Android Social Media

I spent the last week or so investigating the number of different Merchant Services Apps available for download in the Android market. In all the private consulting I do its quite handy to have the ability to take credit card charges at all let alone on my phone while I’m on the go.

Essentially, and for the sake of argument, I found that there are two types of apps in this category. The first type are the apps that are designed to integrate your existing merchant account with Paypal or the like. The second type are the apps designed to provide you with a fully functioning and new merchant account. The problem I have with the first type are the simple expense of the affair. You have the cost of your existing merchant account which probably runs from $15 to $30 per month (paypal is $30) and then the additional expense of either the app download or the monthly fee to the app provider who marries your phone to your merchant account.

In order to decrease overall expenses and keep the system fairly simple I was on the look out for an app/account that would be minimum in expense and from which the app developer could provide me with a merchant account. After doing some basic research I chose Paynet.

Paynet’s app is very simple to use and free to download. I called them directly on the phone to start the application process and after 24 hours I was approved. They sent me a merchant number and after a few setup items online I got a mobile pin number that I used to activate the app. This entire process didn’t take anymore than an hour and its super easy to use. I can use the app or the online virtual terminal to process a charge and the system auto-generates and emails a receipt to the customer if you want. It also keeps a log of all the charges so you can view your past history.

The first charge I made was on a Friday and the funds were in my checking account by Tuesday of the following week. The best part: the monthly fee for EVERYTHING is $10!!!!!!!! I canceled my Paypal Virtual terminal on the spot and am now using this exclusively!

Thank you PaynetSystems for making this a great App and a great and affordable way to accept credit cards online or from my phone!

If you are going to look into this I can also recommend one of the sales reps. I delt with Bill Johansen and he was really great. He has given me permission to list his direct number and email here so that our readers can reach him directly. His number is 1-800-809-1989 Ext 109 and his email is billj@paynetsystems.com. When he asks how you how you found them just mention our website or “jpsquared.” That way Bill will know you saw this article when you call or email. If you would prefer just go to the site and start the application process click here.

Jacob S Paulsen
www.jacobspaulsen.com

If you are in the process of researching merchant accounts I am providing here some additional information you may want to consider.

If you know anything about merchant accounts then you know there are thousands of different providers online that are eager to take your money and set you and your business up to take credit cards. What are some of the different factors that you should consider when looking at Merchant Account providers:

• Account Setup Fees
• Per Transaction Fees (fixed rate fee per charge)
• Processing Fees (% of each charge)
• Monthly account fees (anywhere from $10 to $40 per month)
• Escrow (Often they require a certain amount of money be held in a fund in case your customers request refunds)
• Processing Speed (How long until the funds are in the bank)

If you go with the PaynetSystems.com solution I described below you will find the absolute best of all of these options!

A good number of ASM (AndroidSocialMedia) readers have their own websites/blogs and this post is to discuss the importance and means of making your site more mobile friendly.

The most recent studies suggest that 1.6% of all USA website usage is done from a mobile phone. WOW!!! 1.6% is a huge number considering the competition of endless numbers of corporate America employees who spend all day on the internet from their desktop computers. 76% of adults say they have done a Google search from a mobile phone at least once! If you have a website or blog it has become imperative that you make your site mobile friendly.

If you are utilizing Wordpress (the most popular website/blog hosting service online) then this process can be quite painless. The most popular plugins available are WPTouch iPhone Theme and Wordpress Mobile Pack. As you can imagine I tend to prefer the Wordpress Mobile Pack plugin since I’m a little anti anything that looks like an iPhone but there you have it. Both plugins allow a great deal of customization including widgets, RSS, pages, and theme options.

If you are using something other than Wordpress I suggest contacting you web developer and emphasizing the importance of getting your site up to mobile standards!

Jacob S Paulsen

Mobile Browser Emulators:

Opera Mini: http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/

Android Broweser: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator.html

We are please to announce the official launching of our first ever “Android Social Media User Manual.” This helpful E-book will help Android users who wish to create and maintain an active online presence in social media and generate an online revenue without wasting endless hours in front of a computer screen.
This manual is about FREEDOM. The freedom to leave your office and continue to be just as productive and effective from your Android phone. This Ebook is 100% FREE OF CHARGE!!! Here is a preview to what’s inside:

• Overview of Internet Marketing & Social Media Principles
• Overview of Mobile Internet and Utilizing the Android device
• Specific App reviews and instructions to help you create & syndicate content, track results, and create relationships
• App Indexes to all the standard Social Media websites including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Freindfeed, Plurk, Blogger, Wordpress, and More.
• Productivity Apps that will help you get more done in less time including an overview of how best to utilize Android Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, etc.

