Social Media
How To Use Facebook to Market Your Blog
We all know Facebook is huge. Just how huge it is, though, is something to behold. The latest estimates I’ve heard is that Facebook is signing up around 450,000 new users – PER DAY. With those kinds of numbers, Facebook starts to stand out as one hell of a marketing opportunity.
Click Here To Continue Reading »
Idea: LinkedIn Recommendations for You As a Blogger
We all know that social media is very important. Especially as we move into 2009, I think people who know how to use social media will find themselves with a kind of social security blanket.
Click Here To Continue Reading »
My Top Must-Follows for ProBloggers on Twitter
If you are a Twitter user and are interested in blogging – especially how to really perfect the art of blogging so you can make money – there are some people that are worth following on Twitter. And here is my list…
Click Here To Continue Reading »
How To Make Money With Twitter
This seems to be a proverbial question. You spend all this time on Twitter, building your follower count. Naturally you want to make some money with those people, right? How do you cash in? And you know what?
Click Here To Continue Reading »
Free Report: The Twitter Manual
Twitter is one of those things that some “get” and others (the majority, it seems) see as a complete waste of time.
And there are a whole lot more of them than there are people like me who use Twitter all the time. My wife, for instance, has told me that she thinks Twitter is really only used by marketers and people who do everything online.
I tell people about Twitter, but most just don’t get it. So, for them (and even us veterans can keep on learning), I have authored a Twitter manual.
I did this on a whim today. Call me crazy. 
It is a free download in PDF format. Just grab it and check it out. All I ask is that you spread the word if you find it useful. Retweet it and send it to your friends.
I have set up a dedicated page for the report right here. Enjoy!
Check the Twitter Tree
I recently met (in a digital way) Jonathan Gunson. He commented on my posts on this blog, re-tweeted my post URL out to his followers and then told me about his Twitter Tree. I thought this tree was an interesting idea worthy of a quick post on the blog.
The site has background music and Jon talking. He wishes everybody a great holiday season and also says that he has a new internet TV show coming about internet marketing. Some people might find it a little sappy, but hey, its the holidays.
Creative marketing?
Either way, creative enough where I thought I’d bring it to your attention.
Using Adwords PPC to Get Twitter Followers. Smart?
I was using Google Gmail the other day (as I do every day) and saw this ad block in my email. The second ad is for a Twitter account: Dolphini. I checked out the Dolphini website and apparently it is a colocation data center in Nashville.
The most interesting thing is perhaps the most obvious: these guys are using pay-per-click to drive traffic, not to their company website, but to their Twitter account. When you check out their Twitter account, you see that they are using Twitter properly. In other words, they’re being SOCIAL.
They’re investing in the customer relationship, not in a hard sell. On the flip side, however, Twitter doesn’t really lead to money in a direct way. Twitter is about relationships. So, I’m not sure how their ROI would be on this.
What do you think? Is this a viable strategy? This is the first time I have personally noticed anyone paying to drive people to their Twitter account. I wonder how much they pay cost per click?
10 Tips For Getting New Twitter Followers
On Monday, I gave you my opinion on why who you follow is more important than who follows you on Twitter. That said, we all want people to follow us on Twitter.
So, why is it that some people attract a lot of followers and others struggle? Below are 10 quick tips to get new followers on Twitter:
- Leverage Your Network. If you already have a blog or a large network on a site like Facebook, leverage that resource to get your existing audience to follow you on Twitter.
- Be Active. Nothing sucks worse than a dead Twitter profile. So, be consistent and try to tweet a few times per day.
- Be a Person. It’s fine to use Twitterfeed to pipe your new blog posts into Twitter, but you need to be a regular person, too. A Twitter stream is supposed to be more than another RSS feed.
- Tweet value. Put stuff out there that is actually worth reading. This doesn’t mean you can’t post random things you’re doing throughout the day (you want to be human), but people will value you more if what you say is actually interesting.
- Follow others. If you follow other people, chances are they’ll follow you back. Don’t be random about. Find people who are actually worth following for your particular interests.
