ChirpCity – find others using Twitter in your town

April 1, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 8 Comments
Filed under: Business Networking, Social Networking, Twitter 

I am always looking for others in my area who are using Twitter and other social networking tools.

There aren’t many people in Murphy, NC who use the service, but a few more are coming online every month.

Today, I found a new tool at ChirpCity.com that helps find other local Twitterers.

Here’s the ChirpCity page for Murphy, NC. I found a few new people to follow there. I’ve bookmarked this page and will revisit it regularly.

If you see this and you are interested in Murphy, NC, you are invited to join us at our new Murphy, NC online community.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Is Twitter a microblog or a party line?

January 1, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 28 Comments
Filed under: Business Networking, Communities, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Telephone, Twitter, Western North Carolina 

I have discovered that there are very few people in Murphy, NC who are using Twitter.

As a result, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I can educate my friends and neighbors in this little mountain town to use free Internet services to promote their activities, interests, events, organizations, and businesses.

I’ve experimented with websites, blogs, forums, communities, and more, and none have gained traction, yet. Perhaps I’m just a bit ahead of time on this, but it may also just be a matter of finding an easy-to-understand analogy that will attract people to creating new conversations online.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we’ve been trained for decades that promotion and advertising are mostly one-way announcements and not two-way conversations.

To promote an event, we buy advertising on the radio or newspapers. If our area and event are big enough, we may even promote it on TV.

These are examples of one-way announcements. We tell, and hope someone listens, hears, and does what we want.

With the widespread use of the Internet, however, this is changing.

Now, we can have conversations, inexpensively or free, and these can lead to that most-wanted form of promotion, word-of-mouth recommendations.

Those of us who practically live online don’t really understand that most people don’t spend all their time thinking about websites, blogs, forums, social networking, and all the other things that we devote our time and energy to on a daily basis.

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I asked someone for his email address and he wasn’t really sure. Now, I don’t know about you, but my email address is so important to me that it has been indelibly imprinted onto my brain.

I’ve spent years making it easy for people to email me. In fact, I get hundreds of emails every day and usually send a dozen or two. How could I not know my email address? It seems almost impossible.

Yet, many people don’t depend upon the Internet for carrying on conversations and talking about what is important to them.

I can spend a half-hour or so writing a blog entry or a new web page about something that is important to me, and I can make it available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. It’s practically free.

Even when I consider how much I pay annually for domain names, webhosting, email autoresponders, page rotators, banner rotators, and other similar services, it all adds up to less than a couple of thousand dollars per year. How much newspaper or radio advertising can I buy for that?

A blog post or web page has an indefinite life-span. I know that I’m making sales from information I put on the web years ago, not just from what I wrote yesterday or today.

Currently, a search on Google for “John Dilbeck” returns over 8,000 results and “johndilbeck” returns over 35,000 results, so there is a lot of information out there created by me or talking about me. This is just a small sample of all that I’ve put online over the last several years.

A radio ad has a life span of seconds. A newspaper ad has a life span of days. Even most promotional products have life spans of weeks or months.

What is the life span of a tweet on Twitter?

That’s hard to say.

If we’re online and watching our Twitter stream, it seems as if most tweets have a life span of seconds, almost like a radio spot.

But, that’s only part of the story.

Think of a major event or thing and search for it on Google. You’ll find hundreds or thousands of links to what you searched for, but you already expect that, don’t you?

Now search for it on Twitter.

Did you know that all those tweets are still available? Did you know that all the hyperlinks are preserved and are still active? Did you know that the search engines follow those links?

Want to know what I’ve been saying on Twitter, or what people have been saying to, or about, me?

Does that give you a different idea about the life span of a tweet?

Now, what happens if we take this knowledge and use it to try to build a conversation.

That’s one of the things I’m going to be doing in 2009.

This year, I’m going to concentrate on two things:

1. affiliate marketing

2. promoting the people, events, and organizations in Murphy, NC.

I am dramatically narrowing my focus and hope I can build higher revenue from affiliate marketing and gain better traction in promoting what’s going on in Murphy.

I’m not going to become a news organization. I’ll leave that to the newspapers and radio stations in town. After all, I’m interested in marketing, not news.

While testing it, I’ve done it for free for several years. This year, I’ll charge reasonable rates for what I will do, and those rates will be much less than what it would cost for using traditional advertising.

Still, I like doing things for free on the Internet and I’ll help people in my community learn how to do that, too.

I think Twitter can play an important part in doing all this.

