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 2, 2009

Pushing the balance limits on twitter

Filed under: Social Networking, random rants — Tags: , — admin @ 10:26 am

OK, I’ll admit it - my vanity has the better of me, and over the last couple of days, I’ve been trying to grow my twitter following as rapidly as possible. I know that twitter sets an initial ‘ceiling’ of following 2,000 people, and my two main accounts (one in my own name, the other for Flightmapping) were both approaching the 2,000 followers level, so I was curious to see how much further I could go.

No of course, all these nerdy statistics shouldn’t really matter, but I love numbers, and I like to find out how things work. So I pushed both accounts until I got the warnings, and then worked out the ratios. This is what I got:

  • Flightmapping - following 2147 & 1951 followers - 91% followers : follows.
  • Avery_James - following 2052 & 2251 followers - also 91% followers : follows.

Now I could have just looked at other accounts and seen what sort of ratios other large users get - does this figure go up or down as the number of followers gets bigger? Would twitter want to publish that? Probably not, they don’t seem to like people using third party software to grow their follower base, but then again ‘organic’ sites have never liked anything automatically coming along and ruining their systems, but there always will be cat and mouse here.

This is what twitter officially say on the matter:

What is aggressive following?

Following users is a way to see their updates in your timeline. If an account seems interesting, feel free to follow it! Many Twitter users receive email notifications when someone follows their account or check out the profiles of new followers to see if they share common interests. If some accounts are aggressively or indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention, it makes Twitter a less-nice place to hang out.

So wouldn’t it be easier just to follow a certain number of new accounts, wait for a certain proportion of them to follow back, and then unfollow those that don’t? Well, again, twitter have something to say about this:

What is aggressive follow churn?

If you decide to follow someone and then change your mind later, that’s fine! You can just visit the person’s profile page and then un-follow them. Aggressive follow churn is when an account repeatedly follows and un-follows large numbers of users. This may be done to get lots of people to notice them, to circumvent a Twitter limit, or to change their follower-to-following ratio.

 So the usual rules about common sense would appear to apply. Sure, it’s nice to watch those numbers tick over and see your following grow, but what’s the end game? I think it is time to get back to work!

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

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.

May 29, 2009

I’m off to DENver, have a nice weekend.

Filed under: Blogging, Chess Board Maps, Social Networking, Trains, Transport, Travel, random — Tags: , , , , , , , — admin @ 9:16 am

Morning,

I don’t ‘usually’ get up much before 11am, and often a great deal later than that, so this week I’m really pleased to say that I’ve been up before 9 every day (except Monday, when I got up around 11, why not - it was a bank holiday). For someone who normally has a chaotic routine, I’m pretty excited about this, because it is all down to one very simple tip I was given a couple of weeks ago. It took a week to get into the routine, and it has taken another week to keep it on track. This week has been extremely intense at times, but I’m hoping I can stick to the plan, and plan to make sure this happens.

So, am I off to Denver this weekend? No, Essex actually, but that just doesn’t sound all that exciting (nothing against Essex of course). To put it the other way, I could say I was going to cycle or drive to Stratford, which wouldn’t be much of a big deal, as Stratford is about 45 mins drive / 2 hours by bike from Coventry. But for an American, Stratford is an amazing place to visit (and in my opinion, Warwick Castle is even more impressive, but it isn’t so famous).

So,  I’m actually off on a bike ride to somewhere I might otherwise call ‘Glorious Middle Earth’ - it doesn’t have much to do with Lord of the Rings (Tolkien was inspired by The Black Country) - and I don’t know if the people who live there are particularly happy, but it is a very pleasant typical English village. On the village green, there’s a memorial to cyclists.

Speaking of which, I’m ‘flying’ with ‘BA’ (Bike Airways = the rest of the world’s favourite airline), and the ‘gate’ (front door) was supposed to have closed 5 minutes ago (my aim was to be out by 9, back around 10 - I’m running 5 minutes late, oh the stress is killing me (softly-not).

HAVE A NICE DAY :)

May 21, 2009

More not so random thoughts

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Coventry, Politics, Social Networking, Time Management, Voice Recognition — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 3:19 am

