Twitter is starting to do a clean-up of the spam accounts.  So, you will likely see some drop in total # of followers soon, if not already.  Here is the official statement:

“For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.”

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

I tell my coaching clients that making money is the easy part. The hard part is discovering what you love and developing the courage to go ahead and do it. I had this conversation with a young student the other day who really didn’t know what she wanted to do, what she loved to do and yet knew that she had talents that were yet untapped. She is definitely intelligent, hard-working, and yet she was going to school aimlessly, not knowing where that would take her.

Basically I told her that she could make money now. Start a business now doing something that she is good at and loves doing now. I told her that I have seen many people go through 4 years of college 2-3 years of graduate school and not know what they want to do and waste 4-7 years in the process. That is upwards to 7 years that they waste time on education, money on education and earning power. Earning power is the amount of money someone can make during their available time. Think about it. If you spend 6 hours a day in school and doing homework and you redirected that time towards creating a business or even working a day job, think about how much money that would turn into. Even a low paying job would amount to $20,000 extra. And if you have really marketable skills, that is $80,000 or more in lost revenue per year. If you multiply it out times the number of years people are in college you are talking about $100,000-$800,000 in wasted money and lost income. No wonder there are so few millionaires in this world!!!

Listen, I am not against education. I just don’t like wasted, aimless education. There are lots of short certificate programs people can complete in a matter of months that have the potential to generate significant income in a career. The Microsoft certifications, Cisco certifications and other certifications from Oracle, Citrix, VMWare, etc. could produce a minimum of 50k in income once you complete them. Not a techy? So, try the marketing certificates, global marketing, nursing certificates, paralegal certificates, etc. The idea here is to get your education done in a year or two and then focus on building your wealth.

Once you get a career you can work on enhancing your wealth with a side business such as a blogging business. You can focus more specifically on what you love. Let’s say you have a unique talent and love for planning parties such as weddings or birthdays. Build your blog around that theme. Find other bloggers that write on that content and make friends with them. Comment on their blog posts. Get into the local community and find others that share your interests. Start a club. Grow your audience. Once you get a significant list of people that read, comment and use your blog, email newsletter, etc. you can start making money.

Even before you get the list, you can start adding Google Adsense, links to affiliate programs for Clickbank, Amazon, Ebay, etc. It is just that without the traffic and a shared community of people that come to your site, none of those things will generate significant income. Next, you can start offering products. E-Books, T-Shirts, How-To Video’s etc. There are hundreds of ways to monetize any passion you may have. The idea here is to do your day job only until your business takes off and generates enough for you to live on. Most people do it as a side business. Blogging doesn’t take much to start on. For a cost of books and 1 college course you can basically pay the minimal costs for your blogging business for several years.

I strongly recommend you at least get a domain name (approx $9) http://domaindjinn.com and it can even be less $1.99 if you go with a hosting plan. With a domain name you point it at your blog from Blogger, wordpress, or wherever. If you want to host your blog then you are taking the next step which most of the best bloggers do. It has a small learning curve. But once you are up and running it is just up to you to start making some good content. Post videos, audio clips, pictures and written content up there. It is easy to do and is only getting easier. Before you know it, you will have businesses coming to you and asking if they can post ads on your site, and pay you for it.

Why is blogging profitable?

People misunderstand the profit potential of blogging and its inherent value. Blogging costs nearly nothing to do. So, they assume it doesn’t have value. It isn’t like you are manufacturing fine china, right? Wrong. The idea of blogging value is the fact that you are a publisher. Just like a newspaper, magazine, or anything else. Google makes billions each year because they publish links. Reuters makes billions each year because they have news programs which they publish. They publish and therefore advertisers want to give money so they can advertise their products on their sites.

So don’t think of blogging as a lowly job with no value. Think of yourself as a publisher of an electronic newsletter, syndicated via RSS, podcasting and perhaps other avenues. You make more as your reputation grows. And it doesn’t take long. The more valuable your information is, the more valuable your WEB PROPERTY becomes.

This brings me to my last point. Value. Most people I meet don’t value themselves properly. If I asked you how much you are worth, you may add up your car value, house value and perhaps your bank account if you have one. Another person may calculate their job salary for 10 years and add that to the above and give me a number. However, I would tell both people that they were wrong.

