James Avery’s blog

November 5, 2009

A serious point about the Cowfilms joke thread on twitter

Filed under: Blogging, Internet, Politics, Social Networking, Time Management — Tags: , , , — admin @ 12:22 am

For anyone who isn’t a regular twitter user, this post will probably make little sense, so I’ll try and unravel it slowly, rather than at the 140 characters maximum speed of light that twitter operates at.

Each day, twitter lists top ‘trending topics’, which could be on any subject - some serious, some not so serious. The cowfilms thread is definetely on the silly side - basically, make any connection between a film title and a cow related theme.

Here are a few of my favourite 10 so far:

  1. Moo Cowsand and One: A Steak Udderssey - @julianyon
  2. The Cud, the Bad and the Ungulate - @ginpitwarrior
  3. Bonfire of the Vachequirits
  4. Friesian Loathing In Las Vegas - @scoop_cooper
  5. 24 Hour Patty People (featuring Happy Moodays)
  6. The Cudfather
  7. Cry Friesian - @davidschneider (of Alan Partridge fame)
  8. Methane, myself and Irene @rumdoodle
  9. There Will Brie Cud
  10. Ruminator 2 : Cudgement Day

So what’s so great about this obviously pointless and frivolous waste of time? Well, actually, if they say that laughter is the best medicine, then this thread is the best stuff in the cabinet. In some respects, it feels like the internet can turn into one big pub conversation - yet no-one has to pay a penny to get their round in, and there’s no side effects to this humour pill, apart from a little bit of procrastination.

Now I know that I’m part of the fortunate digital elite, and that I can dip in and out of twitter as I please - some workplaces have quite wisely cracked down on internet usage, and not everyone has the internet at home.

But there’s another serious side to all this - today’s big twitter topic may have been humour related (there’s another thread going about blaming everything on P Diddy), but at other times, the top trends are politically related, as we saw when the UK truly dominated the twitter charts two weeks ago when Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time. For non-British readers, Nick Griffin is the leader of the far-right, racially motivated, British National Party.

Another top trending topic today has been the elections in Iran. Now there was a lot of media attention back when the elections were first run, and a lot of people were able to get their opinions out on twitter. This time round, on the 30th anniversary of the US embassy hostage crisis, we’re hearing calls of support for the USA, rather than the usual death chants.

So, let’s say long live twitter, and long live the American dream which created it, all the way from the farms of Nebraska.

November 1, 2009

How long could you live without money?

Filed under: Blogging, Internet, Making Money Online — Tags: , — admin @ 3:41 am

OK, let’s take a break from any posts about making money online. How long could you live without the stuff for?

I’m just skimming through a blog written by Mark Boyle, who is approaching the end of living for a year without money - a concept he terms as the ‘freeconomy‘. I’ll have to admit that there’s a lot that I like about some of the basic ideas of the Freeconomy - in essence, the idea that not everything is about money money money - but for me, this is always something to exist alongside our greedy capitalist world, not as a replacement for it.

Apparently, Mark’s big conversion was from watching ‘Gandhi’ during his final year as an economics student at university. I think that’s when many of us started our conversion away from wishy-washy idealism and towards how things work in the real world. Still, every day without spending money is a day when an internet marketer can’t fail to improve his or her bank balance - but I guess not spending money, and just not using it full stop, are two separate concepts. I still prefer the former, but it doesn’t take an idealist or a beatle to tell you that money isn’t everything, and that all you need is love - most entrepreneurs and self improvement manuals will tell you that aswell. You just might have to fork out a small amount of cash to pay for them.

October 7, 2009

Why I don’t want 400 new twitter followers each day

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Social Networking, twitter — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 3:05 am

OK, I’ll start with a caveat - of course, I do want as many twitter followers as possible. Who doesn’t?

But assuming the main way of getting twitter followers is to follow other people and get followed back, why should I place my trust in people who promise upto 400 new twitter followers per day? And why has everyone selected 400 as the magic number? My guess is that this is based on following 1,000 people each day in the hope that they will follow you back. This is the maximum amount that twitter will let people follow without bringing up a violation warning.

