone by then (no more exhibitors).

 
In addition I spent a lot of time talking to the various companies – there were just so many! Interesting how my focus changed in the past few months. In ASE I was primarily interesting in finding unique affiliate offers, so had a lot of conversations with both large and small affiliate networks. But now my hands are pretty full in this respect, so this time I was more interested in finding interesting/cheap/unique traffic sources, so primarily was talking to ad networks and other companies that offer equivalent services.

 
During the day I met many friends I know from the NY affilate meetups, from ASE as well as some of my affiliate managers from some networks that I have not met in person until now. It was great seeing Casan Van Langen, my affiliate manager from AzoogleAds, and finally meeting Melissa Emmett, my affiliate manager from MarketLeverage.

 
Also great to meet friends I know, such as Dina Riccobono (from MarketLeverage), Heather Smith, Miki Rapoport (see his picture below closing a 7 figure deal – a moment I was lucky to capture in real time), Ian Fernando, Ken Chen, Steve Fulop, and many more.

 


 
I also had a fantastic meeting with Richard Young (from Arcamax publishing). Just like the last time we have met, we had an absolutely great conversation. I wouldn’t have met him if it weren’t for the yacht party in ASE!

 
One fun thing about ad:tech was the Twitter board. There were a few of those, and they included tweets that mentioned the #adtechny hashtag. I think this was moderated, because I found myself talking to a guy next to it and neither of us saw our tweets on the board. Though eventually I did manage to get one in 😉

 


 


 

Parties

A major aspect of these conferences is the after hours parties. Irritatingly – but understandably – they all took place on the first day. I’ve been invited to six separate parties on Wednesday, and planned to attend three. Unfortunately, I forgot to RSVP one (Clickbooth’s). I went to Azoogleleads’ heaven and hell’s themed party which was awesome (and really embarrassed my wife when I wore the glowing red horns, unlike the standard ‘cloth’ ones, during the entire time. Hey, what’s wrong with some attention? :P). Unfortunately I can’t provide a picture (believe me, I want to!) because the photographer seems to have omitted it from his website, and did not respond to my email…

 


 
Later I went to the VIP Mix+Mingle event (organized by Advertise.com, Adknowledge and GenieKnows) – which was tons of fun as well. Still need to find my picture which was taken there somehow.

 
I felt kind of stupid when I saw Clickbooth’s party was right across the street from the VIP Mix+Mingle event, and I couldn’t go because I didn’t RSVP… Eric later chastised me for not calling him (I didn’t have his number!).. next time.

 
I also had to miss the BlogUp, an event organized on the second day that aimed bloggers to meet other bloggers – since by then I started feeling unwell again. Based on what I heard, it was a big success and a lot of fun.

 

For two weeks now I keep planning to write, but life has been keeping me way, way, way too busy. There are already three posts in my head that I want to write, but no time. However, I decided to take this quick break since this will be a short post.

 
Ever since I wrote my article, Five Different Types of Spammers, I noticed that the post keeps getting spammy jokes (always one liners), something that I never got before. More interestingly, it’s only that specific post.

 
Clearly, some spammer/s saw my post and is/are joking around with me. I don’t think this is in ill intent, as actually most of the one-liners are pretty good. If they didn’t include links to drug sites, I might actually approve them. However, maybe it’s just my (at times) weird sense of humor, but I find this situation hilarious. So I’ve decided to include those I find amusing.

 
The point of this post is – the comments below are all spam comments I’ve received. Every single one.

 
This will be a repository for the spam jokes I get (those I think are good, at least). The people sending them are clearly making an effort! In fact, they’re invited to contact me – I’m curious to know their story 🙂

 
It’s a shame I erased most of the comments. But here goes. I get 2-3 a day, and about half are good, so this list will grow (edit: it seems the pace is greater than I remember – I get more like 5+ a day). Starting with only 3 5 14 26… 30

