Twitter Track is Back!
Welcome to The Real Tim Jones. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or for more frequent, informal updates, you can follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Well, at least some version of track is back. Several people, including Sam Harrelson and the guys over at TWiT quit using Twitter for a while, due to the lack of a “track” feature. Apparently, the people at TweetLater also mourned the loss of this feature, as they’ve brought it back from the dead.
TweetLater allows a user to send Tweets, even when they are not online. In this sense, it’s similar to TwitterFeed, but you can set up any Tweets, not just those coming from an RSS feed. I used to use another service TweetLater provides, where you can have a direct message to people that start following you on Twitter, automatically. This became too generic and impersonal for me, so I quit using it.
This past weekend, they came out with two new features. The first tracks all replies made to your Twitter account. This helps you see the important conversations between you and your followers. Personally, this functionality was already covered by TweetDeck. The second feature was bringing back the track feature. Track, on TweetLater, allows you to track individual keywords and have the report sent to you by email at an interval you select. I’m sure Sam or someone else will tell me exactly why this is not a pure “track” system, but at least some innovators are taking steps in the right direction, as obviously no one at Twitter has any interest in working to bring the track feature back.
Market Leverage Contest Update
I wanted to give everyone a quick update on the Market Leverage contest to let you know that there is still lots of time and opportunity to win this contest and a new Flip Mino! As I said in the original blog post, most people just ignore the contest and do not enter. This leaves tons of opportunity for the select few that will go for it. We’re a little over half-way through the month and there is no clear leader, so it’s anyone’s contest to win!
This is a great month to enter a revenue contest, since we have Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up in just over a week. Take advantage of these massive shopping days and get some quality content and PPC campaigns in place over the next week and you could win big, this month. Not only will you get a good start in affiliate marketing, but you could win a new video camera or $75 to go with your earnings!
Zac Johnson has a great post, today on how to find quality, tight niches on which to focus your marketing efforts. Go over and check it out for some ideas on what products or services to begin promoting.
Later this week, I will be posting some tips and tricks for PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. I will also point you towards some free clicks that may be available to help take the sting out of starting a PPC campaign.
So, subscribe to my RSS to get the latest news, ideas, tips, and tricks from The Real Tim Jones and go sign-up with Market Leverage and make some big money for the holidays and win a Flip to video all the holiday action!
Biz Web Coach Launched!
He’s one of the first people I followed on Twitter (and I mean really followed). He is one of the few 
people I look to for business and marketing advice. Now, he’s launching a whole new brand called Biz Web Coach! Jim Kukral often leads the pack with innovative marketing ideas and his business acumen.
Many people know Jim as the emcee of Affiliate Summit or The Daily Flip guy. He’s a consummate brand evangelist and advocate of the philosophy of giving more to get more. Today, he launches his new brand with this philosophy in mind. His new site provides tons of free information, audio files, videos, and he’ll even provide your business with a free assessment over the phone. For a small price, Jim can become your personal business coach, providing direct interaction with Jim and his consulting services, as well as support for your online business venture.
I don’t want this to become a sales pitch, you can read that, yourself. What I can say is that I truly look to Jim for business advice, to help solve problems, for ideas, guidance, and thoughts. He’s a leader in the online industry and I have a great deal of respect for him.
I encourage you to check out his site and learn from one of the leaders in this industry. Take a look at all the free information he’s provided and get a feel for who Jim is and what he can provide to your business. I urge you to use his services if your looking for business advice, for solutions for the challenges you encounter, to boost sales, or require additional consulting services. This is a perfect brand launch for Jim, as he’s already The Biz Web Coach.
Also, Jim has provided the opportunity to promote his services with an amazing affiliate program that pays well and Jim even provides his personal support and services for this program, too.
UPDATE:
Here are some other sites that are talking about Jim’s big launch:
- Jim Kukral Launches Coaching Program
- Jim Kukral Rebrands as The Biz Web Coach
- The Web Coach Promotions from Jim Kukral
- Jim Kukral: Always Fun Marketing
- Jim Kukral is The Biz Web Coach
- Hands On Coaching and Consulting with The BizWebCoach
Black Ink Project 2.0 Released!
