FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION

16 CFR Part 255

Guides Concerning the Use of

Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising

I would like to start by saying that we, as a company, are not playing the “Dreamseller” game. We aim, at all times, to do business ethically and honestly and expect our partners and/or affiliates to represent us in the same spirit.

We do not want relationships with people and companies who do not share our values.

You can join our Affiliate Program at:

http://affiliates.contentbuzz.com/

All we ask is that you make a simple declaration that you will not miss-represent our products …and that if you have any doubts about your promotions you submit any relevant material to us for approval.

At the end of the day we do offer a ‘free trial’ for our products that enable prospective purchasers to try them out and decide for themselves whether they are suitable for their needs.

For your information:

Summary of the guidelines:

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

The Full Monty:

http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf

If you have any questions, please contact us…

Many individuals, and businesses, are becoming aware of the power of marketing their promotional content across many of the Social platforms using well “optimized” videos, podcasts, social bookmarks etc.

The combination of video marketing, content marketing, social media marketing and seo techniques are proving irresistible to Google and the other major search engines.

Google loves the use of profiles and user-generated media content. Why? Because profiles generally have to be created by humans.

Google knows that the best content is found on sites that require a captcha or an email response (Digg – YouTube etc).

Spammers and Blackhatters aren’t welcome on Google’s front page!

You can basically create two types of user names.

Firstly a real one, which may include a reference to your name, or your company name, and the second type which is where you create a persona, or fake account. These are frequently used by affiliate marketers who promote different products in different niches and generally need to create lots more of them.

There are basically 3 options for how you create your user accounts.

The first option is to do it manually.

First you need to decide which sites you want to join. You then need to enter all your profile details; verify the email notification to finish the registration process. Obviously this is extremely time consuming and a very good reason why you should consider account creation software.

The second option is to use an account creation service.

For example we provide an account creation service for clients of Video Wildfire or Content Buzz who haven’t the time to do it themselves or just want to get on with submitting their videos and other content to the social platforms. You can find more details here Account Creation Service

The final option is to use profile Generation Software.

Using account creation software will save you hours of your valuable time that you could put to more productive use.

Take the Free Trial of Content Buzz and see how quick and easy it can be.

But before you can submit your promotional videos, bookmarks etc. you do need to join up to all the required platforms.

Setting up a Campaign (user account) involves entering the following data:

• Your First Name
• Your Last Name
• Social Site User Name
• Social Site Password
• An Email Account
• Your Country
• Your Zipcode
• Your Date of Birth
• Your Gender

For your convenience, we have introduced an Account Creation Service for clients of Video Wildfire and Content Buzz.

Plan 1

Joining all the Sites supported by Video Wildfire.

Approx. 90 Video Sharing Sites, Social Bookmarking sites and Social News sites.

We provide you with the email account (all emails verified), and a file which you simply import into Video Wildfire for $47. Once you have given us your preferred profile details, there is absolutely nothing to do manually.

Plan 2

Joining all the Sites supported by Content Buzz (apart from the Blog Platforms).

Approx. 140 Video Sharing Sites, How-to Video Sites, Photo Sharing Sites, Podcast/Videocast Directories, Webfeed (RSS) Aggregators, Micro-Blog Platforms, Social Bookmarking Sites and Social News Sites.

We provide you with the email account (all emails verified), and a file which you simply import into Content Buzz for $97. Once you have given us your preferred profile details, there is absolutely nothing to do manually.

We generally have a turnaround time within 48 hours.

Our Software, Video Wildfire and Content Buzz, does include an automated User Account Creator, but if you would prefer a tailor-made, preconfigured set of user profiles, take advantage of our Account Creation Service.

To order, contact Shaun and he’ll send you a PayPal invoice. Once we have received payment we will send you a form for you to fill in with your desired User Name and other data:

sales (at) contentbuzz.com – Enter Plan 1 or Plan 2 as the Subject

Now you have the choice. If you would rather spend the time it takes to create profiles on all the Social Platforms that we support on something more productive, use our account generator service.

For a complete Custom Profile set-up service, choose Plan 1 for all the sites supported by Video Wildfire, or Plan 2 for all the sites supported by Content Buzz.

In the first instance send an email to Shaun:

sales (at) contentbuzz.com – Enter Plan 1 or Plan 2 as the Subject

Once you have received your user accounts, you can simply use the software to quickly log in and expand your profiles where allowable.

