If you read either Shoemoney.com or JohnChow.com, you’re probably aware of the little brewhaha they have with Invesp.com. If you’re not up to speed, the quick and dirty story is invesp.com started an informal survey last year of the Top Online Marketers of 2008. They give you a list of nominees and you vote for your favorite. They’re running it again this year for 2009.

Of course it’s just a great link bait idea and really serves no purpose other than getting traffic out to their site. I don’t think the winner gets anything except some bragging rights (emphasis on “some” since this thing holds no real value).

Well, Shoemoney and John Chow (who are both on the list of nominees, btw) decided to vote up a guy who goes by the name ZK and get their blog readers behind it. ZK regularly comments on their blogs and sounds like a decent guy. Without their backing, he likely had zero chance of beating out the other big guys in the Internet Marketer space. They each created a post on their blogs saying “let’s vote this guy up and make him win”. Harmless enough…right?

The result? ZK CRUSHED it. He was winning by an absolute landslide. Until Invesp.com decided to intervene. Now whatever their reasoning or motivation, it doesn’t really matter. They really can’t come out looking good from this situation and it further drives down what little credibility their “survey” had in the first place.

Which leads me to some points/observations:

1. Rule #1 for EVERYTHING you do: Be honest.

I’m not saying Invesp.com is intentionally being deceptive, but their actions don’t look good. Just let the guy win and enjoy all the traffic you’re getting from 2 heavy hitters having a little fun with your survey. I’m sure they’re pissed off because they feel the results are falsely skewed. Whatever. It’s a two-bit survey that doesn’t mean anything…who’s whole purpose is to get you some free traffic and inbound links. Is that really worth your integrity being compromised? No way.

Personally, I think integrity and honesty are two traits the Internet Marketing space could use a little more of. There are lots of shady people out there who want to make a quick buck. Don’t be one of them. Don’t even flirt with the line by being partnered with someone on something that is shady. In fact, don’t do anything that even looks shady. You get the point.

2. Don’t piss off the big guys.

Sure Shoemoney and John Chow are not the end-all be-all in blogging or Internet Marketing, but do you seriously want those guys and their readership who tend to be VERY loyal to them and what they have to say upset with you or think you’re jacking with them? Why not play nice and get them on your side. You’ll be a lot better off in the long run.

That said, nothing is worth compromising on #1. Even if that means pissing off the big guys.

3. Remember the “little people” and help them out whenever you can.

The real winner, either way here, is ZK. That guy just got some serious exposure that I hope helps him tremendously. I love that Chow and Shoe both got behind him.

As you grow in your experience, knowledge, success, etc., every step along the way there will be people newer, smaller, less experienced, etc. than you. Look for opportunities to help them out whenever you can. Remember we all had to start somewhere and just because you’ve made a 4, 5, 6 figure check in a month from your efforts, doesn’t make you better than anyone else.

Pay It Forward (I loved the premise of that movie).

I read a lot of sites, blogs and newsletters. Some are consistently pretty good, others marginal, and others are almost always a complete waste. When I come across something I find surprisingly valuable, I like to share it with others I know are interested in the same thing.

We picked up a new advertiser last month, LinkWheel.net. I also did a paid review of their service here: LinkWheel.net Review. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you do so and check out the LinkWheel.net service for yourself. It’s very cost effective to try.

As part of picking up LinkWheel.net as an advertiser, I subscribed to their newsletter and have been reading what Michael has been sending. I have to say, I am consistently impressed with the content that has been showing up in my inbox over the last couple of weeks. He’s not promising rags to riches in 3 easy steps or millions made overnight, but he has solid ideas that get you thinking. Many of them you can pick up and run with using the tools and knowledge you already have. I love stuff like that!