• What did one ocean say to the other ocean? Nothing, they just waved.
• What is the biggest ant? An elephant.
• What is the most popular wine at Christmas? “Can’t we open the presents yet?”
• Why do birds fly south for the winter? Because it’s too far to walk. [got it twice!]
• What kind of coffee was served on the Titanic? Sanka.
• Why did the man put wheels on his rocking chair? He wanted to rock and roll.
• Why did Willie Nelson get hit by a car? He was playing on the road again.
• Why do bees have sticky hair? Because they use honeycombs!!
• What does it mean when the flag’s at half mast at the post office? They’re hiring.
• What do you call it when worms take over the world? Global Worming.
• Why was Santa’s little helper depressed? Because he had low elf esteem.
• What’s happening when you hear “woof…splat…meow…splat?” It’s raining cats and dogs.
• What do you use to redecorate a baby’s bathroom? Infantile.
• What city has the largest rodent population? Hamsterdam.
• Why does Santa have 3 gardens? So he can ho-ho-ho. [this one is pretty lame, I know]
• How would you clean a tuba? Try a tuba toothpaste. [this one is pretty lame, I know]
• What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.[got it twice!]
• What’s green and red and goes 1000 miles an hour? A frog in a blender. [got it twice!]
• Where does all the pepper go? No one nose.
• What do you call a crazy blackbird? A raven lunatic! [I have a feeling this one came from someone else]
• What do you call a crazy baker? A dough nut.
• Why do hurricanes travel so fast? If they traveled slowly, we would have to call them slow-i-canes
• What is the difference between a photocopier and the whooping cough? One makes facsimiles and the other makes sick families.
• Why do bagpipers walk when they play? They’re trying to get away from the noise. [I got this one twice! Hmm. The guy is starting to repeat himself]
• Why is the letter A like a flower? Because a Bee comes after it!
• What do you call a bee born in May? A Maybe.
• What is a zebra? 26 sizes larger than “A” bra.
• What do you call four bull fighters in quicksand? Quatro sinko.
• Where did King Tut go to ease his back pain? The Cairo-practor!
• What kind of bird can write? A penguin. [didn’t really get this one..]

 
Edit: Unbelievable (to me), but the jokes stopped. That’s 3 days in a row now. I guess the spammer follows my blog and doesn’t want to give me material? Oh.. but it was really in the best of intentions. Like I said, he’s more than welcome to send me an email, I’m curious to meet the fellow!

 
Edit2: No, they’re back. I’m actually feeling relief. It made checking spam more fun.

 
Edit3: Ok, I think 30 is a good place to stop. I made my point, and some are starting to repeat themselves…

After using Twitter very heavily for – what – 3 months now? I’ve noticed that there are certain mandatory milestones people who use Twitter pass through.

 
The first occurs somewhere around 150 followers/followees. You realize there’s no way you could keep track of all the conversations since the web interface isn’t really designed for this. At this point people either limit the number of people they follow (too many conversations going on), start using specialized software (such as TweetDeck) or just give up and return to Facebook saying that Twitter sucks and they don’t see the point (in fact, I’ve dedicated an entire post to this, Explaining Twitter to Facebook Users).

 
The second is actually an artificial milestone: it’s set exactly at 2,000 followers. This number is defined by Twitter itself. I don’t remember the exact rule, but it goes something like this: you can’t follow more than 2,000 people unless you have at least 90% of that – 1800 – followers (or something similar). This is actually pretty effective, and you see a lot of people with disproportional follower/followee ratio (50 followers and 1750 they follow). Usually these are people who try gaining a large number of followers very quickly. Not that it’s impossible, but this is not the right way I believe, and neither this is the point of Twitter. The easy – and the fun – way to overcome this is by progressing through interaction (and I’ve written a post about that too: How to Gain Twitter Followers For Free and With No Tools). I wasn’t even aware of this limitation when I crossed 2,000!

 
(An interesting side note, several friends have told me in the past that I have an anecdote for everything. This is true. For almost everything I hear there’s something related I can think of. A family trait, we all are like this. Funny that my blog is starting to look like that too, don’t you think?).

 
The third milestone, is one I believe I reached in the past two weeks is – I estimate – around 5,000 followers, and will shortly elaborate on it.

 
I’m sure there are more such milestones I haven’t reached: 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 1 million, 3 million, 1 billion, etc. And of course, some milestones can only be reached by God and Ashton Kutcher, and neither is talking to us, so they shall have to remain a mystery.

 
So back to what I wanted to cover in this post: What happens when you start having a lot of followers? (which in this context, is my third milestone).

 
Although I “only” have 7,000 followers, thanks to my witty banter, humorous activities and unnatural modest personality (not to mention my own custom devised algorithm of finding followers – why do people need software packages? It’s just so easy), and some of my best Twitter friends have way, way more followers than I do (like Darren, 101,000 followers, Heather, 22,000 and Ken, 20,000), I’ve started feeling a change once I reached the third milestone. By the way, these three people are always going to be on my #FollowFriday list. Truly some of the greatest people I know on Twitter and outside!

