Over the weekend I discovered a new Twitter tool thanks to a status update on Facebook by John Chow. Since checking it out I have uninstalled TweetDeck and deleted my feeds in TwitterFeed. I love Hootsuite because it is web based so I can use different computers and keep my preferences. Here are some other reasons why I like to use it:

1. Allows you to easily manage multiple Twitter profiles.
2. Manage multiple users and set permissions for which Twitter profiles they can post to.
3. Track statistics. When you shorten a URL using their Ow.ly URL shortener it will track how many people clicked the URL and you can view these stats in Hootsuite.
4. Just like Twitterfeed you can automatically feed your RSS to your Twitter stream.
5. Schedule Tweets. No need to use TweetLater anymore since HootSuite allows you to schedule tweets.

These are five of my favorite features of Hootsuite. You can check out all the features of Hootsuite here.

As you can probably tell I am really excited about this tool. Several months ago I thought about creating a web based Twitter app that would allow you to do basically all the things Hootsuite does. Thank goodness I didn’t waste my time as the creators of this great application did a way better job then I ever could.

So stop wasting time, check out HootSuite now.

Recently I decided to hire a PHP developer to work on a software project. I spent some time contacting developers through Sitepoint letting them know what the project was and providing specifics along with my budget. Finally I found one whose work I really liked and he said he could meet my budget so I paid him a 50% deposit.

He was paid on a Thursday and I didn’t hear from him until the following Monday. I was cool with that since it was a holiday weekend and let it slide. Monday I was looking for some more information on him and found a blog with a comment saying he was a known scammer, which obviously made me more concerned. He finally contacted me and said that person was a disgruntled customer who received a full refund. He gave me his phone number, we chatted, and I felt fine with this guy working on my project.

Some time goes by and he shows me the mock up of the site, which I like and tell him to proceed. This is where I learn this guy is terrible at communication. I call him a couple time with no answer. I email him, he responds, I email him back with no response. His excuse? He changed his phone number and my last email went to his SPAM folder. All the other emails were received without a problem but one just happened to go to his SPAM folder. He then says he will give me his new number, this was last week and I am still waiting on it. I am now in the process of trying to get my deposit refunded but am not holding my breath.

So how can you avoid these mistakes?

Ask For References

Ask the person you are thinking about hiring for some references. Contact those references and see what they have to say. Find out about how this person communicated and whether or not they were satisfied overall with the work performed.

Set Milestones

When you hire someone, no matter how good of person they seem, make sure you set milestones. Come to an agreement on when you want and should see the different parts of your project. Don’t just say “let me know when you have this ready” – set solid dates on when it should be ready.

Final Deadlines

In addition to milestones you also want to agree to a date on when a working version of your application will be available, how long you will test it, and more milestones on when the issues you find will be fixed. The bottom line is that you don’t want to have an open ended time frame. No matter how nice and energetic the service provider seems you you must set deadlines.

Use Escrow

You may not want to use an escrow service for really small projects but it will give you piece of mind. Escrow.com has reasonable prices, for transactions up to $5,000 it is 3.25% ($25 minimum). I don’t know about you but $25 is a small price to pay to keep my sanity.

Conclusion

What have we learned? No matter how “cool” the service provider seems make sure you:

1. Ask for references
2. Set milestones and deadlines
3. Use an escrow service

If you have tips on this please feel free to put them in the comments.

Any way, as I mentioned I have a few projects I am working on. One I am particularly excited about. The mock-up is complete and the coding has begun. Hopefully it will be finished by the end of the month so I can share it with everyone.

I am also getting ready to completely redo DynamoPro.com. There is going to be more functionality and a better design. None of this is going to happen until the previously mentioned project is finished.

On a final note, tomorrow is my birthday. Nothing special planned but I am looking forward to dinner with my wife, son and friends. I hope everyone is doing well and hopefully I will have some news for you all soon.

Flippa.com

Fans of the Sitepoint Marketplace were in for quite a change yesterday when Sitepoint switched their website marketplace over to Flippa which bills itself as “The #1 marketplace for buying and selling web sites”.

