UPDATE: OK, worked great. All posts are perfect. If you want the Twitter Updater Go Here

Business-to-Business Marketing

FREE CD on Guerilla Marketing Tactics from Perry Marshall

If you spend more time chasing sales than closing them, you are wasting your advertising dollars. Businesses of all sizes have an advertising budget but many aren’t getting a good Return on Investment (ROI). Why? They are missing the main principles for eliminating cold calling and wasted advertising dollars.

A finely tuned marketing and publicity system delivers a predictable number of quality sales leads to you every day, month in and month out, so your salespeople only spend time with people who already understand what you do and who have proactively asked you to help them solve their problem. — Perry Marshall

Perry Marshall, truely the first Internet Marketing Expert, is offering a FREE CD on his Guerilla Marketing Tactics.

While Twitter has grown exponentially over the past several months, so has the onslaught of spam, objectionable material and rumors. However, I have also found a great many helpful, warm and friendly people. Like in your real life, you enjoy a handful of close friends that you like to hang with – ones you trust and whom trust you.

And once in awhile, among these select few, come a smattering of quality business projects that fit you like a glove. I have been fortunate to not only have established great friendships, but forged business relationships.

If you are thinking Twitter is simply another frenzied forum of opinionated, rude and confrontational people – you are right. But it is also a place to connect with like-minded individuals. And unlike the real world – you can block whom you don’t wish to associate with.

TrueTwit is a Twitter validation service that verifies the humanity of those who follow you. Here’s how it works:

• You sign up for a free account a TrueTwit.com
• Any new followers receive a Direct Message (DM) requesting validatin through a unique link
• The follower then must fillout a CAPTCHA form showing they are human, not a bot
• When they validate, you receive an email that a human has followed you

Any new follower that is already registered with TrueTwit.com is authoirzed immediately. This may cause some problems as the spammer may just sign up and then spam.

The only failing the site is still in BETA and some features are not available, like removing the automatic follow other TrueTwits. If you plan to sign up at TrueTwit.com – don’t choose automatic approval [a checkmark in your signup]. There may be followers you just don’t want to follow back.

UPDATE: just DM’d with Chad Brandt, A consultant and software engineer working for Kettle River Consulting as Developer on TrueTwit.com, and he informed me that the feature for changing the auto follows “will be in the admin area today or tomorrow.” [as of July 18, 2009]. You can follow Chad on Twitter or visit their blog at http://www.truetwit.com/blog/.

If you are looking for a great way to stop Twitter Spammers, then I suggest you check out this free and powerful tool. TrueTwit.com

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UPDATE: I personally stopped using TrueTwit as it seemed to hinder more than help – at least for my account. My account seemed to stall – getting only 3 new followers in a month, so I have decided to manually monitor my account. I believe TruTwit is still a good choice for many, and highly recommend it as a deterrant from spam follows.

After several months using Twitter I have concluded it is a great way to connect with customes and clients, so long as you can filter out the junk mail and tire-kickers. Like e-mail and junk mail, I sift through accounts that interest me. I find that a quick note from time to time from followers makes the start of my day interesting. Yet, like fish, some begin to stink in a few days, inundating me with a barrage of 10 or more tweets in a row.

While I remain patient, I start to feel pressured to read or buy from these twitter salepeople. Anxiety starts to rise. I am annoyed because my tweet from Kevin Spacey has moved off the main view scope.  I decide to pull my favorite twitters in to my RSS reader – ahhh, I can now read them at my liesure.

Now, when I go to Twitter it is to search for new interests, to deal with new and potential clients and unfollow those who clog up my twitter home.

An excellent source of information on PPC Marketing – Adsense, specifically, is The Unofficial Adsense Blog.

After several refreshses of the PPC Classroom 2.0 site, it was there.  I immediately signed up with no problems. I haven’t had time to do a full review, but since there’s a lot of buzz surrounding PPC Classroom 2.0 , I thought it best to get something objective out for you.

What’s In PPC Classroom 2.0

PPC Classroom 2.0 is free as long as you pay shipping and handling of $6.97 for US residents or $9.97 for international deliveries. This payment covers the shipping of a DVD shipped to your door, online access to the materials, and a many bonuses.

If it is free – then they must be making money. It is from all the upsells, which makes sense.

When you enter your shipping and credit card number for PPC Classroom 2.0 the first upsell is for the “Niche Detective Club”, which is free for 30 days and $19.95/month after.

The second upsell is called a negative billing option. When you pay the DVD shipping and handling costs of $6.97/$9.97 you also agree to pay $97/month starting 30 days from the order date. This payment is for full access to the Membership area “PPC Inner Circle”. In other words, the first month’s access to the “PPC Inner Circle” is free, at which point you either need to cancel the membership or pay $97/month to continue. Either way, you only pay the initial small fee for lifetime access to PPC Classroom. If you choose to cancle the PPC Inner Circle membership your access to PPC Classroom is still available.

I am not fan of negative billing or upselling, although I do understand that upselling is necessary to make money. They promise to make cancelling the PPC Inner Circle membership easy…. here’s the cancellation policy:

In this ecomony I don’t classify a $97/month as “nominal” (especially if you add on any of the upsell offers you chose). However, I have worked with Affiliate Classroom, and have a mutual associate who knows the people behind PPC Classroom. From my perspective I’m confident they will respect this policy.

NOTE:  you have to pay with a credit card, or PayPal Debit Card – PayPal is not an option.

As I go through the site, I will post my findings.