 
An important point: I follow almost every single person who follows me. Why? I just think it’s fair. This point is arguable since I know many people don’t agree with this philosophy, but personally I think that unless you’re a real (non web) celebrity or truly have something unique to say on Twitter (not your blog, TV show, or whatever), you can’t expect people to follow you if you don’t return the favor. The fact John Chow lost a quarter (or more) of his 60,000 followers since his mass unfollow just proves this point – and I don’t think his process of losing followers is over just yet! Of course, this only holds true if you’re actively trying to expand your number of followers: if you’re just in Twitter then there truly is no obligation for you to follow anyone.

 
Here’s what happens – at least to me:

 
The good

1. When I first heard of Twitter, I read that you can pose a question, and you’ll always get an answer from someone in the Twitterverse. So after I joined and had a couple hundred of followers I tried it. No response. I tried it again later. No response. And again. No response. Kind of sucked, but I thought – I guess I simply don’t have enough friends/followers.
   
    
   However, some time ago after the ‘third milestone’, I tried again. I pose a question and now I always get answers. Usually multiple, and usually from people I don’t know. This is just awesome. For someone like me, who thrives on interaction and enjoys meeting new people and starting conversations this is absolutely fantastic. I’ve actually started doing it just to get closer to some people who follow me (and I them). This is one of the best aspects of Twitter. I’m really enjoying this.
   
    

2. You start getting offers for Sponsored Tweets. My original reason for entering Twitter was promotion of my blog and I knew this may have financial repercussions even though I didn’t anticipate or aim for short-term ones (it’s been 3 months and I’m still not doing anything of the sort). However, I truly hadn’t expected anything like that. You tweet a 1-3 messages and get money? It’s not a lot of money, yet this was still a nice surprise. I tweet sometimes hundreds of messages a day, what’s another one? Let alone one I mark as ‘#ad’ or ‘sponsored’ (the application gives you that option)
   
    

3. People you don’t know start referencing you or a conversation you had in a way that implies they know you or have been following your conversations, at least to some extent. Some people may feel threatened by this, but I just love it. It’s like skipping the whole “introduction” aspect of becoming a friend – like jumping directly to stage 2 of a friendship.
   
    

4. Continuing the last item, people you don’t know start including you in their #FollowFriday. This even now still surprises me and greatly flatters me.
   
    

5. You get more business opportunities. I’ve already had several such discussions – which makes sense, because there are so many people on Twitter who look for that, myself included. The one that most surprised me is the offer to give high level direction to a new Twitter application as a “Twitter Guru”. And more so, that the advice I gave was extremely easy to give and I also think, extremely useful. Twitter is truly very simple after all. After you’ve used it for a while you know what could be improved on and what is already great.

 
The bad

1. Your twitter mailbox becomes useless. Tweetdeck shows you only the last 20 messages, so these days I usually don’t even bother checking my DM box – it’s filled with “offers” and twit validations and whatever. It’s a shame they can’t get a better system for that, like a white-list or a word filter (I’d filter every message that mentions “Trump”), because I’m sure I missed the occasional important direct message (apologies if I never answered someone who reads this).
   
    

2. There is a definite loss of privacy. Personally, I’m not too sensitive about what I say. Although at times I’m sure it would be best if some tweets were not public, I still don’t worry about that too much. However, particularly when engaging in personal conversations, sometimes it’s almost easy to forget there’s an audience (and this changes when someone jumps into the conversation – happened several times). This is particularly true when you speak to someone who has fewer followers – or follows only real world friends – and may not to be used to keeping this in mind.
   
    

3. Twitter becomes an increasingly greater time hog. Today I had lunch with a friend who told me “but you don’t really know or care about all 7,000 people, do you?”, and I said I don’t know all of them, but I know many, and certainly will be happy to get to know better anyone who is interested in knowing me. Furthermore, those that I do know, I care about, and as a result, I find myself spending more and more time on Twitter. People who know me know I’m very honest about saying this. I’ve met some fantastic friends in the past few months as result of using Twitter.

 
I don’t know what the future will bring to either myself or Twitter (personally I’m not too certain about its future). I assume it’s a different scenario when you have a 100,000 followers. I certainly have no problem conversing with multiple people at the same time (I vaguely remember even testing myself using various messengers and the maximum conversations I simultaneously could do is 8 – not just in terms of typing – I type very quickly – but also in terms of being truly focused on the conversation).

 
However, with such a great number of followers I’m sure one may easily find himself talking with many more people than 8. That would be beyond my technical ability (though it’s possible mentally I could do more than 8). If that happens, I’ll simply become a slow responder, I guess. Not that I envision myself ever having 100,000 followers (I anticipate I’ll peak at 30,000. Don’t ask me why, it’s just an educated guess).

