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Twitter RSS Feeds

You can publish your tweets via an RSS feed. Simply log into your Twitter account, and scroll to the very bottom of your profile page where you will see a RSS button available.

Click on the link to load the page where you will be given the option to subscribe to the feed using a variety of RSS readers including Google, Live Bookmarks and Bloglines.

Browser Plugins

There are also Firefox plugins designed for use with Twitter that make it even easier to stay up to date. As you can see, the Twitter community is consistently expanding and as it does, additional applications and programs will be available, so it’s an exciting time to join the community.

TweetBar: One of the most popular plugins that displays Tweets within a sidebar in your browser. Works with Flock as well.
http://www.mikedemers.net/projects/tweetbar

TwitterBar:
http://spatialviews.com/twitterbar
This app makes it easy to post tweets based on current websites that you are browsing. You can easily add notes to the websites that you showcase.

TwitterFox: Displays a pop-up notification when new tweets are posted on the Twitter network.
http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/TwitterFox

As you can see, Twitter is far more extensive than what it may appear at first glance, and as the popularity of Twitter grows, so will all of the options available to its users.

Since Twitter is open source, it allows developers to create all sorts of valuable applications and utilities that will continue to improve the Twitter community.

Explore the different tools that are available and put them to good use for your Twitter marketing campaign.

From instant website updates, to easy management of Tweets, there are so many possibilities to make Twitter work for you, regardless of what niche market or industry you are involved with.

It is not just blogs that are a hive of activity these days but social networking sites as well. Microblogging with Twitter has suddenly become huge.

There are many things that you can do to set yourself apart from all of the other Internet Marketers attempting to use Twitter to grow their lists or attract new customers.

Aside from ensuring that you remain active within the Twitter community, you should spend some time developing a reputation amongst those that are following you.

Instead of posting links to your website or blog only to send them to a landing page for a new product, write a few articles on current news topics, gossip, controversial or comedic subjects and entertain your followers so that they begin paying more attention to your tweets.

Some of the most successful Twitter based marketers are savvy enough to know that if they post tweets that consist of current hot topics, people will notice them and essentially check out their profile to find out more about them.

The objective is to passively but consistently advertise your websites via the Twitter community but take a different approach by prompting your followers to follow your links by enticing them with interesting information.

Once they are there, they are bound to take a look around and you will most likely generate a ton of repeat visitors this way.

Using Twitter to grow a list of responsive and targeted subscribers is also exceptionally simple, If done correctly. First, create a squeeze page exclusively for Twitter followers and be sure to thoroughly explain exactly what they will receive in exchange for subscribing.

Offer them a free report or product to warm them up, and promote it via your tweets by emphasizing that your offer is available only to fellow Twitter members.

Be sure that your product is either extremely focused on your niche market, or on the contrary, extremely generic where it would appeal to a broad range of visitors.

Either way, offering something exclusive to Twitter members will yield a better response and show that you are interested in offering something back to the community.

Just like with every other social community, your marketing campaign needs to be tweaked and offered in a very different format that caters to their desire to network with other like-minded individuals.

This is why people join social communities, to make friends and from a business perspective, to meet other people to possibly joint venture or network with. They do not join social communities to be sold to, and you need to remember this so you can approach it from a different, less aggressive angle.

If you have ever heard of link bait before, you know that these are pages set up to draw attention based on current events.

Setting your permalinks correctly will help you rank better because they will contain relevant keywords based on the different page content that you create.

Click on “Permalinks” from within the “Settings” area.

Click on the “Custom” option and paste the following into the text box (double check for accuracy to ensure it matches with no extra spaces)

/%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to:

/%category%/%postname%/.

Doing this will transform your URL’s into search engine friendly ones, and will also include the titles of each of your posts and pages, while instantly formatting them correctly.

For example, if you created a post with the title “Circus Clowns”, the URL to that post would look like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/circus-clowns.html

Important Note:
If you had already created posts, you will want to ensure that those who visit your older URL’s are instantly redirected to your new pages. You can use the free “Redirection Plugin” to ensure that people are not directed to nonexistent pages. You only need to do this if you have already published content on your blog.

Redirection Plugin: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

The next step is to ensure that your blog is included within search engines like Google, but also blog based communities such as Technorati.

In order to do this, click on the Privacy tab and click the link that indicates your blog will be visible to everyone, including search engines.

Click “Save Changes” to complete this step.