My original post on this release was nothing more than a sales pitch, so I trashed it. If you want to read the sales pitch for the new Black Ink Project, you can go to the sales page. 
I acted as a “guinea pig” for Jeremy Palmer by taking part in the original Black Ink Project, as well as Black Ink Project 2 (so, wouldn’t this latest release be 3, rather than 2.0?). Even though I’ve been in business online since 2000, I still learned a lot from Jeremy over the two “courses”, as well as from the unbelievable amount of additional resources Jeremy provided for each session.
As I mentioned in my guide to affiliate marketing, Jeremy offers an extensive knowledge base in the Black Ink Project that covers the gamut of online business. If you’re just getting started in affiliate marketing, struggling with making a living online, or even an experienced online entreprenuer, everyone can benfit from this course. It’s worth checking out.
Guide to Affiliate Marketing
With our Market Leverage blog contest going on this month, I thought it would be a good idea to provide some semblance of a guide to affiliate marketing.
Wikipedia describes affiliate marketing as:
Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
Basically, once you have an affiliate relationship with a business, either directly or through an affiliate network (such as Market Leverage - a company that creates a “network” of businesses, as a one-stop shop for affiliate publishers to find businesses/services/products to promote), you promote their products and services through a variety of methods, including pay-per-click advertising (PPC), content generation on blogs or landing pages, search engine optimization (SEO), article submissions, and so on.
Additionally, the internet and affiliate marketing community provides tons of valuable resources for free. You can learn more about affiliate marketing by visiting the following sites and reading through past posts, keeping up with new posts, and exploring the sites for guides, free e-books, paid e-books, videos, and more.
- Affiliate Tip Blog by Shawn Collins: Shawn offers a video guide for new entrants to affiliate marketing that gives you great information about how to get started in affiliate marketing.
- Zac Johnson: Zac never ceases to amaze me with the quality, free information he provides at his blog. Especially helpful for this month’s contest would be Zac’s free landing page and reviews page for promoting various Market Leverage offers. These give your campaign’s a jump-start. Zac also has a great starter guide for PPC (pay-per-click) marketing.
- Rosalind Gardner: Rosalind is widely considered one of the best with regard to learning about affiliate marketing. You can learn a ton from her website, NetProfitsToday and most affiliate marketers have studied either her Super Affiliate Handbook or How To Make A Fortune Promoting Other People’s Stuff Online or both. As she notes on her site, she has over 1,000 blog posts, over 200 articles, and 7,300 forum entries to advance your knowledge!
- Jeremy Palmer: Jeremy has produced two great online courses about affiliate marketing called the Black Ink Project. In the Black Ink Project, Jeremy takes you all the way through getting started as an affiliate marketer from developing a business plan to having a fully-functional affiliate marketing business in place. Additionally, you can download his free e-book about affiliate marketing on his site, Quit Your Day Job.
These people know, understand, and teach these concepts much better than me. There are many others out there providing great information about affiliate marketing and how to get started, however I get the most from the ones mentioned. Get over and check out their sites, absorb the information, and most importantly, take action on what you learn!
Make Big Money Online! Win a Free Flip Mino, $75, and More!
For November, Market Leverage is holding one of their, by now, well-known mega promotions for the network. Market Leverage is one of the most, if not the most, creative self-promoting companies in the affiliate marketing industry. In addition to their unique promotions like this one, Market Leverage leads the industry with fantastic support and great money-making offers (always helps ). I’m sure they are holding contests on other blogs, but I’m going to follow ML’s lead and make this one just a little bit better with some prizes of my own. So, enough with the fawning, let’s get to the prizes and how to win a new Flip Mino!
Prizes:
- New! Flip Mino!