Judging by the comments left on this thread the reception to the change seems to be more negative than positive. As @sitepoint pointed out to me on Twitter this was also the case back in 2005 when they started charging for the marketplace.

What are the people most upset about? The new fee structure, of course. It is now $19.00 to list something for sale plus a 5% “success” fee if your site sells. Though as @sitepoint also pointed out to me, you can split the fee with the buyer or charge it as a buyer premium.

Other complaints included the site colors, gui, name and that the site seemed to be buggy. To be honest I have no issues with these. I found the site to be pretty easy to use, the colors pretty nice (though I would prefer a clean white background) and haven’t really had any problems with site bugs.

I don’t want to stick up for the Sitepoint owners but some of the complaints have no foundation. Especially the ones complaining about having to register for another site. If they would have taken any time to read over Flippa’s FAQ they would quickly find out they can use the same login information they do on Sitepoint. This type of complaining almost justifies the poor behavior from a Sitepoint co-founder.

This brings me to this thread. Someone on Twitter put it best: how tacky. I really surprised at Marks inability to take criticism. I understand it pissing him off because I am sure he has put in a lot of hard work on the new site but he really should think more before he types. His arrogant undertones seem to imply that Sitepoint is invincible in the website marketplace business. This mindset is very dangerous in the world of business and could hurt Sitepoint and Flippa.

Yesterday when I saw the switch had been made I had intended to go over to Flippa and use it as I have the Sitepoint Marketplace. After seeing the attitude of one of the co-founders I am reconsidering this decision. I will see how the rest of this plays out since I believe and second chances and think that Mark’s emotions may have gotten the best of him when he posted his message.

I have already updated a few of my sites. As of right now I don’t see a lot of difference but can tell 2.8 is a bit faster and also supports timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment.

Bounce rate, which is sometimes confused with exit rate, represents the percentage of visitors who exit your site on the same page the entered it without going to any other pages on your website.  It represents those people who go to your site and then click the back button or type another site into the address bar.

How do you improve the bounce rate of your site? First you need to determine if you need to.  First, if you bounce rate is below 50% you are doing pretty good.  Typically you want to shoot for a bounce rate of under 30%.  Like your golf score the lower you can get it the better.  Another reason you don’t need to worry about your bounce rate is if your site is there for the sole purpose of directing traffic somewhere else, such as a landing page for an affiliate offer.

Now if you have a site such as a blog you want to make sure you are working to improve your bounce rate.  Here are some tips.

1. Take the opportunity in your articles or posts to link to other articles on your site.  If you have a WordPress blog a ‘related posts‘ plugin is a good option.

2. Feature popular articles.  Have a section on  your site, preferably above the fold, that highlights popular articles or content on your site.

3. Create pages that you can reference often such as a glossary of terms or other types of reference pages.

4. Take advantage of the social aspect of the Web and provide a comments section or forum.  Give visitors the option to interact with you and other readers.

5. Have interesting content. Give people a reason to explore your site.

Taking these five things and implementing them on your site should put you on the right path to improving your bounce rate.

If you have questions please leave them in the comments and I will do my best to help answer them.  As always you comments are welcomed (and are DoFollow).  Thanks for reading.

Twinkini Screenshot

I have been using Twinkini on a daily basis for approximately 30 days now and thought I would share my experience with everyone.

Twinkini is a Windows Mobile Twitter application made by Trinket Software.  It is the second Windows Mobile Twitter application I have used.

The Twinkini software is written in C++ and compatable with all Windows Mobile devices.  I have an HTC Touch Pro with Windows Mobile 6.1 and it is very fast.

As for pricing Twinkini offers a value shopper option for $4.95 and a business user option for $9.95 which includes increased support.

The GUI

The Twinkini GUI is uncluttered and easy to navigate.  When typing out a tweet you are taken to an editor that counts the number of characters you are up to.  Also, if you don’t like the default color scheme there are several other themes to choose from.

Another thing I really liked was the easy access to my @replies.  The only thing I couldn’t find was how to access direct messages.  I may have missed it but I looked through all the options and could not find it.  Then again Twitter’s mobile website doesn’t seem to offer this either.