Here’s a quick sampling from a 3 newsletter series he did titled “101 Ways to Make Money”:

• # 2 – Write and Get Paid For It: If you’re an e-mail and Facebook junkie I’m sure you could find tune your writing skills. Sites such as Associated Content, Pay Per Post & Helium will pay you based on “impressions” your articles receives. This is called PFP (pay for performance).
• # 16 – Come Up With Cool Domain Names: Sites like Picky Domains allow you to suggest names to them…and if it’s registered you get 50% of the fee paid to you via Pay Pal. Pretty cool gig, I think.
• # 37 – Get Free Stuff and Auction It: Believe it or not Craigs List has a free section. In most metropolitan areas people just leave stuff beside the curb. Grab it and start an eBay auction. There are other auction sites out there too…check out UBid.
• # 55 – Sell Your Unused CPU Cycles: Want to help create the worlds first super computer…and make money doing it? Sell your unused CPU shares on….CPU Shares.
• # 73 – Rebuild Expired Domains: What should you do with an expired domain name that has a couple years behind it? Rebuild. Instead of placing ads and hoping visitors come…go out and make it work for you.

Those are just a few from the list. Those are not the only emails I’ve found helpful from Michael though. He’s also had others like $100/Day Blueprint – Content Writing and 6 Ways To Make Money With Yahoo Answers. Again, this not get rich quick stuff, but great content to get your creative juices flowing. I’ve already found a couple of ideas I’m going to try in some niches I’ve wanted to get in to.

Head over to LinkWheel.net now and sign up for the newsletter. It’s free and you’ll find some valuable content hitting your inbox on a regular basis. The sign up form will pop up as soon as you hit the LinkWheel.net page: LinkWheel.net.

DISCLAIMER: I wasn’t paid in any way to write this review. It’s just a resource I found valuable and thought might provide some value to you as well.

It’s been almost exactly 2 months since I had my little run-in with Toktumi tech support, cancelled my service, then heard immediately from the CEO with an apology and an offer to give things another try. You can read my original post and the excellent response from the Toktumi CEO here: My Experiences With Toktumi & UPDATE: My Experiences With Toktumi.

I’ve been using the Toktumi service for one of my business phone numbers for the entire 2 months. Call volume is not super heavy and Toktumi has performed flawlessly. In fact, I have yet to find a major difference between it and my $1500 hardware PBX I bought a few years ago. Actually the one difference I did find is it’s not a HUGE pain in the butt to make changes to the auto attendant and extensions since everything is web based with Toktumi. VERY VERY handy.

I’m so impressed with the service that I’m transferring a second business number to my original account and set up another account today for another business I own. I’ll also be transferring 2 numbers over to Toktumi for that business. I did a quick calculation today and found that I’ll be saving nearly $200 a month in phone service, even after paying for the Toktumi service.

I’ve tried a number of online PBX type services over the last few years and Toktumi is by far the best and most cost effective. Period. Sure there are some free options like Google Voice, but that’s for personal use and just won’t cut it for business use.

If you have a small business, no matter what you’re doing, you have to give Toktumi a try. They have a free trial and you can just snag a local number or even an 800 number to try it out. I can’t imagine you won’t fall in love with the service and the ease of managing the auto attendant, voice mail, etc.

One thing I did beat my head against the wall a bit at the start of my Toktumi trial was getting my calls to transfer to mine and my employees cell phones correctly. I wanted to give you a few tips to help ease some setup pain.

1.  Recording your auto attendant and voice mail greetings

I don’t know about you, but I hate cheesy auto attendant and voice mail greetings. I feel that if you’re going to go to the trouble of having a business line, act like a freakin REAL business. Don’t record your greeting on some dime store crapola phone that sounds scratchy. An easy way to get decent quality without spending all day on it is to just use your iPhone’s recording function. I recorded 7 messages in under 10 minutes just using my iPhone mic and the Recording app bundled with the iPhone. Once recorded, they’ll appear in iTunes automatically (assuming you have that sync option set up). Export them from iTunes in MP3 format (if you don’t know how to do that, it’s simple…Google something like “export from itunes in mp3″ and you’ll find lots of results) and upload them to Toktumi when prompted. Piece of cake and quick!

2.  If you’re always using an auto attendant to answer, don’t make your callers wait

If you’re going to have an auto attendant answer every call, that’s what I do, don’t make callers listen to the phone ring 10 times before it answers. Just have your auto attendant answer on the first ring. You can set this option on the Voicemail and Call Flow screen when logged into your Toktumi account. It’s under Inbound Calls. Not a biggie, but a nice little thing.

