Yesterday saw the launch of the new program from Walter Bayliss called Totally Tweetable.

Let me start out by saying that I am a big fan of Walter’s sites.  I use Instant Blog Subscribers every time I update my blog.  It’s a great program.  So I was very much looking forward to see what Walt’s latest project was going to be.  I have to admit I was very disappointed to find out that it was a new Twitter marketing tool.

I like Twitter.  I have Twitter setup as my homepage in my browser.  I don’t tweet a whole lot but I am following some interesting people and I love reading my updates throughout the day.  So when I started seeing automated messages sent by Totally Tweetable through the Twitter accounts of some of the people I was following I knew this was going to be a problem.  I say “was following” because I have no interest in having my Twitter feed filled with advertisements.  I have been unfollowing Totally Tweetable members since the site launched.

I was going to totally ignore Totally Tweetable until I started to see some glowing reviews from other marketers who’s opinions I respect.  I figured I should join and take a look for myself to see if it’s as bad as it appears.

To be fair, Totally Tweetable starts out pretty good.  It’s essentially a safelist/viral list builder.  As a free member you can send an email (not a tweet) to 100 members every 7 days.  You can earn additional credits to send your ads to more members by reading the emails sent by other members.

No problem there.  I love safelists so that’s right up my alley.

The problem comes when you read your emails and claim your credits the program automatically sends a tweet from your Twitter account promoting the ad you just read.  Yes, it’s good for the advertiser but it basically turns your Twitter into a spam account.  If you read 20 emails a day to earn credits that means you are going to be sending 20 tweets a day promoting other people’s sites.

Why would anybody want to do this?

Want to know the fastest way to lose Twitter followers?  Use Totally Tweetable.

It appears there are ways around this.  You can create a fake Twitter account to use exclusively with Totally Tweetable.  You can even skip the Twitter verification part to prevent the site from accessing your Twitter account.  But what is the point of this?  If your ads are being retweeted with Totally Tweetable you can bet that most of them are either going to garbage Twitter accounts or they are being sent along with dozens of other automated tweets pissing off that member’s followers.

I don’t know why Internet marketers have to try and turn everything they touch into a spam tool.  Twitter is far too powerful to be abused like this.  If you are a Twitter user you should be following people you want to follow and tweeting the things your followers want to read.  Twitter is a “social” platform.  It’s not for automated spamming!

To sum up… Totally Tweetable appears to be a good looking safelist/viral list builder that you can use to email your ads to other members.  However if you link it to your Twitter account you might as well kiss all of your followers goodbye.  If you choose to join make sure you setup a fake Twitter account or skip the step that gives Totally Tweetable access to your account.

Happy Tuesday!

I am very excited today because the long wait is finally over…

Thumbvu is here!

In case you haven’t heard Thumbvu is the new traffic exchange program that i’ve been testing for my good friend John Guanzon.

I know…  Another new traffic exchange.  Big deal.  Right?

No. Thumbvu is different.  It’s like nothing anyone has seen before.

Thumbvu is a totally unique traffic exchange which prequalifies your visitors right from the surf bar.  It also ties directly into your social media sites like
Twitter and Facebook allowing you to build your social network like never before.

There’s even an app for your phone

You gotta try this…

Thumbvu is free to join, but I urge you to carefully review the one time offer
you will see after you do. They are practically giving you everything you will need for your advertising needs this year at a rock bottom price you can’t  afford not to take action on.

Click the link below to join Thumbvu now…

This had been bugging me for a long time.  I finally figured it out and thought it was worthy of a blog post.

When sending emails with Aweber you are presented with two boxes where you can put your email… one for html and one for text.  For years I have been just been using the text email option figuring that text emails are going to be the most accessible to the most number of people.

Aweber has a neat feature for tracking the number of times the links in your emails are clicked.  The problem with this is that it turns all your links into these big ugly tracker links that nobody wants to click.  I also like to include a signature in my emails with links to this site and my Twitter so those end up getting converted too.  But if you send html emails you can fix this!

Here’s how you do it…

From within the Aweber html editor highlight your URLs and click the “link” icon at the top of the editor.  Then paste your URL in the “Link Text” and “URL” boxes and click “Apply”.  This will tell Aweber that your URL is a link and it will also display it correctly when you turn the link tracker on.

For about a week I switched and started sending html emails instead of text emails.  The stats were great.  I could even split test and find out which headlines got the most people to open my emails.  However, sending only html emails boosted the spam detector up to 2.7 because apparently spammers are known for sending a lot of html emails with just an image and a link.  Not horrible, but not great either.

I finally found the solution in of all places… on the Aweber site!

It seems that the trick is to create your email in the html editor first and then copy and paste that email into the text editor.  You don’t have to worry about people receiving the same email twice.  Aweber will send both the html and text emails but the end user will only see the version that their email program supports.

So there you go.  Now you can send out your Aweber emails with all the fancy tracking features, your links won’t look like crap, and you can assure that your emails are being delivered to the maximum number of people.

Ok, I am just about happy with where my blog is now.

I have been hearing about “Twitter” for awhile now and when I heard about this cool plug-in called “Tweet My Blog” I knew I had to try it… but do I really want to put myself on Twitter?

Too late. It’s done!

If you want to “follow me” and get notified every time I scratch my butt check out My Twitter Profile.

Now that my Twitter account is all setup the first thing I did was to get a copy of “Tweet My Blog“. This is a really cool plug-in that links to the Twitter network that sends an update every time you post a new blog. This will be my first time trying it so it’s pretty exciting to say the least.

If you have a blog of your own and you use Twitter check out Tweet My Blog.