Earlier, I said that it takes a good analogy or model so that people can easily understand how to join in online conversations. Things that are simple for some of us can be confusing to others.

For example, take the idea of Twitter being a microblog. Those of us who blog every day can understand that, but if you don’t know about blogging, is it a good model to use?

You may not be an old geezer like me, but I remember when several people used the same phone line. This was called a party line. At any given time, someone may have been talking on the phone, but you never knew who was listening.

Later there were private lines and now cell phones, but in the very early days, we had party lines.

Here in Murphy, this is a good analogy to use for Twitter. Why? Because it’s an ingrained part of the local culture. There is a popular program on WKRK radio called PartyLine, and it is hosted by Bill Yonce on weekdays and Tim Radford on Saturdays.

Listeners can join the conversation by calling the program and talking to the hosts. They can chat about what’s happening, offer what they want to sell or ask for what they want to buy, or just pass the time for a few minutes. A few years ago, when Mom was healthier and still able to get around well, she would always have PartyLine playing on the radio as she worked in the kitchen.

So, for the people who are much more comfortable with offline communications, perhaps a party line is a better analogy for Twitter than is a microblog.

You can listen to whomever you chose on Twitter, so it’s not like some giant chat room. You can fine tune the group of people you listen to so that you get specifically what you want. Anyone can choose to listen to you, or not, too.

Substitute the word “follow” for “listen” and you have a good understanding of Twitter.

Then, you have to think about how these groups of followers overlap, intersect, and diverge. For example, John may follow George, but not Jane. Perhaps Jane follows John, but not George. If George tweets about something interesting, John would learn about it – potentially – but Jane probably would not. However, if John then tweets about it, he would be extending the reach of the conversation beyond George’s followers/listeners. In traditional marketing, we call this “word of mouth.”

In reality, George may tweet about it, and John may post the information on a blog, lens, forum, website, or some other presence he maintains on the web. All of this can be done in a remarkably short time, with little effort, and negligible expense.

Who knows how far the information will spread?

So, while Twitter may be thought of as a party line, it potentially has a much wider reach. It brings another meaning to the old saying, “a little birdie told me.”

Unlike a party line, however, you can’t just talk as long as you want. You are limited to short tweets of 140 characters or less. You can tweet all you want, but each one is short and generally focused.

How much does it cost? Nothing.

So how is that going to help me promote Murphy, NC?

Well, there’s the rub.

There are so many tweets every day on Twitter that a few about Murphy would easily get lost in the crowd.

That’s where the #MurphyNC hashtag comes in.

By tagging all tweets that are specifically about something or someone in Murphy with that code, it is easy to search for them. It is also relatively easy to syndicate those search results.

Currently, there are few tweets with that hashtag, but I’ll be working to change that, over time.

This morning, I am testing syndicating these #MurphyNC tweets on my Squidoo lens for Murphy, NC 28906.

It didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped.

I could not get the lens to show the feed, so I ran it through Feedburner.com and created a new feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MurphyNC-TwitterSearch

Squidoo can read and show that feed, with no problem. I wonder if it is because the Twitter search feed is in Atom format rather than RSS.

Another problem to consider if you want to syndicate hashtag searches on your lenses is the fact that Twitter uses relative anchor addresses in the content, instead of absolute URLs. This means that the #MurphyNC link in the content will not link directly to the Twitter search page. This will give you unintended results, depending upon where you syndicate it.

To get around this problem, I’m syndicating headlines only on my Squidoo lenses. If someone clicks the headline, it will take him/her to the status address for that particular tweet. Since this is shown on the Twitter domain, the hashtag link in the content will point to the right place.

It will be impossible to syndicate a real-time conversation on Squidoo, because the minimum update time for an RSS feed is 30 minutes for a Squidoo RSS module. At this point, that’s not a problem, because I’m the only person doing it and all my #MurphyNC tweets have been tests up until now. However, if it ever gets popular, this would not be a workable solution for syndicating the feed.

Although doable, this may not be the best way to syndicate a conversation on Squidoo.

I’m open for suggestions, because this is something I want to do on multiple lenses, as well as several blogs and websites.

Why am I talking about this on a blog that is about affiliate marketing?

This question is easier to answer. It’s because readers of this blog are generally more technically sophisticated and are used to online interactions. It’s also because I earn money from affiliate marketing even on my local pages for Murphy, NC.

And, Twitter is already helping me earn from my affiliate marketing efforts on my Squidoo lenses and blog posts.