3.  Solve your forwarding calls problems

This is the one that took me quite a bit of time to figure out, and it turned out to be something super simple. I wanted an auto attendant to answer, give people options for an extension, then depending on what they chose, that would forward the call to the appropriate person’s cell phone. I didn’t want to use the voicemail feature in Toktumi (although it’s dang handy, like sending you your voice messages by email), I wanted each person’s cell phone voicemail to be the place where messages are left.

The problem I was having was the call would forward, but Toktumi would hang up before the cell phone voicemail would pick up to take the message. I finally found the setting that needed to be changed at the bottom of the Auto Attendant screen in the Toktumi web interface. You need to change Ring time-out for forwarded calls to the max. I have mine set to 8 Rings. Problem solved!

If you want Toktumi to act as your voicemail system, you’ll want to set it to a smaller number so your cell phone voicemail doesn’t have time to kick in before Toktumi sends the caller to it’s own voicemail system.

As I mentioned before I’m a happy Toktumi customer and look forward to a long relationship with them. If you’re wondering, no, they didn’t pay me for this review or offer me anything to try their service. In fact, I signed up originally because I saw a Shoemoney post about them. You DEFINITELY need to give them a try though. You won’t regret it.

Check them out here: Toktumi.com.

I can’t believe it’s already December! Where in the world is time going these days?! It’s time for our monthly income breakdown for the blog. Here’s a breakdown of earnings for November 2009:

Banners – $80

Banner Trade – $65

Adsense – $47.17

LinkXL – $66.00

Kontera – $0.10

Infolinks – $10.28

Total: $268.55

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Here’s the usual monthly reminder…If you want a free link to your site on a permanent page on blueverse.com, then COMMENT It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s therapeutic.

Thoughts from last month

Last month went by way too quickly. I have to apologize for the sparse posting in November. I’ve been cranking away on a couple of projects and just got down to the end of the day on many days with no time left to post. I promise to do better in December. I already have a number of posts outlined and scheduled for the coming weeks.

As far as income goes, last month was a bit better. Sold a couple of banner ads and did tradeout with one advertiser, so that was decent. Kontera continues to SUCK. I left the earnings on the report so you can see what they’re doing for me.

What I’m working on this month

I mentioned last month that I was looking for something more in blog monetization. I haven’t figured out what it is yet, but I’m not convinced the traditional banner ad is the way to go. They tend to be ineffective for advertisers and tough to sell as blog owners. I feel like we’re on the verge of something new in monetization, but I haven’t figured out the direction yet. I’m interested to hear how any of you are monetizing your blogs or other web properties.

Let’s have some ideas!

There’s something I don’t get about email. Who in the hell is clicking on the spam emails like the Viagra and penis enlargement ones?! For crying out loud, isn’t that industry about dead? How could they possibly be still making money? Maybe instead of targeting our frustration at the spammers sending these emails, we should be pissed off at the morons clicking on that stuff.

That said, aside from the obvious learning points there (DON’T CLICK ON THAT CRAP! being #1), I think there’s some things we can learn from these guys (sorry ladies, I’m pretty sure most of the scumbags who send that crap out are guys). Bear with me and I’ll see if we can get some value out of the annoying junk that fills our inboxes on a daily basis.

1.  They’re persistent. Far far FAR more persistent than most of us who claim to be doing business online. Can you imagine if we were that persistent with our Google Adwords optimization. Or resubmitting our Facebook ads when they’re rejected? Or testing new ads for affiliate offers, posting styles for our blogs, or traffic drivers?

I don’t know about you, but I’m generally lazy at heart. Being persistent takes work and intentional action. Sure it pays off nearly every time, but it’s not something that comes naturally. I could stand to catch a bit more of the persistence bug from these spammers.

2.  They stick with what works. Or so I assume. They’re still sending the things out, so they MUST be making money at it. I suppose it’s one of the ultimate online implementations of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). I haven’t done an exhaustive study of penis enlargement ads from the past 5 years. I avoid the things like a plague due to my general distaste for spam, but I doubt they’ve changed all that much. Put a picture of a busty blond in an email with some clever letter substitutions for penis, sex and male enhancement and blast away. Plain and simple.

