Internet

Baby Boomers Guide to Using Twitter

March 10, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

If you ask your Baby Boomer neighbor to twitter you next time she finds a sale on lobster at Albertsons, you will probably get a quizical stare. Not many in this generation are familiar with Twitter, but many want to know what is going on so here is a short guide to using twitter.

What is Twitter?

According to Om Malik,

“Twitter is a micro-messaging service that has caught the imaginations of everyone from tech mommies to cable news networks, sports stars and Hollywood stars. It has become the source of breaking news and rumors.”

A twitter is an instant text message from a cell phone or computer. A twitter is a sentence that is less than 140 characters long. It’s a short, but sweet message, like a chirp from a bird. The purpose of a twitter is to tell someone what your latest thoughts or activities have been. Twitter messages can be read from a mobile phone or the internet. You need to set up an account at Twitter.com to use this service.

Who gets your twitter messages?

Someone that you have asked to follow your messages or that has asked you if they can follow you. You can have no followers or you can have thousands of followers. It’s all up to you.

Websites such as twitterholic.com will tell you what people or organizations have the most number of followers. CNN Breaking News has the most number of followers (437,573) which makes sense. People can get breaking news on their cell phones when the stories are released. President Barack Obama has the most number of friends (374,715) however, he has not made any posts since he became President.

What is a tweep?

Tweeps are people who receive your twitter messages. You too can become a tweep.

Who invented Twittering?

Twittering, commonly referred to as micro-blogging or micro-messaging was the brain child of Jack Dorsey. He started a company that was using software for emergency dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web. He and Isaac Stone, they wrote Twitter’s prototype, using instant text messaging, in about two weeks. They took their ideas to a company called Odeo and teamed up with Evan Williams, well known for his role in Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing blogs. They launched Twitter Inc., and three years later Twitter has approximately 5 million users. In February of 2009, they received a buyout offer of $500M.

Who cares about your tweets?

This depends on you. If you are a witness to an earthquake, a fire or other natural disaster, you may be the key to notifying people about the emergency situation. You may save lives by your quick thinking and quick messaging. You might come across an article that you love and want to tell people about. If you can type your message in 140 characters or less, you can tell all of your followers about it. If you find that the url you want to announce is too long, go to tinyurl.com and make it shorter. Have you read a good book lately? Gone to a good movie? Gone to a horrible movie? Let others know about it. Tweet it! See the bird below this post? Baby boomer tweeps are invited to click on this link and share this post. You can follow my tweets by going to twitter.com

Five Tips To Keep Websites Ranking Well

February 5, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

If you have a business on the internet, then you are well aware of how important it is to keep your search engine rankings for your best keywords. When your rankings drop, your sales drop immediatley. When your website gets dropped from the search engine results panic may set in. Life becomes frantic and you begin to picture your business coming to a screaching halt. You will certainly understand how scary it is to watch your website disappear in the SERP’s (search enine result pages) for the keyword phrase that brings you the most traffic.

That is the dilema I faced this past week and it was one I hope doesn’t happen again. It made me realize how totally reliant an Internet business is on search engines and unfortunately sometimes there is nothing you can do about it but wait and see if your good website ranking comes back.

To help you live through a traumatic experience like this, I have a few suggestions for you in keeping your website running smoothly.

Review all the files on your site to see if there are any files that shouldn’t be there. Look carefully at the ones that raise any questions in your mind.
Use Google webmaster tools. There is a tool there that you can use that will delete undesirable pages from their index. So any unwanted pages that are indexed by Google can be removed. I did that for a lot of pages that were reporting 404 errors because of what I had done to reorganize my blog pages.

In Google webmaster tools there is a blog that you can post questions, complaints, etc. and read about what others have experienced. Many people have experienced the same problems you have had.

Review the page in question that is not being included in Google’s index. Go through the page with a fine tooth comb and get rid of any unnecessary coding, make sure you are using your keyword phrase in all of your alt tags. Rename some of your photos with the name of your keyword phrase.

You can always pay a SEO specialist to take a look at your site. Let them see if they can spot anything unusual.

Hopefully your website business won’t go through this, but because it is on the internet, it is vulnerable to that. Use these tips to help you keep your search engine rankings.

100 Popular Questions Asked on The Internet

January 15, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

What are keywords?

On the internet keywords are basically what words the user types into the search engines to find what they are looking for. Keywords can be fun to research. This data is relevant to bloggers because it helps them know what to write about and what people are interested in.

Where do I find keyword tools?

There are a lot of tools on the internet that research the number of times keywords are searched for. One of those keyword tools is provided by a company called Wordtracker. Wordtracker has recently come out with a beta version keyword tool that will tell you what questions people are asking based on the keywords you enter. This keyword tool is very handy and a lot of bloggers will enjoy using it.

How many results for keyword searches are considered popular?

When you begin your keyword research, you’ll see that many questions get less than 100 searches. To be included in this list of 100 popular internet questions, I chose the majority of questions that had been asked over 400 times.

What keywords are people using in the questions they ask?

