How do you describe a fellow who takes a brilliant idea and, for all practical purposes, virtually gives it away because of a wager made whilst throwing back a pint–or more?

First, the back story.

A few weeks ago Andy and his dad were enjoying a sociable beer when they noticed a guy moving between tables with a “charity bucket” in hand. Here, in the states, we usually see this stuff at intersections. People going from car-to-car soliciting funding for one, presumably, good cause or another. It seems in the UK they do it in beer gardens.

Andy and dad started discussing the efficacy of this particular approach to fund raising. Was it really worth, to the collector and the charity, the time and effort required?

Being an online marketing kind of guy Andy told his dad he could raise more money online and with less effort and cost than the fellow going table-to-table. His dad bet him he couldn’t. Enter pride.

They made a bet, a high stakes bet. Andy would attempt to raise a certain amount of money–for charity–in a set period of time. If successful, next outing dad buys the beer. If he fails, Andy buys.

Ten-thousand American dollars was the agreed upon amount. To be raised by July 19, 2010. All proceeds to Asthma Research.

Now comes the big question. How? Charities typically employ two methods of fund raising. The first is the most common. A direct appeal for donations. The second, and less common, method is to offer something of value in return for a donation. Andy decided to take the second approach.

Fortunately he had recently developed a very useful WP Plugin, WPSyndicator. The plugin will syndicate your blog posts to at least a dozen important Web 2.0 sites. Great way to garner attention.

Some WP Plugins—particularly the better, more useful one’s—often cost forty or fifty bucks each. As he’s donating all proceeds from sales of WPSyndicator to charity Andy has reduced the price of the plugin to less than $10US.

Now, he could easily make some serious bucks from this handy product but instead, just to avoid paying for a pint, he’s donating all proceeds to Asthma Research, is Andy a “Drunken Idiot” or a “Superhero”?

As a long-time asthma sufferer I have a definite opinion.  I purchased it. You’ll have to judge for yourself.

You can learn all you Need to Know about WPSyndicator by clicking this link:

http://wpsyndicator.com/charity.php?e=hateasthma

Disclaimer: As you can easily see the WPSyndicator link appears to be an affiliate link. In this particular case I get absolutely nothing for promoting this product. Other than the personal feeling that my small contribution may make someone’s life easier sometime in the future. The affiliate link is used only for tracking purposes.

ROI—Return on Investment—in the business world is a comparison of dollars in versus dollars out. Ideally you want the number to be as high as possible. You want a high return.

In the non-financial area you also want a high ROI. Your time and effort investment. If you do something for pleasure you want satisfying results. You want a high payback. Doesn’t matter what it is. Playing softball, you want to win; watching a movie or reading a book, you want to feel it was time well spent; participating on Twitter you want to be noticed.

You may “tweet” only to stay in touch with family and friends or you may simply want to keep up with “hot tweets” or “trending topics” to see what has captured the Twitter worlds interest at a given time or any given day.

Perhaps you use Twitter to broadcast a specific political, social, religious or commercial viewpoint or message.

Regardless of reason you need to be noticed. Let’s face it, internet marketing is competitive. If no one sees your message, what’s the point?

And even if someone sees your message, is that someone the right someone? If, for example, you’ve written selling a fantastic dating guide and the only person to see your promotional tweets is a charter member of the Society of Misogynistic Hermits it’s not too likely to sell. That’s a pretty dismal ROI for the time and effort you’ve put into writing, proofing and promoting your product.

Your poor return could be for a variety of reasons. Time and timing are two major ones. Twitter operates, excluding temporary interruptions, 8,760 hours per year. That’s over a half-million minutes. To further complicate the issue a recent study showed that Twitter passes 1,138,772 tweets per hour–over 27 million per day–through the system.

So, even if you can stay up all day and night for weeks, months or a year tweeting the odds of being seen by just the right person at just the right time are, at best, slim.

Fortunately there’s a solution available. Twitter Vending Machine is a 54 page system that will show you how to get the right followers; yes, followers interested in your niche and what you have to say. And, how to automate your tweeting so you don’t have to stay awake to tweet continually for days at a time. Marketing is hard enough with sleep.

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Elmer