Let’s take a look at the options under the “Discussion” tab.

You will want to ensure that the first three options are enabled, so that other blogs are notified whenever you link to them, and that you are allowing pingbacks and trackbacks.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:
1)Person A posts something on his blog.

2)Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback-enabled blogs.

3)Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post.

In this way, all editorial control over posts rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient).

The automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.

Trackbacks are a way to notify blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks, so no other action necessary.

Whenever you begin to write a post in Wordpress, you will see the option to provide a trackback to another blog, in the event your post is related to another website.This is essential in marketing your blog.

Do you write interesting articles that your readers can’t
wait to finish reading? Or do you write traditional, boring
articles; articles that your readers may not even finish
reading?

If you answered traditional boring articles or even a
collection of them both, you may want to reexamine the way that you write. After all, it isn’t a secret that readers actually like to enjoy what they read. That is why it is extremely important that you write captivating content.

As it was mentioned above, the subject of your articles isn’t as important as the way that your articles are written, but it is still important. For that reason, you will want to write articles that interest your readers.

The best way to come up with these article subjects is to use the internet to your advantage. After all, the internet is likely where your articles will be published. To find “hot topics,” to write about, you will want to use keyword research tools, search engines, news websites, and shopping websites.

Many use articles to create back-links to their websites.
These back-links are used increase website traffic. The only problem is that many article directories only allow links at the end of an article. This means for you to benefit from article distribution and back-linking, your readers must make it to the end of your article.

After you have created your article, you will need to proofread it. If you find your content dry, dull, or boring, there is a good chance that your readers will as well.

An article that is easy to read is also important. You can
write a captivating article, but if it difficult to read, it
won’t do you any good. When it comes to easy to read articles, grammar is an important component.

Whether you are planning on selling your articles, using them for your own personal use, or submitting them to article directories, you need to take the time to proofread your articles.

Many internet users claim that the number one turn off is articles that are poorly written. There is no quicker way to lose a reader than to have an article that is poorly proofread.

As search engine optimization has grown more popular, so has the use of unethical search engine optimization. What are these “black hat” techniques? Why are they so bad? Better yet, what can you, as a web site owner, do to legitimately increase your search engine ranking with a blog or other website?

So what are “Black Hat” techniques?

“Black Hat” techniques are unethical techniques that some site owners use to get their site listed on search engines. Here is a list of three common “Black Hat” techniques
you should avoid if you want to please search engine spiders.

1. Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the overuse of keywords in a piece of content. Generally, this is repeating the same keywords over and over just to achieve a higher search engine ranking.
2. Invisible text. Quite a few cheap sites use this tactic, which involves making keywords in a font that is the same color as the background, so that readers can’t see the massive amounts of keywords, but search engine spiders can.
3. Doorway pages. These are pages that regular visitors cannot see, but search engine spiders can. They are done to trick the search engines so that the site gets a higher ranking.

Why are “Black Hat” techniques bad?

They’re bad because they go against the rules set forth by
search engines.

Do “Black Hat” techniques work?

These techniques only work temporarily. Eventually the search engine spiders catch on and your site is permanently banned from being listed.

Fortunately, there are multiple techniques that you can use to get your site legitimately listed high on search engines.

Keywords

Natural use of keywords is perfectly fine. By natural, we mean keywords that are spread throughout a document in a way that isn’t blatant.

You should take a few minutes to identify some keywords that are relevant to your site. Then, begin to write the content. Try to incorporate the keywords you have picked out in a natural way throughout the content.

Ideally, if your content is 600 words, you’ll want to
use the main keyword between 6-18 times, which is a keyword density of 1-3%(keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the total words of a document).

Linking

Linking is a very common practice between web sites. How do you do it? Well, you ask a site that is relevant to yours to post a link to your site on their site.

How does this help your listing? Well, each time a search engine spider visits a page with a link to your site on it, the spider will then visit your site.

You’re a blogger and are constantly hearing about pinging… The thing is, you don’t know what it is and what it can do for your blog. I did not know either to begin with.
Well that’s fine because a lot of bloggers don’t quite
understand pinging.

What is pinging?

When a blog is pinged, it essentially tells a web blog tracking system that the blog has been updated. So, pinging is the process of telling these tracking services that a site has been updated.

So how does pinging work?

A ping service scans regularly blogs for updates. Whenever there is a new update for a particular blog, that is reported back to the pinging service’s site.

