PalatnikFactor.com

So, after ALL the buzz and actually, this is a site where the buzz about it keeps increasing, I decided to join Twitter. Many online marketers are on Twitter, well, I think now people actually like it but many have joined it to see how they could "game it" and see how it could work towards our benefit or the benefit of clients.

I see why it could work towards generating traffic and buzz now. People can know what you're doing and can actually see your interactions with others. It seems like a great tool for big companies to keep close interaction with their followers, or even better yet, seems like a VERY powerful tool for bloggers.

Barak Obama has a Twitter account, what a smart move.

Hit me up on Twitter HERE or leave me a comment with your twitter address. If I can figure something cool on it (game it =) somehow) I'll let you know.

Friday morning, I posted a podcast titled, “Video Opportunity for Publishers & Advertisers.” Soon after, I was browsing the web just checking out some stuff and stumbled upon Swicki. Video is in and if you can monetize it, you should! In the podcast I talked about Adsense video units, which is basically an embedded YouTube video in your site or blog with an ad on top and at the bottom which I think can give you good CTRs.

So, Swicki is pretty cool. You can check it out on my blog at the left (it usually shows mini video clips but now it is showing a tag cloud.) Here is why I think this could work to monetize your visitors from video. It’s something new so users will be curious to click through. It’s a video widget which you set-up keyword tags and will show related videos (pretty cool videos you may even find interesting.) It scours Google video for related videos and takes the visitor to a site with all the videos in one place.

So how do you monetize this? While setting up your Swicki page, you can customize the ads section choosing what platform of ads to show (adsense, etc) and allows you to enter your code.

As a search marketer, I never knew the important of the whole back end set up of things. That is until the first time I had a story make the front page on DIGG and BAM…server went down, it was truly a mess. This isn't a technical post but more so a warning and a good deal I found.

If you're like me and just worried about the marketing side of things, start thinking about back end issues, especially if you're running affiliate marketing campaigns and they start piling up. I had everything hosted with GoDaddy on a server with MANY domain names…it may be cheap, but you get what you pay for, but pretty good to start to be honest.

A few months back I remember listening to Shoemoney's radio show and he had someone from Lunarpages on. I came across the Lunarpages Coupons blog and for any webmaster or someone running a good amount of campaigns, it really has great offers (not only cause this is a review.)

Lunarpages is very reputable and that's something you must really look for in whoever is hosting your sites. The most important factors to me as of now for a web hosting company is recovery time (if you loose files), price, and credibility.

Some of the coupons currently up are:

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Lunarpages coupon for VPS Hosting - Save $35:
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Lunarpages coupon for Dedicated Servers - Save $50:
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(Note: I only do paid reviews when I really think it will help readers)

Want the real facts on Facebook apps and advertising? What are some of the major App players doing? Check out ADONOMICS.

If you’re a software developer up-to-date on online trends and so fourth, then you’ve thought about developing a Facebook application. If you’re an online marketer, you know the power of Facebook and what the applications mean in terms of opportunity to capitalize on one of the fastest growing website in the world right now.

The New York Times reports all about the craze with Facebook and what some of the big players in the Application field in the market have done to hit it big with Facebook users.

Here are what I think are the most important quotes:

“Some developers report earning tens of thousands of dollars in advertising with the applications they have created”

“Nevertheless, Silicon Valley venture capitalists are creating funds devoted entirely to investing in Facebook tools. Internet entrepreneurs are shifting their businesses to focus on the social networking site. Some of the most popular applications are being sold, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars — but only when buyers’ and sellers’ ideas about the potential of Facebook are similar.”

“chief executive of RockYou, based in San Mateo, Calif., said the price would be high for anyone who wanted to buy his 20-person company’s most popular Facebook widget, Super Wall. “If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I’d say, ‘Forget it,’” said Mr. Tokuda, 41.”

“Mark E. Zuckerberg, announced a new investment fund, the FB Fund, to give grants of up to $250,000 to developers creating new tools for the site.”

“The iLike tool, which lets users post clips of their favorite songs, has since been added to the pages of 8.6 million of the service’s 43 million users, and it gets twice as much traffic as iLike’s year-old Web site.”

If you're a Facebook Apps developer…Contact me…I have a million dollar Idea!!! Would love to speak with you.

I love when Microsoft makes new acquisitions…just goes to show they are still very much alive in the game and struggle to always maintain and grow their market share. I spoke to an AdCenter rep last week comparing Google's Quality Score to MSN's Live Search and we started talking about Market Share as well. I belive he told me Live Search has seen about a 900% search increase in the past few months and reiterated how new LIVE was to the advertising game in terms of their PPC platform, etc.

Why is this important? I think this acquisition is to ramp up the search with shopping search, a great vertical angle to the engine. Google had its chance with Froogle, which i actually sold about 3 item and really liked it…it was a simple platform but I guess just didn't go well with users.

Jellyfish really looks like a plain old shopping website but I have heard of it before. What's different about this site than other comparison shopping engines? "You use Jellyfish.com just like you would any other shopping search engine to find the right product at the best price. But when you actually buy something from a store in our engine, we share at least half of what we earn by connecting you to that store." WOW…great business model..especially to consumers…buy something and get paid for it…just giving you a nice big coupon. It's said the revenue share is about 20-40%, but I'd have to dig deeper on that stat.

The incentive is there for the buyer…let's see what MSN can do to really make this platform a part of their search and how well they can integrate it.

WHAT'S YOUR TAKE?

Joel Comm, one of internet’s most popular entrepreneurs within the industry has launched a reality show online, The Next Internet Millionaire. I had the chance to see Joel speak at the Affiliate Summit here in Miami this summer.

Joel has done some impressive things online such as start ClassicGames.com which was acquired by Yahoo! in 97’ and now is Yahoo! Games. Also, Joel wrote a NY Time Best-Seller book, The Adsense Code.

This is pretty exciting as it’s at least the first time a show online launches that I’ll be watching every time there is a new episode. There are 12 contestants competing for a grand prize of 25k cash.

The first episode is already out and I enjoyed it. The most interesting I found in the episode that I think we can ALL apply is SimpleOlogy, the simple science of getting what you want. The example put fourth was to make two points, map out your day, and make a point from start to finish. For every time you do something to meet your end goal in your day, you keep making that line straight. Every time you deviate from that point, you make the line skewed. The shortest way between two points is a straight line.

Thought of the day: In our complicated lives, we forget the simple things can make the biggest difference.

Watch the first episode HERE.