I’ve been experimenting across a number of Twitter accounts lately, and I’ve come up with some guidance that I hope will help you be a better user of Twitter. I define success in this field as attracting a large number of followers who actually do follow you, click your links, and want to engage with you further.

Don’t Answer “The Question”
The first thing you see on your Twitter page is the question, “What are you doing?” If you want to excel at Twitter, you need to ignore it. People don’t care what you’re doing. I’ll leave the “making a sandwich” example to other bloggers, and you need to leave the “making a sandwich” tweets to other Twitter users.

Let’s face it; social media is pure, unvarnished human selfishness. It’s all about the self-centered life of the person reading your tweets, not you.

Tweet GOOD STUFF
On a related note, pick a few subjects to tweet about and tweet interesting, relevant, informative things about them. Post links to blogs, news articles, etc. Try to think of what your audience wants to read about, and deliver it. Use Google Reader to compile a list of related blogs and news items that are relevant to your subjects. Pick the best stuff every day and tweet it.

Be a RT’er to the STARS
Follow the most interesting and well-followed people in your subject areas and re-tweet them from time to time. With luck, they’ll thank you and their audience will see your name mentioned! They’ll often remember you and repay the favor later on.

Leave room for the RT
Don’t use all 140 allotted characters for your tweets. Calculate how many characters it will take for someone to type “RT @yourtwitterusernamehere ” and subtract that number from 140. That is your personal character limit. This way, it will be easier to re-tweet your stuff.

Search & Follow
Search at search.twitter.com for your core topic(s) and follow the people who use those keywords. Especially if they use your keywords or topics in their username.

Schedule Your Tweets
Nobody who uses Twitter well and often  uses the regular Twitter interface. I recommend that you sign up with HootSuite. It’s free, and will allow you to manage your Twitter account much more efficiently. The main attraction of HootSuite, for me, is the ability to schedule your tweets. This will allow you to set aside 20 minutes in the morning to schedule all your tweets for the day.

Forget the Crap Software!
There are lots of gimmicks out there that will claim the ability to garner you hundreds or even thousands of Twitter followers in a short amount of time. Avoid them like the plague. You will quickly be labelled a spammer and possibly booted from Twitter. Even if that doesn’t happen, people will not be attracted to you.

I think all of us have found ourselves in a place where we scratch our head and wonder just how we arrived at such a sad state of affairs. I know I have, and the thing I’ve learned is that it’s nearly always the result of extraordinarily bad decisions.

I bet bankruptcy court was one of those places for you. At least, it should have been.

If I may be so bold, let me give you a few ideas as to why you found yourself there.

It all centers around one word: competence. The dictionary defines that word as “the ability to do something successfully or efficiently.”

I figured I’d better explain it since you don’t really seem to have any experience with the concept.

The lights on my cable modem shouldn’t be flashing, but that’s what happens when it’s not connecting to the Internet. This would be the third such service interruption over the course of one day.

Hey, I understand that these types of issues happen. But once a week for a month? And three times in just day? Not acceptable.

I can be understanding when bad things happen, but when I call up to report a problem (and attain resolution), don’t jerk me around. Especially don’t jerk me around in an accent that is barely understandable.

Don’t jump to some sort of lame explanation about my router being at fault — it isn’t.

Also, don’t give me goofy solutions about flipping around my ethernet cable between the router and modem. It won’t work and we both know it.

And while we’re on the subject of the less-than-optimal service call, don’t upset me further with the upsell for cable TV or phone service. It ain’t happening.

And let’s get that billing right, too. Double charging me and then totally dragging your feet to refund my money… not cool.

It will soon be time for us to part ways. For good. Sorry to say it, and I wish you well. I really do.

Matt Gordon
-Former Employee
-Soon To Be Former Customer

Large numbers of people go into Internet Marketing as a side business because they are dissatisfied with some aspect of their career. Maybe they would like to make more money, maybe they would like to own their own business, or maybe they want the freedom intrinsic to working on the Internet.

But as it turns out, their online business does considerably worse than the job they’ve come to hate. In fact, in most circumstances, it’s an utter failure.

