Tag Archives: Twitter

How to Build and Drive Website Traffic

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Probably the single biggest question about building websites I get is how to drive traffic. I’m not saying it’s the most important part, but it’s definitely key. Content is king, sure, but if you don’t have traffic, you could be pouring your heart out to a wall. Really what every website wants is quality, converting, long-lasting traffic in high volumes.

There are essentially four ways to drive to your website, which are: search engines, direct traffic, referral links, and your ‘list’. I’m going to teach you how each of those things work on an intermediate level and what their value is compared to the others. I’ll be covering some of the more detailed finer points of these traffic sources in the future. This is basically a primer for what is to come.

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Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 3

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Get social.

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your blog, it’s time to get engaged.  You have great content and you’re tracking your visitors. Now you need to get out to the community and interact. If you’re focusing on the gaming niche, do things like hit up gaming forums and talk about the games you’re playing. Don’t blatantly advertise your blog. Just put it in your signature. People will click on it, I promise.

Be creative when you’re baiting people to come visit your site. Back on gaming: if you’re playing, why not set things up to do live casts of whatever you’re playing. People can interact with you while you’re trying games out and that entices users to visit and subscribe. You can take the archived video and turn them into posts later.

Commitment

12 hours or more.

Constantly be Producing Content

Back to that content thing. You’ll most likely see this every week for the rest of the series and then beyond. This is the groundwork and foundation that your website rests on. Without nice, high quality content people won’t have a reason to visit. Try to vary things up a bit. I have three major topics I focus on with mine: diet, exercise, and motivation. I try to hit at least one a week, and never three of the same one in a row.

Twitter

Search.Twitter.com is a powerful tool to interact. You can use this to find out what people are talking about in your niche(s) and correspond with them. You want to be spending at least an hour a day doing this. If you’re not an expert, use it to find experts and ask questions. You can also aggregate news stories in your niche that you find. This will provide value to your followers as well.

There are some more advanced ways to interact with Twitter that I won’t go into here. There are all sorts of things you can do, like setting up bots to aggregate information for you to using services to respond to high volumes of followers. I just want you to know that they are out there and I might cover them in the future.

Facebook

You should definitely have a fan page for your blog. You can do one of two things: if you have brand awareness already you can just create a page for your blog; if you don’t, you can create a page about the niche for your blog. What does that mean? It means that if you’re in the gaming niche and you blog is: MyGamingSite.com you could either make a fan page called: 1) MyGamingSite.com or 2) Playing Video Games. The latter will attract more likes from people that don’t know who you are.

You can then leverage that population to advertise your site. When you reach a higher level of traffic, you can create a new fan page for the same blog and name it whatever the site is. That fan page will be much more targeted and convert better when you’re soliciting your fans, followers, and users. You should spend at least an hour a day conversing with people on Facebook and creating awareness of your pages.

Problems I Had Last Week

I didn’t really have any problems last week. I did change my mind about some plugins, etc. That was mostly a function of response to the post I did about plugins. That wasn’t anything major. I’m mostly talking about plugins that added widgets that could easily be HTML in a text widget. For example: Feedburner subscription boxes.

How are things going so far?

Please let me know if this was useful to you and how things are going. I’m truly interested in helping you do this and want to help you along the way.

Earthquake Shakes Toronto and Twitter

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Ok, so Toronto just had an earthquake ( June 23, 2010 at 1:45 ).  I don’t really know what the details are yet, but I can give updates.  That’s not what is interesting to me, so much as the speed at which I was able to figure out what happened.  I was able to figure out where and when it was about 5 minutes after it happened.  The speed at which we can get information these days is astounding.  I felt the ground shake and immediately did a Google search and found all sorts of relevant results – most of which were from twitter.

I think that for breaking information, the Internet is an amazing place to ween data, but to get trusted information, classic journalism is still king, albeit not for too much longer.  What do you think?

In an emergency situation like an earthquake, would you go to twitter to report it?

Update: From what I can tell, it was a 5.5 magnitude on the Ontario/Quebec Border

Pros and Cons of URL Shortening Services

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URL Shortening services have become all the rage recently, especially with the character limitations on twitter.  They have their advantages, but also have disadvantages.  Those disadvantages become readily apparent as a web developer, affiliate, or Internet marketer.  URL shortening services.