If you want to get followers, there are plenty of simple and free systems available, which don’t need any cash outlay to use. Oddly enough, the one I currently use, buzzom.com, was recommended by a friend, after I tried to use a wefollow plugin which didn’t offer any way of limiting the number of people I was following. This very quickly took me straight up to the 1,000 limit, which then gets really irritating, as there are other people I wanted to follow manually, but I could not do so for another 24 hours.

So if I admit to using an automated service, which could potentially add 1,000 new follows each day, why don’t I want to go this far?

Spam, Spam, Spam

Buzzom.com selects people to follow based on your user profile, and I presume it also looks at who you’re already following, and what kind of tweets you make. I’ll happily stand corrected here if I’m wrong, but for people I elect to follow personally, this still leaves a good chance of following people who are just out there to spam twitter with online MLM schemes or junk about making money online, when the only ‘product’ is a website which tells you how to make money online. I’m not into that - I want to build decent content, engage with people as I go, and talk about the experience. But even when I look for people to follow on behalf of Flightmapping.com, which is tagged up as a travel website, there are still a fair few spammers lurking.

100 at a time should be enough!

Every time I follow new people, I am likely to delve into their tweets, and read up on worthwhile blog posts they make. But I also have to do a fair bit of sifting through the spammers before I get back to reading the tweets of people I already know, and have chosen to follow manually. So for now, I think that working on 100 new follows at a time seems to be a reasonable balance. As I said in my last post about reaching the first milestone of 1,000 followers, I have guestimated that I need around 10,000 followers before things start ‘getting serious’. My initial expectation was to build this up slowly over a year or so, but this can clearly be done in around 3 months by getting 100 new followers each day. I just don’t think there are enough hours in each day to build up followers any faster than this, although of course, once you get established, there is no reason why you shouldn’t pick up lots more followers automatically, as you get established as a good quality contributor.

Balance follows and followers

Like it or not, twitter is always going to be governed by a certain element of  ’social proof’. If you are lucky or skilled enough to pick up loads of followers without having to make much effort, then fine, but otherwise it is best not to follow thousands of people until you start to get a few followers yourself. Having a massive imbalance just makes you look desperate.

Flushing Out

One key tool I like with buzzom.com is the ability to flush out users who haven’t followed you back. However, I think this is a bit easy to use too heavy handedly, as the default button to click is ‘flush and block’. Blocking out people just because they haven’t followed you back is needlessly harsh - not everyone uses a system to follow back people who follow them, and they may be away for a few days. Even so, it really isn’t worth getting so worked up about who follows you and who doesn’t - just remember SW-SW-SW: some will, some won’t, so what! When using the flush tool, it is key to pick out the people who’s tweets have been memorable, or who are known authority figures in their field (and not just because they tell you they are!).

I hope these are a few useful points about how to grow twitter followers in a sustainable manner - and no, I’m not making myself out to be an expert, just someone who wants to follow a steep learning curve, to help and be helped, and to use twitter as the great conversation tool that it is.

I’ve got my first 1,000 twitter followers - so what?

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Social Networking, twitter — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 2:38 am

So, I’ve fed my ego and gone out to get my first 1,000 twitter followers, both on my personal account, and on the account we use for Flightmapping.com. So what? Well, to be honest, so not very much. My vanity, and my desire for traffic, and hence revenue, want as many twitter followers as possible.

I have guestimated that I’ll need about 10,000 to start seeing any worthwhile difference. This is based on an assumption that 1% of people will respond to tweets about new blog posts, and that five new blog posts and site updates each day could generate 2 x 10,000 x 1% x 5 = 1,000 new visitors. At this stage, I am dealing with very crude maths, and I’ll adjust my forecasts as I go along. I’m interested to hear from other twitter users who are out there to build decent traffic to content related blogs, and not just to get people to sign up to online get rich quick programmes. How are you doing?

Thoughts on Compound Growth - Possibilities and Dangers

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Making Money Online, Social Networking — Tags: , , , , , , , , — admin @ 12:55 am
Compound Growth of an Online Business

Compound Growth of an Online Business

On Sunday, I posted about how little I was actually earning from my blogs, and how I hoped to enter a steep learning curve in order to improve this. I’ve never been shy of writing content, but the social media arena has always been something I’ve never quite got round to entering. So I decided to hold my hands up and admit to being a total newbie, and see where things go from here. I have entered the steep learning curve of twitter, blog promotion and blog optimisation, and I am looking forward to enjoying the ride. So how realistic is it to expect to follow a growth curve which keeps on going up, and how can website builders ensure that their growth is exponential, rather than just solid and linear. Or is linear growth better?

