Actually, he didn’t – it was about two years ago. But my friend Mindy Audlin’s dog Ted did just pass away, and she wrote a beautiful tribute on her blog, Remembering Ted. Reading it, of course, brought up all those old feelings in me. I wrote a poem at the time Buster passed that was very cathartic, and I had never had a “personal” place to post this, so I thought I would now.

Buster Died Today

Buster died today.
His time had come.
As I lay on the floor with him,
He leaned his head against me,

And I knew.

Still, having him put to sleep
Was the hardest choice I ever made,
And holding him as he died,
The hardest thing I ever did.

We spent the afternoon…remembering.

Today was a great day.

Today, something happened that changed my life. I won’t go into the details, so don’t ask. But as I was sitting on my front porch this afternoon, I had a profound realization:

Right now, even though I have some unfinished commitments, right at this moment, I feel no external pressure. For the first time in a long time – I can’t even remember when – I feel like I have 100% complete, total choice over what I do right now, tonight, tomorrow, etc. I’ve known that for a long time intellectually, but now I truly feel it.

I have things I want to do. I have commitments I want to keep. But I have nothing that I feel like I have to do, as soon as possible, or my life might just collapse around me.

That’s a powerful place to be. I plan to stay in this place. I feel better than I’ve felt in years (and that’s saying something, ‘cause I’m generally a pretty happy guy). And it is my most sincere wish that everyone in the world could find their way to this place and live every day like this.

As I wrote about last week, I’ve finally come to the realization that I need lots of Twitter followers. Since then I’ve been using @BigRichB’s Brute Force Twitter system, and here are my results so far after just one week, according to TwitterCounter:

In case you can’t read the fine print, that’s a prediction of 24,103 followers in 30 days (that’s an increase of about 20,000) if I continue at current rates.

In the process of getting all these new followers, I’ve received dozens of auto-DMs promoting “Twitter Traffic Machine”, claiming that it will get you 16,000 followers in 90 days and help you make money in the process, so I thought I’d take a look and see what all the buzz was about.

Now, the creator of the program, @BillCrosby, has a fairly impressive track record:

But the real test of a system isn’t whether it works for the person who created it, but whether or not it works for the other people who use it. So I thought I’d start looking at the results of people using the Twitter Traffic Machine system and comparing them to my own.

Well, see for yourself. Below are links to TwitterCounter graphs comparing my results for the past month to the results of the last 30 people who’ve sent me an auto-DM promoting Twitter Traffic Machine. I’m not listing the names on this page, because I’m not trying to embarrass anybody – just doing some objective research. Draw your own conclusions.

1 (showing the best one first) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Well, you get the picture. That’s just 30 out of over 60 I’ve received, all of which look basically the same. And that first one above is the best out of the bunch.

I could easily write this off as “well, like most other internet marketing things, people just aren’t working the system,” except that Twitter Traffic Machine touts itself as "The Completely Automated Twitter Growth & Money Making System for People That Want to Set Up A System ONCE, Forget About It, and Have it Grow and Make Money EVERY Day!"

If it were completely automated and as effective as it claims, the vast majority of those people would be seeing results similar to mine.

I will tell you that the system I’m using is not completely automated – it takes work. Not a lot of work, but still work. I’m spending about half an hour a day on it. But you do literally get followers in your sleep. For example, when I went to bed last night, I was at 9,863 followers. This morning I’m at 10,036. My graphs are already out-of-date!

I think my main issue here is this: how can someone tout a product that’s supposed to be generating results when it hasn’t generated those results for them yet? Or, apparently in this case, much of anybody else either? I mean, if you’re supposedly using a system that generates more followers, don’t you think the first thing people are going to do is look at your stats? And when they don’t back up the claim of “16,000 followers in 90 days”, who in their right mind is going to buy it?

Prove me wrong. If you’ve been using Twitter Traffic Machine and getting great results, show me. Let’s compare numbers.

P.S. I forgot to mention the fact that wasting your welcome auto-DM on promoting this is missing an opportunity to a) brand yourself and b) invite further conversation. I’m not against auto-DMs in general. You can learn a lot about someone by what they choose to say in that first 140 characters. What does it say about you to a new follower if the first words out of your mouth (fingers?) are an affiliate promotion? And worse, it hasn’t even worked for you yet! Think about it.