The Industry Review

A conversation I often have with fellow internet marketers who are not in Twitter is: is it worth the time investment from a financial perspective? Usually I am told that this is obviously not the case, and thus, disregarding the fact it’s a good way to befriend people, it’s not a good investment in terms of time and money.

 
Although I know some people who have been monetizing Twitter rather successfully, my answer is: yes, this is right in the short term, but no in the longer term. Yes, I’ve made some money using Twitter with SponsoredTweets and Ad.Ly, as well as the occasional affiliate offer, but overall if one wants to monetize his time, then there are definitely easier to make money online.

 
That being said, every day I meet great people and make many useful business connections. To use one example, if it weren’t for Twitter, I wouldn’t have met the incredible, pancake loving, Darren Williger (@williger) who invited me to participate as a panelist in a webinar series which is not only great fun, but will be monetized soon as well. Nor would I have been invited to ad:tech as press (yes, I came thanks to this blog – but ad:tech heard of my blog through Twitter). Or be invited to the MarketLeverage VIP Yacht Party during Affiliate Summit East (which obviously was an event many would have paid to participate in and was incredible from a networking perspective).

 
Personally, I think this is just the beginning. The more time passes, the more people I know, the greater my online presence and the possible networking that I can do. So judging Twitter just by the immediate ROI is a mistake, in my opinion. Ask me again in 6 to 12 months and I’m confident I will have significantly better examples than the ones I’ve given.

 
This conclusion is emphasized by the fact I’ve been very active on Twitter for a rather short amount of time – only since the end of July 2009 (though I did register in March).

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.