Well, I have always found the prospect of compound growth far more exciting. Prior to turning my attention to blogging and offline print maps, I maintained a 60-70% annual growth rate on Flightmapping.com. Of course, the big question when anyone makes claims of massive growth is what level they are starting from. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that 1000% growth from £10 per month is still just £100 per month. But what if that is just the start, and within a few short months, you can double that figure again several times over?

Of course, the possibilities are endless - and there is no reason why a relative beginner can’t build up a substantial and stable income through building highly relevant content-focussed blogs - providing that there is a revenue stream which can be built from them. It is no use blogging about a subject which either has very few potential readers (although believe me, on the internet, there are people out there into just about anything), or which is just not going to generate much revenue (note to self - stay away from long political rants!).

So what are the dangers?

Judging by the endless streams of spam on twitter, the first pitfall has to be to go down the ‘I made millions of dollars online and so can you’ route - almost all of these systems are built on bringing more people in below you in the pyramid, and they just aren’t actually out there to generate any kind of sustainable income, except for those who are in right at the very start. Quality content blogs take time to build up, and this is the big question. Do you have the time to spare? Can you sit back and wait for your websites to grow? Well the good news here is that you will never have to sit around twiddling your thumbs - on the internet, everything can move like lightning, so it’s totally unlike opening a retail store and waiting for the punters to come in off the street. The simple question is - can you build up your website(s) quickly enough? Well, as long as you are starting off by building your website as a secondary income generator, the answer should always be yes. Expecting to become a millionaire overnight is almost certainly going to land you in disappointment.

So even if the rate of growth slows down as you get bigger, it still pays to go for explosive growth.

Happy blogging!

October 3, 2009

Last month I made a paltry £10 through blogging. I just want to double this each month!

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Internet, Making Money Online, Time Management — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 1:06 pm

Forget about all these wild claims about making thousands online from signing up to someone else’s automated scripts programme!

I don’t want to earn a fortune, I just want to double this amount every month for a year! Hang on a minute, after a few months, this starts to look quite juicy:

September £10
October £20
November £40
December £80
January £160
February £320
March £640
April £1,280
May £2,560
June £5,120
July £10,240
August £20,480

Oh, the powers of compound growth! Of course, doubling for the next few months should be child’s play, but who knows what will happen after that.

To clarify - I am looking at building up Adsense and perhaps other affiliate revenue from blogging alone, and not from Flightmapping.com, which is a dedicated travel website, albeit one built using very last millenium web 1.0 Architecture! Flightblogging.com is a standalone blog related to, but getting very little traffic from, Flightmapping.com, and my own personal blog is now building up slowly too. I also expect to re-instate a couple of other long standing blog projects, whereas the World Tube Map concept may evolve into an online discussion with some revenue opportunity, but the main aim of this is to actually sell physical printed maps, which don’t count as online revenue.

You might ask why current earnings are so low. The reasons are simple - I am a relative latecomer to the social networking and blogging scene, having put so much effort into building Flightmapping.com as a content portal, and focusing purely on SEO around the quantity of text, rather than playing the link building and social networking game. I am declaring my hand as a newbie in this field - and I want to learn - FAST!

Hopefully progress will develop with some good advice from friends old and new.

As always, keep your seat backs firmly upright, Pay Attention Meticulously, and enjoy the journey!

Hopefully this tells you what I’m on about

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Music, Social Networking, Trains, Transport, random — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 7:21 am

Please excuse the messy theme whilst I’m upgrading the blog, but I hope that the ‘map’ above provides a better overview of my key interests than any set of text links ever can.

I’ve set out some of the key topics I expect to blog about here on the left - I supposed I should add cycling and general transport together with trains, and social networking could also be expanded to include affiliate (online) marketing, although my interest here is more as a passive way to earn extra revenue, rather than an end in itself. Having said that, I’m always available for consulting if the price is right!

For the past 7 years, I’ve been working on Flightmapping.com, which is driven by affiliate marketing revenue, but which is also managed by my brother Mark and colleague Dan, who is the best person to contact about anything affiliate related on there.