Being a curious person, I spent some time this morning researching keywords used in questions on a variety of different topics and chose to list 100 of the top ranked questions that people are asking. The number that you see represents the number of times that question was asked over the past 140 days. You may be able to use these statistics to write your own blogging posts. Spend some time using this keyword tool to help you with ideas of topics to write about.

Using popular keywords in your writing will help you attract readers to your blog. Be sure to use keywords that are meaningful to your readers and that provide answers to their questions.

What keyword tools do you use and why do you like them?

23 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Blog

January 9, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Every blogger wants more people to read their blog, but not every blogger knows how to do this.

Sure, you can get readers to your blog when you have already established some notoriety for yourself, such as writing a best selling book like The 4 hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. Maybe you have somehow gotten masses of people to a website through some special offer like Zac Johnson did. Or you could be a popular blogger like John Chow who now has such wildly successful friends that they sit around discussing how they can’t live on $10,000 a month income anymore.

The question is, how do you get people to read your blog when you are first starting out and you don’t have these incredible stories to tell people?

Well, the answer is given to us by Denise Wakerman, co-founder of The Blog Squad. She has been assisting professionals and small businesses to use marketing strategies on the internet to improve their businesses.

Here are her 23 best tips to get more traffic to your blog

Post nearly every day on your blog; the more you post, the more readers you’ll have.
If you have more than one blog and it’s appropriate, cross post to drive readers to each blog
Write and submit articles to directories with links to the appropriate blog
Write and post news releases online, about onece a week, with links back to the appropriate blog
Provide links to blogs in email signatures
Comment on other blogs
Write posts with links to other blogs and mention the blogger’s name (if they’re watching Google Alerts then they know you’ve posted about them and will usually visit your blog)
Thank people who post comments via email
Put links to your blog in product than-you emails
Put links to your blog on than you pages people see when they purchase your product and services
Encourage people to subscribe to your blog in follow up email autoresponder messages
Put blog links on LinkedIn profile, MySpace profile, Facebook profile and Twitter
Put links to your blog in your ebooks
Put links to your blog in your bios
Tell people about your blog when you do presentations
Encourage people to visit your blog when they sign up for your ezine so they can get even more free info
Put a featured blog post with a link in your weekly ezine
Pull blog feeds into your Facebook profile and other social networks
Include blog links in signature blocks on forum posts
Submit your blog to all the blog directories and search engines
when appropriate, direct people to specific blog posts to answer their questions in discussion forums
If you post videos on video sharing sites, include the URL for you blog in the description
Most importantly, write informative content using keywords that will be picked up in organic searches

When planning strategies to get more traffic to your blog, be sure to make a commitment to yourself to post as frequently as possible and to provide your readers with some fresh new ideas. They’ll be glad you did.

Next post: Getting People to Comment on Your Blog Posts

A Great Idea Is Only The First Step For Your Online Profitability

January 9, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Whether you are looking to improve your blogging development, or are looking for more effective ways to monetize your website, the key to building and maintaining a site that will capture the interest and attention of the blogging community is by finding your niche.

Find and fill a unique need in a way that no other web site does. You’ll then be able to build a lasting readership among web surfers. Once you have discovered a niche, you will still have a lot to do, but finding your place in the constantly evolving blog world is the place to begin. It can be tough to distinguish your blogging web site from all of the others.

Every great blogging web site starts with a great idea, and you can’t build a successful site that will last without one. There are many great sites aimed at today’s bloggers, and competition for the attention of this growing demographic is fierce.

To make your blogging web site unique, you will need to offer something that no other site is currently offering….. or you will need to do the same thing that an already popular site does, but in a more relevant way.

One way to discover an ideal model for your blogging web site is to look at the sites that have successfully captured a blogging audience already.

Then determine how you can adapt some of these existing strategies.

You will also need to add a unique selling position to your project in order to stand apart from your competition.

The most successful websites that consistently do the best in today’s market are the sites that have the “personal touch”. The fiercely individual surfers who are bloggers are a demographic that responds best to personality, so consider how you can give your site a unique and attractive feeling by lending your own voice and sensibility to your site’s design and content.

Once you have a great idea for your site, have pinpointed a special niche that you are well equipped to fill, and have infused the site with personality, the next step is figuring out how to get the word out to bloggers.

In the long run, a great idea just isn’t enough to propel your blogging web site to success. You will need to draft a smart and realistic marketing plan in order to draw readers to your site. Once you hook a blogger, your great content will keep them coming back, but it is vital to get that first glance or your site won’t have a chance.

And, once again, the key to any online success is TRAFFIC.

Without traffic, you might as well just be writing to your Mother (which at this time of year is also a good idea).

Always be aware that traffic doesn’t just happen; but is the result of some pretty serious marketing efforts on your part.

Oh sure, the search engines will find you….eventually; and you will get some traffic from paid advertising….usually very expensive traffic.

So what works? Quickly? Most effectively? And most affordably?

You may start by asking yourself, “How did I get to this blog?”

Check back regularly to find out. Bookmarking this page right now could prove to be one of the better “get traffic” decisions you make.

Or better yet, the very bottom right hand corner of this and all of our pages contains an RSS link. Just click the button and relax. You will automatically start receiving any and all updates.

Till next time,

Fred