Top 10 Great Twitter Stories of 2009… aka I’m Tweeted Out

Over the long weekend, I thought I would catch up on some industry news. I started browsing Web sites, only to discover Twitter... everywhere. I couldn't escape the 140 character micro-blog site no matter what I clicked. And I came into work today, only to learn that Twitter was named the most popular word of 2009.

So, in honor of Twitter topping the entire English language, here’s my...

Top 10 Favorite Twitter Stories of 2009

1. Tweet & You'll Be Shunned – Former Vice President’s daughter Meghan McCain exposes cleavage on Twitter, and then apologizes to her 60,000 followers after posting the revealing picture.
2. Tweet & You’ll Be Fined – Players from the Phoenix Suns and Charlotte Bobcats are fined $7,500 for posting to their Twitter accounts during games.
3. Tweet & You'll Become News – Actor and comedian Stephen Fry announces on Twitter that he deleted his Plaxo account with 20 million friends after the site exposes his personal information.
4. Tweet & You'll Be Thin – Actress Demi Moore posts the “original” photo of her recent cover for W, and experiences a backlash by followers accusing her of using model Anja Rubik as a body double.
5. Tweet & You’ll Be Sued – Rocker Courtney Love calls fashion designer a cocaine dealer on Twitter, gets sued.
6. Tweet & You'll Be Suspended – A live Twitter feed to a local television billboard in Alabama creates a stir, leads to the suspension of the station’s general manager and news director.
7. Tweet & You’ll Go To Jail – Pulp Fiction writer is re-jailed after investigation that he tweeted from prison. Authorities deny Twitter use had anything to do with his incarceration.
8. Don’t Tweet & You’ll Go To Jail - Canadian teen sensation Justin Bieber attracts mob of teenage girls to a mall in Garden City, N.J. Island Def Jam Records senior vice president is arrested by Nassau County Police for refusing to tweet the crowd, asking them to disperse.
9. Tweet & You’ll Break Up – Jennifer Aniston allegedly dumps singer John Mayer over tweets.
10. Miley Cyrus Chooses Boyfriend Over Twitter - "FYI Liam doesn't have a twttr & he wants ME 2 delete mine w/ gd reason"

Whew! What a relief she chose her boyfriend over Twitter!

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents The Ten Golden Rules for E-Commerce

Please join E-Commerce Expert Scott Pooler from http://www.iBusinessLogic.com and Jay Berkowitz of http://www.TenGoldenRules.com for a fun and enlightening webinar all about Best Practices for E-Commerce.

- Best technical solutions
- How to promote your store
- How to optimize your store for the search engines
- Best strategies to convert visits to sales
- Advanced E-Commerce Strategies

The event will take place on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register please visit: The Ten Golden Rules for E-Commerce.

Adwords Report Center On Its Way Out

Remember having to go into the Adwords Report Center to find out what phrases people were searching to find your ads, what content placements your ads were appearing on, and whether your ads were performing better on search or content networks? Well, those days are near over as more and more advanced reporting is becoming readily available right in the Campaign Management tab.

It was always a hassle to go into the Report Center, set up a report, run the report, and analyze the report just go go right back to your Campaign Management tab to make adjustments. As part of Google's latest Adwords interface, this problem is quickly being solved with great data being available without running reports.

For example, instead of running a report to see what keyword phrases people are searching, you can just click on the "See Search Terms" button on your Keywords tab and get the complete list of search phrases that generated clicks on your ads. Right from that screen, you can add phrases as negative keywords with a click. You can also add well performing phrases to your campaigns with all matching options very easily.

The new Networks tab displays all the content network placements your ads appeared on along with click and conversion statistics. You can easily remove any content placements that are performing poorly or you just do not want to be associated with.

I am sure that I am not the only Adwords advertiser that is waiting patiently to see the Adwords Report Center disappear altogether.

TrafficWave and Team OceanSwell - Part I

This blog is titled 'My Internet Marketing Journey' for a good reason: because it catalogues much of that journey step by step. And where that journey has finally lead me is to the creation of Team OceanSwell - THE way for anyone to be a success with my favorite MLM/affiliate program, TrafficWave. This new Team downline (as of today's date), has accomplished more in a few short weeks than few people will accomplish in a year or more (or EVER), and I know that to be a fact.

