Anyone who has anything at all to sell, and expects to sell it in reasonable quantities is well advised to make serious attempts to understand the thought processes of potential customers. Buying decisions are by no means as logical as we are often led to believe.  Indeed that is true of any and all the decisions we make.

With respect to our marketing in general, and our advertising and copywriting in particular, most of us need to get a better grasp of how people actually make choices.  Decision making is only consciously rational to a limited degree.

Jonah Lehrer’s book, How We Decide, explores many of the mysteries of the human mind, not only in connection with buying and selling but across the board of our human experiences. What’s more it’s written for the non-specialist in language that is intelligible to the ordinary intelligent person.

Buy it from Amazon.com or from Amazon.co.uk

There’s a new free Social Networking community that posts your tweets on Sokule, Twitter and other top sites instantly – and what’s more you can EARN from it!

Sokule is rather like Twitter, but with far more functionality. It truly is “So KULE for Business!” SOKULE is like Twitter but MONETIZED.  Sokule’s innovative Affiliate Program provides for 20% to 50% commissions.

Features include:

• Your “squeeks” can be posted on Sokule, Twitter, and (eventually 40) other TOP Social Networking sites INSTANTLY!
• Paid members are NOT limited to short tweets, your squeeks can be up to 500 characters, enough space to really say something important!
• You can include LIVE clickable LINKS on your profile page!
• You can share up to 5 of your photos in your profile!
• Schedule posts to go out at specific future times, even while you’re on vacation.
• Sokule lets you instantly invite all your Twitter followers to join you on SOKULE!
• Sokule has upgrade options, and that means you EARN CASH when your followers upgrade

I joined recently and am impressed. Take a close look at Sokule.

Twitter began as a fun and innovative way to achieve social networking but has quickly become an easy and helpful tool for promoting businesses, both large and small.

If you are already using Twitter for your business, then you will no doubt be looking for ways to improve your Twitter productivity.

But how can you increase productivity on a site that allows you to type only one hundred and forty characters? Here are 5 ways suggested by David Perdew of “My Twitter Toolbox“ to improve your time on the Twitterverse.

1. Sort out your followers. You can find applications that will allow you to separate the people you follow and tweet to into separate groups. This way, you can have a group for your friends, your family, business connections, and more. With these separate groups, you can focus your business related tweets on the right people.

2. Tweet and tweet often. You cannot be very productive with Twitter if you do not dedicate time to it. One way to get many followers is to tweet as often as you possibly can. By doing this, you will have more of a chance of people noticing you and following you.

3. Send useful tweets. Tweeting often does not mean sending the same messages over and over. If potential followers see that you never post anything new, then they may not follow you. While you want to tweet as quickly as possible, make sure you are tweeting something worth reading.

4. Include links, but make them short. There are plenty of applications that will allow you to shorten your links to save a great deal of room. Make sure that you always use a link-shortening tool to make the most of every tweet you send.

5. Know when to step away. You do not need to spend all of your time on Twitter. You do not need to neglect the other parts of your business. Make sure that you devote enough time to the full scope of your business activities.

To see a video introduction of the top 20 Twitter tools, visit “My Twitter Toolbox“.

Happy tweeting,

- David Murray -

Today I learned of the launch of a new ad exchange, and took a close look at it. It is so new that when I checked a few minutes ago it only had less than twenty members. I’m confident that this will change quickly.

The basic format is like a standard text ad exchange of the type popularised by Frank Salinas, and therefore similar to our own, Text.AdMastery. However there some fresh twists. There’s a section which allows surfing of sites very much like a traffic exchange, and another that behaves like a credit-based safelist. This last is similar to the existing solo ads facility but instead of requiring a substantial number of credits to send a solo to the entire membership the safelist allows the sending of smaller numbers.

I suggest you take a look at it by clicking on the banner below.

I’ve been working today to revive some of the AdMastery.biz sites.  Some of them have been sadly neglected during my recent long period of weak health, and as I worked away it dawned on me suddenly that I’d never updated the name of this blog.

This has been done today and the banner above now reads, “The AdMastery Blog“. Several of my other related advertising sites are shortly to be brought consistently under the AdMastery banner. There are other developments planned for the coming months also – including things that according to previous plans should have been launched earlier this year, if only I had not been forced to take time off.

I’m intending to add posts here several times a week and to expand the coverage to assist small-scale internet marketing businesses much more comprehensively than in the past. In summary this blog will now be designed both to support users of the AdMastery.biz advertising services, and also to provide helpful content and references for people developing their knowhow in home-based internet marketing – including email advertising, various type of ad exchange, traffic exchanges and safelists, to mention just a few of the topics to come.

You may notice that traffic exchanges are mentioned there. Because the AdMastery.biz portfolio does not include a click exchange (as traffic exchanges are sometimes called) and at present it is not intended to launch one, I’ve never paid much attention to them here.  However, on recent reconsideration of their potential I’ve returned to using them considerably more myself and will therefore be referring to them periodically.  For example, you’ll find in yesterday’s post a brief note on my initial impressions of HitSilo, the new traffic exchange from Logiscape Technologies.

Also, given that this site is itself a blog, I’ll also include material on blogging and you can look forward to some changes in The AdMastery Blog itself. I’m hoping shortly to include a review of Alex Sysoef’s training programme for bloggers, “Expert Wordpress“, once I’ve been through the materials myself.

Wishing you success,

- David Murray -

After many years of ignoring them I started to use Traffic Exchanges back in early 2007. Having tried many different exchanges (I think about a hundred in all) I concluded that there were a few from which significant income could be generated – from using them to advertise other products and services, and also from recruiting new members to the exchanges themselves.

For the past year or so my mind has been on other things, not least my own web sites, but recently I’ve come back to traffic exchanges and have been surveying some of the more recently launched sites. In a previous post I referred to the new exchange launched by Tony Tezak, but today I’ve been taking a look at the latest offering from Logiscape Technologies, HitSilo.

I am impressed. It has a more complex method of operation than most hit exchanges, but having experimented with it I’m pretty well convinced that HitSilo is going to be a winner, one of the popular exchanges of the future. For greater benefit join now, upgrade and benefit from its remarkable range of advanced features.

If you have used Traffic Exchanges in your promotional work you will probably have faced the following problem.

On some exchanges you’ll have assigned credits to display one of your sites,and then waited for days or even weeks for them to be used.

On others you’ll have looked at the exchange stats after two minutes and found they’ve already gone, in a flash.

Well, I suppose I’d rather have the second problem than the first, but if I’m allocating a lot of hits to a particular promotional campaign I’d like some degree of control over how quickly they’re used up.

For some years several exchanges have allowed their users to specify a maximum number of of hits per day. I can, for example, allocate 700 credits and say they must be used over the next seven days at the rate of 100 per day.

That’s certainly an improvement, but Tony Tezak’s new exchange goes further.  He allows you to specify not only hits per day, but within the day how many per hour – and so to spread them around the clock.

Take a close look at Tezak Traffic Power and see how it might fit into your promotional portfolio.

Wishing you success,

- David Murray -