Tweet Glide Appearance

When you start up Tweet Glide you see a screen made up of five columns.  You may have to scroll to see all five.  These columns can be in any order and can be removed individually (with some restrictions), but are basically:

• Tweets – Similar to the Twitter “Home” page, this shows all the tweets from your friends as well as your own out-going tweets.
• Ads – Shows ads from other Tweet Glide users who have earned credits or paid for them.
• Direct Messages – All messages sent directly to you, instead of tweeted to all the sender’s friends.
• Mentions – Shows any tweets that have mentioned you (your Twitter ID) or thanked you.
• Favorites – Shows the specific tweets you’ve marked as favorites in Twitter.

You can leave Tweet Glide open on your desktop and watch as tweets come in and send them out whenever you want.  You can also reduce it to a system tray icon where it continues working and you can open it anytime.  Of course, you can always close it completely and come back later when it will update itself upon opening.

Tweet Glide Neat Features

One cool feature of Tweet Glide is the ability to tweet more than 140 characters.  Sometimes you just can’t figure out how to say what you need in that small space, so this comes in handy.  What will show is the first 140 characters (or a few less) with a link to the rest of the tweet, housed on Tweet Glide’s servers.  This saves you from having endless run-on tweets, continuing your story from one to the next and possibly getting removed as a friend for sending too much.

Opinion on Tweet Glide

When I first started with Tweet Glide about a month ago I wasn’t sure about it.  For one, it seemed too slow and was possibly slowing down my whole computer in its zeal to retrieve the latest tweets from all my tweeple!  There have been a couple updates to the software since then, and that is no longer a concern.  It also contains settings with which you can control how often Tweet Glide goes out to retrieve Tweets for you.

My second issue was more with their sales page than with the actual product.  They seemingly over-sold the viral advertising part of it in my opinion.  They went on and on about how great this feature was and how the software was free.  They never mentioned how many tweets you had to send to get a decent amount of ads out, so I think that was just a little deceptive on their part.

The real story with the ads is you can buy them, or you can save up credits which will be used as they are earned.  One credit is one ad going out.  One credit is earned by posting three tweets through Tweet Glide.

Now, I’m not one of those people who spends hours tweeting.  I try to get on and send a tweet or two a day, but that’s it.  So in the month I’ve been doing this, I’ve earned around 10 credits.  They give you ten for getting Tweet Glide, so I’ve had 20 ads go out in that time.

Now that’s not a lot, and it’s arguable that putting ads in regular tweets has no limits and will be seen by even more people, as they aren’t limited to Tweet Glide users.  Consider, however, that the Tweet Glide ad will sit on the user’s ad column much, much longer than any ad on the tweet column would.  For example, I currently follow around 2000 people.  The amount of tweets that comes by in a minute is tremendous.  A tweet will stay on my Tweet Glide screen for about 30 seconds before being replaced by a whole lot of newer tweets.  An ad, however, will stay there all day; maybe more!  There’s little chance my ad won’t be read, where there’s an absolutely HUGE chance my tweets won’t be read.  Plus, I’ve definitely seen traffic from my Tweet Glide ads, and at least one sale — not bad for free!

All in all, I like Tweet Glide for its convenience, longer tweets and added advertising component.  It works well, and it’s free!  What more could you ask?

Get your copy of Tweet Glide here.

Article marketing is one of the good ways to get one-way links to your website or blog.  You simply write an article, post it to a popular article directory site with your bio and link at the bottom.  Not only will you get credit for the link back from the article directory, but if your article is good and valuable, other webmasters may use it on their own websites or blogs, giving you more link backs.

Sounds easy.

But to be truly effective in the eyes of the search engines, you really need hundreds of articles/link backs out there in order to increase your ranking even a little bit.  It may not be feasible for you to write that many unique articles and spread them all over the Internet, especially if you run multiple websites.

This is where Jet Submitter comes in.  Jet Submitter is a two-part process.  First you create an article that is “spun” into many articles.  Second these many articles are then posted to hundreds of article directories.

Article Spinning

I’ve used article spinners before with much disappointment.  I’ve found they turn well-written articles into garbage.  You see, they work on the principle of substituting words with similar meanings.  They aren’t intelligent, however, and can’t see when they’ve accidentally turned your words into something meaningless, or even funny.

