You don’t have to do a lot of searching to find Twitter icons to place on your website. But many of these websites only display 1-2 icons. The following list contains my top 6 Twitter icon websites. Each of these websites display at least 5 Twitter icons:

1. Twittericon.com. Not only does Twittericon have an abundance of twitter icon designs (over 200), it also gives you the ability to enter your Twitter ID and then copy/paste a preformated link to be placed on your website. This eliminates the need to download the image, upload it to your website/blog, and create the html code to link to your Twitter page.
2. Deviantart.com. Well-known for it’s collection of images, Deviantart has well over 200 Twitter icon designs.
3. IconFinder.net. I visit IconFinder quite often when I need icons for website projects. I went on the website today and found over 100 Twitter icon designs. The Twitter icons used on my site (and www.grasshopperpebbles.com) were downloaded from IconFinder.
4. IconSpedia.com. IconSpedia has over 50 Twitter icons.
5. Webdesignerdepot.com. Webdesignerdepot offers 50 free Twitter icons as well as an assortment of other images.
6. Vincentabry.com. This website offers 31 unique Twitter Icon designs.

You can google to find other websites that display Twitter icons, but this list may be all that you need.

Have you ever visited a website where you were skeptical about it’s usefulness? I recently visited a site, youdolink.com, that I initially thought should belong to this category. Youdolink.com a free self-promotion service that guarantees at least 20 minutes of fame on their website. Here’s how it works:

After you enter your website address and description, your link will appear in position #20 on their “Hall of fame”. As other users enter their website information, your link will move up on the list until it reaches the #1 position. Youdolink.com guarantees that your link will remain in each position for at least 1 minute (20 minutes of fame).

First thought: In order for this service to be of any use, the website itself would have to get a lot of traffic. If no traffic, then it’s a bad idea.

As I looked around on the site, I noticed that the top 5 most sites (and number of visites) were displayed in the sidebar of the “Hall of Fame”. The top 2 sites had over 30,000 hits (and site #3 had nearly 30,000 hits). While this is a modest amount of traffic, it is traffic nonetheless.

I clicked on their twitter link and found that they also tweet the link of the website in position #1 whenever it changes. They have nearly 300 followers. Not a tremendous amount, but when they grow, they may be effective way to promote a new site.

I decided to test YouDoLink.com’s current effectiveness. I entered the name of my company website (www.intriguingminds.com). I used Google Analytics to track the number of hits to my site during my “20 minutes of fame”. After 12 hours, my link had moved to position #10, but I only had 1 visit to my site.

Well, I got my 20 minutes of something, but it wasn’t fame.

I recently stumbled upon the site proxifeed.com. The site offers an automated tweeting service. I considered signing up, but I was a bit skeptical. I think that having an automated service misses the entire point of using twitter – it’s about the community. As I looked more into proxifeed.com’s service, I began to understand the reasons why one might consider using it.

According to Proxifeed, the primary purpose of the service is to get more people to follow you on Twitter.

Proxifeed creates and broadcasts automated postings into your Twitter feed
Use keywords that match your areas of interest and let Proxifeed identify relevant real-time web content. Mix-in other RSS sources too. See your feed become exciting and engaging. More and more people will notice and start following you.

To many businesses and marketers, tweeting is just another strategy used to reach potential clients. But if you joined a community, you participate in the community. Marketing is about building relationships and I’m not sure an automated system will enable you to do that.

If you think that you don’t have anything to say, you are wrong. Have you seen some of the tweets of the people you are following? The other day, I tweeted, “Need a break. Going to lunch.” While this wasn’t my only tweet for the day, you will find that a percentage of tweets are random. On that particular day, I tweeted from my I-phone while I set up an Ubuntu webserver. I tweeted the entire date, documenting my experience on Twitter – and going to lunch was one of my experiences.

You will find that I was not the first to send a tweet about going to lunch. So, if you happen to be watching the NCAA basketball tournament, tweet about it (I did). Perhaps using Proxifeed.com’s service is a good way to increase followers, but in the end you will have to get involved in the community.

Got a product from a small company you really love? Think this product is so great, it’s going to be a big success? Tell your friends about it via Hollrr.