Fill out this simple form to get your E-Book emailed to you right away!

Don’t forget to Re-Tweet & Digg this post!

With so many services online to shorten your URLs many people are wondering how they should move forward. Short URLs are a huge convenience when working in limited space such as in twitter where you are limited to 140 characters or less.  In addition to shortening your URLs there are a few services that will also track your URL syndication by letting you know how many clicks you receive. This makes URL shortening a 2-in-1 tool for use in the social media and internet marketing arenas.

As an Android user there is one service that stands out. Bit.ly is the most widely used service among twitter users and now allows 3rd party applications to connect and shorten/track urls on your behalf. Bit.ly provides tools including browser plugins and shortcuts to make easier the use of their service. In addition to tracking your own URLs you can search twitter by keywords or by profile to see the results of other user’s Bit.ly links.

After setting up your account with Bit.ly you will be able to access your unique user API. If you have the Twidroid PRO app on your Android you can enter your bit.ly username and api to shorten URLs in the Twidroid app via your own bit.ly account. This will allow you to view tracking results later and get quick access to shortened URLs.

There is also another great app in the market for URL shortening called URL Juicer (@urljuicer). URL Juicer will shorten URLs using a variety of services including bit.ly. Enter your username and api in the credentials menu to get started.

Video marketing has become a big trend in Internet Marketing because of the ways videos are listed on the search engines. If you can syndicate your video to enough of the biggest video based social websites such as Youtube you can get quick results. Videos are also a big part of social media because of their ability to form relationships and share a more “real you” with others.

The key is in the syndication. How do you create a high quality video with the correct title and description and then get it syndicated to as many websites as possible? Traditionally people without amazingly cool cell phones have used services such as TrafficGeyser.com and TubeMogul.com which both offer video syndication to a vast network of video websites such as Youtube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv, MetaCafe, etc. Now that we are going all mobile (THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS WEBSITE) we need to understand how this can be best accomplished from the Android device.

With the update to the 1.5 firmware on the Android platform earlier this year all Android devices now come standard with a camcorder app. By default you can share a video directly to Youtube.com. When you upload to Youtube you can select a title, description and tags but can only upload videos up to 3MB.

www.pixelpipe.com

I prefer the PixelPipe Pro app which will upload all videos regardless of size and also allows a title, description, and tags. Furthermore Pixelpipe will automatically upload your video to Youtube, Facebook Video, DailyMotion, and others. It will also update your status (tweet) the title for you along with link to the video on twitter, facebook, myspace, friendfeed, bebo, hi5, plaxo, and up to 40 other social networking sites. THAT IS POWERFUL SYNDICATION coming from a cell phone.

When syndicating a video consider the following helpful hints:

Taking video from a cell phone is naturally not as high of quality as other video recorders. Hold the phone extra steady while recording and consider your lighting conditions. Poorly lighted places will make for very poor videos.

Choosing a title for your videos is an important process. In addition to letting people know the general content of your video you also need to make a title compelling enough to make it worth watching. If your title shows up on twitter with a link will people click it? Questions often make powerful titles and including the word “video” will let people who see the tweet or status update know that the link will lead them to a video.

The description is your best place to put keywords in paragraph form while describing the video content. Including a url to your main site or blog will also help in SEO efforts.

The tags are keywords. Be creative. You want to consider keywords that people may use to search for you and your content without using the overly used cliches of your niche.

Jacob S. Paulsen
www.jacobspaulsen.com

We are looking for people who would like the opportunity to contribute content to our blog. Android Social Media represents the very best of the Android Platform and how it can be utilized to play an active part in Social Networking and Internet Marketing. Would be authors are asked to fill out the form below.

Content submitted by other authors will be manually approved by the site admins but authors will have the chance to post their signature and website in all of their content.

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Our friends who developed DroidAnalytics have done it again with Droidsense.

Adsense – Google adsense is a widely used advertising revenue system for internet marketers and web developers. Anyone can sign up for a free adsense account which will give the user html code to embed into their website. This code will display ads relevant to the content on the page and when ads are clcicked the user is compensated. Its the way a lot of online organizations pay the bills and fund their projects.

Droidsense – It is currently the only adsense app in the market I could find but honestly I don’t need more selection. Very inexpensive, this app is a no-brainer for any adsense user. They even have a demo version you can tryout until you are convinced.

