BlackySky : Hack the web Since 2007

I read almost everything about twitter and his new plan to fill up those holes. The new twitter plan may kill many twitter app start-ups as soon as now.

The main problem is building a business on top of a platform. The best example is twitpic or bit.ly.

They create a great feature for twitter and twitter noticed it. Twitter decide to have their own short url service and I bet they will have their own photo service too.

There are only three options for those developers:

Innovate fast and become more independent from the platform.

Hope twitter will acquired them

Kill their project and move on to the next thing.

Anytime you build on top of a platform your business is at risk to disappear at anytime.

Now what’s the link with affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a service on top of a service or product just like 3^rd parties for twitter.

For example affiliate marketers were among the first to test out to the limit PPC marketing. Now most services limit what an affiliate can do with PPC.

I can talk about SEO etc. affiliate marketing was looking for the next thing to grab as much traffic as possible.

Anytime someone changes the rules for an affiliate marketer there are only 3 options left for them:

Innovate fast

Hope you did so good that the business owner will hire you as an online marketer

Kill and move on to something else

Of course I believe in innovation.

Innovate fast is the only option:

This is exactly what I will do this year.

I give some example:

Imagine you promote electronic products from a company X. that company X decides that his affiliate programs is not profitable and move on.

Your option: find another good electronic product company to promote.

That’s the weak option. The best option is to create a website that promote the best price from electric products from many companies (affiliate or not) but on top of that you sell guide to use to product 10 times better. Or you can create a better user experience.

Now almost every electronic company will hope to be on your website and become a partner and even help you create better guide.

The whole idea is to create a bigger picture. Always imagine the worst case scenario.

I recently got many e-mails about mobile marketing. I read some post and report about it. They say it is the next big thing. “Here you go have a course to teach you how use it now.”
You know what… you can have your own mobile marketing service for free.I notice it the other day. For some reason no one is talking about it.

The solution is twitter.

Nothing new there, you probably hear about twitter all the time.

There is something special about twitter because you can send message by SMS.

The idea is to create a twitter account only for SMS updates because we don’t want to spam nobody.

Once you create this special account, you are ready to rock and roll.

Your only goal is to make people subscribe by SMS by clicking this icon on twitter.

(They need to put their phone number on twitter if they don’t go on twitter from their mobile phones)

Sounds pretty easy but you need a great reason otherwise no one will trust you.

In my town, the local metro service uses it.

You can subscribe by SMS to receive update when the metro has a problem.

This is a great example.

At my university they use it too.

You get update when there is a major problem in the university only. ( security problems)

To make sure everyone sign up they did a contest and someone randomly might win a prize.

As you can see there is plenty example out there. The service is there and it’s free.

As a restaurant you can use it to give away very sweet and nice coupons ….

Go out there and use it but please do not abuse it and spam people on their SMS