Why is that?

It’s because although a lot of people think they have an online business, they actually have a hobby. But here’s the deal:

Internet Marketing is NOT a Hobby!

Let’s look at a few of the differences between a professional and a hobbyist. Then you can decide which one you want to be.

A Pro is a Fisherman; A Hobbyist is a Fish
Are you spending more time learning, surfing, and buying instructional products than actually “doing” Internet Marketing? You know, acting like a fish. What you need to do is act like a fisherman — actually casting your lines, trying different bait, and reeling in some fish of your own.

A Pro Works Working Hours in a Work Environment
If you own a business, keep business hours. Not necessarily “9 to 5″ hours, but they keep regular hours at a place of business. Your couch in front of the television is not a “place of business,” so find one. A spare bedroom, your dining room table, a coffee shop, whatever. But set up a time and environment and keep to it.

A Pro Has a Business Plan; A Hobbyist Has an Idea
Business plans have business models, revenue plans and projections, and defined sets of expectations and responsibilities. Hobbyists just hear of a “business opportunity,” tactic, or “money-getting idea.” Be the pro –  have a plan, and work the plan.

A Pro Doesn’t Get Distracted; Hobbyists Do Several “Projects”
Professional business owners don’t open a restaurant, a store, and a dry cleaners all in the same month. They choose a business, and build it. After they’re successful in that endeavor, they may expand their business portfolio, but not until they’ve achieved a certain level of success in their current business.

A Pro Doesn’t Take Business Personally
Although owning a business is one of the fastest ways to force you to confront the “mental stuff” that’s flying around in your head (opinions on money, selling, promotion, and more), the business professional realizes that any result is an asset, even if it’s a “failure.” The hobbyist decides that he isn’t “any good at this stuff” and continues the downward spiral.

So take the decision and make your stand. What are you: an Internet Marketing professional or hobbyist?

Remember the kid from “The Sixth Sense?” He saw dead people. Not a good gift to have, but he was able to learn how to turn it to his advantage so he could help people who needed it.

If you want to succeed in marketing, you need to start seeing marketing. This is pretty easy since it’s all around us. You just need to start paying attention.

Be seeing marketing — and I mean really seeing it — over time, you’ll amass a powerful arsenal of tools to grow your business.

If you feel you really don’t know what to look for, try reading Robert Cialdini’s excellent Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. That will give you more than enough material to work with.

Don’t pay attention to what people or companies say or do from the perspective of a consumer. Watch how they do it. Look for patterns and tactics.

Some questions to ask yourself:

1.) Have I seen this technique before?

2.) What is the desired call to action (what they want you to do)?

3.) How does the market react to this marketing?

4.) How does this particular element integrate into this company’s other marketing?

5.) If appropriate, how can I implement this tactic into my marketing?

6.) How can I test this technique to improve upon it?

See anything interesting out there? Tell me about it! What did you learn?

As a marketer, I’m looking for a few things in a content management system (CMS). Will someone with skills and brains please build this???

Any Page, Any Element Taguchi Testing
I want to be able to split test things like headlines, colors, etc. And it should be from right within the content management system. I don’t want it to be an added-on feature that makes me add lines of code here, there, and everywhere.

Assignable Backend Roles
I want certain people to be able to log in to the back end of my CMS, but not necessarily have full privileges. For example, writers should be able to create content, but not publish it without my approval. That kind of thing.

Built-In Analytics
Yes, I know that analytics packages and content management systems are often thought of as separate packages, but my opinion is that if you aren’t testing and tracking your content, you aren’t managing your content, you’re just publishing it.

Built-In Media Support and Library
Not only do I want the CMS to maintain a library for me to pull from, but I want built in multi-box support for images and movies. If I upload an audio file, I want it to give me a built-in SWF player for streaming audio.

Customizable RSS Feeds
Whether it’s a certain type of page, a certain class of pages, all pages, or whatever, I want control of what goes into an RSS feed, and the ability to create my own feeds as I desire.

Flexible Member Permissions
I want to be able to assign roles to people who sign up with the website, and allow certain roles certain privileges. I’d also like to offer “staged content,” where their access changes on a set schedule. For example, getting “Week One” content the first seven days, and then getting access to “Week Two,” etc.