This has been a long-winded way of asking your opinion of how to describe using Twitter to talk about a town or city. Is it a microblog or a party line, or something else entirely?

What model or analogy would you suggest to make it easier for offline-oriented people to join in online discussions using Twitter? Do you think Twitter is really effective for this?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Small towns, social networks, and communicating

December 28, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 14 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Business Networking, Communities, Social Networking 

During this time between Christmas and the new year, I’m doing a lot of thinking about what I plan to accomplish in 2009.

I am narrowing my focus and will be concentrating on just two areas: 1. affiliate marketing and 2. promoting businesses in Murphy, NC.

That means I will stop doing many of the things I’ve been doing. I’ll stop blogging on a lot of different topics and I’ll close down blogs and websites in January that are not related to my two primary areas of interest.

It also means that I’m going to be much more active in my community than I’ve been able to be for the last several years – both online and offline. Yes, that means that I’m actually going to leave my cave and talk to real people in the real world, again.

I really love living near Murphy, NC. I love the people, the small town atmosphere, the scenery, and being away from the big cities.

I don’t like how hard it can be to meet new people and to earn a living here. Sometimes, I think the two go hand in hand. In order to earn a living, perhaps new people in our area need a way to tap into the changing social networks and to make friends with people who know where the jobs are and can hire them.

Today, I was reading an interesting article at SocialMediaToday.com, How Small Towns are Social Networks, and it sparked some ideas I wanted to share with the author.

I agree with her observation that small towns are social networks and the photo of the bulletin board with all the business cards reminds me of several similar boards in Murphy.

I was wondering how one can best combine the offline networks of bulletin boards and newspapers with the online networks of Twitter, Facebook, and local portals and forums.

If the businesses are mostly promoting offline and the potential customers and employees are increasingly going online, how do we combine these networks so that it is easy to connect and to get to know each other?

Maybe I’m a bit uncommon as compared to most of the people here in western North Carolina. Instead of reaching for the yellow pages to find a phone number, I search on Google. Only if I can’t find what I’m looking for online would I consider going offline.

Yet, I believe most of the people in this area approach this type of information gathering first from the offline world, and many of them never go online for local searching.

I don’t have any data to back this up, it’s just a feeling from having talked to people.

With the price of offline advertising going up and online advertising going down, how long will it be before the businesses bring most of their marketing activities online?

How long will it be before the residents of Cherokee County take their local information gathering activities online, primarily?

How can I position myself and my services to help put these two groups together so we can all benefit?

As I said, I had some ideas I wanted to share with the author of the blog I was reading, so I was ready to comment and saw the following: “To Comment on this post, you must first register. Click here”

Sigh…

I really had something I wanted to say, so I registered, something I am doing much less of now than I used to do.

Over an hour later, I’m still waiting for the authentication email so I can post my comment, and you know what? I’ve lost interest. Even if I get the email now, I won’t bother activating my account just to post a comment.

Yes, I was a hot prospect then, but I’ve gone completely cold, now.

I even clicked on the link to the original post, but it, too, requires registration. That link takes me to Reddit, and that’s not what I’m looking for. I want a way to contact her directly.

Wait a second, that’s not accurate. Over an hour ago, I wanted a way to contact her directly and carry on the conversation. Now, not so much.

No more. I’m no longer interested.

I think back to just a few months ago when I changed my primary blog to this one with the main goal of making it easier for my friends and visitors to join in the conversations by commenting. It is working out very well, and I’m making friends with fellow bloggers around the world.

I would have enjoyed exchanging ideas with the author of the article I mentioned, but I can’t even see her profile without registering.

To top it off, there are links to the Twitter profiles of three people in the article who are referenced only indirectly, but there is no link to her Twitter profile that I can see. I did a search on Google, and I think I found her Twitter profile, but the photo is different and I’m not sure it’s her.

So, while she makes some good points about social networking, the way I found her has been time-consuming and frustrating.

It turns out that I followed the URL on her Twitter profile to her website and confirmed that she was the author of the article. To her credit, her own blog has links to her email address, Twitter profile, and Skype accounts. Not only that, but the article makes it easy to comment and she even uses CommentLuv. See it here: How Small Towns are Social Networks

Had I found the article on her actual blog instead of a syndicated version of it on SocialMediaToday.com, I would have been much more likely to have joined in the conversation and I would not have felt so frustrated trying to find a way to communicate with her.

Now, I’ve opened up at least one door by following her on Twitter.

Perhaps I’ll even find the motivation to share my thoughts with her on her blog – if I can remember what they were.