- Strike a conversation. Just following a person and sitting back accomplishes little if your goal is for them to follow you back. Strike a conversation with them! Talk back! Send a reply. That’s a sure-fire way to stand out to people who follow a lot of people.
- Retweet. If somebody you follow sends out a really useful or interesting tweet, retweet it to your own followers. Not only do you provide value to your own followers, but it shows up as a reply to the person who originally sent the message. Good on both fronts.
- Be Interesting. It helps, not only to be a real person, but to actually be interesting. Funny tweets are one example. Careful, though, don’t be fake!
- Be Interested. Take an interest in your followers. This goes hand-in-hand with several of the above tips, but at the end of the day, when you show interest in your network and the actual people who follow you, they’ll WANT to follow you. Acknowledge your followers publicly when they post something interesting, for example.
- Don’t Forget Photos. People like photos, so if you use TwitPic sometimes to tweet photos, people will watch and take a gander.
Which Is More Important on Twitter: Who You Follow or Being Followed?
Like almost every blogger out there, I am on Twitter. As of the time I write this post, I have 1,342 followers and I’m following 885.
I gain new followers every day. Just being out there, writing a lot, being involved in social media, I’ve reached a certain momentum such that I seem to gain new followers without doing much of anything. Admittedly, that’s nice.
My natural inclination, and it seems the majority of other Twitter users are in this boat, is to take that “followers” number really seriously. We all want a lot of people to follow us on Twitter. Even if you don’t want to admit it, it is a bit of an online status symbol. A bit of digital “street cred”.
But, which is more important, really? Is it more important to have a crapload of followers than to follow the right people?
I’ve had people see that I follow almost 900 people and they ask, “Why"?”. They observe, and correctly so, that I couldn’t possibly read the tweets of 900 people. And they’re right. I do NOT read every tweet that comes across my plate. There are other Twitter users who follow a lot more people than I do and, trust me, they’re not reading everything either.
When you follow a person, that means you can tap into their thought stream. Random thoughts, new links they find, or their new blog posts – you’ll have those things entering your tweet stream. So, I have almost 900 people who comprise a steady stream of collective thought.
The beauty of a site like Twitter is the near-instantaneous nature of it. You can learn of new things quickly. News events break VERY fast on Twitter. It is like having 900 pairs of eyeballs out there acting like a little conduit of information which is sent TO YOU – via Twitter.
Do you see the value of that? I sure do!
Following the right people puts them into your thought stream. You can see what they see (if they tweet it, of course). That’s a LOT of information at your fingertips. And like any river or stream, you just dip your toe in it when you see fit. I’m not watching every tweet that comes across my screen. But, I monitor it in my peripheral vision (so to speak) so I can keep tabs on what’s happening out there.
The value of your tweet stream is determined by WHO you follow. So, take whatever you’re interested in, find the people in your niche, and follow them. You can use a site like Twellow to find people. You can even use Twitter search to enter search terms you’re interested in, observe the people who talk about those things, and follow them.
We all like to be followed on Twitter, but let’s not get too hung up on it. Obviously being followed is a good thing. But, I think there is perhaps more value to be had in simply following the right people.
Is Magpie a Good Way To Monetize Your Twitter Account?
Be-a-magpie is a way to “convert your tweets into bling-bling”. In other words, make money from your Twitter account. It first came across my radar because I was seeing tweets with the #magpie hashtag. When I checked it out, I was momentarily surprised but realized that it is inevitable.
In short, it works like this:
- Advertiser approaches Magpie to purchase advertising.
- Magpie matches the offer with Twitter users who are signed up to Twitter.
- Magpie tweets the ad out on your account in a ratio of 5 to 1, tweets to ads.
- You get paid.
Any businessperson can immediately see the theory behind Magpie. We know that social media and “going viral” are killer when it comes to promoting online. Twitter is huge and it makes sense (from the business standpoint) to use it to get out commercial messages. Just like PayPerPost and ReviewMe for blogs, Magpie has come in with a way to pay for tweets. Click Here To Continue Reading »
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
