The Open Source Marketer

Coming up this weekend is the World Internet Summit in Dallas. In case you haven’t heard of this event, it’s one of the premium places to go to connect with other Internet marketers and find joint venture partners. There will also be a list of well known “guru” marketers there that will be presenting information on how to make money online.

Here’s a pre-event video describing what you will see at the summit.

Get More Information About The World Internet Summit in Dallas

If you plan to attend, here’s a few things that I suggest you take along.

• Your laptop (this should be obvious)
• Laptop power cord and spare battery (again, obvious)
• Business Cards (print them at home if you don’t have any)
• A Camera for photo opportunities (you’ll put these on your blog later)
• A backpack to carry what you bring and what you take home.
• An audio recorder or video camera (if they are allowed)
• A friend, they will hear all the things you miss and you can speak well of each other in front of other people.

Be sure to make a list of items before you go to help you remember everything. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve attended various events only to find out I forgot something.

You might have your own personal list of items that you like to bring to events so be include those in the list as well. Check everything off before you go and you’ll have a much better time.

The Dallas event is four full days worth of information which is nothing compared to the extremely low cost. If you’re in the Dallas area and plan to attend, let me know. I’d love to connect with you and get your thoughts about Open Source Marketer.

Waiting patiently,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Think you can’t do it?

Think Again!

If you run any type of offline events to promote your blog, and you collect phone numbers from your meeting participants, then you might want to take a look at phonevite.com. This handy service helps you automate your call list so all you have to do is record your event announcements once and then have them broadcast to your call list automatically. This would even work if you had an online membership base that provided you with their phone numbers.

The basic service offers 25 calls for free and the Premium service offers calls at a nickel per call. You can even schedule calls in the future. So, you can record a message, schedule it to go out at a preset time, and then forget about it.

The best part of the process is that it’s your voice and your message. So, the person who receives the call will hear your voice, but you don’t have to make a hundred calls to get a voice message distributed. It’s genius!

I promote Open Source Marketer through offline events using Meetup.com and you can bet that I’ll be using this service to remind participants about upcoming events, remind them to leave feedback on past events, and to interest them in speaking at future events.

If your concerned about do not call lists or people not liking automated messages, remember this is just one tool that you can use to communicate with people. If you let them know ahead of time and tell them why you use the service, then they will be open to it. And as always, don’t add people to your list that you don’t have an active relationship with. Keep your list clean and responsive and tools like this will serve you well.

Remember, it’s your voice, your ideas, and your message. Make it unique and make it available to those who will listen.

Being creative,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Running your own ad server can open up a lot of possibilities when it comes to delivering ads on your blog or across multiple blogs. If your looking to centralize management of your ads, create a unique offering, cut down on ad blindness, then running an ad server is the way to go.

An easy ad server to install and operate is OpenAds, formally known as PHPAdsNew. The software is freely available and most unix based hosting services offer it as part of their administrative control panel.

Installing the software is pretty straight forward. However, getting a handle on how to load up advertisers, create advertising zones for your blog, and then map ad inventory up to ad zones can be a little bit of a learning curve.

Fortunately, the software comes with a good bit of documentation. It’s entirely possible to install the ad server and get it setup without any prior knowledge of how it works. However, if you can find the talent, I recommend hiring the initial setup out to someone who knows how to do it and then copy what they’ve done.

There are a few draw backs to running your own ad server though, like concerns about server up time and on-going software maintenance. If you don’t want to be concerned about maintaining software updates, or keeping servers online, then an alternative solution is Google’s Ad Manager.

Google provides an ad server that’s very similar in concept to OpenAds called Google Ad Manager. The service is extremely simple to use and it comes with Google style tutorials to help walk you through the getting started process.

Because the service is provided by Google, you shouldn’t have to worry about software or servers and you get reporting on click-thru rates.

I’m still using OpenAds, but I have created an account with Google Ad Manager and I plan to try it out on a few websites to see how I like it. For now, I can tell you that it is easy to navigate and understand. Having the OpenAds experience under my belt has helped me, but I honestly believe that you can setup and account and get started without any prior knowledge.

The main reason you might want to try the Google Ad Manager on is because you won’t have install or maintain any extra hardware or software and if you don’t like the service or you discover you have special requirements, then you can always transition off of it later.

Streamlining,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Well, it’s been four days since I posted about BrightKite and now I’m in. Someone was kind enough to send me an invite. I’d like to give a big thanks to whoever it was. The invite didn’t tell me so unless you speak up, it will just have to be your secret.

