All Entries in the "Microblogging" Category
The Blog Writing One-Two Punch
I used to call a combination of blog writing and article writing for Internet marketers a powerful one-two punch. While it can still be a powerful marketing puglistic combination, I’ve discovered one that is even more powerful – the blog-Twitter punch.
Savvy Internet marketers have discovered that Twitter is one powerful traffic driving machine. But if you use Twitter for delivering the hard sell, it likely won’t do much for you. Twitterers who are successful at using Twitter to drive traffic to their blog then to their website are doing it by using Twitter as a reputation tool to draw followers to themselves then to drive those followers to their blog and website where they can close the sale. It’s powerful targeted marketing. Have you set up your Twitter account yet?
Will Google Introduce Real-Time Search?
It’s been rumored for awhile. Twitter will knock down Google. Google will buy Twitter. The two will marry and live happily ever after. Yada yada yada
OK, let’s get real. Loic Le Meur, founder and CEO of Seesmic, asked Larry Page what he thought about real-time search. The Page said he thought it was a good idea. Actually, it something like, “Yeah, I know, Twitter’s kicking our ass, but I need to look good so I’m going to say we’ve always needed it and now those pogues down in future product development are agreeing with me now that they see Twitter kicking our asses.”
Or something along those lines any way.
So the big question is, will Google develop a real-time search engine? Will it use semantic technology? How will its ranking algorithms be structured? Will domain age go away? Will blogs benefit?
Stay tuned. More to come.
Is Twitter A Blogger’s Best Friend?
Should you be on Twitter? Should you have a Twitter account? I think you should. But there are other reasons to use Twitter. Even if you aren’t a Twitterer yourself, you can use Twitter as a blogger to help you come up with topics to write about. This ability plus the use of Twitter to promote your blog posts is a very powerful combination.
CNET recently reported that Twitter Search is adding the ability to crawl links, making Twitter Search an actual real-time search engine. That means in addition to finding the latest tweets on a given topic you can also find the latest blog posts and other information published online by conducting a Twitter Search. While I wouldn’t abandon Google just yet, this does add a level of competition between Twitter and Google. In terms of real-time search, Twitter wins.
Of course, Twitter hasn’t officially announced the availability of this technology or started allowing users to search the entire Internet. But when it does then every blogger would benefit by using Twitter to promote their blog posts. Twitter will likely the the way that future searchers use to find information right now, the most recently published information, on a topic of interest. And you’ll want to be there.
Have You Started Your Twitter Opt-In List Yet?
In the past, savvy Internet marketers would build an e-mail subscriber list and send out periodic e-mails to that list. It was a great marketing tool because all you needed was an autoresponder, a little tool that sent out all your e-mails on a prescheduled calendar. You wrote up all your e-mails at one time, loaded them into your autoresponder and set it on autopilot. That was it.
Today, Twitter can do the same thing except that your prescheduled messages have a 140-character limit. That’s OK. You can use free tools at your disposal to make this happen. Here’s how:
- Sign up for a Twitter account
- Open up an account at Tweetlater
- Promote your Twitter account like crazy
- Sign in to your Tweetlater account and presechedule your tweets. You can schedule minutes, hours, days, or weeks ahead. Write out your tweets and schedule them at time intervals that you feel appropriate for your list.
- Build value into your Twitter list by adding tweets between scheduled messages.
That’s about it. Now you have a Twitter opt-in list that you can use for marketing purposes. Need help setting it up? Call us.