How many of your projects end up not going anywhere because they get overly complicated, too feature rich, or just plain too big? What if you would have stuck with just getting enough done to get the project out the door, then circled back and added features under phase 2, 3, 4, etc? I’ll tell you what you’d have…You’d have something completed, live, and generating some results towards your goal instead of yet another incomplete project. Keep It Simple and go with what works.

3.  They are very good at adapting. Sure there are a lot that get caught in the spam filters, but I swear, I still get at least a few that slip through every day. And I have pretty strict filters. That tells me that they’re adapting to the challenges they’re faced with. Just because we consumers have gotten better at filtering their junk mail, doesn’t mean they’ve given up. They just send out more of it in more creative ways. It sucks for us, but you have to kind of admire their ability to adapt.

We need to adapt when we’re faced with challenges online. This could be new technology we need to embrace, new ways to market to our audience, or new ways to accomplish something. You can’t sit back and relax. Be continually looking at what’s next.

Next time you get some annoying email, comment, or piece of junk mail, consider what you can learn from the person sending it. If something wasn’t working for them, they wouldn’t be sending them out.

I’m always into free resources. Seems like no matter what the topic is, someone has written an ebook, blog post or article about it. Oftentimes the only “payment” required is an email address. Hopefully everyone is setting up an email account or two just for this purpose. If not, grab a free Gmail account and stop giving out your everyday email account for offers.

In preparation for Unique Blog Design’s release of their new Squeeze Theme for WordPress, they have set up a squeeze page of their own to gather email addresses of interested people. To entice you to enter your email address, they’re offering a free ebook about squeeze pages called Squeeze Pages 101.

I snagged a copy and gave it a quick read. It’s not earth shattering content that will make you rich overnight, but it’s a great primer on squeeze pages, what they are, how they differ from landing pages, and some advice on conversions. Definitely a solid guide if you’re new to affiliate marketing or are unsure about how a squeeze page could help you make some money online.

At the end of the day, the people doing the least amount of work for the most amount of profit are the people with lists. Once they have subscribers interested in a product, service or niche, they simply email offers and tidbits to them and let the numbers game do it’s thing. My first thought is always, “But I don’t have that big of a list. What’s the point?”, but everyone had to start somewhere. Better to start today, even if you’re unsure of what to do with the list, than be in the same position a year from now with NO list.

On the affiliate marketing note, just a quick reminder that if you purchase the Affiliate Theme from UBD by Sunday, November 22nd, you can pick up the Squeeze Theme for 50% off. See this post for details and the link: The Easiest Way To Build Nice Looking Affiliate Sites.

Grab the Squeeze Pages 101 ebook now.

Just in case you’ve been living in a dark cave, hibernating for the last 3 months, I’ll fill you in on one of the hottest things in the Make Money Online (MMO) space right now. It’s making money from Twitter. Big MMO like John Chow and Shoemoney are making thousands per tweet. Crazy…I know!

Of course most of us peons with smaller Twitter follower counts won’t even come close to that, but what about a $50 spot for a sponsored tweet? Heck, I’d be happy getting a Jackson once a week for sending a tweet out to my followers. And for those concerned about the purity of your Twitter following and how they’ll respond to ads you’re sending them, I think that argument is pretty much dead.

So if you decide you want to monetize your Twitter following, even just a bit, you now have several options. The latest, Ad.ly, just started stealing some of the limelight away from Sponsored Tweets and promises to be a solid service. And by “solid service” I mean one that can actually make us all some money, even if our follower count is low.

Now here’s the thing with these types of hot platforms…you need to jump on it early. It seems like the people who really bank are the ones who get in sooner rather than later, ride the wave, then catch the next hot monetization thing that comes down the pipe. The great thing about Ad.ly is you control your Twitter account and can decide not to accept any future advertisement offers when the time comes that you don’t want to work with them any longer.

Another cool thing about the Ad.ly system is it’s including a self-serve option for advertisers, which will increase the number who participate AND they’re basing your value as a publisher on a cool quality score model. That means that the higher quality accounts with ACTUAL followers who care about what the person they’re following has to say, has the potential to make more than someone with sheer numbers. This is a sweet turn of events for those of us with a smaller number of followers.

All in all, there’s really no reason not to sign up for Ad.ly. Take 5 minutes and sign up now. Who knows, it might put some greenbacks in your pocket! You can sign up here: Ad.ly.