There are so many people out there who want to earn money online. They hate their jobs and our money buys less and less at the store. It's getting really bad. What I've seen in my two years of marketing online is that there is no shortage of people with the desire to succeed and the willingness to work at it in their spare time. The problem is that they're lost, overwhelmed by it all and simply don't know what to to.

TrafficWave's product and affiliate pay plan attracts an enormous number of new members on a regular basis because of the 30-Day Free Trial offer. The problem is that virtually EVERYONE lets their account go inactive after those 30 days. This is because they join to make money and if they don't see any progress in 30 days, they simply quit.

The TrafficWave autoresponder is great product that, long term, you really need in this business. However, very few people join TrafficWave for the autoresponder anymore than people join GDI for the web hosting. They join for the affiliate pay plan. They want the MONEY!

For that reason, TrafficWave's 'forced' matrix affiliate downline structure has a very strong appeal. For most people, the idea that their sponsor simply can't recruit indefinitely on her or his first level, but must provide 'matrix-spillover', sounds very good. In fact, it sounds so good that most affiliate members simply do nothing but sit there and wait for it. The problem is that, though it is a 'forced' matrix, nobody is forced to do anything - and most will not, can not and WON'T! And one or two people can't do it all by themselves. Trust me, I know.
That's why Team OceanSwell is so powerful. It takes the idea of a forced matrix and adds the element of forced teamwork and forced referrel success. It accomplishes this with an aggressive and caring Team Leader and a SIMPLE system that everyone uses consistently and perstistently. Because everyone in the Team downline is forced to help and motivate each other (they have no other choice) it works like a miracle. And that means that the 'fantasy' of earning online money that can actually PAY a bill or two becomes reality.

Check it out: Team OceanSwell

And follow our brand NEW profile on Twitter.

Making Google Reader More Social Friendly & Colorful

As an avid user of Google Reader, I’ve noticed more and more social friendly features appearing within my Google Reader. Now you will notice favicon support has recently been added, which to some may add a little more personality to his or her subscriptions. There have also been a few other additions such as “sort by magic” and “recommended sources.” Of course, the more you allow Google to study your reader habits, the more personalized these results appear for you.

Another really helpful feature I have been using more of lately is the “send to” ability. You can access this feature by going to settings -> send to. This feature gives you the ability to share a post from a specific site by the click of a button from within your reader as opposed to having to go to the actual website. For example, if you have a subscription to a site and upon reading a blog post you think to yourself, this would be a great post to tweet, you can simply enable send to Twitter, and Google Reader will pop-up a screen with the tweet already prepared [as opposed to going to the site and retweeting].

Do you find these new features helpful?

Google Introducing New Ad Formats for Search

Anyone advertising in Google Adwords probably knows that Google typically only displays text ads on their search pages, while other ad formats (video, image, etc) can be shown on Google's content network. Well, somewhat behind the scenes, Google has been testing additional ad formats to be used in search, so don't be surprised when you start seeing videos, images, and products in the paid search listings.

For example, you may start seeing individual products with prices and links within a single Google ad as this is something they have recently been testing aggressively. Another ad format Google is experimenting with is the comparison ad. Great for consumers, comparison ads are designed to compare rates/prices of different advertisers within an ad.

As most of these new ad formats are of great benefit to the consumer, they can hurt the advertiser who does not stay on top of the changing landscape. Being competitive in paid search will require staying aware of new ad formats and using them effectively to reach your audience.

What Type of Apps Do You Want for LinkedIn?

According to a breaking story on Mashable, today brings big news from LinkedIn, which finally invited developers to contribute to its social media platform. The new LinkedIn Developer Platform is expected to spur the onslaught of new apps you can use with LinkedIn – much like those available for Facebook and Twitter. In fact, you can expect integration with TweetDeck as early as this week, according to the article.

What does this mean for Internet Marketing?

We’ll have to wait and see, but for those of you that currently leverage social media to network and market your business, it appears you will have even more options. Of course, instead of Roller Coaster Kingdom, Farmville, Mafia Wars and the other time-suckers you can find on Facebook, I hope we can expect more useful business oriented applications.

For starters, I'd like to see a way to sync all my friends (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) so I could group (segment) them more efficiently, and communicate (market) to them from one application, with the ability to choose my platform (medium)...

What types of apps would you like to see for LinkedIn?