I have been using Craigslist.org for many years to sell and buy many things (I never use Ebay or StubHub aymore). I have been successful in finding new employees for my companies and tenants for my rental properties. Needless to say I am a HUGE fan!

My admiration for CL grew even greater, a few weeks back when I was in a crunch. My family and another family were traveling to the Boston area to spend the weekend at the Life Is Good Festival (great time BTW) and around 9pm the night before we were informed that the third family that was suppose to join us had a family emergency and would not be able to go….immediately I thought how can I get these sold and not lose money before tomorrow at 11am since they were still selling tickets at the event. Fortunately the CL microchip that has been implanted in my brain (years ago) kicked in and said  “Post them on Craigslist”…..so by 11pm that evening sitting in our hotel room on my iPad I had the tickets posted slightly under the sales price.

By 8am the next morning my phone and my wife’s phone began to ring with calls and text messages of people wanting the tickets and even through Sunday people were still wanting to see if we had them available. We ended up selling them to the first person that called us.

I did not make money selling the tickets however, our losses were less by putting a simple free ad on Craigslist.org.

So before you do anything…..try Craigslist first, you might be surprised.

It’s been a while since my last post and I’ve started gathering a ton of information about Twitter. Call this a case study if you will.

I love trying to figure out how people are going to react / respond to certain ideas.So far 1,350+ tweeps have watched the video I made last month to say “Hi, and thanks for following me.” I knew it would work beautifully because the idea was just so simple… I think the results speak for themselves – here’s the video (if you haven’t seen it yet).

Here’s what some of my Tweeps had to say about the video…

Unexpected Effects Of Being A Twitter Rockstar

Another interesting thing happened when I took 15 minutes to create & upload the video to YouTube.  YouTube (owned by Google) is a social video network, you’ve probably already heard of it. Did you know that people can subscribe to your channel? It’s kind of like adding a tweep… except on YouTube!

While my plan was to welcome and engage new followers on Twitter… I ended up with this AWESOME FREE BONUS! I’ve had 30+ new people subscribe to my YouTube channel.

That’s pretty cool, but I’ve also had well over 100+ new friends added to my Facebook / LinkedIn / MySpace / Digg / Pownce & other social networking sites thanks to FriendFeed. If you haven’t done it, go and grab yourself a FriendFeed account and add your other social networking accounts TODAY! Put it on your blog… or maybe right next to your Twitter welcome video?! This is just a suggestion, but after all, social networking sites and social media is there for us to be social, right? It only makes sense to let your twitter friends know where to find you on the other sites.

Why Should You Follow Me?

Twitter is emerging more into the main stream day by day. People online are now wondering who they should follow. Since Twitter is the answer to “What are you doing right now?” I’ve created a little site called Tw33t.me to answer the question “Why should you follow me?”

The idea for Tw33t.me is simple. Much like FriendFeed, Tw33t.me users will be able to add all of their other social networking sites & a Twitter welcome video to their profile page by using their Twitter username and password. The idea is to create a sort of “Online Social Resume.” The site is in Alpha – almost in Beta – and I’ll be updating everyone via Twitter when we “officially” launch.

Pre-Tweet. Auto Tweet. Tweet Later.

I get this question all the time as a result of my Twitter exploits – “How do you auto-reply to new followers?”

Glad you asked. The answer is a handy little site called TweetLater that allows you to pre-post, auto respond, and even auto-follow new tweeps. TweetLater is a little techy, so I decided I’d drop in this short “How To” video so you can set it up to work for your Tweeps! I did this with Gmail because I figure that most readers have a Gmail account. Take a look. Re-watch it if you need to! *If you use Outlook @Wordpresswizard already made a How To video over here 

Tweet Responsibly

Now, I would be delinquent in my duties as a social media evangelist if I didn’t mention being Socially Responsible. It’s great to have thousands of followers and friends on Twitter and other social sites… but we have to remember it’s not just about numbers! These are real people your talking to, they want to be engaged in your conversation… otherwise they wouldn’t have followed you. I know that some people are just going to use the scripts to gain as many followers as they can – so that they can push whatever affiliate program or junk they’re selling on ebay… We can’t stop that. But we can make a difference by using social media for good!

When you see an injustice or something that others should be made aware of… broadcast it! I’m infatuated with “Green Living.” If I see or hear anything that I think would help… you’d better believe it’s going out on my twitter stream! Some folks are going to use my tutorials for spamming purposes. It sucks, I know! I still believe that there’s more genuinely good people out there than there are shysters.