Pros

  • Making your URLs shorter. The biggest advantage to using these services is their Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
  • Masking your URL. This can be advantageous if you want to hide the fact that you’re linking to an affiliate offer.  That might also be considered a little gray or black hat.
  • Tracking clicks is possible with some providers. This can be useful for tracking the effectiveness of campaigns or specific mentions of things.  You can have multiple shortened URLs point to a single place with different sources, allowing you to track click data.
  • You don’t have to manage the shortening software or hosting yourself. For people that aren’t technically inclined, especially with web programming, this can be a major advantage.

Cons

  • If the URL shortening service goes out of business you’re screwed. This is especially true if it was a popular link, or it took a lot of work to get the link listed where a lot of people can see it.
  • They can see a lot of your data. If someone at a shortening service gets wise to what you’re doing, especially in the affiliate world, they can track a lot of your data and what you’re doing and mimic it, reducing your sales.  I’ve had this happen personally before, and it really sucks.
  • People don’t always trust shortened URLs. I find that if I can use a shortened URL that makes sense to a person behind my own trusted domain, I see about 15% more clicks.  I’m actually in the process right now of adjusting all of my plug-ins that do automated posting to my personal URL shortener.
  • Shortened URLs carry no SEO value. This is an important one.  You aren’t getting credit for your links when you use a shortening service, they are.  SEO credit doesn’t carry through the service because it usually isn’t a 301 redirect.

What do you do?

It’s hard to decide what you’re going to do, knowing these things.  I’ve found that it’s best to use your own URL shortening service.  There is a plugin for WordPress called Self Shortener.  It can be automatically installed via the plug-in manager or downloaded from their website.  This specific service doesn’t track clicks, but I’ve modified mine to do so.  There is also the open source project by Gentle Source for an installable URL shortener.

Why [the] Web Won’t be Nirvana

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Cliffor Stoll is an astr0nomer and author.

Here is a Newsweek article published in 1995 by Clifford Stoll (<- Wikipedia). The original article is at Newsweek Here.  I’ve modified it to make more sense:

After two three and a half decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker spammer or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers (goToMeeting), interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms (Wikipedia). They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities (goToMeeting). Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems (eBay, Amazon, etc.). And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic (see: Obama and Twitter).

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper (New York Times, Newsweek, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher (College External Degree Programs and Online Degrees) and no computer network will change the way government works (Any .gov website makes getting info and forms a lot easier).

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet (Twitter), a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly (Twitter). The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen (Everyone Listens). How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc (iTunes, Audible, Kindle, iPad). At best, it’s an unpleasant chore (Environmentally friendly, easy, and you can do it while driving): the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can‘t tote that laptop iPad or Smart Phone to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet (hehe). Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data Google indexed, relevant data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking With volunteer editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland utopia of unfiltered relevant data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805, Search time, 5.7 seconds). Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes seconds to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. Wikipedia was first and had the date in less that four words. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.” Fail Whale.

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30 million. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult easy to use in classrooms and require extensive almost no teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? Yes I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals.(eBay, Amazon, etc.) We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more fractions of the business in an afternoon entire lifetime than the entire Internet Amazon handles in a month hour? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t (PayPal) –the network is missing has a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople (Affiliates).

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate connect us from to one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway,” to be published by Doubleday in April.

The Twitter API

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I’ve been messing with the Twitter API for the first time in the last few hours, and I’ve learned a TON.  I know – I’m jumping on the bandwagon late, but oh well.  I managed to create a script to retweet “stuff” based on the search functionality and I made a script to automatically follow people that post specific things.  I also managed to get my account suspended in like 2 hours due to suspicious activity – whoops.  I guess you live, you learn.  Basically everything for status updates and following uses CURL, which looks a little something like this:

<?php
 $username = "<username>";
 $password = "<password>"; t t
 $message = "<message content>";
 $url = '<API URL>';
 $curl_handle = curl_init();
 curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
 curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
 curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
 curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$message");
 curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
 $buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
 curl_close($curl_handle);
?>

If you’re looking for more info on how to use twitter, check out this eSeries.  It’s a good resource.

