I went to the BTW (Blogger Twitter Whatever) meetup in the Clarion on Thursday night organised by Jason Roe. It was great to chat and exchange stories with other twitters that I talk to regularly. Below is a picture of me and Emilio Navarro chatting over a pint.

I also got a chance to chat to Merrill Goussot. Merrill has a lot of things going on at the moment. He has his Social Network For SEO, PPC, SMO www.conversionr.com. His “Overheard in Paris” site has just got a book deal and he is also maintaing his geek travel blog Voyageek . It was great to chat to him and Claire Boyles at the event:

I’d definitely recommend to anyone to try and attend the next meetup.

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Its the statement we all want to be able to say! Whether your pushing affiliate programs, selling your own products or subscription services, everybody is trying to monetize twitter. Finally there is a service which will pay you to tweet. It’s called SponsoredTweets.com and its authorised by Twitter and brought to you by the IZEA network.

Basically SponsoredTweets pays you per Tweet that is authorised by their advertiser. They calculate how much your tweet is worth based on your influence/follower count. So the lower your twitter following, the lower you get paid.

It has a real simple interface and is very easy to get setup on:

Check it out and start getting paid to tweet!

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This weeks Promo Tuesday, I’m promoting Claire Boyles “Tweeting for Business Success!” seminars. Claire is a successful business coach who runs her own company Management Matters. One of Claires specialities is using Twitter for business. She plans to run a series of “Tweeting for Business Success!” Seminars in the Clarion Hotels in Dublin in August. These seminars are aimed at Twitter novices or any business owner who might be considering using Twitter for marketing purposes.

After attending this seminar you will be able to:

• Set up your own twitter account
• Have the inside knowledge of twitter etiquette
• Get your tweets Retweeted by others
• Learn about various applications to enhance twitter functions
• Gain World Wide, Irish & European exposure to key customers
• Know how to develop relationships & keep your tweeps happy

Her previous twitter seminars have been fully booked and places are strictly limited- early booking is recommended to avoid disappointment!

Weds 5th August @ 12-2.30pm

@ The Clarion Hotel, IFSC -

Price : €47 including light lunch & a great opportunity to network with other business owners

Follow Leo on Twitter : www.twitter.com/LeoFogarty

Follow Claire on Twitter : www.twitter.com/ClaireBoyles

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Well after 18 days I’ve finally reached my first Twitter milestone. We’ve got a 1000 followers. In honour of of this achievement, I’d like to share with you the twitter tools I use and why I like to use them.

Twollow.Com

Twollow is a great service whch will allow you to automatically follow people on twitter based on the keywords they use in their tweets. It is a great way to follow people with the same interests as you!. For Affiliate Marketing purposes you can use it to follow people interested in your niche. Hopefully they will follow you back

Twist.Flaptor.Com

Twist is a nice little app that allows you to monitor trends in twitter. Want to see what the best time of the week to tweet about Affiliate Marketing? Want to see who the top tweeters are about your niche? Twist can help! Below is a graph monitoring tweets about Affiliate Marketing.

Twitalyser.Com

Twitalyser will allow you to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

UseQwitter.Com

I love Qwitter.com because its developed by an irish company. It has been developed by Eoin and the lads at contrast.ie . Qwitter e-mails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message that details what the last tweet you did which caused them to stop following you.

Follow Me on Twitter

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There are a lot of bloggers that I read on a regular basis. As someone interested in internet marketing, you should be an avid reader of people in the niche so you can keep up with tips and trends in the industry. The main areas I would follow are affiliate marketing, new media, seo & sem.

Now with Affiliate Bloggers, I’m used to seeing paid posts. This is normal, their aim is to make money online so why wouldn’t they do paid posts. I have no problem with this, most put up disclaimers when they do it. What I do have a problem with is when they plug bullshit especially when it’s a paid post.

Think about it? You spend months writing good content, build up your readership levels so you have some influence in your area and then you blow it by doing a plug for a dodgy product or service. Why would you do it?, let alone do it for just $250 bucks, well thats the question I ask Tyler Cruz.

I’ve never met Tyler or corresponded with him but I have been an avid reader of his blog. Why? The No. 1 reason is his honesty. He’s not afraid to disclose the affiliate sites he runs, he shows you his earnings, even his weight loss battle! So you can imagine my disappointment when I came across a paid post for Usocial.net?

Why am I dissapointed?

I’m not dissapointed that its a paid post but in the product he’s chosen to promote for $250. I mean the advertisers own hype isn’t even real. If you look on usocial’s own twitter services page they claim to have 18,000 followers on twitter, yet when you check twitter.com/usocialdotnet ,they only have 14,000 followers.

Secondly they are selling services which claim to get you up to 100,000 followers yet they only have 14,000. When you search for a review of their service, I could only find one valid review of their digg service ( http://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com/forums/general-poker-affiliate-forum/514-usocial-net-review.html ) which wasn’t very promising. Basically the reviewer said that all their diggs had come from newly created accounts.

This is interesting when you consider their wording for their twitter services:

“we’ll bring you 2,500 brand new Twitter followers to your existing account”

The key here is “brand new”, what good is that for marketing purposes? There all bogus accounts! Any other reviews I could find were all created by Alexa Darver an Affiliate whoose identical review is everywhere. Even in a legitimate media article (http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/march-april-2009/353-usocialnet-creating-a-buzz-in-the-social-media-scene), they state themselves that they are just creating accounts:

“instead of selling a software and leaving the users alone with the hassle of creating needed accounts and spending time submitting their links every day, they offer a compact and simple solution”

I enjoy Tylers blog and I will keep reading but in this case, I think it would have been worth Tyler spending 5 mins vetting the advertiser. Is it worth the potential damage it can do to your reputation for plugging an inferior service for $250? You decide!

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