Business
Sell advertising space on your Twitter account!
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 | Affiliate, Business, Marketing, Mashup, Tools, Twitter | 1 Comment
It was only a matter of time before people started finding ways to monetize Twitter, last week announcing the arrival of a short-url CPC program and this week announcing the arrival of Twittad.
Twittad.com lets you put up your twitter account on their marketplace where advertisers can see the number of folks who are following/followers as well as the price you are asking to allow their products/advertising to be displayed on your twitter page.
If you’re a Twitter user looking for advertising – You get to select the duration that the ads are displayed as well as the price. Anyone interested in purchasing that space will then contact you through twittad.com, giving you the ability to accept or deny the offer.
How does twittad.com make money then?
They get paid a 5% service fee on the total purchase price (minimum of $0.99 cents).
What’s to stop an advertiser from contacting the user directly, skipping twittad altogether?
NOTHING! You’re given the user’s twitter profile, there you have any number of ways of contacting them without twittad even knowing! Email, through their website and even through twitter.
Right now the most expensive twitter account only has 599 Followers/605 Followings. Get this, it’s going for $100!! The highest paid twitter account though is only $25 for an user with a following of 351. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of the developers who purchased the account!
I can’t see how this will last… but it’s an interesting attempt at monetizing Twitter. I give it a week before script-kiddies with auto-generated twitter accounts take-over the site. Good luck.
Make Money With Twitter (And Other Social Media)
Thursday, August 28th, 2008 | Affiliate, Business, Promotion, SEM, Tools, Twitter, Utilities | 4 Comments
Interested in making money on twitter.com & other social media sites? Here’s something I was recently sent:
There’s a new CPC Advertising site called adjix. Available for both advertisers and publishers, it takes long URLs and converts them into a shorter format similar to tinyurl or shorl. The only catch is when a user clicks on the link, they’ll see an advertisement in the top of their screen. The best news is, you decide what category of advertisement it shows. You’re also provided two separate types of short-urls:
Here’s an example link (in the technology category):
One of the great things about this service that sets it a part from all the other URL-Shortening services is that it provides you with user information on anyone that follows your link. It even shows the IP & hostname of the user!
Another key feature of adjix is that they give you the ability to use your own domain instead of theirs!
What does that mean? Say goodbye to http://adjix.com/fp9p and hello to http://links.brentter.com/fp9p! All it took was an easy DNS change and voila, the affiliate link no longer looks like an affiliate link.
Also, if you just wanted to use this URL-Shortening service but did NOT want to display any ads, they have recently launched a no-ad version of adjix! You can find more information about that here.
There’s a long list of categories available for you to choose from as well.
Here’s a sample:
This is the start of a whole new breed of CPC advertising opportunities. Should be interesting to see what comes out next!
AT&T Allowing Home Activation For New iPhone 3G!
Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Apple, Business, News, Twitter | 2 Comments
Contrary to what AT&T and Apple have both been telling everyone, some stores are quietly selling iPhone 3G’s to customers and telling them to activate it at home via iTunes. A massive server overload this morning has rendered Apple’s Activation Servers useless at this moment, however representatives from Apple have already acknowledged this and are working to get them back online.
Until the activation servers go back online, anyone trying to purchase a new iPhone will find out that they have a “bricked” version – only allowing for Emergency calls as it will not have been synched with the wireless account.
Users trying to upgrade their 1st generation iPhones or iPod Touches will also “brick” their device, making it useless until Apple fixes their servers.
News of this, along with updates from stores all across the country, has been widely talked about on Twitter.com. A quick and easy way to search through ‘the noise’ on Twitter is to use a free service called Summize.com. Summize enables you to easily search for specific topics and arranges them based on the time/date that they were ‘tweeted.’ For example, to see all the messages posted to Twitter regarding the iphone activation servers, search on Summize for “iphone + activation.”
Apple should have been able to predict that there would have been a heavy strain on the servers with thousands of users trying to register, synch, and activate their Apple products simultaneously. This makes you think twice about using Apple’s server hardware in any production environment….bad move on their part.
Flash Files (.swf) Now Searchable!
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | Adobe, Business, google, News, SEM, Yahoo | No Comments
Adobe has just announced that they have teamed up with Google and Yahoo! to help improve the way in which search engines catalogue .swf files.
According to their press release:
Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. This will increase the accuracy of web search results by enabling top search engines to understand what’s inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.
Improved search of SWF content will provide immediate benefits to companies leveraging Adobe Flash software. Without additional changes to content, developers can continue to provide experiences that are possible only with Adobe Flash technology without the trade-off of a loss in search indexing. It will also positively affect the Search Engine Optimization community, which will develop best practices for building content and RIAs utilizing Adobe Flash technologies, and enhance the ability to find and monetize SWF content.
This is BIG news to put it lightly. Flash files have always been partially searchable via Google, but now there is no doubt as to what content is picked up by the spider. This was a great move on Adobe’s part, most likely fueled by growing competition in the form of Microsoft’s Silverlight. See, working in an open-market does have it’s benefits!
OpenSolaris and OpenBlueDragon Both Released!
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | Business, News | No Comments
Ok, well Open Blue Dragon officially was released 3 days ago, but who’s counting…. it’s the first freely available, enterprise level JAVA CFML server released under the GPLv3 open source project. They plan to release a pre-configured version for both VMWare and Amazon’s EC2′s service, however in the meantime you can head on over to their download page and grab the actual source files, the J2EE WAR distribution, or a pre-reconfigured jetty instance (easy install). There’s also already an instructional video on how to install it on your mac in their forums. Released by New Atlanta, this is a big move to keep Cold Fusion developers from having to learn a new language (let the flame war/hate mail begin)… although the way that they’re releasing it is pretty-cool. It’s designed to run seamlessly with even the ‘soon to be released’ Windows Server 2008 ensuring those wanting to switch over to becoming a .net shop/provider, now don’t have to give up any cold fusion apps that might be in place. By the way, Blue Dragon is used to help host power-social-networking site myspace.com…. so this isn’t your small-time server engine.
Also released (today though), was the long awaited, much talked about Open Solaris enterprise server as well. Easily integrated with virtualization software like VMWare or VirtualBox or even installed by itself via the live-cd, you can find all the various methods of download on their site as well as you have the opportunity to get an official cd sent to you via mail (if you act fast that is). They do admit to leaving out a few install options that are present in the current Solaris 11 update, however they claim that might change in the near future. What they did not leave out of this release were the best parts (in my opinion) – The ZFS file system, DTrace as well as their patented Solaris Containers which make virtualization a breeze. I think they skipped out on the SPARC integration but last I checked I didn’t have any type of mainframes lying around here, so the versions provided work great on my machine!
It’s been a big week for open-source releases of once expensive server software. I get the feeling this can only make things harder for companies like Microsoft, who still haven’t released the latest Microsoft Server 2008 from beta yet, to compete when similar enterprise level resources are available at no cost. It’s only due time until they go open-source as well…. although I’d say it’d still be a few more years.
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