Ok, so I’m being asked a lot lately how I got into the whole internet marketing scene, so I figured I might as well write a blog post about it. I’m not a big fan of writing… so I’m going to make this as “to the point” as possible for both my benefit and yours, since I’m assuming you probably don’t enjoy reading fluff. So here goes.

1. After I graduated college in 2001, I Worked in an IT department for a company in Batesville, IN called Batesville Casket Company. I worked there for around a year or so. As some of you probably know, working in an IT department is very much like the movie “Office Space”. I would actually work for about an hour each day and then have 7 hours to either stare at the computer screen OR surf the web. I’ve always been interested in figuring out new ways to make money, so I found myself searching online for all sorts of “make money” type ideas/programs etc.

2. I came across some eBay selling course and bought it for about 20 bucks. Read through it and it motivated me to start selling things on eBay. Instead of selling junk from home, I searched through eBay looking for small items that people were selling. Not “junk items”, but “new items”. Things that I assumed they bought wholesale from somewhere and then sold them directly on eBay. Buy low, sell high. Back then, there was a section on eBay that was free, where you could actually see what any item actually sold for. Doing this, I could get a good idea on how much I could afford to pay for something wholesale, in order to sell “high” on eBay and make a profit.

Through my research while at my day job, I came across a couple of things that people were selling for much higher than what I could get them wholesale for. I tried to look for small items like sports cards, or electronic devices etc. Stuff that could easily be shipped, but could be sold for a decent amount. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading and studying of Twitter the past couple of months and after all of the reading, I’ve come to the conclusion that the single best, “non-spammy” method for building a big, loyal, Twitter following is through the use of Twitter Giveaways, or Twiveaways as I like to call them.

What’s a Twitter Giveaway? Well, essentially, you give something away… whether it’s an eBook, software product etc. OR a physical product like an Ipod… in return for Twitter users

1. reTweeting a message that you ask them to reTweet to their Twitter account

2. Follow you on Twitter

This does a few things…

1. It builds your Twitter follower count when the initial registrant follows you on Twitter

2. It “goes viral” because when the initial registrant retweets your message, you’re now “advertising” on their Twitter profile page, to all of THEIR followers. Their followers then click on the reTweet message and sign up for your contest also… and the process just spirals

This is how many of the people with large Twitter followers are able to build a Twitter

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Hey guys, I sent out an email about this a couple weeks ago and have gotten some good feedback from it, so wanted to post here to quickly go over the process of what I accidentally did to build a very large email list in a short period of time.

1. I created www.ppcwebspy.com, which is a cool Firefox addon for keyword research. The overall process/flow of the software itself is very viral. (i.e. there is a big incentive for others to tell others about it, other than just because it’s good (which should always be a given if you create and sell anything)

2. I created a short demo video of me explaining how the software worked and what it does.

3. I posted a link to the video on my Twitter page (www.twitter.com/brad_callen). The video was nothing special. It was just me explaining the software and talking about how excited I was about releasing it to the public. It was 100% complete, but I was bored while my programmers were putting the finishing touches on it, so I had time to make a video showing how it worked. I made sure to mention that it wasn’t quite ready/complete, but would be soon.

Note:

- At this point, I’ve never mentioned the URL (web address) to where my Twitter followers could get the software… Basically because it wasn’t quite finished yet. I did, however, mention the name of the software.

- I only had about 2,000 followers at the time

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Update: Before posting a comment with a question, please read the FAQ, as we’ve answered many of the questions that have been asked here, already. You can read the FAQ by clicking the link below:

www.ppcwebspy.com/FAQ.php

Hey gang, we’ve made some major changes and improvements to PPC Web Spy, based on recommendations from you all.

Here are the things we’ve been working on over the past week, amongst the craziness.

To update your copy, simply click the “view keywords” button you would normally click to view keywords. Up will pop a screen telling you to update. Follow the onscreen instructions to update your version.

1. Completely changes the look of www.ppcwebspy.com to a much more upbeat, happy, and uplifting design. I feel this better represents the software than the dark, gloomy looking site from before.

2. Changed the entire focus of the site so that the small viral/affiliate link feature is barely mentioned… and is mentioned as only a side benefit, which is what it should be. The focus is now on what the tool actually does and the purpose of why I created the tool to begin with: To unccover your Adwords competition’s keywords.

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Ok, this has been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. I’ve noticed this getting worse over the past 2 years and I predict that it will be a major major problem in the coming years…

Here’s the process. So and so creates a product. The product gets downloaded by thousands of people. 99% of those people have success of some sort with the product, and are completely satisfied. 1% of the people are not.

The 1% of people that are not satisfied tend to be those people that would spend time posting in forums or blogging about it, while the satisfied people are out actually using and benefitting from whatever service/product that was provided.

This is even more prevalent in the internet marketing community than any other community and it’s getting worse and worse by the minute.

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