Key features :

• DroidSense allow you to analyze your Adsense™ performance daily, weekly, monthly and yearly from your Android™ Phone
• Multi-accounts (If you manage more than one Google Adsense™ account, DroidSense can import datas from all your accounts)
• Reports by day, week, month, year
• Revenu charts by day, week, month, year (Chart generated of the current listview)
• You can manage Date Format, Number format, Money Symbol ($/€)
• Notification at the end of the update to see how many you earned since last update.
• You can choose witch CSV file to import (Adsense For search, for Mobile Content, for Domains, for Feeds, for Videos and Referals) separatly by account
• Etc…

If you operate a website online it becomes important to have some way of tracking your audience. Some of the questions that you should be asking are:

• How many people visit your website each day?
• How long do they stay on your site?
• Which pages do they view?
• How did they come to be on your site?
• Where do they live?
• How do these numbers compare with yesterday or last week’s traffic?

Google Analytics has long been the best tool online for tracking your visitor information and thus answering all of these questions. That is why our tram has been testing various apps from the Android Market to find out which offered the best mobile solution to bringing you visitor info to your Android device.

Since there is no real good reason for us to talk about our less than favorite apps we are going to stick to just two. Our favorite free app and our favorite app overall (paid).

mAnalytics. For a free app this is really good and for most people this will probably be good enough for you. It will allow you to view basic stats for any of your profile’s by any custom date range. You can view total visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, avg time on site, and % of new visits.

You can view some basic charts to geta feel of your site’s performance over time but nothing complicated.

DroidAnalytics. This app has a lot of great features. We were very impressed with the speed at which the app moves and loads data. This alone would make it worth paying for. The default layout is in landscape and shows you a quick view of all your standard traffic stats with a break-down below. This “table” view took a minute to really understand how to manipulate it with the controls but is really great at displaying the data.

You can also view stats for visitor country origins, top performing keywords, and traffic sources. These are three features that no other app we tested could display at all, let alone in a quick and easy to use layout like DroidAnalytics.

We set out this week to try out android social bookmarking apps. We specifically wanted to focus on some of the big hitters like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, etc. All in all this didn’t turn out well.

With the exception of Delicious none of the programs have a 1/2 decent app available for the Android. DiggDroid and Digg Mobile Web sound exciting but they don’t give you the option to Digg anything so what’s the point? If I’m going to download a digg app I want to be able to at least be able to digg something from the browser share option.

There are three apps that we tested out with the Delicious API. Beelicious and the official Delicious apps both are great. I personally prefer the official Delicious app simply because it is official but both performed well.

Calling all geeky Digg lovers…. MAKE US AN APP!!!

Continued from “So You Want To Make Money Part 1 and Part 2”

The whole point of this site is to educate people about social media all the while trying to emphasize that people can run their internet business from their phone and more specifically that the android platform is the very best for that purpose.

Focus on this idea… Your goal is to put in as little time as possible into building sincere relationships and inevitably making a profit online. You want maximum results for your online time investment.

This also means you will have to find a way to do this while on the go. Sitting in front of a computer all day is a really lame lifestyle.

Let me show you a couple of ways to do this:

First you need your own website as we discussed. I hope you will use wordpress for that website and if so you need to download “wpToGo” from the android market. If you use a non android device search for wordpress apps. This will allow you to create content on the go and will grant you freedom.

You will also need to track visitors and usage of your site. Install google analytics to your site and then download and install the “Mobile GA” app from the android market. This will allow you to track your usage on the go.

Next you will need to download “twidroid” from the android market. Twidroid will give you COMPLETE control over your twitter account. You can manage @replies, direct messages, tweets, etc. One more way to decrease the amount of time you spend on your computer and increase the time you spend living life on the go.

Now download “Pingdroid” from the android market. This will require an account with Ping.fm This app will allow you to tweet/update your status on up to 60 different social media sitrs at once. This includes all the major players such as twitter, facebook, myspace, bebo, friendfeed, bebo, hi5, etc.

Now download the “pixelpipe ” app from the android market. Pixelpipe is the most powerful online picture syndication service. Every time you take a picture with your phone worth sharing you will be able to upload it directly to all your social media sites.

Also don’t forget to utilize your video recording options from your android phone. You can upload directly to Youtube every time you record!

Now you need to get set up with Google Reader. Subscribe to blogs that will help you grow. This is part of the online educational process. Once you are subscribed to several good content blogs download the “Newsrob” app from the android market. This will allow you to read your blogs on the go. You will never miss anything!

Now is there any doubt in your mind that you can have an active presence in social media from your android phone?