 

I keep planning to do two big posts and yet things always keep interrupting me and I end up writing about something else. I suppose this is the good thing about having a blog: you can always talk about what you find interesting at the moment. And I still intend to write the other posts.

 
Some time ago I created a new site promoting a piece of clothing (I won’t say which one). Using several tools, I estimated it would have a decent amount of traffic, even if on the low side, and little competition. Furthermore, I did a quick search: monetization should be easy: both in terms of ad revenue and in terms of affiliate offers (easily found some, and good ones too). I built the site, and within 2 weeks ranked #1 on Yahoo, Bing and Google. Piece of cake.

 
To my surprise, I got traffic, but very little of it. Really disappointing; although I was not expecting a lot of traffic, clearly the tools I used to estimate what I’d get were wrong since I never got more than 5 visitors a day – and I was #1 on all three search engines!

 
Therefore, I started using it as a test site: I did experiments with it such as removing a large number of backlinks at the same time to see what would happen: they slowly vanished from the my site (meaning, the backlink count slowly started going down every day), and eventually I lost my #1 position on Bing – but that’s it, still #1 on both Google and Yahoo.

 
I removed the ads and started testing other forms of monetization, not because I thought I’ll get anything from it (clearly I would not with so little traffic), but because I wanted to see how it would look/affect the rankings/whatever. Some things have peculiar effects on SERPs and I was curious whether I’d stumble on anything interesting.

 
Following a conversation with a friend I had on Friday, I decided I’ll just flip (sell) the site. I’ll rebuild the backlinks, restore the ads, and quickly regain my #1 Bing position. I would advertise it exactly as it is: #1 rankings on all search engines, all original content, small niche, but very little revenue. Hey, even if I get a $150 it’s worth it – it may be useful for someone else, but from my perspective the site is a total loss.

 
As I started rebuilding links I noticed something .. interesting. Something which completely made me feel like an idiot. Apparently all this time I was checking the site rankings for the wrong keyword phrase. Clearly I was #1 for a phrase but it was not the phrase I was aiming for originally. And all this time I just assumed I somehow got a niche that sounded good in theory, but in fact isn’t. After checking my rankings for the right keyword phrase I saw I’m around 40 something. This clearly explains the low amount of traffic I get… and still not so bad considering I eliminated a large portion of its backlinks in an antagonizing way to the search engines.

 
So no total loss. Back to building backlinks, I restored all the ads, added multiple affiliate offers (more than I had before) and starting tracking the right statistics now.

 
This emphasizes the importance of doing things meticulously. Although I usually pride myself on being very thorough, I’m only human too. I’m at least glad to see that it means this site is not a total loss and may yet prove to be quite a good one!

This isn’t really a post: but why would anyone look for a search query “Ashton Kutcher and the Mossad”? Someone got to my blog by searching for this phrase. Unsurprisingly, I’m very highly ranked for this phrase (on several versions of Google, I tried), since this is such an unlikely combination and I mention both in two separate articles. But why would anyone look for that? If you know, can you please let me know? I am really curious.

 
It’s nice that Google sends me the growing segment of Ashton fans that are interested in the Mossad. You’re all welcome to my blog! (no sarcasm here, I welcome all visitors).

 
p.s. Isn’t it a good premise for a movie? Someone writes a blog about Ashton Kutcher and the Mossad, next thing he knows the Mossad is after him because it turns out he accidentally found out about a conspiracy (i.e. Kutcher is an undercover Mossad agent, and I’ve just now blown his cover). I think Shia LaBeouf should play me in this case (not that we look anything alike, but he’d make a good casting). Ashton will play himself, and the Mossad agent will be played by Willem Defoe or Donald Sutherland. Maybe Sutherland is better.

 
A real blog post should be coming tonight or tomorrow. This is just for my personal amusement.

In case you are not familiar with it, the Google Keyword tool is an excellent free keyword research tool. You type in a keyword or a phrase, and it shows you the search volume, cost for advertising, competition as well as associated words and phrases. A necessary tool for all affiliate marketers.

 
Some time ago, out of curiosity, I used it with my own name as the seed keyword. The result quite disturbed me. But that’s in the past. In fact, it made me reflect on my life and ponder who I am. Moreover, since today is Yom Kippur (the Jewish day of atonement) I figure it’s most appropriate that I post this now. Google was right and I was wrong. But let me explain what the search tool found:

 
First, apparently my name is associated with:
“Ten stupid things women do”
“Ten stupid things women do to mess up their lives”
“Care and feeding of husbands”

 
Huh. So accurate it’s uncanny. I’ve really underestimated Google. I didn’t realize the burden my wife carries. I hope she doesn’t read this!