You can almost think of ping services being just like
search engine spiders—both scan sites looking for information, and both report that information back. The difference is, a ping service only reports back new blog
posts.

Why is pinging useful for my blog?

Pinging, in effect, tells people that there is a new blog
posting available. Those who are loyal followers of your blog will see the ping and want to visit your blog.
Pinging helps to increase your traffic because it tells
people when your blog is updated.

Those who visit sites with pinging services will see this information in the form of a scroll on the left or right side, or top of the page. The scroll is usually in XML format and typically includes the title and URL of your blog, as well as the date and time of the update.

Who offers pinging?

The answer is, there are several pinging services available
which you can use to have your blog pinged.

Weblogs.com

Weblogs.com is probably the most well-known pinging service. Weblogs.com monitors sites for updates and then pings whenever there is an update to report. Virtually every blog software is available to use Weblogs.

Yahoo’s Blo.gs

Another popular pinging service. This one is offered by Yahoo and has a built-in integration with movable type and other tools. One cool thing about this service is that it offers the ability to give out updates via Instant Messenging services like AOL and ICQ.

It is a direct pinging service, so those who sign
up for subscriptions to your blog will be sent an email anytime your blog is updated.

Blogrolling.com

Blogrolling allows its bloggers to manage their
blogrolls(updates) through a web-based interface. Recently
updated blogs are also highlighted on Blogrolling’s web site.
Data is automatically retrieved from other sites like
blogger.com and weblogs.com every 5 minutes. Search on the site first for your URL before signing it up.

Technorati

Available at http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, Technorati is another service that pings blogs. It gets its data from a variety of places and is definitely a site you should go to for blog pinging.

These are just 4 of the many different blog pinging services
available. A quick search on Yahoo or Google will reveal many other possible blog pinging services to use for your blog. It is best to sign up for as many as you possibly can to ensure that your blog is well-pinged. A well-pinged blog will definitely help your blog attract more visitors. So sign up for as many as possible and watch your blog traffic increase.

There are countless methods that you can use to generate fresh traffic to your blogs. Before we begin however, you should understand what RSS means and how important it is when generating traffic to your blog.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of delivering content on a regular basis to news sites, online publishers, and other blogs.

Bloggers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed that is made available to anyone interested in becoming a subscriber.

The more subscribers you have, the more people are reading your updates and visiting your website.

The great thing about RSS is that you do not have to create it manually, it’s built into the Wordpress system, and each time you create a blog post it will be added to your RSS feed.

However, In order to offer your visitors the ability to subscribe to your RSS feed, you will want to subscribe to a free service such as http://www.FeedBurner.com

Feedburner, owned and managed by Google.com, is one of the most popular methods of serving up your RSS feeds through visitor subscriptions.

In addition, Feedburner provides additional information including stats relating to your blog. You can just log into your Feedburner account and look at your stats and charts.

If you manage multiple blogs, you can create and track feeds for all of them with FeedBurner.

Feedburner also makes it extremely easy to encourage your visitors to become RSS subscribers by offering you a piece of code that once inserted into your blog, will offer a RSS subscription box, enabling your visitors to instantly subscribe to your feed.

Once you have created your Feedburner account, you will want to locate the code that allows your readers to use your new Feedburner feed.

You can do this by using the Feedburner plugin available to Wordpress users running self hosted blogs.

http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=78483

Or you can add it to your sidebar manually, by copy and pasting your Feedburner code into your blogs sidebar.php page to make it available to everyone who visits your blog.

Title Tags

Modifying the title tags within the pages that you will create directly affects the SEO of your entire blog.

To ensure that these are set up correctly you will need to modify the header.php page associated with the current theme you are using.

Note: Some of the newer themes are already optimized for SEO, however it’s important to check to ensure that they are before you begin to use the theme.

To do this, click on DESIGN and then click on Theme Editor.

You will see a listing of files associated with your current theme. Look for the one titled “header.php” and click on it to load the code into the editing window.

In order to edit any pages of your theme, you will have to change the permissions of the file by logging into your FTP, clicking on the header.php page and setting the permissions to 777, so it can be writeable (changed).

Once you have made the changes, you can set the permissions back to their default settings.

Within this header.php file, you want to replace the code that is contained within the tag with the following:

elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: ";
echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?>

Like I mentioned previously, check the current page before modifying it as it may already be optimized this way.

Click “Save” to apply your changes.