• I am definitely practising my own version of flipping – sleeping from 9-to-5, and working the rest of the day (well, night really) round that, but this week has been pretty good so far, even if I would like to have gone to the twitter discussion event which was on earlier on today in London, but I only found out about that from Murray Newlands’ blog late last night.
• My hours might be totally out of kilter, but I am trying to get into a habit of producing a minimum of 1500 words of ‘useful’ (i.e. commercially proven) content before doing anything else, or at least as soon as I switch the computer on.
• Having said that, the first thing I did when I got ‘up’ today was go for a bike ride, and this was a nice reminder of the joys of cycling along canal tow paths (see upcoming Bling My City post for more about this).
• I haven’t got round to reading or hearing any news today, but the last breaking story which came through last night as I was shutting my computer down was that there had been a military plane crash in Indonesia. No doubt by now we’ve had the usual messages of condolence from the Foreign Office, saying how deeply saddened Mr Miliband is to hear such a tragedy. You always know when they trot out the deeply saddened line that they don’t give a monkey’s, because if they did, they’d say something original.
• Speaking of news, much as though I was glad to finally see the back of speaker Michael Martin, has this not buried a far more significant story about the missing link being found in the evolutionary chain? Surely when we look back at 2009 in 20 years time, this will be one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time, although how it had been kept under wraps for 20 years is another story.
• I was having a good MSN chat with the ever-busy Nadeem from Azam Marketing  last night, and we were both agreed that quick lists like this are quite a useful way of dividing up thoughts, ideas and useful links, but I also wonder if there is a twitter application which could compile up a day’s posts, filter out the idle chit-chat and then integrate the decent ones with WordPress? I guess not, that would require a computer to do some thinking.
• So what useful links could I add today? Michael Dunlop (Income Diary) has an interesting list and discussion of 30 dyslexic entrepreneurs — there’s a few well-known and well documented characters on the list like Richard Branson (Virgin) and David Neeleman (Jet Blue), but I didn’t know about Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), but can’t exactly say I’m surprised. In certain respects, I’d have asked the question the other way — which entrepreneurs (or major achievers in any field) haven’t had to deal with some form of learning disability, serious emotional challenge or mental illness at some stage in their lives? If you go through the list of the top 10 greatest Britons, I don’t think you’ll find any. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_Britons
• Speaking of IKEA, it’s about time I went to get some more bowls for the kitchen, and this has to be a lot easier when you have a flashy new city centre IKEA store within walking distance. How many people have bragging rights to that? Seriously though, IKEA has to be one of my most respected brands, and I’m really glad they actually put a bit of thought into designing it.
• Lee McCoy (the Get Visible legend) had an excellent interview with Martin ‘purple’, where he gives a very interesting tip about using social networking sites like twitter to ask questions, rather than just talk about your lunch.
• I also need to look up ZiiTrend, a website about ’social predictions’.
• Meanwhile, Lee himself made some excellent points about blogging being far from dead (I think this particular Internet party is only just getting going), and I certainly concur when he says ‘I agree that Twitter is a much better conversation tool, and when you think that open conversation is the best route to expanding your mind, I still prefer blogging as the nature of my thoughts are essentially verbose. I dislike quick one-liners, it simply isn’t me’.
• Going over some reading from last night, Nadeem also gave a very interesting interview to Murray Newlands, but I think I’ll have to take him up on his comments about Margaret Thatcher later.
• See Flightblogging.com for my upcoming post about Log maps, potentially the next major development in Flightmapping.com.
• Whenever I come up with new ideas, I’m always slightly wary of sticking them straight up on the Internet, because a lot of people say that somebody else might steal them. However, I just don’t think there is much you can really do to copyright protect an idea, so my general feeling on this is to just stick stuff up anyway. I’ve never been short of ideas, so if somebody takes one, well, you know what they say about imitation and flattery.
• Yesterday, Chris Clarkson pointed me to a very interesting article about the Google user experience, and their 10 principles to create a so-called ‘Googley’ website. I think we have a lot to learn, and a lot to do, so that’s enough for now.
• Well, not quite — last night, Nadeem kindly suggested that I should update my blog more often, and I’m glad to say that even though I’ve been doing a couple of posts each day this week, this hasn’t distracted attention from the ongoing text updates for Flightmapping — these will always be like painting the Forth Bridge, but if you really do want to know anything about finding cheap flights to Copenhagen, Stockholm or Oslo, that’s my focus this week. As far as the maths goes, this blog post, like almost all of the content I write, has been created using voice recognition, so it has just taken 20 minutes so far, and maybe another 5 to check. Regardless of whether anyone else reads it or not, I always think it is good to review what you’ve read yourself, especially as there is so much other random information out there. I reckon that between blog posts, twitter updates and news articles, you could quite easily scan through 100 pages in a couple of hours, so spending 15 to 20 minutes summarising the key points has to be time well spent.

Enough for now!

March 26, 2009

A few bookmarks about Social Networking and Affiliate Marketing

Filed under: Blogging, Social Networking, Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 3:45 am

I’m going to expand on this list over the next few weeks, and I know I have a fair bit of reading to do to play catch up.

A few useful blog posts with suggestions for expanding websites through Social Networking:

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