I’m looking forward to exploring BrightKite and reporting back what I find. One thing I can already see is the use of Placemarks, which are like bookmarks for the common places that you go to all the time. You can text @work to a special number and that will let people know you’re at work. This is like a short hand way of relating information.

I especially like that I can connect my Twitter account to my BrightKite profile. The advantage to me is that I can post to one source and have it distributed to multiple places. I have my Twitter account connected to several other social networking sites, so when I update Twitter I am also updating these places around the web. With the explosion of social networking sites and the maturing social market, I think it’s extremely important to automate your connection points as much as possible. It’s not practical to think that someone can go around to every social site and update their friends on what their doing. But if all those sites are plugged together, then it becomes fast and easy to let people know what you’re up to.

Eventually I can see this format expanding into the OpenSocial platform to provide you with one centralized social profile, but that’s another post all together.

So thank you to whoever sent me the invite and oh, and I have three invites of my own to give away. So, if you’re looking for BrightKite invites, leave me a comment about how you plan to use BrightKite (include a real email address in the address field) and I’ll send you an invite. Comment spammers need not apply.

Sharing the love,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Where to place your email sign up form and RSS subscription badge is an interesting topic to me. I see a lot of variations and each solution seems to have it’s own set of mertis.

Regardless of style and arrangement, the one most important piece of advice I could ever give a new blogger is to put their email and RSS subscription boxes above the fold, preferably at the top of their blog. If you want people to find it, then put it where they can see it.

Here is a great example of placement from ReadWriteWeb. In this example, they’ve placed their RSS subscriber badge directly inline with their email subscription form. Not only does this make them easy to find, but it bring immediate attention to the fact that there are multiple options for getting information from the blog.

Perspective

Don’t be shy. Ask for the sale. If you want readers to add you to their RSS reader or subscribe to your email updates, then make it easy for them to do so.

Idea seeking,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Online social networking is still a very young industry and because of that there is still a ton of room for new ideas that can stretch and grow the current social landscape.

BrightKite is a new social networking player that’s bringing fresh ideas to the table. BrightKite combines a Twitter like social update service with mobile technologies to create a better networking experience.

Through BrightKite you can update your followers similar to how you update followers on Twitter. But BrightKite adds the ability to update followers on your physical location as well as your activities. Knowing someone’s location can easily open up opportunities for meetings and it adds a real option for creating solid offline social interactions and not just online connections.

According to the BrightKit website:

“Brightkite is a location-based social network that enables people to take their online profiles with them into the real-world and make real-world friends. Users can see where their friends are and what they’re up to all while maintaining comprehensive degrees of privacy to non-friends. Depending on a user’s privacy setting they can also be open to meeting others nearby.“

By Invitation Only

The service is currently in beta and they’re only accepting new accounts by invitation. Anyone can sign up to receive an invitation, but there’s a waiting list, so be aware. You can get an account early if you can find someone who’ll give you an invite.

This viral way of building a user base is absolutely genius. Google did this same thing when they originally launched Gmail and it created a powerful sense of exclusiveness that made people want to get in even more.

Now BrightKite’s “by invitation only” beta program is doing the same thing. By limiting how many people can get in they are effectively increasing interest in the service and raising demand for membership.

In fact, some people have started giving out BrightKite invitations as promotional items. Technosailor has been giving out ten invitations at a time as part of his efforts to promote his District of Corruption podcast. This shows that restricting the supply on digital goods creates demand and promotes a truly digital economy.

Searching Google

As of this writing, if you search for BrightKite in Google you’ll find that there’s quite a conversation happening on Twitter. According to TwitterStat results for the keyword BrightKite, the buzz around the service has increased sharply over the last month.

A side note here is that Google is indexing Twitter posts on a regular basis and people are using Twitter as a tool for getting into the search index. The search result for BrightKite is a good example of how Google is pulling in Twitter posts as part of the search index.

By Invitation Only

One interesting point about BrightKite is that even though membership is limited to invitations during their beta program, their overall system is still open for viewing and search. You can search for people by name, or geographic location and get back results complete with Google maps and comments.

This is another fantastic move by BrightKite because it lets people to see what their missing by not being on the inside. This increases desire for membership without increasing the supported size of your user base until your ready to open the doors to everyone.

Perspective

BrightKite promises to offer a better networking option than Twitter by adding location mapping which should help everyone create better connections. Twitter is good, but 140 characters can only go so far.

BrightKite is also showing their creativity and social awareness by generating buzz and interest in their service before they even open the doors to the public.

And no, I don’t have an invite. So, if you want to share the love, contact me and I’ll be sure to give you plug in my next update.

At home in my pajamas,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com