Sometimes, though, that communication can be something as simple as a “thank you”, but have a major positive impact on someone. Think of all the times you’ve held the door open for a stranger and they just walked right on through without acknowledging your act of kindness. Call me old fashioned, but I sometimes say “You’re welcome” to see if that snaps them out of their world for a few seconds.

Now let’s place that in an online setting, a place where it’s so easy to ignore someone and drop our usual standard of common courtesy. Ah, but you’ve no doubt seen those autoresponders for when you leave a comment on someone’s post and getting an automated email thank you for doing so. Or opted in to someone’s mailing list and received and automated response thanking you, too.

Did you know you can do that with Twitter after someone follows you? Yep, it’s called TweetLater. It’s free and once you set it up, you can add your own personal message that will be sent to the person that just followed you. This could be a thank you, a link to your blog, and maybe — if appropriate — you could link them to your product or service. This last part is something you have to be very careful with as it may turn off some people on the spot.

And that’s not all TweetLater does. You can automatically follow people who follow you, schedule tweets for future delivery, and create keyword alerts. Are you interested in what a certain “sammich man” has to say? If you narrow it down to a keyword, you can be notified when that word is used in one of his tweets.

For those of you who have followed me on Twitter (thank you!). I hope you have see the autoresponder in action. Sure, it’s automated, but it’s still a nice way of letting people know you’ve taken the time to let people know they exist and have done something you appreciate.

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First, I went to Google’s Keyword Tool and searched on “pillow”. I added the CPC column and sorted on it in descending order. I usually look for keywords or keyword phrases that have a respectable search volume, are not too competitive, and have an average CPC (cost per click) that’s worth going for. Of course, the higher the CPC the better, but my threshold usually sits around above a dollar and change.

Here’s a sample of what I found:

So we have “mattress pillow” with an average search volume of 74,000 and CPC of $3.15. Now, that doesn’t mean that you are definitely going to get $3.15 each time someone clicks on a Google Adsense ad, but it’s a good indication.

I then took that keyword phrase and ran it through Market Samurai (one of the prizes I’m giving away in my contest) to see what it had to say about “mattress pillow”. The steps I take in determining a niche evolves constantly, but for now, if Market Samurai tells me that something isn’t worth going for, then I typically just let the keyword go and search for something else.

Well, this time Market Samurai told me in its own way that the phrase “mattress pillow” might actually have potential. See below:

The image above is a portion of a screenshot using the SEO Competition screen. It tells me the backlinks and PR of sites that rank for the keyword phrase I’m researching. For those of you who don’t have Market Samurai, I can tell you that green colored cells are good or “less challenging to dominate”, amber cells are slightly less than good, and red ones are indicators that you have a lot of work ahead of you if you choose to tackle that keyword. In other words, it’s probably not a good idea to spend your time on something that has a red cell.

Well, as you can see, there’s a lot of green cells for this one. So if it were me, I would decide to either write a post that’s rich with the phrase “mattress pillow” and its ilk or I might even register a domain with that as the name or something similar and build it to contain other related keywords. You know, your basic search engine magnet.

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One opportunity that I’ve come across is a company called Motive Interactive. For publishers and advertisers, this service I think shows a lot of what is being sought after: exposure and sales for advertisers, and attractive commissions for bloggers.

After signing up with them, the first thing I noticed was how simple their interface was to use (more on this later). Very straight forward. You’re immediately given a graphic demonstrating your account’s activity as well as given the ability to add your campaigns on the same page for an overall review.

But here’s where the good stuff comes into play. When you’re ready to join a merchant’s program, you just click on the “Offers” link and you’re taken to a page divided into several tabs: All, New, Hot, and Exclusive. This way you can easily narrow your focus on what you’re interested in most. After a while you may find that going through all merchants to be a bit cumbersome or familiar, so that’s when you click on one of the other three tabs to dig a little deeper and not have to sift through a lot of other offers you’ve already seen.

Like most other affiliate programs, Motive Interactive has its share of merchants you can join and be accepted immediately while others require an approval process. Also like others you’ll find programs that have to do with products and services like health and dating services. So lots to choose from. Once you are approved, the program is moved into your “My offers” category for quick access.

You also get your own representative to assist you in your efforts. Luke, my rep, quickly approved my application and my request to join a couple of merchant programs. If you’re using AIM, you’ll be happy to find a link in your account that will connect you with your rep via IM or email. Very handy.

I think they could improve on space you have to work with after logging in. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not a major thing, but I think a few simple tweaks here and there would make better use of the space. I get a slightly crowded feeling when I am having to scroll around when there’s extra space that could be put to better use. This would particularly come in handy when previewing the creatives for programs you’ve already joined. But on the plus side, all that information is fast to load, so while I’m deciding whether or not I want to join a merchant’s program, I can easily see what I have to work with and how it can be put to use.

A couple of other suggestions for improvements (and it may be that I just haven’t read or looked hard enough):

• Make it clearer as to which form is the right one to signup on. As a publisher there are two signup forms: display and performance. Why the split? Why not one form for publishers and one for advertisers?
• Finding a place to generate an affiliate link for Motive Interactive itself must be somewhere, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in my account.

They do have a higher default payment threshold than I’ve seen elsewhere ($100), but you might try asking if they can reduce that for earlier payouts. All in all, I think Motive Interactive is definitely something you should look into. There’s no shortage of programs to promote. Perhaps you have a spot on your blog to advertise something they have or have an email list you could promote to. I’m going to be giving them a shot and I hope you will too.

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You know the ones, they go something like this:

Oh my gosh, I am SO sorry for doing this to you, but that email I sent you yesterday had “this” price instead of “that” price. So I’m going to make it up to you by giving you a discount.

This is a super secret website that I’ve passed out to only a handful of people. It contains my most prized secrets. My friends were telling me I was crazy for doing this.

If my competitors found out about this, they’d surely steal my business, so if I give you a ridiculously low discount now, I might be able to head them off.

Gosh darnit, if that server didn’t act up again. So many people emailed me telling me they couldn’t access the order form, blah blah blah.”

Is it me, or do these sound like carefully crafted scripts, ploys that have been engineered to lull their audience into believing they’re getting a deal? Am I the only one who gets mad over this?

What troubles me is this is how these guys are making their money rather than just coming out with the truth like Josh Spaulding, Mark Mason or Clayton Makepeace.

I want out as an Internet marketer!

Or at least I would if I didn’t want to prove these pretenders wrong so much. But that’s not the real reason. I’m doing it because I want to succeed…the right way.

I’ve heard it takes something like seven times for a person to hear/read a message before they actually buy what’s being sold to them, or something like that. I think I recall that correctly. Geesh, seven times? I guess I’m one of those people who can make a quicker decision about something long before I reach message number seven.

These are things I’ve learned so far about Internet marketing:

• If you have to make up a reason to contact your readers, then don’t. It’s as simple as that.
• If you don’t have trust, you will NEVER make it anywhere, online or off.
• Unless you have something profound to say, some new information to deliver, then resist the urge to email your audience every day hashing out the same old message with a new veneer on it.

What are your thoughts on this?

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