Intelligent and Customizable Search Engine Friendly URL’s
It amazes me that so many content management systems don’t provide even this basic feature. I don’t want to see URL’s with question marks, ampersands, and long numbers to identify pages. Give me something understandable, with real keywords in the URL.

Paste from Microsoft Word (or Pages)
Let me write my copy in Microsoft Word (or the excellent Mac OS X Pages), if that’s what I choose to do, and then handle all the formatting when I import it into the WYSIWYG editor.

Per-Page Robots Meta Index/Follow Settings
Especially in the case of campaign landing pages, I don’t especially want everyone and their mother dropping by from their favorite search engines. So give me an option for each page to give robots special instructions. OR, write it to a common robots.txt file.

Per-Page Title Tag Customization (and Meta Description, too)
Do I even need to explain this?

Real-Time PDF Creation for Printing
If someone wants to create a clean hard copy for printing, I want the CMS to provide one.

Scheduled Go-Live Dates/Times
Another self-explanatory item. It doesn’t appear until I say it does.

Site Map — HTML and XML Versions
Just one less thing I’ll have to worry about.

User-Selectable Template Styles
There are several different sub-page types, and I’d like the ability to select preset layouts and styles based on my objectives for the page.

While launching the almost-ready-but-not-quite Matt Gordon Podcast, I had the opportunity to try out three USB podcasting microphones. If you are in the market for a USB microphone, I hope I can provide you with some guidance.

With a background in radio and some experience doing voiceovers and announcing at live events, I’ve had the opportunity to use plenty of microphones. So I know how my voice “should’ sound, and have the experience to know when a microphone is a good fit for my voice.

Which brings me to a crucial point: I probably don’t sound like you. Each of us has our own distinct sound, and the microphone that sounds best to me, for my voice, might not be the best one for you.

The three USB microphones tested were the Marshall Electronics MXL USB.008 ($199.95 list),RODE PODCASTER ($369 list), and the Audio-Technica AT2020USB ($249 list).

Notes on Each Microphone

MXL USB.008
The specs told me this might be the best microphone for my voice. A relatively flat response throughout the frequency range and a gold 32mm element (that’s kind of large), made this condenser my first choice. But when I got it, I was disappointed in the performance.

The MXL USB.008 had a very bright, and harsh sound. The audio equivalent of a room where the lights are turned up too high. The “ess”-es made me squint they were so piercing, and it just didn’t have the warm, resonant “presence” that I like in my vocal recordings. I couldn’t imagine anyone listening to me talk through this microphone for an extended period of time  – it would just be too hard on the ears.

RODE PODCASTER
This microphone was initially my first choice, until I found the MXL. I like that it closely resembled the Electro-Voice RE20, which was the microphone we used in the studios at KTRS Radio in St. Louis (the microphones have since been changed out for another brand). I also liked that it hand zero-latency monitoring built into the mic, so I could plug my headphones in and listen as I recorded. Additionally, it was made to be used close-up to the mouth, much in the same manner I was used to from the old broadcasting days.

One thing that struck me was that RODE wasn’t trying to produce a microphone with a wide, flat response. They were clearly aiming at normal voices. After all, it’s cool that your microphone can pick up from 20 Hz all the way up to 20 kHz, but human voices only take up a fraction of that spectrum.

But for me, it just sounded dull. It’s strength was right down the middle, but lacked the crystal-clear highs and the rumbling lows. For many voices, this would be a good microphone, but if you have a bass or deep baritone voice, you won’t be happy with this microphone.

Audio-Technica AT2020USB
Another condenser microphone, but with a 16mm capsule.

Ahhh…. Audio Heaven. This is clearly the right mic for my voice. It has a warm, intimate sound when I get in close, and  still does the high sibilants without sounding too piercing. Nice and silky sound to it.

Conclusion
The Audio-Technica AT2020USB is the best microphone for my voice. I’m just sorry I had to go through three microphones to find out. Your mileage may vary; definitely experiment with as many models as you can get hold of.