Currently in invitation-only beta, Seattle-based Hollrr aims to help small companies launch new products. Hollrr allows you to root for products you think deserve to succeed. By joining a Tribe of Followers, you are able to promote a new product to all your friends via Twitter, your blog or even Facebook. They’ll also work with partner companies to reward the Tribe for new customers it brings onboard. What’s even better…the earlier you join the Tribe, the larger is your share of the Tribe reward. Hollrr rewards those who are good at spotting early which new products will be successful.

Looking for cool new products? Just go to Hollrr.com and see which products people are making the most noise about.

I’m finally getting around to creating this post about my wife’s eBay experience this past Christmas (2008). She was able to make quite a bit of money selling multiple Wii Fits on eBay and other online sources. It was an unnerving experience for her, but she was able to make a profit and that is all that matters.

Back in August of 2008, my wife told me that Kmart had the Wii Fit on sale, but they were sold out by the time that she got there. We had planned to get a Wii Fit for the kids for Christmas – and my wife hates to buy anything unless it is on sale. I told her that we should really consider buying multiple Wii Fits the next time they go on sale and that we should then sell them on eBay.

I didn’t think much more about it until one day in late November, my wife called me on the phone, very excited. She told me that she had just left a Target where she had purchased 6 Wii Fits that were on sale (1 for the kids, and 5 to sell on eBay). She asked me if she should purchase more and I said that she should, so she purchased 5 additional Wii Fits.

My wife already had an eBay account, so she quickly placed a few of the Wii Fit’s up for auction. I told her that she should add only a few of the products in the beginning – to see what the market was like. She setup the each auction with different durations.

We noticed that people didn’t really begin to focus on an item until the time remaining for the auction was close to completion (although many had set a maximum bid price). Although there are reasons that a bidder may set their listing to display for 5, 7 or 10 days, when you are selling a Wii Fit at Christmas time, setting a auction duration at anything past 3 days is a waste of time. Most people did not begin bidding until 1 hour or so before the auction was ending (there are exceptions, of course).

One aspect of selling eBay that my wife and I did not particularly like was that most of the people selling Wii Fit at that time were offering Standard shipping for free – cuts down on profit. Because my really disliked having to pay shipping cost (which was much in most cases), she also added a few of the Wii Fit to our County’s online classifieds. I think she sold 3 of them from this source. She did not make a great profit from these sells, but, because she sold them locally, she was able to deliver the Wii Fit personally. She and the buyer always met in a public place and I went with her on a few occasions, so she was safe.

All and all, it was a good experience. Now she obviously did not make enough to quit her job, but it was a nice bit of extra change.

I have been doing a lot of web development lately and haven’t had much time to do a lot of marketing. A few months ago, I happened to notice Google Trends. Although there are many websites and tools that have replaced Yahoo’s Keyword Selector too, this Google tool displays a bit more granulated results. Top 10 countries. Top regions within a country. Subregions. Cities. Wow.

I searched for the word ‘ajax’ (I’m such a geek). The top country searching the word “ajax” was the Netherlands. I then selected ‘United States’ from a Country Region drop-down. Utah was the top State drop down searching for the word ‘ajax’.

I clicked on the “Utah” link and found that Orem, UT was the top city looking for the word ‘Ajax”. Now I really didn’t need to know that, but it is interesting that I can view this type of information.

I am also able to see a graph of the search volume over a specified set of time (all years, last 30 days, etc). Google Trends is a marketer’s dream, both on and off line. Being able to narrow your search to your locale is just a tremendous asset when you are marketing your product. Not only can you see the demand, you can also see how it trends over time.
Wow.

The Google Trends category will be used to display interesting searches I may do on a particular day. Go to Google Trends and explore multi-region search.

While researching an affiliate marketing product to market, I stumbled upon a sales page that displayed a few videos. I know that some marketers host their videos with YouTube, but these videos were too long to be hosted with YouTube (videos on YouTube can’t be longer than 10 minutes).  After a bit of investigating, I learned that the marketer was using Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) to host their video.

Unlike YouTube, hosting with Amazon S3 is not free, but I did find the prices reasonable. They even have a calculator that you can use to estimate what your monthly billing will be. So if you have a need for video hosting, visit Amazon S3 to see if their service is right for you.

If you are in need of a good web developer, please visite http://www.intriguingminds.com. Intriguing Minds is the name of my company and the site displays some of the work that I have done. Also, if you are interested in web development/design, visit my technical blog, http://grasshopperpebbles.com.

