Author: Dan Morris

Do you spend hours of time on Twitter?

Let me rephrase that.

Does Twitter mean something to your business?

If so, what would happen if Twitter went down? If you lost all of your followers? What would happen if someone started spamming from your account? (Could you imagine if someone started sending out porn links from the @microsoft “verified” account?) Do you have a contingency plan?

The fact of the matter is having a contingency plan is sometimes what makes and breaks a company. Let’s take a look at Toyota for example. They’re suffering some major PR bruising right now because they’ve failed to act timely and confidently in the face of their automotive problems.

Let’s compare that to Johnson & Johnson – the definitive contingency planning company. When someone reported they’d found a needle in their shampoo – J&J went into action. They’d already brainstormed that problem and had a book with the fix already written. Within a week they had all the affected shampoo out of stores and new “Needle-Free” labeled shampoo on the shelves.

We know that Twitter has become part of our business because you can barely watch any news program that doesn’t cite Twitter or invite you to comment on Twitter. More and more people are joining Twitter, following companies, brands and people and “believing” what is being tweeted. That being said, it’s also largely out of our control. Everyday, people are encountering twitter problems like:

• Spammers
• Lost Followers
• Lost Profile Photo
• Deleted Account
• or the inability to log-in among others

The key is to get the solution in your hands BEFORE you have a problem. For example there are two things you have to do to stop a spammer should they get access to your account. Unless you do both, you likely won’t stop them. And once you see spam with your name on it, how long do you have to fix it before your customers’ notice? Before they complain? Before they unfollow you?

I wrote a report called TwitterGlitch that highlights these problems, how to fix them, who to talk to at Twitter to get them fixed and even which third party “help desks” are monitored by Twitter.

The smartest thing you can do to protect your Twitter account is to click on “Profile” everyday and make sure all the tweets on your front page were left by you. And if you’re using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, make it a habit to log-in to Twitter.com once per week to check your account log-in. Otherwise, get a copy of TwitterGlitch and have the solutions to your problems in your hands. Don’t make finding the solutions your second problem.

Last night I did something I haven’t done before. I took a product, created a website and started driving traffic to it in less than an hour. Now that is LEAPS and BOUNDS ahead of where I was a year ago, before the first NAMS conference.

Now I have shiny button syndrome, so perhaps, I shouldn’t have digressed from my original goals to get that done last night. But I came across a free “rebrandable” e-book from Kevin Riley. Normally I think I would have just set it aside for the time being, but Kevin mentioned that he put some “case studies” about how businesses use Twitter in the report.

Having just produced Twitter Glitch, I was immediately interested.  So I quickly read the report and actually thought it was pretty cool – excellent information – for Twitter users.  What was even better is that it was a “Free Report” I could give out on my own site.

A good part of this “hour” getting this executed was deciding how to give it away. I assumed I would “tweet” about its existence, but there still had to be a way for people to view it.  So where do I put it? In a new post in this blog? On Facebook? On a new webpage? As a bonus in TwitterGlitch? Hmmm. . .

I really wanted to use it to help build a list, but ultimately decided that a “Free” report should be free.  So I abandoned my desire to use an opt-in box and ultimately decided to create a new webpage on TwitterGlitch.com.  I may change that – and always can – that’s just what I did.

Now Kevin Riley does makes it easy to give away his reports. He provides you a webpage and even some e-mails so you can tell people about the free report. So I modified one of his webpages and created this page: http://twitterglitch.com/TwitterMeThis (take a look at it).  When you press the button, you get the report instantly! Voila!

So, I was quite excited by that. There’s no way I could have done that a year ago – and while that’s small potatoes to the experts, it makes me smile like an expert.

So Darren Crawford and I had an idea after seeing at least one person come away from NAMS without even a blog set-up.  We decided we’d start a weekly mastermind group for #NAMS folks.  The idea is simple really.

Once per week, we’ll put on a NAMS only, mastermind phone call. If you’re like me, you’re not ready to hire a VA until you’ve got some level of confidence and knowledge about the tasks. And I recall quite well that 1 year ago getting a blog set-up was a major hurdle. In fact, it wasn’t until NAMS that Cathy the WordPressWizard informed me about the difference between a WordPress.com account and a WordPress blog.

So, go to Free Weekly Mastermind.com and get in on the fun. Between the two of us we can get you from A – M, then we’ll make sure to have some guest experts on the calls with us to get us from M – Z.

There are many steps that never get taught at conferences – and for the most part – they shouldn’t be. So if you’ve never heard of nameservers, cron jobs, embed code, article automation, the 10x10x4 traffic strategy, TubeMogul, Onlywire, or the PrettyLinks Plugin – there’s a good chance this Mastermind call is for you.

If you know all that stuff, then join us so you can stretch our learning and we can try to stretch yours.

Sign up for the Free Weekly Mastermind.com Today!

Ever get in way over your head? Did you come out unscathed? That’s what a lot of people at the Niche Affiliate Marketing System are feeling this weekend.

Hold that thought. . .