There are two ways to make money on the Internet: sell your own products and services, and sell other people’s products and services. As John Reese says, the smart people do both.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will consider “your” products as an order that you fill, even if they aren’t actually “your” products. If someone else is filling the order, we will consider it a sale of “other people’s” stuff.

But within these two high-level concepts are several business models you may wish to employ. Here are some of those models:

Selling Your Own Products

Selling Physical Goods
It sure seems to work for Zappos, Amazon, and others. And it can work for you, too. Consider opening an online store. If you need help finding a wholesale source for the products you would like to sell, check out Worldwide Brands.

Selling Digital Goods
You may wish to sell information products, where the buyer receives digital copies of your product (think iTunes). No shipping and handling, no inventory, warehousing… not a bad idea.

Memberships
Many kinds of websites lend themselves well to a membership model, where subscribers pay a monthly fee for access to the content of your site. You may run a community, have special content, or provide a service for your members. This is sometimes called “continuity.” Some marketers would argue that if you don’t have some kind of continuity program in your business, you don’t really have a business.

Advertising
If you have a lot of great content that attracts lots of visitors, you may want to sell advertising on your site. Advertisers may want to buy per thousand “impressions” of their banner ad. Alternatively, you may wish to charge “per click,” as in when your visitors click on an ad. This is the way you can make money through the Google Adsense program.

Selling Other People’s Products

Affiliate Marketing
This may be the ultimate “lazy man’s” way of making money on the Internet. You will promote other people’s products. When leads that you have generated make a purchase, you will be paid a percentage of the sale.

Drop Shipping
If you would like to sell physical goods, but don’t want to deal with the warehousing, fulfillment, and shipping hassles, you may want to consider working with a source that will drop ship for you. This is when you forward them the order information, and they ship the order directly to your customer.

Extra Credit
One bonus question; not that this is a quiz: What can you do to combine business models for an end-to-end business? For example, creating your own product, selling it, attaching a continuity  program to the backend of the sale (maybe with a free trial?), and then making appropriate affiliate offers to that list.

Think about it. Just remember, you’ve got to walk before you can run. Don’t try to take on the whole world at once. Get raving fans doing just one thing well, then add on an element and grow your business step by step.

Every business has barriers to entry. Internet Marketing is not much different, although the costs are significantly lower than traditional or brick-and-mortar businesses.

Internet Marketing is a resources game. If you are just starting out, your resources are time, money, and knowledge. If you have more time and knowledge, you ultimately may not need to spend as much money. If you have more money than time, you may be able to spend more and have to learn and work less.

As you progress, other currencies are added to the game, such as your email list, links, affiliates/partners, and reputation (including Social Media followers/friends/connections). But for now, we’ll just talk about the tools you need to get started.

I’ve compiled for you a list of the basics; the stuff everybody needs. None of the links are affiliate links, and I receive no consideration or compensation for recommending them. Not all of these might be necessary, depending on your business model.

Hosting
You’ll need a place to put your site to serve it to the Internet. I use and recommend Dreamhost, and have heard good things about Hostgator. You’ll need to pay in advance, and the longer term you buy, the cheaper the price. Plan on spending $215 immediately for 2 years of hosting.

Email
No, not the email you receive, but the email you send to the list of people who want you to talk to them. You need a service provider to like Aweber to handle sending out emails to your list, manage unsubscribes (they happen) and CAN-SPAM compliance. You’ll start out paying $19 a month, and pay more as your list grows beyond 500 people.

Keyword Research
Although there are a few free keyword tools out there, such as the Google Keyword Tool, you might want to supplement those keyword lists with some results from a paid service. Although you could pay Wordtracker for $329 a year, I recommend Keywordtopia for $19.50 a month. You’ll need to spend a couple of bucks extra for the premium keyword services (including Wordtracker results), but it’s worth it.

Analytics
Always, always, always have tracking on everything you do. Everything. Check out what you can do with Crazyegg. For starting out at just $9 a month, it’s worth it.