So, have questions?  Let me know.  I’m hoping to do a twitter series soon!

Bill Gates is on Twitter

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Oddly, I find it somewhat amusing that Bill Gates (@billgates) is getting into twitter so late in the game. Either way, as of right now, he has almost 100,000 followers in just over seven hours. I find that truly amazing, especially since Ashton Kutcher was so happy to make it to a million, but it took him forever.

I’m following him, and finding it interesting that he’s tweeted to Ryan Seacrest half of the time (twice).  Interesting.  I think maybe the catalyst for him was the tragedy in Haiti – which by the way, you should donate to right now – even if you already have.

Anyways, it’ll be interesting to see what he tweets about.  What do you think of this whole thing?  Twitter? Bill Gates?  I’m interested.

The Internet – A Small Town in Cyberspace

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Internet Cafe

Users at an internet cafe in China

The internet is a community like any other town in the world.  It has people, transportation, communication, media, and many other features of actual cities and towns.  The people that spend their time working and playing online have developed relationships with others in a way that people become friends in real life (I hate saying “in real life” too, because despite some arguments The Internet IS “real life”.  It just takes place in a different locale – anyways, I digress).

Transportation

Google is the backbone of Internet transportation, serving as the largest central hub for directing traffic.  There are other modes of transportation such as MSN, Yahoo, or the once defunct, rising once again Ask.com.  Unlike our physical world, we can transport ourselves directly to a new address.

We can also move fluidly from one website to another – each link becoming a road, moving away from where we were last.  I suppose some peoples’ goal would be to get as many roads leading to their house or place of business.  Others may even charge a toll to use their roads (subscription services).

Friends & Communication

The amazing thing about this new world is that the barrier for entry to communicate is extremely low.  Anyone can get their 15 minutes of fame by creating the next most popular viral video.  We can build relationships with people that we have never met in person before.  People even work for businesses from the other side of the world without ever setting foot in their physical offices.

We can build, maintain, and document our relationships with others on our websites, through Facebook, or through a much lesser known standard: XFN.  Sharing information with friends in our community is extremely easy – and almost overwhelming at times.  Many people blog, and those blogs can be aggregated to one place through RSS, putting so much information at our fingertips.

We talk through chat, web conferencing, and internet telephony like Skype.  Any person can stand at their podium on streaming sites like USTREAM or Justin.tv and talk to their viewers, not unlike a person standing at a podium in Central Park.  People can even get together for a quick soccer game in our virtual community.

Media

The new newspaper is Twitter and the new televisions are YouTube and Hulu.  Social media is adding new dimensions to media and news is being reported and shared at alarming speeds.  I find it amazing how quickly an Amber Alert can permeate Twitter even if it’s fake.

It’s interesting to see how traditional media is still having trouble keeping up and people that can adapt are taking advantage of that gap.  Internet performance marketers all over the world are stepping up and representing huge corporations and usurping advertising dollars from the traditional power houses.  This new media is so enticing for business, because compensation is based entirely on performance – much like 100% commission sales people.  No, it’s not like that.  It is that.  Businesses ALWAYS have an unlimited budget for positive returns on ROI.

So what other ways does the Internet seem like a small town to you?  or a big town?

January 2009 Contest: Twitterlicious

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Description

Every month, I do a contest of sorts for free shirts from shirt.woot.  This month I want to focus on twitter.  I will be choosing a winner the first Monday in February.  When I choose a winner, I will purchase 4 woot shirts of their choice for them.  Official rules are below.

Rules

I’m keeping in simple this time.

You must follow me on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/jtgraphic.

You need to tweet and include the following information:

You must leave a comment here the first time you tweet.  There’s no need to do it ever time.  Leave your twitter username in the comment too, so I know how to track you down.

Each tweet is one entry in the contest, but you are only allowed one entry per day, so please don’t spam it.

If you’re interested in joining these contests as an ongoing thing, just subscribe to my blog via the email form.