So you know the benefits of branding yourself diligently online, whether you’re running a startup, a large corporation or a solopreneur operation.

Whoever you are online, having a consistent look and feel to your communications contains so many benefits you can’t overlook it.

One of the ways to do it is creating a magazine or a newsletter of your own.

But what if you don’t like to do just a plain text, e-zine type newsletter, perhaps it wouldn’t suit the rest of what your company does?

You’d probably look into creating a PDF newsletter, or even a mailed newsletter which has even higher perceived value.

But there’s one roadblock you then run into that doesn’t get talked about that often. ACTUALLY DESIGNING A MAGAZINE.

If you’re not actually in the magazine publishing business, it can drive you CRAZY!

And just like anything that really isn’t part of your core business, you should look for a way to do it in an easy way that doesn’t hog a lot of time and resources.

Fiiine fine fine, the point already…

There’s a new way to create a pro looking magazine online for FREE, called…

Openzine.com helps you create a magazine online

OpenZine.com is a great little site that lets you create a self-generated magazine that looks good, can have different types of content, and have your own look and feel.

Yes, you could argue that it’s not much different from the usual blog or generated web site, but the difference is in the metaphor.

The magazine metaphor, ease of use and higher perceived value to your subscribers makes OpenZine worth exploring.

Give it a whirl, will ya! YOur subscribers will thank you for creating something out of the ordinary and more thought out.

Begin with their creative tips or video walkthrough.

These days, if you’re working online and have a bit of a following gathered… you’re quite literally all over the place.

You got your Twitter teamsters.

You have your Facebook fans.

You got your Flickr friends.

You got your Posterious pals.

And Ustream. And Youtube. And FriendFeed. Ning portals. And three different blogs… and it just grows and grows and grows!

So your peeps need to be connected to all of these to get eeeeeverythiiiing you release out there…

What’s an overwhelmed web maven to do?

You COULD go to Yahoo Pipes and start building a combined feed from scratch. That will be easily at LEAST a couple of hours of building and testing, thank you very much. And more if you’re not cut out to do that sort of thing.

Luckily there is now a much, much easier way to involve and engage all your customers, followers and fans:

FeedMingle combines all your feeds into a single master feed

FeedMingle is beautifully simple idea: take all of your feeds, slice and dice them into a textarea on Feedmingle, push a button and hey! You got yourself an all-inclusive feed you can now send out to your email list to follow.

Of course, it may be a little late to the party with real-time feed updates (RSS Cloud, PubSUbHubbub) gaining spiff and all that, but it’s useful nonetheless. Simpler technology doesn’t always mean it’s necessarily inferior at all.

So here’s a quick recap of the benefits of doing this:

• Make it easy for your followers and customers to follow ALL your content – so they won’t miss that Twitter-only offer or a YouTube-only interview you did
• No need to check twitter, facebook, flickr, posterous, 3 blogs and ustream to get eeeeverything…
• Just promote a SINGLE FEED and incentivize people to subscribe to it (say, a special gift feed only found on that combination feed)
• Involve and engage your subscribers more, knowing they’ll be following all your stuff

So that’s our quick audience-building tip for today, put it to practice will you!

What’s that, MY Master Feed you ask?

Subscribe to it here. A work in progress, but see how it looks!

So you’ve got your blog set up to generate revenue? – Check.

Sales pages in stellar condition and copy converting for you? – Check.

Advertising and content based promotion working for you (push AND pull)? – Gotcha.

Okay.

So where does an agile internet entrepreneur turn to find yet another platform to peddle their wares, so to speak?

Well okay – how about the Real Time crazy we’ve all been hearing so much about.

We’re all taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook and so on – so what’s new under the sun here you say?

The thing is… in order to make payments, you still need to take people away from where they like to roam… which today is undeniably Twitter.

To get around this seemingly issue, let’s take a look at a service called TwitPay.

TwitPay - Sell Stuff Directly Through Twitter

Now, you may justifiably be thinking: “what’s new about that, I’m already tweeting my product launches, content, everything”?

That was my first thought too, so let’s take a closer look!

Here’s what TwitPay does for you:

• Send money to anyone on Twitter – PayPal works in the background (format: @friend twitpay $3 coffee’s on me today)
  (before you try this, you need to follow Twitpay first and wait for them to follow you back)
• Sell digital content directly from Twitter – PDF, MP3, OGG and WAV are the formats currently supported
• Run brand promotions on Twitter (this one seems to be still in beta or Early Access program as they put it)
• Raise money for charity through retweets (this too seems to be in limited access still)

So what are some of the possible practical uses for TwitPay? Here’s a few you might run into:

• Butter up a blogger or Twitter pal whose content you really appreciate, 5-10 dollars is okay (how do you think THAT will stick in their minds about you, instead of a simple retweet!)
• Get the attention of a high profile person by tweeting them your appreciation (did DM’s ever work for this, anyway?)
  
• Thank an employee, business partner or joint venture partner (or several) for a job well done: “@ev twitpay $5 because Twitter rocks”
  
• Send out affiliate commissions for an ad-hoc Twitter-only promotion you did (it could all happen within a DAY!)
• Sell a downloadable replay of a webinar you recently did – instead of going through the hassle of setting up a web page etc. just to be of service to your people
• Sell a quick downloadable report on something topical you know a lot about
• Ride on the coattails of the trends of the day – react quickly, create a product and sell it through Twitter… and you could have an avalanche of sales just because you delivered exactly what people wanted right then and there!)
• Put your old ebooks out for sale – people who never saw your original sales page may well go for it (format: “@vendor RT2Buy http://rt2b.me/xxx” OR simply retweet the original msg)
• Run special Twitter promotions of your own products – yeah, this is the really obvious thing to do.

Of course, there are some caveats or let’s say special considerations to think of, too:

• People generally don’t like to make their purchases or transactions public (how about an option to do it via DM?)
• Then again, in some cases being public about it is a plus: charity causes and products people are “proud to buy“
• Your PayPal address doesn’t get exposed, as TwitPay acts as the middle man
• TwitPay takes a somewhat hefty 15% off the top (for RT2Buy) then again maybe it’s worth the sheer ease of selling
• You may have to deal with manual settlings somewhat – so perhaps it’s not for mass sales unless you have an assistant looking after it

TwitPay is taking advantage of PayPal’s new Platform, it is one of the first to do so, paving the way for many more innovative payment solutions to come (you can be certain ProfitHacker will report on all significant payment innovations!).

If you ask me, TwitPay is the first symptom (not sure if they’d like me calling them a symptom, but oh well..) in a move towards an even more accelerated cycle of sales: you can go from spotting a need to product to sales within a single day!

So there you have it – a way to generate quick, impulse buys through just retweeting – Paypal working in the background for you (which is genius really!)

You’re essentially delivering bite-sized content to the masses; micropayments finally make sense, hurray!

If you liked this post and the possibilities ahead it may have opened for you, follow TwitPay first, wait for their follow back, then go ahead and tweet me a latte!