Shopping Cart/Checkout Software
Depending on your business model, you may need a shopping cart system. You can start out with 1ShoppingCart, which will run you $34/month or $349 per year, if paid in advance. If you plan on selling digital products (e-books, MP3 courses, etc.), use E-Junkie. You can start out there for just $5 a month.

Total Costs
Assuming a moderate amount of list and web traffic growth, plan on spending around $1000 your first year. This price includes the first and second year of hosting.

And now, the good news…
Some tools that you’ll need to make the wheel turn are free. Here are a few…

Analytics
Yes, I know I mentioned this category earlier, but go ahead and grab a Google Analytics account and remember to track and test!

Keyword Research
Make sure to check out the Google Keyword Tool. Use it to generate a keyword list relevant to your market. This probably isn’t the only keyword tool you will want to use, but it’s a good, free, start.

CMS
Content Management System. This will save you from having to learn a lot of HTML and other programming languages to make your web pages do what you want (you’ll still need some knowledge, though).

Your choice of CMS will depend a lot on your business model and what you want the site to do. Two free tools to consider are Wordpress and Joomla. Incidentally, if you go with Joomla, consider joining Rockettheme (starting at $50) for some of the best design templates around.

Fools are all around. They are many.

In fact, there is possibly a fool either reading or writing this blog. Either one is possible.

What is a fool? Glad you asked.

Any one can simply be “not smart.” In fact, I, myself, have been accused of being “not smart.” But a fool is different. Fools are often semi-functional, but their foolishness impedes the work or progress of others.

In the not-too-distant past, I worked with someone who I thought could be a fool. I wasn’t sure, so I had to ask a couple of people I knew to be smart if he was a fool.

Turns out, he was.

But the incident taught me that I need to be better at spotting fools. Here is a handy three-step guide that you, too, can use to spot people who are fools.

1.) Fools are completely convinced they are the smartest people in the room.
One of the easiest ways to spot a fool is that they carry themselves in a manner to suggest that they are smarter than you, although there is no additional evidence to support that belief. If a person isn’t smart enough to carry him or herself with humility and treat other people respectfully, watch out. You may be dealing with a fool.

2.) Loud, obnoxious behavior.
Fools often announce their presence with behavior that causes their foolishness to stand out. They often choose to express themselves loudly or in a manner that attracts undue attention. Foolish non-verbal self-expression can come in the form of tattoos, body piercing, and unnaturally colored hair. This is not to say that all people who engage in such activities are fools.

3.) Obsession with pop culture.
Fools often don’t know very much, thereby making them fools. But what they do know is who got voted off the island, the identity of the latest American Idol, and which celebrities are dating each other. It perhaps might be that the pop culture information filling their heads leaves no room for little else.

You may have deduced from my lack of posts over the past few weeks that I had nothing to say.

That would be wrong.

Rather, I’ve simply been afraid of saying it.

Well, after spending most of the day laying on the couch nursing a headache (the caffeine-laced “Headache Relief” pills and a glass of water finally knocked it out), I’m cranky enough to start spilling it.

By way of re-introduction, please know that I write about what I know, what I’ve experienced. If you’re looking for the typical “you’re here to serve, and give before you receive” marketing blog, go read Seth Godin. He’s a better writer anyway. If you’re looking for the “seven easy steps to building your marketing empire,” go read one of the IM gurus like Rich Schefren or, better yet, John Reese when he gets around to actually writing something. Although a bit of all that stuff is part of my experience, I’m not here for that.

This site is generally about Internet Marketing and other stuff and how it relates to my life. In other words, it’s about me. But not really.

Speaking of that, if the whole “Matt Gordon: The Official Website” thing didn’t strike you as at least a little bit icky, this site may not be for you, either. It was a dig at all the pompous, self-centered sites (especially blogs) I see around the Internet these days, but nobody got the joke. Probably my fault, but I think it’s sad that everyone seems to swallow that much arrogance without even blinking these days.

So, yeah, you got it: this isn’t your standard “sit around drinking steamed milk or whatever that crap is” marketing blog. I’d like to think it’s a bit more authentic than that. I’ll do my best to keep it that way. Enjoy the ride!

Or don’t.

I’ll be back soon with a post that’s actually about something. See you then.