To make things clear, our service only creates accounts for the sites that either Video Wildfire or Content Buzz support. We do not create accounts for the blog platforms that are included in Content Buzz, as you need to do that yourself using your most highly targeted keywords.

If you need several preconfigured profiles, contact Shaun with your requirements and he’ll be pleased to send you a quote.

sales (at) contentbuzz.com

Tips on choosing a “User Name” and “Password”.

• Abbreviate your name or your business name.
• Preferably make them between 8 and 10 characters
• Make the User Name Unique, or we’ll make it unique, by adding numbers i.e. contbuzz98.
• If a site requires it to be shortened, we’ll do it.
• Make the Password unique e.g. jkh56ye2 (8 characters).

If you are a client of Video Wildfire or Content Buzz, and want to take advantage of our Account Creation Service, here is how to order:

Contact Shaun and he’ll send you a PayPal invoice. Once we have received payment, we will send you a form for you to fill in with your desired User Name and other data:

sales (at) contentbuzz.com – Enter Plan 1 or Plan 2 as the Subject

Download Videocast

Show Notes:

http://www.contentideasfactory.com – free download

Internet Marketers are constantly looking for ways to get backlinks to their other web properties to enhance their search engine optimization efforts.

One simple, quick, but little known technique, is by using what are called “webfeed aggregators”. This is basically a webpage that displays the RSS feeds from whatever source you select. You can add feeds from your blog, social bookmark sites, some video sharing sites etc. Every time you add a new post, bookmark or video, your “aggregator” page is automatically updated along with another valuable backlink.

By adding RSS feeds to Blogger, or any other free platform, you can enhance this strategy for even more backlinks, in effect creating your own personalized webfeed aggregator.

Potential Uses:

I think the best way to use this technique is to create backlinks to your “secondary” web properties. By this, I mean the web pages that you have set up to enable prospects to “get to know you”, before actually exposing them to your sales messages, the so called “warming up” tactic.

Think in terms of a Squidoo lens, a Hubpage or maybe your YouTube channel or Facebook page.

A final take on this strategy is to make use of a service called yahoo pipes. This enables you to combine 3/4/5 feeds into a brand new individual feed.

Step by step procedure:

Prepare the feed you want to use. This is an example of a Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/42590060.rss.

Once you’ve logged into your Blogger.com account, go to the Dashboard and select “Layout” for the appropriate blog.

1. Click the ADD A GADGET link.
2. In the new window click FEED.
3. In the Configure Feed window add the required feed and SAVE.

Your feed will now show on the right hand side of the blog.

You can repeat the process to add more feeds if required.

This method is effective at the time of writing. Blogger may alter the procedure over time, but the end result will be the ability to create your own personalized “webfeed aggregator” at will.

With a little imagination and work, you can create unlimited backlinks to your web properties.

Designed to work within the Twitter API and the limits that they set, it is not a Twitter Spam Tool!

It will help you manage and organize your Twitter account/s, saving a lot of time doing your daily maintenance tasks; finding and adding followers, unfollowing people who are not following you back, reading your VIP Tweets, searching Twitter and more…

Read the story of how our Twitter Intelli-Browser came into being and the steps that the Twitter Police are taking to stamp out Spammers on their site here:  “Twitter Tool and the Twitter Police” . The Twitter Intelli-Browser is only available within Video Wildfire or Content Buzz – The top Video and Social Marketing submission software. 

Download Podcast

Show Notes:
Where you can stimulate your creative thinking apart from the major search engines.
More info at http://www.contentideasfactory.com
http://www.videowildfire.com/lpindex.asp

We developed the tool initially to help us develop our own Twitter accounts.

We worked from the traditional assumption that, for marketing purposes, by gaining a large number of followers, you could rapidly achieve “authority” status in your niche along with other “vanity” type issues.

The tool that we originally developed, enabled us to find and follow as many Twitterers as Twitter allowed, with a few clicks of the mouse. It worked like a dream. We used it cautiously, and were able to add followers at will.

However…

You’re probably aware that Twitter limits you, in theory, to 100 calls to their API per hour, and recently reduced the number of followers that you can add from 2000 to 1000 per day. However, our tests and research show that these figures are somewhat arbitrary. (For a more detailed opinion of the rules, have a look at http://shellicindberg.blogspot.com/ )

Their algorithm is definitely not as refined and developed as say Google’s, understandably. We could not find any rhyme or reason as to what they permitted vis-a-vis “following” and “unfollowing”, over several different accounts.

