Month: June 2009

Posted on

TweetLater Reviewed

Have you ever wondered how the top Twitter users send you those automatic messages when you start to follow them and how they auto follow you? Are they up all night clicking follow and drafting messages back? No, they are using in many cased a free online service called TweetLater.

I have been testing this new application and consider it a must have for any Twitter “power user”. It is free to use, but you can upgrade to the Professional version and get more features, but the free version is certainly handy and does a few very cool things.

  • Allows you to set up an auto responder sent automatically to anyone who follows you.
  • Allows you to follow (or not) them automatically when they follow you.
  • Allows you to unfollow them automatically when they unfollow you.
  • Allows you to schedule tweets for future publishing.
  • Allows you to enter tweets and will meter out their publishing automatically – like a drip campaign.

I have been using TweetLater mainly for the auto responder feature and find it a great tool for building and connecting with others. If you want to consider the Professional version, it will cost $29.97 a month. In the Professional version you will be able to:

  • Manage multiple Twitter accounts.
  • Allow account access to an assistant
  • Schedule @ replies and direct messages to when the recipient is online.
  • Schedule reoccurring tweets and supply alternative text for rotation.
  • Choose to mute specific uses without unfollowing them.
  • Use TweetCockpit as your Twitter power user interface.

For my personal needs the free version is a good fit. People who may be interested in the Professional version may be product managers and advertising agency account managers.

If you are not using Twitter, you may wonder what is all the buzz about, why invest my precious time? With the research that I have done this past month, what I have found is that some people are actually selling their Twitter traffic services. Let’s say you have 20,000 followers, you tweet about a product and include a link. Even if 10% of your followers went to visit the link, that’s a whooping 2,000 new visitors exposed to your product or service. There have been some interesting stories lately on the Web of entrepreneurs making thousands of dollars a month driving traffic to paying web clients in this manner.

What does this all mean for the everyday business owner? Well first, I’m not going into business selling traffic, but what that does tell me is that if you have a new service, a new product, something you want to promote. You can do it easily, for free, to others in your wider social network thereby exposing your products, services, and content to a massive audience all by yourself. All it takes is some time to build your Twitter following base while interacting with others. It’s actually a win-win situation have fun, build followers, build website or blogsite traffic. TweetLater is just one of the tools to use in your arsenal to get and build your following in your first step towards marketing yourself and services online for free.

Posted on

WordPress Title Glitch

Have you seen this on your own blog? You create a blog post and then when you publish it and click on the title of the post to see the separate post page you get a message saying the post cannot be found? What causes that? How can you fix it?

First remember that blogs communicate in the world of HTML and each blog post is really an entry in a database. When you use special characters in your blog post title sometimes you mess of the database preventing WordPress from being able to find the post to return it on its own page.

Here are some of the characters that we know cause this to happen: …   –   &

If this happens to you, you cannot just go in and fix the title, the damage has been done. You will need to delete the blog post and totally re-enter it in WordPress.

So if you have been mystified over when and why this happens, now you know!

Have you seen other characters do this on your blog? Leave me a list below to share your knowledge so we can all stay away from those characters too.

Posted on

You Really Must Use American Speaking Ghost Bloggers

Here is an excellent case in point. I just got this email in my inbox. I have not edited a single thing, just changed the names and removed the links.

Hi ,
We are Dhxxxxj and Hxxa (names changed to protect their identity from ridicule by Nancy McCord) from Bangalore , India . We work from home as a full time bloggers.
We started blogging since sept2006. We have around 7 blogs on which we write the posts.

Please find the list below

URL list removed to protect the innocent clients who have bought their services

Please let us know if you have any writing opportunities
Thanks
thanks!

Man, that’s scary isn’t it. That could be your ghost blogger if you use just any firm or a possibly a low bidder from a resource like Elance.  I have highlighted the problems so you can tell at a glance where the errors are:

We are Dhxxxxj and Hxxxa from Bangalore , India . We work from home as a full time bloggers.

We started blogging since sept2006. We have around 7 blogs on which we write the posts.

Not only is grammar wrong, spacing is wrong and verb usage is wrong. If you want to spend a lot of time rewriting your blog posts you could pay about $5 a post to get this kind of content. Better yet, you could hire my firm where we employ only American speaking professional college educated writers. 

Many of our writers have college degrees, some several years of college, some that are just short of graduating, and some with higher level college degrees. Sure, you will pay more, but you will not have to waste your time correcting your blog posts, you will build readership because people will understand your message, your blog posts will make a positive impression about your company’s professionalism, and on top of that you will have well written engaging content. The choice is yours.

Find out more about our American speaking premium level ghost blogging program.

Posted on

Best Practice for Posting Twitter to Facebook

I’ve been doing some testing on the best practices for feeding your Twitter posts to your Facebook status, and I have some new recommendations for you.

First, I post much more frequently on Twitter than anywhere else. Twitter followers are used to this and conversations there are a stream of consciousness back and forth. The Facebook and LinkedIn worlds are different. You can easily lose followers by feeding your Twitter status directly to Facebook and be confused by friends as spamming them with status updates. It is just too much information for Facebook, but the interaction is what grows your network on Twitter.

This is what I do, first I stopped feeding my Twitter status through Facebook with the Twitter application I had installed before. Now I use two applications and select when I update Facebook and LinkedIn. I use TweetDeck and choose to send my status to Facebook about once or twice a day tops. Then I use Ping.fm to send a status update one more time to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. By turning off the Facebook Twitter application, now only when I want to my status moves to Facebook using TweetDeck – a much more user friendly plan to not alienate Facebook users with the volume of posts that an active Twitter user will typically generate.

Ping.fm is an excellent tool if you want to feed your status to LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter all at the same time. I am finding that typically I will have both TweetDeck open and Ping.fm open throughout the day. Now if Ping.fm will just allow me to schedule posts.  You can create posting groups, but I have not figured out if Ping.fm will schedule posts yet.