Want to Sell More on the Net? Change the Process to Change the Results!

Want to sell more on the Net? Write better. The power is in your words!

Unfortunately, at least 98% of small business sites start “at the end”… the sale.

Great Netwriting is actually far more than writing great sales copy.

Before you write to sell, take an order and ship a product…

You need traffic. PREsold traffic.

And sales copy does not do that.

That is why effective Netwriting is really a two-step process. This requires two different kinds of writing…

1. Write to PREsell.
2. Then, and only then, write to SELL.

Now for the good news… you can do this. How? By taking The Netwriting Masters Course. It is the only book about Netwriting that covers both PREselling and Selling (every other book on Netwriting focuses only on writing to sell — this itself is a reflection of that “starting-at-the-end” philosophy).

And now for the best news of all…The Netwriting Masters Course is free!

Effective Netwriting (i.e., the kind that generates income) is indeed something that anyone can accomplish. There is nothing magical or complicated about it. And you don’t need an English degree or be a literary genius to do it. But you do need to make the critical offline-to-online business mindshift from “location, location, location” to…

“Information, information, information.”

Surfers on the Net are not looking for you or your business. People search for information and solutions. So give them what they want. Well before you make your first sale, provide the information (i.e., high value content) that people are searching for, in a way that the Search Engines like. Create content that overdelivers what your visitors seek.

Most small businesses fail on the Net because they prepare to sell and collect money, before they have provided what their visitors are searching for (information). These small business owners build a Web site to sell and somehow figure that traffic will just show up and be willing to buy or hire immediately.

Wrong thinking… wrong process… no results! It’s like pushing a string. You have to pull instead… pull targeted visitors into your site.

Let’s summarize these four simple steps…

1. Create the information that your prospective customers want.
2. Attract targeted traffic at the Search Engines
3. PREsell your visitors — build confidence (people buy from those they trust).
4. Convert traffic to dollars — sell (whatever that may be… hard goods, e-goods, services, even clicks on Google ads).

As you can see, the first three steps involve a completely different kind of Netwriting. Write to deliver what humans want… information. And write for two audiences, the Search Engine spiders and the humans. That’s what effective PREselling is all about!

To date, all the attention about writing-for-the-Net focuses on only one of the four key steps, the last one. Yes, that last one is an important one (it can literally triple sales… or destroy all your good efforts if you write terrible sales copy).

But sales copy only gets a chance to shine after your PREselling content gets the first three steps “right/write.”

Join the “Top 2%” on the Net. PREsell with information-packed content, then sell with benefit-focused sales copy, smoothly converting your visitors into customers. This “1-2″ power strategy is the core to building traffic and earning income on the Net.

Right thinking… right process… profitable results!

You can do the same.

Click here to download the free Netwriting Masters Course.

Note: The above downloading link does not work. If you VIEW SOURCE, you’ll see that this is just a sample URL for you to replace with your own.

You are about to download a pdf file (”NetwritingMasters.pdf”). Save it to your desktop. After you have downloaded, double-click it to open.

The goal of The Netwriting Masters Course is to help you write better so that ulitmately you can sell more. It shows you how to use the right words with the right process… how to pull targeted visitors into your site, PREsell them… then, and only then, sell.

Change the process to change the results and start building your traffic and income today.

Click here to download the free Netwriting Masters Course.

As you may know, without absolutely kick-butt copy, it won’t matter how much traffic you get, how high you are in search engines, or any of that other stuff. Maybe you’ve written a couple sales letters, maybe you’re read books on copywriting, heck… you can probably even recognize good copy when you see it. But your copywriting still isn’t that good and your website is not making the kind of money you want to make.

Don’t blame yourself. You see, what you’re probably missing the thinking process that goes on while the copy is written, and why the copy is written the way it is, and what makes it work. What if you can tap into the “thinking process” of a world-class copywriter?

Do you think your copywriting skills will be catapulted to entirely new levels?

It’s NOT another course on copywriting. It’s NOT another seminar on writing copy…

It’s your chance to get inside the heads of the world’s greatest copywriters taking a pool of winning sale
letters that combined, produce MILLIONS of dollars and then see how YOU, too, can profit from “swiping” these
untold, hidden, jealously-guarded secrets.

I give this product my absolute highest recommendation. Go here to find out more.