Different tactics were required below and above the 2000 followers level. However, the basic tactic was to “follow” as many people as Twitter allowed, and then wait and see how many followed you back. If they didn’t after say 48 hours, you simply “removed” them. This enabled you to follow more people…

Also, when you reached the 2000 following/follower mark, you are only allowed to follow 10% more followers than those you’re following.

Up to as recently as this week (end of June 09), these tactics worked well, but it appears the rules have changed. Twitter seems to have launched an attack on what they consider “spam” strategies, and have completely revised their policies.

Using our software, on one particular account, they suddenly blocked us from adding more than 30 followers at a time, then 20 and then nothing…

We waited 24 hours and tried again, but a Red Flag was being waved and it was obvious that “new” rules had come into play.

I did some research, and discovered that I wasn’t the only one having problems. I even found out that Twitter was aggressively trying to “shut down” one particular software developer.

When you think about it, it is understandable and probably inevitable. Imagine the strain on their API with thousands of marketers (spammers) following thousands of people every day! Not only that, but Twitter is all about communication. How can any individual follow the Tweets of thousands of people?

This is their opinion, and who are we to argue with them?

So, in my opinion, the clamp-down has begun, and as marketers we need to reconsider our own strategies, and develop methods that will work within the new boundaries that exist.

I have reproduced Twitter’s spam policy below, and my thoughts on how we need to be marketing on Twitter in the future.

“*Spam: You may not use the Twitter service for the purpose of spamming anyone. What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming are:

• If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
• If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
• If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;
• If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following;
• If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
• If a large number of people are blocking you;
• The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;
• If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts ormultiple duplicate updates on one account
• If youpost multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #
• If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending or popular topic
• If you repost other user’s content without attribution.
• If you have attempted to “sell” followers, particularly through tactics considered aggressive following or follower churn.”

In the light of this, what are Twitter prepared to let you do?

What constitutes their ‘algorithm’ for acceptable user behaviour?

Some possible inclusions:

On the content side of things, they are telling you to mix up your Tweets. They want to see more “personal” updates, in proportion to those including links.

You may well be penalized for posting duplicate Tweets across multiple accounts, as well as on just one account.

They will also frown upon misuse of the hash tag, as well as “trending” or “popular” topics.                                                                                                    

So when Twitter decides what they will allow you to do, all these factors will be taken into account, along with the number and regularity of your Tweets and the number of users that you are following and being followed by.  

You need to avoid the situation where people have a reason to block you, or accuse you of spam.

It does appear that the major anti-spam tactic that they are attempting to curtail is what they call “aggressive follower churn”. This is highlighted in two ways. Firstly, if you repeatedly follow and then unfollow the same user, and secondly, when you remove a large number of people who are NOT following you back, and immediately add a large number of new followers.

Twitter wants you to attract followers by the quality of your content, and in a natural fashion, not by gaining the system.

Here are a few tips to help you promote your business on Twitter:

• Always use a Photo and a background image to your profile
• Get your main targeted keywords in your Bio
• Always thank Re-Tweeters
• Retweet big names in your niche – RT @username
• Re-Tweet good quality posts
• Don’t Tweet to many links and recommendations
• Send your Follow Friday message on Thursday to get maximum effect
• VIp list – very important twitterers
• Keep clear of automation tools
• Avoid people who have lots of followers and with less following if you are getting near your 10% limit, as these people are unlikely to follow you back.

“Meaningful Messages” are the order of the day.

You need to accept that the days of bulk follows/unfollows are by-and-large numbered, and adjust your thinking accordingly.

Ultimately, the main tactic to use in the future is to be extremely careful and selective as to whom you choose to “follow”, because if you want to “unfollow” too many people too quickly, you will be tempting the Twitter Red Flag.

It is now pointless, and a waste of time, to add anybody and everybody to your “following” list, in the hope that they will follow you back.

Ally this with producing good content that converts a high percentage of browsers into followers.

Introducing the Twitter Intelli-Browser:

The Intelli-Browser enables you to do your Twitter Marketing more efficiently.

Main Features of the Intelli-Browser:

• The ability to work with multiple user accounts.
• You can open separate windows for each account.
• A button to bring up the highlighted accounts home page.
• A button to use Twitter’s Advanced search option.
• A button to use Twitter’s People search option.
• The ability to save keywords for re-use.
• All the Browser Navigation tools that you need.