 
Second, the tool even further speculates about my life and ties my name with:
“Bad childhood good life”

 
Like I said, at first I didn’t agree with this claim, but after going through all my repressed memories, I realized Google is in fact right. My childhood wasn’t as good as I remember it to be. It even rained the day I went to Disneyland, how unfair is that?? My childhood just sucked, and thanks to Google I see that now.

 
Perhaps they should rename it from “Google Keyword Tool” to “Google Psychic Tool”. Because it is! Google just reaches into an interdimensional database of facts and pulls out the nitty gritty stuff you won’t find elsewhere, in places such as Bing or Yahoo. And I won’t even mention Ask, not even as a joke. That’s why Google is #1. Because of this stuff.

 
Final conclusion: if an advertiser wants to bid on my name, he should consider the headline “Ten Stupid Things Women Do”. This is scientifically proven to work.

Wow, again I write about Twitter. This is becoming a Twitter blog. Well, what can I say – I like Twitter, and spend a large portion of my time there – naturally it’s something I think a lot about. Next post won’t be about Twitter (my promise to myself).

 
Although I’ve seen articles that list useful Twitter sites (and/or tools), I find that many of them don’t have a lot of value. Consequently, I thought I’ll share my own list, which I’ve created for my own usage.

 

Tools:

I only use a single tool, TweetDeck, which is a fantastic tool that allows you to do everything the web interface allows you, but much much more. Phrased differently: the web interface is not really practical, you need something like TweetDeck to really be able to benefit from Twitter if you have more than a few dozen followers. What I particularly like is the ability to create ‘columns’ where only certain friends, or certain search terms appear – though you can still see the Twitter timeline if you want. As a result, it allows you to focus on what you find interesting, while still benefiting from the whole.

 
There are many free & paid Twitter tools, but I don’t find them useful (i.e. TwitterLocal, etc)

 

Sites:

 

1. Search.Twitter.com: a must. Twitter’s internal search engine. Brings you discussions that occurred in the past few seconds. Hey Google, can you do that?
   
    

2. Friend or follow: shows you the people you follow but haven’t returned your follow, and the opposite as well (the site refers to them as ‘fans’). Very useful if you like to get followed in return for following someone.
   
    

3. Backupmy.net: one of my favorites. Twitter only backs up your last 3,000 tweets. However, if you write a lot of interesting tweets, have multiple conversations you’d like to keep, or just like having your tweets stored, this site allows you to do this for free. I downloaded all my tweets and it was pretty amusing to see my first tweet back in March… I was so young and naive.
   
    

4. Twitter grader: I actually thought of dedicating an entire post to this site. This is a ‘grading site’ of sorts for Twitter users. Basically, based on certain factors (number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, number of recent tweets, etc) it assigns each user a score. Moreover, it allows you to see the global top users, top users in your country, state, and city. I think their algorithm is significantly flawed and has multiple problems. However, it seems to be popular, so I occasionally check myself as well. I didn’t write the post about this because I suspect this may be a post that only interests me (.. I am an ex-computer scientist after all, so algorithms still appeal to me). If there’s anyone interested, I’ll be more than happy to write why I think this site’s algorithm is so wrong. One day I’ll create a site that will really enable ‘measuring’ individual users.
   
    

5. Twitoria: allows you to find users that haven’t updated their pages for a given amount of time. If they’re not your personal friends, you may want to remove them from your list.
   
    

6. My Tweet Space: fantastic tool for creating Twitter backgrounds. Highly recommend, and many thanks for the good folks over there that allow us to use it for free.
   
    

7. Twitterfeed: allows you to feed your blog directly into Twitter. Some WP plugins allow you to do that as well, but this is another way. Although I don’t currently use it, I intend to use it in the very near future.
   
    

8. Future Tweets: allows you to schedule future tweets. I’ve only used it once and it seemed kind of cool, but didn’t really feel the need to use it since then. Maybe I’ll use it again in the future.
   
    

9. Topsy: a search engine for tweets – allows you to find out how many times a tweet has been retweeted. Pretty cool.
   
    

10. Stuff to Tweet: shows you the coolest tweets. Can’t say I’ve really used it, though at times it’s interesting to see what’s popular.
    
     

11. Revtwt: Although I’ve not used this myself, I think it’s fair that I include it just because many people would find it interesting. In short, the site allows you to make money from your tweets. I don’t think a lot of money, but if you have many followers, this can accumulate to a respectable amount, I hear.

 
Please let me know if you think I’ve missed an important Twitter site or tool. There are several more in my list I don’t find that useful, but I discover new ones almost on a daily basis.