Saturday morning Mark Hendricks spoke to the group as a whole. What was probably a bit strange to the attendees is he didn’t talk about internet marketing, he spoke about life. But it slowly became clear that a career in internet marketing is about the juggling of time, family, use of money, use of time and tasks. Without looking at all these things as a whole, how you create a lifestyle that includes a healthy balance of life – not just work.

One of the illustrations Mark used was the working of a maze. To get your crayon from the Start to the Finish, isn’t if faster if you start from the finish and work backwards? The point he makes is – doesn’t it make sense to create a goal and work backward from the goal to now see how to accomplish it?

For instance if you want to make $48,000/year, don’t you first need to be able to make 4,000 in a month? Doesn’t it make sense then to figure out how to make $1,000/week? And then doesn’t it make sense that you’d have to learn how to make $150/day? (Yes, I know that’s not perfect math, Bob The Teacher) 🙂

When you work backwards and try to figure out how to make $150/day – you’ll know you’re beginning to achieve your goal.

Back to feeling overwhelmed. . .

So what I know,  as a 3 time NAMS attendee, that the “newbies” might be feeling overwhelmed right now, but once they establish their overall goals – all the tools they learned here will be right in their lap. And they’ll know exactly how to use them.

Related Posts:

• NAMS – A website owner’s workshop
• Lessons from NAMS
• After NAMS – Getting it done

Ever been to an internet marketing conference? Let me guess. . . Session 1. . . chat in the hall with someone you sat near. . . Session 2. . . rinse, repeat.

Most of them are like that. You go in knowing that the speaker’s have a goal in mind. Sure, they’re going to provide you some information that will be useful – but ultimately they’re going to be selling themselves or their product.

Now imagine this. . . you sign up for an internet marketing conference. . . but before you go you meet 90% of the people in an active forum, exchange ideas and even set up dinners to talk about subjects like copywriting and joint ventures.

Imagine creating mastermind groups and find business partners before you even get there. That’s what NAMS has turned into. The Niche Affiliate Marketing System Workshop, put on by David Perdew has become an incubator for success.

So can you still expect the instructors to spend their time selling? You can expect it – but most of the time you have to ask them if they have a product based on the lesson. This is a group centered on educating its peers. This is a group of friends – hell bent on being just that.

And in this crazy world – what better way to spend a weekend than with friends!

Interested in when the next NAMS event will take place? Try Clicking this!

Well I’ve worked on turning one of my websites into an affiliate site this week, and let me tell you there is definitely a learning curve.

In fact, as of this moment, the site isn’t even live yet. First I had to identify some software that would handle the tracking of affiliate sales. In the end, I asked some folks I knew and got pointed in the right direction.

Then I decided to create a new sales page, but I couldn’t finish that until I’d completed setting up and installing the affiliate software. Why is that you ask? Well, the sales page has a “buy now” type button on it. When you click it, you’re supposed to go to an order page – well the order page is part of the software so I had to configure that to get the url for the order page.

Then, the order page requires integration with PayPal (or Clickbank). However, I couldn’t set-up PayPal until I’d completed the Thank You Page because PayPal wants to know where to send people back to once they’ve completed the order.

Back to the software. . . Then I noticed that I also hadn’t set-up the autresponder system, which is the tool that automatically sends out confirmation e-mails and future follow-up e-mails. That meant that I needed to go to my autoresponder to get the code and add it to the software.

Once I got all of that configured correctly, I still needed to upload the product and then use my cpanel to password protect the folder that houses the product. That certainly won’t stop the “product theft”, but it will slow some of it down.

I’m pretty sure that when I have all that done this week, it will work beautifully. I can’t say that I recommend the affiliate tracking software yet, but it does come highly recommended. All the other tools here I use quite often and enjoy.

So in somewhat chronological order, here’s the tools you need to create an affiliate site:

1. First of all you need a domain name. I’ve used GoDaddy to buy my domain names, but I host them elsewhere.

2. I’ve used Hostgator to host my sites. I like the cpanel and the price is right.

3. Then you’re going to need the affiliate tracking software. I’m using Delavo, but haven’t used it long enough to give you an opinion.

4. After that it would be helpful to have an autoresponder set up. That way you can send confirmation e-mails, follow-up e-mails, product updates, etc. I use AWeber but envision I’ll change to ByPassPublisher sometime later this year.

5. To get paid, I use PayPal, but I think you’d be better off if you could take credit cards on your site with a merchant number. Unfortunately, no matter how you slice it – you’re going to be giving a piece of the pie away.

6. To load up the software and sales page to your site, I recommend downloading filezilla. It’s a free tool that will help you in everyway. If you’re building a WordPress site, however, you won’t need filezilla. Either use Fantastico in your cpanel, or this free WordPress Installer.

7. The only other tools you may need would be an html editor (like NVU which is free) and perhaps a .pdf creator like Adobe.

Once you have those things in place – you’re ready to go!

The NAMS 4 ACTION GUIDE IS READY HERE: http://lettersfromdan.com/namsactionguide/

I’ve finally finished the NAMS 3 Action Guide.  Writing from the perspective of someone who’s been to the first 2 NAMS events, I thought I’d give you some perspective on how to make the best of the event.

Please let me know what you think, and if you went to the first two NAMS events – what did I leave out?