The Business end of the Twitter Intelli-Browser

Section 1 – “Search Results”. Collects the user names on any given Twitter page.

Section 2 – “Followers”. This is the list of people following you.

Section 3 - “Only Followers”. This is the list of people who are following you and you have not yet followed back.

Section 4 – “Following”. This is the list of people who you are following.

Section 5 – “Only Following“. This is the list of the people who you are following, but have not followed you back. You may wish to delete some from this list to enable you to be able to add more “Followers”.

Section 6 – “VIP”. This is a list of your “favourite” Tweeters, so you can quickly keep yourself in touch with their latest updates.

Section 7 – “Pied Pipers”. This is the list of users who have a list of followers who you may well be interested in following yourself.

You can add users to your VIP list or Pied Pipers list from any of the other sections. These two lists are updated instantly.

Notes:

You will see that our figures sometimes don’t marry up with Twitters. This is because our software takes out the duplicates that appear on Twitter.

When changing between accounts, we automatically log you out of the current account, so you will then need to log in to the new account.

You can open multiple windows of the Intelli-Browser. I find it useful to open a different window for each account that I’m working on. Just go to Tools >> Twitter Tools >> Intelli-Browser to open them.

When using the software, appreciate that one call to the Twitter API equates to downloading 100 users. So if you have more than 10000 followers for instance, you may well need to wait until the “next” hour to receive them all!

Conclusion:

I guess the Internet community will always have spammers and scammers. Generally this minority ruins everything for the majority. How much time, money and effort has been expended to combat the email spammers?

Are they on the verge of taking over Twitter or will they be successful in their attempts to keep Twitter clean?

Would a paid business model work? Maybe we could buy 1000 API calls at a time, not for searching but for our Tweets, follows, unfollows…

Would a system that made a CAPTCHA compulsory every 100 API calls work?

Whatever measures Twitter introduces, it is up to us as marketers to support them if we want to use their site to find prospects for our businesses!

For those who may find it useful we have added a transcription of the video…

Del.icio.us

Delicious is an example of a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking.

Some of the Top Social Bookmarking Sites

There are many bookmarking sites. Some of the best known are digg, reddit and stumbleupon.

To promote your business online, you need to get into the routine of bookmarking any new content that you create on as many of them as you can.

Over the last few years, they have become a major and incomparable tool for companies to enhance their Internet presence.

The Benefits of Social Bookmarking

1. Search Engine or Organic Traffic

If you look on a bookmark as a one-way backlink, we know that part of Google’s algorithm is to count the number of backlinks to assess your Page Rank, and will probably help you get higher rankings on the search results page.

One thing that so called “Gurus” fail to tell you, (or don’t know), is that some Social Bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, operate a “nofollow” policy. There is a simple way to get over this to claim your “Google Juice” which I will explain later in this video.

Google and the other search engines send their robots to the Social Bookmarking sites many times a day, subsequently your new pages are likely to be indexed extremely fast.

2. Direct and Indirect Traffic

Many people use sites like digg and delicious as search engines in their own right, as they can find many links to blogs, videos and other content that is classified by user-generated tags, avoiding what Google decides to serve up.

Social Bookmarking sites cannot only be used to send traffic to your blog, but also to other content that you have submitted to other Web 2 platforms. For example YouTube and other video sharing sites, podcast directories, squidoo lenses, hubpages and many more.

Another important benefit to consider is that the visitors that arrive on your landing pages are highly “targeted”, as they find you from tags and keywords that you have selected, and content that you have created.

3. Relationship Building

We’ve established that Social Bookmarking is a great way to “announce” your fresh content and make your content available to a wider audience, but probably the greatest benefit is that bookmarks (along with micro-blogs) can open the door to building relationships with your prospective clients.

Can Your Business Benefit from Social Bookmarking?

Modern marketing methods dictate that it is no longer sufficient to just put your “sales messages” in front of prospects. You need to develop conversations in order to attract prospects.

You need to be able to produce quality, relevant content, that attempts to solve the problems that your target audience may have, and distribute it to as many Web 2 platforms where you can be found.

This can take several forms

Content Factory

Articles or blogs that you can either host yourself, or use free platforms such as Blogger, Squidoo or hubpages

Images that you can share on sites like Flickr

Videos that you can promote on youtube, viddler and many more

Audio Podcasts  that you can submit to lots of directories

Most businesses can benefit from Social Bookmarking strategies.

Social Bookmarking Tips and Strategies

Tagging your Content

Most Social Media sites use a system of tagging to categorize their content.