There are a few things to keep in mind when you are entering in titles for your blog posts and pages.

Google only shows the first 70 characters of your title within search results, so be sure to include your most important keywords within each title, stripping away any clutter.

You should also focus on using different page titles for each post, and avoid using the same keyword at the start of every page title as well.

Mix it up and be creative with your titles while remaining consistent and taking measures to ensure that each of your titles directly describes the content of each particular page.

Customizing Wordpress

Before you launch your blog and make it available to the public, you will want to customize the way it looks as well as the way it functions.

We can do this by uploading a professional theme, and activating it from within our blogs admin area.

There are also a handful of plugins that I strongly suggest when optimizing your blog for best performance in search engines and blog networks.

To start, you can choose a free blog theme from any of the popular template directories online.

While paying a designer to create a customized blog theme will certainly help you gain a bit of edge over the competition, it can be quite costly, so until your blog is generating an income for you, you can always use a free theme, that is clean and well designed.

One of my favorite places to look for themes is on fellow blogger sites, rather than the popular theme directories.

The reason I tend to seek out smaller networks showcasing free templates is for the obvious reason, that fewer bloggers are likely to be using these themes.

The more common a theme is, the less appealing your blog will be since those visiting it would have seen the design on another site before.

One thing that many new bloggers tend to overlook is the unique factor.

Here are a few of the places that I scour for new blog theme releases. Some of these sites offer affordable pay-to-use themes as well, which can be a wise investment and a lot cheaper than paying for a custom design.

http://www.BlogOhBlog.com

Explore the archives for previous releases that are hidden away. Fewer bloggers will notice them, and the quality of Blog Oh Blogs themes is very impressive and easy to work with.

http://www.WPSalon.com

http://www.BloggingPro.com (search the archives)

http://www.BlogsTheme.com

If you are good with editing CSS and HTML, you could choose to purchase one of the more popular premium themes such as the widely used “Revolution” theme by Brian Gardner, but I only suggest using these themes if you have the ability to customize them so they don’t look like the thousands of others using them.

Setting Up Your Twitter Account

In order to begin using Twitter to broadcast your messages, attract new website visitors and potential customers, you will need to create a free Twitter account.

Here’s how to set it up:

Visit http://www.Twitter.com

Click on the “Join For Free” link to get started.

I do suggest using your real name on Twitter if you are comfortable with doing that, or another name that represents your brand, website or blog.

Once you have created your account you will be able to log in immediately.

The first thing you should do is create your Twitter profile.
To begin, click on the “Settings” link in the navigation bar on the top right corner of your Twitter account.

On the profile page you see various options including “Account, Password, Devices, Notices, Picture and Design”.

To begin, click on the Account tab. You should take a few minutes go o over the various options and fill out your account information.

This includes:

Name: Once again, I suggest entering in your real name so that people can easily recognize who you are.

Username: Whatever you choose here will become part of your unique Twitter link that directs people to your front page so they can choose to follow you or read your current updates.

Example: http://www.Twitter.com/YOUR-USERNAME

Since your username is part of your twitter link, choose carefully!

Email Address: Enter in a valid email address. This will not be visible to your followers.

Time Zone: Select the time zone applicable to your location. This is important if you want to read notices according to your actual time.

More Info URL: This link will appear on your profile page so be sure to choose a valid URL that will direct people to your website or blog. It will count as a back-link to your website.

Online Bio: Write a few lines that describe who you are and what you do. Your bio page is limited to only 160 characters.

Location: You can choose to leave this blank or enter in your country or city.

Language: Choose your preferred language.

If you select to keep your updates private, only people that you have manually approved will be able to follow your updates.

If you plan to use Twitter to promote your websites, blog and general activity, you will want to leave this box un-checked.

The next tab on the top is marked “Password”. If you ever wish to update your password for security purposes, this Is where you would do it.

Twitter devices

Twitter offers the ability to receive updates via your cell phone or through Instant Messenger such as gTalk.

You can use Twitter mobile regardless where you live, but you need to ensure that you add your country code with your direct number.

You can visit the following site for help locating your country code:

http://www.consumer.att.com/global/english/country_codes.html

Once you have entered in your mobile number, you will need to confirm it before you can receive mobile updates.

The verification code will be sent to your phone number, and you will need to enter it into the site before your phone is activated.You should also check with your service provider to determine ifany charges will be applied.

For more blogging success tips on twitter and microblogs, visit
BlogSuccessmachine