The Open Source Marketer

Recently I acquired a great personal assistant. She posts to my blog when I ask her too and she reminds me about important things I need to remember. The best part is she hasn’t cost me a dime, she’s available 24 hours a day, and she’s available to you too.

What I’m talking about, of course, is posting to twitter using Jott.com.

Jott is a speech to text method of getting posts on your blog using a telephone and Twitter.

Basically you sign up for a free Jott account and then connect the service to your Twitter account. Then you can call a Jott phone number, tell the system where you want your comments to go, and then you leave a voice message that gets converted to text and posted to your Twitter.

There is a verbal confirmation process that you complete to verify that the system understood your comments. But, once you approve the message it is converted and posted.

The service is extremely accurate and easy to use and since twitter can be connected up in lots of places you could effectively generate new content in hundreds of places just by making one phone call and essentially leaving a voice message.

The Jott service also offers the ability to connect to Tumblr, WordPress, Yahoo Groups, LiveJournal, Amazon, and lots of other sites which is great because it puts blogging and written social communications in your pocket.

In fact, that is how I use the service. I use my cell phone to post to Twitter and I use Jott to remind me about important events that I don’t have time to write down (like if I’m in traffic).

To use the reminder feature, I call the Jott service, tell the system I want to Jott myself, and then set a reminder date for my voice comments. The system will then send me a text message on the future reminder date. This has worked great for capturing ideas and setting reminders that I would have otherwise lost if I had waited to write them down when I had an opportunity.

There is one interesting twist to Jott that I have noticed, but not confirmed. They recently added the ability to Jott Amazon. Which means you can search amazon using their voice service and they will text message you the results. As I say, I have not confirmed this thought, but I would imagine that the returned result has their affiliate link built in so that if you do buy something from Amazon based on the returned results, they will get a commission. If they are not doing this, then they should be.

So, there you go, something to play with over the weekend. Be sure to leave me a comment and let me know how you use the Jott service.

Breaking free,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

PS. You can follow my Twitter to keep up on more great tips like this one.

Well if you haven’t heard, Rich Schefren has finally released part 2 of his special Attention Age Doctrine report that offers recommended solutions for getting attention in an age of information noise.

What’s the main take away?
Of course you will need to read the whole Attention Age Doctrine report to fully get all the recommendations that Rich provides, but the the main take away is that traditional pushy sales tactics aren’t going to cut it online anymore.

People are tired of being sold to and they are tuning out anything that feels like a sales pitch.

So What’s The Solution?
The solution is to make selling online a conversation. As marketers and online business owners, the solution is simply not to present ourselves like used car salesmen (sorry guys).

People (you and I) still want to buy things. Truthfully, in a lot of cases we all still enjoy the act of buying things. But, if given a choice, we want to buy from people we trust and not from people who push things on us. In fact, we want to make buying decisions based on information from sources we trust. Rich’s report will help you understand how to make this happen.

So, download the report. Give it a read. And, learn from someone who is leading the way for the next stage of marketing on the Internet. Things are changing rapidly and not everyone is paying attention. That’s why now is your time to get ahead of everyone else.

Looking to the future,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Internet Marketing is an ever changing landscape of technology and customer behaviors. Though it can be challenging to successfully match customer behavior with the use of technology, there are a ton of Internet Marketers who will gladly teach you what you need to know to establish an online business. But what will that business look like tomorrow?

In a recent article on MarketingVox article entitled, Era of the PC Seeing Sunset in Land of Rising Sun, they visit the idea that the personal computer as we know it today may become a footnote in the nerd history books.

If that is true then what comes next? According to the article, mobile devices are replacing traditional personal computers and people online are using social networks more and more to communicate and collaborate. As Internet Marketers this should start our brains buzzing. We should be wondering what that means to us now, and what it will mean to us in the “future”.

I won’t try to answer those questions in this post, but I will leave you with this one thought. I bought an iPhone almost two months ago and I carry it with me everywhere I go. I can get email, text messages, phone calls, web pages, weather, youtube videos, calendar appointments, stocks, Google maps, and iTunes all through one device. I post to twitter, check domain names, check link backs using Google, do research, and on and on. I still carry my laptop with me everywhere I go, but with the iPhone that has become less of a requirement.

My point here is I suspect we will see more mobile devices showing up in our web server logs and as Internet Marketers we should be thinking about how to handle that now.

Just thinking out loud,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

P.S. If you are interested in watching the front runners to spot trends, then look at Google. They have recently opened up opportunities in the mobile ad space with their Adsense and Adwords programs. I suspect they are looking down the road and we should be too.

Tracking clicks can be an important part of any online marketing but not everyone has the nerd muscles to set up their own click trackers. There are a number of scripts out there and home grown solutions for tracking clicks, but I want to give you a quick overview of a tool I like to use for tracking specific click events.

The tool I like to use is BoldURL.com. At first glance BoldURL looks like another long url shrinker. There are several hundred of these url redirection services in use today. In fact, you may have heard of tinyurl.com or some similar service, but BoldURL has a hidden surprise on the inside.
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