The Title of My Blog.

It occurred to me today that some of my readers might be wondering about the name of my blog. You could be asking why the blog is called "The albaTRossK". You could also ask why certain letters are capitalized. Well I'm going to tell you.

My dad and I both share the name Tim Kaelin. He is a first and I'm a second. We are both in a similar business plus he has years of business experience in other fields under his belt. With that business experience comes business names. Before I was ever old enough to start thinking of the businesses I wanted to do he had exhausted all of the obvious choices. T Ross Kaelin inc, Ross Enterprises, TRK designs, etc. etc. Basically anything playing off the standard use of initials was taken. So I had to get creative. My first go was Trossk. I thought it was a good name that I could brand over the course of a decade or so and it fit into what I thought was a good business mold for a business name. It almost sounded corporate and could be followed up nicely by Inc.,Opp., Enterprises, Corp. and so on.

Then over the next couple of months after having written Trossk Enterprises on notebooks full of ideas and manilla folders with loose sketches in them, I decided that I wanted to save Trossk for later. I needed a friendlier name. I needed a more memerable name. After kicking a few ideas around for a while I decided on AlbaTRossK. There were a few different reasons for this. It is an already recognizable name as there is a huge bird called an Albatross. Then there is a bit of symbolism in the name too. There is freedom associated with being able to fly like a bird, and I want to create freedom for myself through the proceeds of my business. Also Albatrosses have very large wingspans, and I want to be big in this business. Along with the symbolism there was also the fact that T Ross is my first intitial plus my middle name. To get Albatross to work with my name all I needed was to add a K at the end for my last initial. So you come up with AlbaTRossK.

I did do a bit of testing with this name too. I use it as a gamer tag in certain online games to see how people with no prior knowledge of how to pronounce it would take to it. I found that with the A capitalized people shortened it to Alba and therefore brought to mind Jessica Alba. While she is a great actress, she is not what I wanted people to think of when they looked at my name. So I lowercased the A and it became albaTRossK. It is simply amazing the effect that capitalizing certain letters has on how people look at things. New people referred to the full name instead of the shortened Alba and that is how I developed the name albaTRossK.

Twitter Help

So it's Friday and I've been working with Twitter and associated programs all day. As a new member in the internet marketing world/society/group/whatever, I had to start somewhere. It seems that there are a lot of internet marketers and some just generally smart people on Twitter. This is why I chose to start there. Twitter in and of itself is a really easy to use simple program. The problem comes in when you want to network with thousands of people. Then you have to seek help. I have found a few good sites that I would like to share with you. They are TweetDeck, TweetLater, and TwitBacks.

TweetDeck is just as easy to use as Twitter is. It's a really simple external program that really breaks down everything that is going on on your twitter page into manageable bits. Am I some sort of Super Decker? No, I have maybe 3 hours of experience with the program, but in that time I've got it down enough to know that it is a very useful tool. I suggest that everyone, who really wants to put Twitter through the paces, should download the program. www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

TweetLater is another really awesome twitter tool. For anyone with thousands of followers who wants to stay visible, I suggest this tool. It allows you to schedule tweets to be published at a later time while you are not even on! This is an awesome tool that will help you stay connected with people around the world and in all different time zones. It's also pretty simple to use. I've already scheduled a few tweets just to play around with it. BUT by far the best option that this program gives you is the auto respond option for new followers. When you are getting scores of new followers a day you don't always have time to send each one a new message, but with TweetLater you can set it to send them all a thank you message. Really this one is a must.
www.tweetlater.com/

If you've already searched through twitter, you might have noticed where a lot of people have nice backgrounds with lots of extra information in them. Just today I was searching around and saw an ad for twitter backgrounds. I went and checked it out and it was what I was searching for. It was great they had all these examples of backgrounds with pictures and side bars and they all looked REALLY nice. Until I saw the price. They were $100 a piece! I said nevermind in a hurry and went to my friend Google. Did a quick search for "free twitter background" and the first site was Twitbacks. AVG said the site was clean so I went on in. What I found was a bit more watered down than the $100 dollar version, but it was still sufficient for my needs. I registered for a free account and quickly (less than 2 minutes) made myself a background. It was super easy to use and has step by step instructions on how to load it into your twitter page. It also had an auto load feature, but I couldn't get that to work correctly. For a free program it was great. Much better than waisting $100 on something just a bit more refined. You can see an example of the work on my twitter page here: www.twitter.com/trossk
www.twitbacks.com/

I would suggest all of these sites to anyone using Twitter to build a business on a budget. They have really helped me and I am sure that I will see good results with all of them.

**If you find the information that I am providing useful, please add me on Twitter or follow this blog. I really enjoy writing this stuff and I hope someone is getting some useful information from my efforts.**

First blogging

For my first blog I will share a little about myself and what this blog will be about. I am a 21 year old college student in Louisville, Ky currently studying business. I work as a mechanical designer for my dad's engineering company. I am always on the lookout for new ways to make money and do business, and that is what this blog is about. It is my journey in this new business model of internet marketing.

I have only just gotten into this area of business so my knowledge on the subject is still very lacking, but as I learn you will learn. Internet marketing is not a completely new way of doing business, but it is relatively untapped. People are making millions, but millions aren't in the business. To the best of my current understanding, internet marketing is like a franchise system in that many people sell the same products at different locations, but the difference is that you don't have a store front. Overhead in this business is rediculously low. You can literally start a business for less that $500. Obviously there are more expensive and much cheaper ways of doing this but from what I've seen $500 is the average. The route that I have chosen, until a better one comes along, is affiliate marketing. Here's a wiki on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

That's all I have for now, but read up on that wiki article so that you can familiarize yourself with what will be discussed here.

Thanks for reading,

Tim Kaelin.