Update: I was informed by the Twikini developer that version 1.1 has support for direct messages.  I installed and have confirmed that it does.  In my opinion that makes this the best Twitter application available for Windows Mobile.

Other Features

Other features include integration with TwitPic, so you can easily share photos and Windows Media Player, which allows you to tweet what you are currently listening to.  In addition to that Twikini also works with several URL shortening services including Bit.ly and  TinyURL.

Another feature I really like (Probably my favorite) is how easy it is to retweet.  All you have to do is select the tweet then tap retweet.  I would never even consider retweeting something using Twitters mobile site but now do all the time since Twikini makes it so easy.

What I Think

I have nothing bad to say about Twinkini.  The only thing I wish it had was support for direct messages.  It is nice to use a program that just works.  I load the application and am tweeting within seconds.  It is much easier then trying to access Twitters mobile website and has a lot more features.  If you are looking for a Twitter app for your Windows Mobile device look no further then Twikini.

I do this for one reason; my desire to earn the trust and respect of my readers far outweights my need to earn a couple of bucks. It is very important for me to be trusted by my readership.  Because of this I will NEVER post an affiliate URL in a product review. It just doesn’t seem right to me.  Plus, I would never purchase a product through an affiliate URL that is in a review.

Reviewing products is something I really enjoy.  Unfortunately I can’t afford to spend the $100’s of dollars to purchase the products I wish to review.  With that said if anyone has a product they would like me to review please contact me. All I ask is that you provide a free copy for me to review and one to give away to a reader (this is negotiable).  This site receives approximately 2000 unique hits a month and that is growing.  Some of the things I can review:

• eBooks
• Software
• Membership Sites

Also, if you don’t have a product but would like to see a particular product get reviewed let me know and I will see what I can do.  Please contact me and we can get the word out about your product to some great readers.

In an effort to make this site more commenter friendly I have decided to install a plugin to remove the nofollow attribute from comments. The WordPress plugin I chose is called NoFollow Free. It is quick and easy to setup and lets you choose which links to remove nofollow from.

Google introduced the nofollow attribute in 2005. They did this so that the link would not influence the linked sites PageRank. It is also said that they believed this would eliminated comment spam. If you run a blog you will know this is not the case. I have never messed with the nofollow attribute up until now and I get quite a bit of spam.

With that said, if you do decide to remove the nofollow attribute from your blog make sure you have the proper setup to eliminate spam. You will definitely want to use Askimet and moderate your comments. Use common sense and monitor the comments and make adjustments accordingly.

The reason I chose to make the switch is because I was tired of punishing good comments just to prevent the bad ones. Askiment does a great job of catching spam so I am not worried about an increase in irrelevant comments.

As always, if you have any questions on this please let me know.

Jeremy Shoemaker of the popular blog shoemoney.com has released a group of free ebooks called ShoeMoney Xtreme Internet Marketing Guides.

Here is what the 12 week course covers chapter by chapter:

Week 1 – The Beginner’s Guide To Internet Marketing
Week 2 – Affiliate Marketing 101: Everything You Need To Know To Start Promoting Products
Week 3 – Market Research: How To Crush Your Competitors And Discover Hot Niches
Week 4 – Pay Per Click: How To Earn Cash With Each Click
Week 5 – SEO: How To Rank Higher And Increase Traffic
Week 6 – Site Creation: How To Build A Site With Zero Programming Knowledge
Week 7 – Content Creation: How To Create Articles That Attract Users And Increase Sales
Week 8 – Marketing: How To Use Social Media To Spread Your Brand
Week 9 – Make That Cash: 10 Ways To Monetize Your Site And Increase Profitability
Week 10 – Testing & Tracking: How To Optimize Your Site & Make Sense Of The Figures
Week 11 – Building Your Team: How To Network With Others And Find Long Term Partners
Week 12 – Launch Day: How To Kick Start Your Business And Manage Your Projects

This looks like a great course, hard to believe that it is actually free.  If you have any interest in doing affiliate marking you need to sign up immediately.

Sign up for the ShoeMoney Xtreme Internet Marketing Guides