This can’t happen with Jet Submitter, because you’re the one who chooses all the alternate words and phrases.  Yes, that’s work.  And it takes some time.  But personally, I’d rather take that time and make sure my articles make sense and still have a professional feel to them than put my name to something that’s just plain ridiculous.  Jet Submitter lets you write and re-write your substitution phrases until you finally get it right.  An advanced feature lets you use Excel tables for your alternate wordings.

You choose how many different articles you want your base article spun into.  If you put the necessary work into your original article, finding just the right multiple alternatives to most of the important words and phrases in it, you can spin it into 50 or 75 good articles, all just different enough to bypass the duplication check many article directories make it pass before publishing.  However many you choose, you can always download a zipped file of all of them for careful review before you use them.

It’s not only the main body of the article that can be spun.  The title, the summary and the bio box can also be altered to many versions, just to avoid any duplication issues.

Oh, and one of the best parts – Jet Spinner is free to use!

Article Submission

When you first join Jet Submitter, you go through the process of signing up as a writer in as many of their more than 400 article directories as you can.  You just set up an email account and Jet Submitter does all the applications for you.  You need to check that email and possibly confirm your application.  Jet Submitter keeps track of all directories that have accepted you.

Once you have an article spun the way you want it, you need to set up a submission project.  Here you tell Jet Submitter which of your articles you want to submit, how many directories you want to submit to per day (to keep you from looking like a machine!), and designate some relevant key words.  Then press the button and your submissions begin.  You can come back daily and see the progress of your project.

I Recommend Jet Submitter

I really like the way Jet Submitter works, and I’ve had really good results from its use.  I recommend it highly.  As I said above though, this isn’t easy and quick; it’s just easier and quicker than doing it all manually.  It’s still a substantial amount of work to create the spinnable text.  For a 500-word article, it probably takes me about a half hour to write the original, then 2-3 hours to create all the alternate words and phrases and set them down on paper just right for Jet Submitter to use.  It usually takes me a few tries before all my article iterations make sense.  But for those 3 hours of work, I’ve submitted different articles to 400 article directories.  It would take weeks to do all that manually!  This is a great service.  Sign up here.

There’s nothing worse than a blinking, flashing, darkly-colored webpage covered in advertisements. Most visitors will leave rather than try to sort out the confusion.

Here are ten tips to keep your web pages clean and attractive, while at the same time garnering higher conversion rates:

1. Keep it “scan able.” In other words, have enough titles in larger print, bolding, highlighting and underlining to entice your readers in further. Most visitors will do a quick scan of the page before settling in to read or moving on. Make sure their eyes stop at places of interest.
2. Make sure your navigational links are consistent, simple and obvious so everyone can move easily from page to page. Your navigation system is not a place where you want to get fancy. Simple text links ordered vertically or horizontally work well. So do buttons and filing cabinet-like tabs.
3. Make sure the appearance matches your content, including any ads. For example, if you have an article about the symptoms to watch for when diagnosing cancer, you don’t want a lot of happy colors, blinking ads and loud music. Tone it down and keep it professional. On the other hand, if your site is about kids’ toys, a little more color and movement and silliness would be expected.
4. If this is your sales page, there should be no other advertising on it at all. Nor should you have the normal navigational links your other pages have. You want the only link away from that page to be your order link. Don’t, however, block the usefulness of the browser back button! This will only anger your visitor.
5. Use a common font, like Times New Roman or Arial. Stick to 12 point. Using a more exotic font may look great on your machine, but if your visitor doesn’t have access to that font, it will look totally different on his screen.
6. If you want to use your signature online, get a scanned-in copy to put on the website instead of using a script font. These fonts aren’t available to everyone’s web browsers.
7. Don’t let your background color or image compete or clash with your foreground. A plain white background is usually sufficient and preferable, as it’s easy on the eyes. A dark background with a contrasting colored text is very tiring to read and should always be avoided.
8. Any time you try a new design, be sure you look at it through different web browsers and screen resolutions. An online service can help you with this. Go to Browser Shots to see how your page looks through different browsers.
9. If the primary content of your page is an article or other useful information, make sure it prints well, or in some cases you may want to link to a printable version – free of ads, color and links.
10. There’s a time and place for everything. The place for large paragraphs with no white space is in the legal sections of your site – the places you hope no one reads, but you must have there by law! Long paragraphs will not grab your readers or encourage them to read more. You want to break them into shorter paragraphs being sure to keep use subtitles and white space in between.

Keep your eye on these tips during design, and look it over when you’re done with a critical eye. There are exceptions to these rules, just like every rule. But violating too many of them will surely scare away readers rather than make them click your order button.