So everything else here is starting off with a clean slate - lots of new projects on the go, but I hope this diagram shows how they are linked all together. The dotted line leads to new websites which are currently in the pipeline. Oh, and how did I forget a tag for music? I guess that’s because I just like to regurgitate other people’s lines, rather than create the stuff. One day, I’ll go out and get that drumkit!

 

You need to find out
‘Cos no one’s gonna tell you what I’m on about
You need to find a way for what you want to say
But before tomorrow - Oasis, Supersonic.

October 2, 2009

Another week, another blog post

Filed under: Blogging, Social Networking — Tags: , , — admin @ 11:32 pm

Hmm, looking back to last Friday’s post, I know I should be posting 3 times each week. But better to post just the once than not at all. Still nothing revolutionary to say this evening, but I hope a few quick notes about what I’ve been up to can show that things are moving along slowly:

  • Monday - I went to a debate about Heathrow’s third runway and the future of air travel marketing, hosted by CIMTIG. Lot’s to write up about this I promise, but not sure when I will get round to it. I’ll have to say that some of my reservations about Heathrow’s 3rd runway have been mitigated, but I’m not yet fully swayed.
  • Tuesday & Wednesday - I’ve made further progress on the first draft of the “World Tube Map” - talking about it to a couple of people on Monday night also got an excellent response. I have something ready to print off, and I’ll probably do an upload early next week.
  • Thursday - not really up to much, apart from watching Question Time in the evening - two excellent contributions from the non-politicians David Starkey and Dambisa Moyo.
  • Today - pretty quiet too, but I am doing a bit of a twitter catch up. I have a lot to learn before I get the social networking balance right, but this should all come together by the time I have the World Tube Map ready to publish, and Flightmapping’s long awaited new site launch is finally underway.

So can I offer one decent tip for the week? Well, one thing about getting more active on twitter is that there are hundreds of people out there to learn from who will be much better than you. That’s not to say that newbies can’t carve their niche - of course, there is plenty of space for everyone, but to quote Emmerson, ‘Everyone is superior to me in that I can learn from them’. Tonight, I’ve read a couple of posts by Bob Wheeler, and his comments on why blogs are the most important tool in social media are pertinent. To quote his own blog:

In fact, if you listen you’ll hear just about every social media guru say, “If you don’t have a blog you don’t exist online”. 

Of course, there’s no point in having a blog if it isn’t kept updated. So I’ve set the reminders to have something worthwhile posted up before this time next week!

Have a good weekend.

September 26, 2009

Hmm, apparently I should be posting 3 times a week

Filed under: Blogging — Tags: , — admin @ 12:38 am

I’m just in the process of doing a massive skills update for this new fangled ’social media’ arena, which has apparently grown threefold in the past year. A very good guide I’m reading from Bourn Creative is telling me to post 3 times each week. So how to get started? Well, sometimes I guess it is just best to put fingers to keyboard and worry about the rest later.

So sorry if this post is hardly going to be the best ever written. It is solely to get the fingers back on the keyboard - and to make sure I close the week out with posting something. I promise to get back next week with something more useful - heck, this week has been interesting in terms of discussions I’ve been attending - from ‘Global Warming and the tourism industry’ at the Royal Geographical Society on Tuesday to Chris Gibb, Managing Director of Virgin Trains speaking in Rugby on Wednesday to watching last night’s return of Questiontime.

Anyway, enough for now, hopefully back with a lot more next week, assuming my ‘jA380′ pilot plan keeps working at the same rate it has this week ;).

July 10, 2009

An Awesome Wave of Coolness - Just How Good are Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Music, Trains — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 12:27 am

I’ve just got back from London, and was cursing myself at the stupidity of making a second trip to the big smoke and back without having a working portable entertainment solution with me.

With the chaos that the house is in, it has taken some time to piece together all the bits that make up this highly complex but awesomely dynamic set of headphones:

Charger + Battery + Ipod + lead + Headphone Unit = Total blitz of sound!

I know they don’t come cheap, but I can’t recommend them strongly enough for any serious traveller.

Well, ipod has shifted from A-ha’s bond theme Living Daylights to Take On Me, which is then followed by Train of Thought. I think that says it all (I’ll say it anyway). Now what was it Alan Partridge said about bouncing back - Aha! Did motivation guru Stephen Covey (as in 7 habits book) then nick his trademark?

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