- $75 American Express Gift Card
- Market Leverage/Ogio Gym Bag
- Market Leverage T-Shirt
- Market Leverage USB Pens
How To Win:
1) Join Market Leverage Through This Blog:
- Prize: Flip Mino (Top Earning Referred Affiliate for November)
- Prize: $75 American Express Gift Card (Randomly Selected Referred Affiliate)
2) Blog About This Contest & Link To This Post:
- Prize: Market Leverage/Ogio Gym Bag (Randomly Selected)
- 2 USB Pens (Randomly Selected)
3) Comment on This Post:
- Prize: Market Leverage T-Shirt (Top Commenter for November)
- Prize: USB Pen (Randomly Selected)
Why Should I Enter:
This is a no-brainer! Many people will ignore this entire post, not bother to enter, and miss out on some great prizes. Don’t be that person! Sign up with Market Leverage, start making some money online, and win free stuff! Blog about this contest, link to the post, and win free stuff! Add to the conversation on this blog, comment on posts, and win free stuff! I can’t make it any easier.
The contest runs from November 3rd through midnight (EST) on November 30th. All prizes will be announced and awarded after November 30th.
Sign up with Market Leverage today and get going making some money! The month’s not getting any longer!
PepperJam Stores Gets WordPress Optimized - Well, Maybe
It didn’t take long for PepperJam Network’s new Store Builder feature to get WordPress Optimized. PepperJam has made the process very simple by just having you click a check-box to alter the code for WordPress sites.
I really wasn’t all that excited about the Store Builder feature, mainly because it was just one more thing to add to my list of “to-dos” and because most of my sites are built on WordPress. Well, PepperJam solved item number two, so now I guess I have to find some time to start building some stores.
Seriously, if you have a shopping-based affiliate site, this tool could be very useful and time-saving, rather than consuming. I decided to build a store, just to show you how it works in a post. It literally took me less than 30 seconds, including the time it took to log-in to PepperJam.
There’s just one slight problem….you can’t see anything in the space above this line, can you? I spent another good half hour trying to get the PepperJam Store working, including looking at the help documentation at WordPress. PepperJam instructions tell you to just cut and paste the code from the StoreBuilder into the “HTML” tab in WordPress. Did that. Tried using a plugin to help with the JavaScript. Nope. Tried adding JavaScript code to PepperJam’s code to help WordPress recognize the JS. Fail. Sorry, PepperJam, looks like you have some more work to do to truly “optimize” the StoreBuilder for WordPress.
Motive Interactive’s Advent 2.0 Goes Live
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Motive Interactive’s newest version of it’s network platform, Advent 2.0. Well, yesterday the new site officially went live! If you’re already a member of their network, you can go to http://network.motiveinteractive.com/index.php/Login and sign-in with your normal login information.
I have done a little searching around and really like the new set-up! Everything is very compact and easy to navigate. You get a lot of information in a very small area and without having to click through a bunch of screens.
I’m am still looking for the new referral program information on the new site, but have not found it or any information about it, yet. I’m sure it’s part of a future update to the platform.
If you haven’t signed up for Motive, get over there and do it! They have a lot of great offers and a pretty new site to explore.
Zac Johnson Does It, Again - Free Landing Page Template
Back in June, I talked about a free landing page template that Zac Johnson gave out on his blog. This was one of my most popular posts, as well one of Zac’s. Well, he’s now created another free landing page template for a comparison/review style landing page.
Zac does a great job creating these simple landing pages and then gives them out to his readers to use for free. My original attempt at customizing his free template in June has done very well, for me.
You may ask, “Why is Tim blogging about this?” I’m doing so because this is a great help to someone just starting out. Zac gives you some basic landing pages to use that can be easily customized, even if you have very little design experience. Take advantage of this!
There are hundreds of courses out there that teach you about affiliate marketing and online business. You could literally spend thousands of dollars on these courses every month! There’s tons of value to some of these paid courses and e-books and you should consider investing in your own education and advancement. However, even good e-books and courses, for the most part, just compile the information already available, if you’re willing to look around and do your own leg-work. Make sure to spend some time learning from the multitudes of free resources online, including the free information and products bloggers like Zac provide to their readers.
John McCain Spotted with a Cindy McKippah
Back at Blog World Expo, you may remember seeing a picture of me in a McKippah from VanityKippah.com.
Well, yesterday, at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, John McCain was presented with a Cindy McKippah of his own. He was so impressed that he had to call his wife over to take a look and get some pics.
He actually asked if Joe had one (Joe Lieberman, not Joe the Plumber) and was informed that Joe had the blue John McKippah (right on, Joe!).