For any of you that have ever read anything like “How to Become a Digg Power User,” etc., you probably already know that in order to get followers or have people Digg / Sphinn / Buzz Up! your topics, they have to be great topics.Guy Kawasaki had written a few weeks back about an AllTop page built to do just that – it’s called GoodTweet. If you’re looking for something to post to your tweeps and you can’t seem to find anything you consider overly exciting, dig through GoodTweet and post it up. This will make your followers think that you have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on. And hence… want to follow you and more importantly retweet ya too!

We will come back and update this post when we find something that will allow the tweeps to use something similar to the GreaseMonkey script from the first article… until then – one at a time and happy tweeting!

Best,

David Brown

Alright… so Tuesday at SMX East was pretty insane.  I don’t want to get into the details now, but make sure you bookmark BigWatah.com, because something drop dead awesome is coming soon.

On the train ride home today I’ll be posting my “real Big Watah post” along with some insane pics and the whole story.  So, make sure you go to BigWatah.com right now and bookmark it.

Here’s a quote straight from Big Watah himself…

“I’m sure that Barack Obama has had a ‘Big Watah’ night at least once in his life”, Brent (Big Watah) Payne.

So this is just a test right now, but we’re working on ways to let you into “our world” by showing you what we’re doing… all day long!

The Cams:

Streaming live video by Ustream

Live TV by Ustream

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Sometimes you go about things in the wrong way. I may have done just that when I decided to do the first (of many to come) SEO experiment on our blog.

If you haven’t yet read the SEO Flattery Experiment post, it’s available here. To summarize, I wanted to test the idea that you could build links by flattering people who you wanted to get links from. I have an interest in photography, subscribe to about 30 photography blogs, and have a photography blog myself… so I thought… Hey… I’ll create a list of my personal favorite photography blogs and then rate them based on some different things and see what happens.

So, I spent about 6 hours analyzing these blogs to determine which ones were the “best of the best” based on 3 pieces of criteria.

There was very little response at first, until I sent emails out to the blog owners. All but two of them responded almost immediately with a courteous “thank you”. One of them linked… which was great! In a conversation I was having with Aaron Wall about SEO and link building, he mentioned that his opinion is that if you can get 10% – 20% of the people, you should consider yourself successful.

I started to see some decent traffic as a result of the post within a day or so. Then, one of the bloggers posted it to a forum and traffic really took off.

They got pissed.

And then I started getting emails. I mentioned in my post on this site, the name of the designer who created 3 of those blogs that were posted. I did this giving them “props” because I really like their work. Well, someone got into a conversation or sent emails or something telling all of the photography blog owners that the post was part of an SEO experiment.

One emailed me saying that he was going to post about it, but now that he knows I was blowing smoke up his ass that he wasn’t going to now.

Another spoke of me as unethical and how dare I do such a horrible thing.

The other, someone who I have actually hired in the past made a comment that they “don’t know how they feel about it”.

Here’s the deal in the end. That post on the ConklinImages blog gets more traffic than any other post now. And in addition, the post is coming up when people search for things like “greatest photography blogs” and other’s that you can see on the original post.

I ask you this my pissed off photography bloggers (whom I still admire)…

Is it a bad thing when someone googles “10 greatest photographers” that your photography site comes up as one of them on my site? I don’t think so.

Getting Hacked

I have never worried about security on my photography blog site in the past because it was just a hobby thing and only had like 50 unique visitors a day… it was really just a personal thing.

So, when I set the thing up forever ago, I 777′d my main blog directory so that wordpress could access my htaccess file. I know!!! Half of you are SCREAMING at me right now. For those of you who don’t understand, this leaves your site WIDE OPEN to hacks.

I had posted screen shots of each of the photography blogs that I rated. I looked at my site the other day and all of the screenshots posted that were of blogs designed by infinet design were completely changed to other images.

Now, they have since been changed back and I have locked up my site a bit better. I don’t know who did it, but I have my assumptions and I say “props to you” for having so much time on your hands.

When I was investigating my log files to see when things were changed… sure enough, my htaccess file was changed on a day that I did not touch it.

Now, I believe that the most comical part of the “hacking” part of this story is the post I wrote a few months ago about securing your site.

peace.

Oh… congrats to Aaron Wall… your comment from the original post was correct.