Your value is immeasurable. You have no limits on how much you are worth!! Let that sink in for a moment.

You are only worth what you think you are worth. If you start to realize that you are worth more than 200 trillion dollars then you start to realize the potential you have and the value you possess. If you value yourself at the value of your 5 year old Vespa and $200 left in your bank account, then you seriously need to look at your self-esteem. Your low self-worth is holding you back from your potential. You have unique talents and abilities that nobody else has. If you can harness that into something you love doing online, you will make money. I have no doubt about it.

I first want to say that I like Neil Shearing and Louis Allport and all those gurus. However this product is not worthwhile and can be a time waster.

At first it promised to be a powerful software package that identifies blogs on a keyword term that you input and allows you to autofill your name, email and web link. Of course you still need to read the blog and make a posting related to the blog. The idea here is to get links back to your website to increase traffic and google rankings.

However, the software doesn’t seem to work well in identifying enough blogs. It may find one or two. But it doesn’t identify blogs that allow you to have links or even if they have a way to post. I am not sure what engine it is using, or what is involved in the code that is causing the issue. You can keep clicking next, next and may find some viable blogs that are on topic. However I think it is easier to go to blogger or wordpress and do your search there and do the same thing.

This brings me to the point that people have to accept your blog post. They can delete it or not accept it. So, you spend alot of time reading their content and make a decent post and may not get a link out of it. I think all in all, it is a waste of time. I prefer many other methods to get one way link backs to your site. This includes PR and article marketing. Even link exchange sites are good. Creating individual blogs on topic are better because you control your own content and back links.

So, my advice is to leave this tool to someone else.

Using this one technique, you can get to a top 10 Google ranking quickly and with little or no work.

It is well known that in order to do well with affiliate programs you need to know how to do keyword research.  Finding the top keyword phrases that people search for using tools such as Keyword Elite, Overture Keyword Search, Google Adwords keyword tool or even the free Good Keywords tool can help.  Let’s say you are looking to market a product such as Dog Collars.  A search on Keyword tools will reveal lots of long-tail keyword combinations that people typically search for.  Such as:

Dog Collars and Leashes
Dog Collars wholesale
Dog Collars training
Dog Collar charms

It is extremely easy to find these keywords.  Here is a hint to find great keywords without using any program mentioned above.  Just go to Google and start typing in Dog Collar.  You will see that Google suggests several typical searches or keyword phrases for you as you are typing.  How easy is that!!!  You should get a handful of quick and easy keywords that you can use within less than a minute worth of work.

Next, go and do some searches for the long tail search.  Long tail just means that you are not searching for Dog Collars which would be the main keyword.  Long tail means you go for something a bit more specific like Dog Collars and Leashes.  Dog Collars is too broad and will have too much competition.  I did a search for Dog Collar and Leashes and found that the competition was 549,000 on Google.  But by assing an s, I found Dog Collars and Leashes had competition of only 390,000.  This only takes a minute.

I like to find competition between 200k and 500k.  Otherwise the pages would be difficult to rank for.  Next I look at the sites presented.  If it looks like the sites are extremely optimized, it may be difficult for this technique to work.  But let’s say the resulting sites looked like blog posts and sub pages to websites.  This may take a few minutes to compare the keywords and the competitiion.

Now I just go off to http://domaindjinn.com and do a search for domain names that exactly match the keyword longtail that I just selected above.  I will look for DogCollarsandLeashes.com.  If that isn’t available, Domain Djinn will recommend alternatives such as MyDogCollarsAndLeashes.com  or Mydogcollarsandleashes.net  As long as you have your keyword in the domain name, you can add news, blog, website, my or a number of other words as a prefix or suffix to the keyword phrase and you will be fine.  The cost of the domain is typically under $9 and can be as low as $2 if you go with the hosting plan.  But for an affiliate program you typically only need the domain.  Once you get the domain, you can then point the domain to your affiliate link and then start your advertising campaign.  Purchasing your domain should take you about 5 minutes.  Pointing the domain should take 2 minutes.

The last thing I do is plug the domain into a search engine submission tool like All-In-One Submissions.  Or if it is a blog, I may ping it with Ping-O-Matic.com.  This takes about a minute to do.