Think of a tag as a user-generated keyword.

Instead of using a search engine’s algorithm to find information that you are interested in, the contents’ creator decides what keywords their item is about.

This is an example from delicious. Up to 5 tags are acceptable on most sites.

SEO Techniques

By using some simple SEO techniques, you can give your content the best chance of being “found”.

Keyword Research

The single most important task to do is your “keyword research”. It’s not rocket science, but it must be done before you actually create your promotional blog or video.

It’s not within the scope of this presentation; suffice it to say that you need keywords that have lots of searches and not too much competition.

Google’s external keyword tool will give you the first, and Google’s search results will give you the second.

Metadata

The bookmarking sites all follow the same formula to enter your metadata.

To illustrate the metadata that you need to prepare – this is a screenshot from Content Buzz that shows you what is necessary.

You need a punchy, eye-catching title that has your targeted keyword as near the beginning as you can.

You can also include your main targeted keyword or a secondary one in your description. It’s best to keep your description down to under 250 characters to be accepted on all the Bookmarking sites.

You need to prepare the URL that you are promoting. It can be a link to your latest blog, a video on youtub, an image on Flickr, or a podcast on one of the podcast directories.

Finally you need to enter the tags that you have prepared.

That’s all there is to it. You can vary your titles, descriptions etc to further your SEO reach, but the most important factor is to make sure you are promoting “quality” blogs, videos etc for the best results.

Social Bookmarking Profiles

Many of the Social Bookmarking sites enable you to create a profile of yourself or your business.

For example, in Delicious you can label your bookmarks with either your own name or your company’s name.

You can also put in a link to a site that you want to promote. In this case we have used the Content buzz blog site rather than a sales letter.

Turning “nofollow” links into “dofollow” ones.

For this example I have taken the RSS feed from our del.icio.us page, and added it to a feed aggregator, in this case Feedagg, and bingo! All the links have achieved “dofollow” status.

Rss aggregators are another module included in Content buzz.

At the bottom of your delicious page you will find the RSS feed you need for the feed aggregators. You just copy the shortcut to the link.

You simply go to a feed aggregator, in this case Feedagg, and add the feed to your desired account.

These are some “nofollow” links on Delicious:

These are the same links on Feedagg, which are now “dofollow” links, with the added “Google juice”.

This is a simple but very powerful procedure that you can use to develop some really advanced SEO strategies.

Give and You Shall Receive

As we’ve seen, Social Bookmarks can effectively “spread the word” about your Blogs, Videos and Podcasts.

By sharing links to other quality content on other people’s Authority sites, you will gain credence for your own promotional efforts.

In fact, it’s essential to mix your promos up with other peoples’, or your account may be suspended for spamming. What ratio? Well I think 2/3:1 is sufficient, you may have a different view. 10:1? Keep in mind that the object of the exercise is to grab people’s attention, to give you a vote or visit your site, not to be ignored!

Most of all make your bookmarks totally relevant to your niche, and interesting enough to not be considered “timewasting” to your followers.

Digg and StumbleUpon

I would recommend that you work hard on your posts to digg and stumbleupon, probably the most highly trafficked Bookmarking sites. Make sure your posts have great keyword loaded titles, and link to top quality content. Don’t be afraid of being funny or controversial.

A little more thought and effort at the planning and doing stage, will bring long term success to your marketing campaigns.

Benefits of Automating Your Social BookmarkingBy automating most of the creating profiles and submission processes, you can really leverage the time that you need to pursue a productive Social Bookmarking campaign.

I would like to finish by giving you a short demo of how Content buzz can help you use Social Bookmarking strategies to promote your business.

http://www.twitter.com/signup

This video is a demonstration of the Content Buzz Twitter Manager which shows you how to maximize the power of Twitter for your online marketing campaigns.

Twitter has become an important Internet Marketing tool, and has become an integral part of many top marketers strategies.

The idea behind the Twitter manager is to make controlling your Twitter campaigns and “drip-feeding” your Tweets as quick and easy as possible.

The Twitter manager has all the features you need to control your flow of tweets to as many accounts as you want

• You can add multiple Twitter accounts
• You can send a Tweet to just one account or several or all of them
• You can add an unlimited number of Tweets to our scheduler
• You can choose to submit your Tweets every “x” number or minutes or hours
• You can check that the submissions were successful

The Twitter Manager is included in both Video Wildfire and Content Buzz.