In the long run, what will I remember about this experience? Will it be her insights on local networking or will it be the frustration of trying to communicate?

So, how does this apply to affiliate marketing?

What are you doing to make it easy to establish conversations with your visitors? How well is it working?

Maybe you are doing a good job of conversing on your blog, but what happens when your content is syndicated elsewhere? Are roadblocks thrown up needlessly? Why? What can you do about them?

If you recommend a product or service as an affiliate, do you make it easy for prospects to contact you to gather further information or to clarify any points you’ve made?

Do you respond to those requests in a timely manner? Do you provide additional information? Do you answer the specific questions that are asked?

In my opinion, the main point of having a blog is to start a conversation.

What are you doing to make it easier for your reader to respond to you?

What are you doing to make it more difficult?

Are you even aware of things that may make it more difficult?

Truly, I don’t want to pick on her, because she’s doing the right things on her own blog. Still, I found her article on another site that is syndicating her content, and finding a way to join in the conversation was difficult and time-consuming.

Is that her fault, or is it the fault of the site that syndicated her article?

I don’t see it as her fault, at all. It seems to me to be the unintended consequences of social networking extending our reach to other sites that may not make it so easy to participate as our own sites do.

In the long run, it will probably be worth an hour of frustration, because I found someone who shares some of the same interests I do. Now that I’ve found her blog, and just now subscribed to it, I’ll look forward to reading what she has to say, and it will be easy, then, to join in the conversation, should I want.

I’m going to take a short break and see if I can work up the enthusiasm I originally had to join her conversation, now that I’ve found it.

Act on your dream!

JD

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What is your opinion of social networking?

November 15, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 13 Comments
Filed under: Attracting Visitors, Business Networking, Poll, Social Networking, Twitter 

Over the last couple of years, I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into using a variety of social networking sites to enlarge my circle of friends and associates on the web. I believe that it is working out well for me and I’m enjoying keeping in touch with my online friends.

Until today, I was showing a couple of widgets from MyBlogLog.com that showed the social networking sites I’m active on and some of the latest things I’ve written on a variety of the sites I frequent.

It turns out that those widgets were interfering with the appearance of polls I create using PollDaddy.com, so I moved both of the social networking widgets to a new social networking page, here on this blog.

That solved two problems I’ve been having.

One, it speeds up page loads a bit because it reduces calls to MyBlogLog.com from every page.

Two, it makes it possible to add polls to articles I write. I don’t know how many polls I’ll be creating, but I’m going to try a few to see what we can learn.

There is an art to creating polls that get reliable results. I am not a master of that art, yet. Therefore, I’m afraid that some of my polls will be worded incorrectly and may skew the results. Since nothing really important will be affected by these polls, I’m not going to worry much about it and I’ll just add polls when there is something I’d like to learn more about from the readers of this blog and other places I’ll show the polls.

You never have to participate in the polls, but I welcome your voting and your comments.

In the following poll, I’m asking your opinion of social networking. I realize that your opinion may not match my preconceived notions, so you can select multiple choices and add your own if it isn’t already there.

To add your own answer if it doesn’t match one of the choices next to the checkboxes, just enter it in the gray text bar between the last checkbox and the View Results link. (At least, that’s what I hope it will do.)

When you’ve made your selections or added your “other” opinion, don’t forget to click on the Vote button.

I look forward to your opinions and thoughts about social networking.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Wrong and right ways to participate in social networking

September 8, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Business Networking, Social Networking 

I enjoy reading Lynn Terry’s blog, because I almost always learn something new or find something that makes me think a bit deeper about affiliate marketing, social networking, blogging, running a home business, and other topics she writes about.

I’m thinking about her right now because she just wrote a couple of excellent posts on her blog about the wrong and right ways to engage in social networking.

Social Media Marketing (A Warning)

How to Use Social Media… Successfully

I cringe a bit every time I see someone suggesting creating multiple profiles on social networking sites and using software to automate friend requests and posting links. Please don’t do this.

Lynn addresses these types of issues in her warnings about the wrong way to use social media.

She offers ten tips on the right way to participate in her second article about how to use social media successfully.

If you are interested in business networking, social networking, and using social media correctly, you should take the time to read both of her articles.

She promises that a case study on using social media is forthcoming and I’m looking forward to it.

Thanks, Lynn.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Chris Brogan has just released a free ebook on personal branding

September 8, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Blogging, Books, Business Networking, Promote Yourself, Social Networking 

I like to read what Chris Brogan has to say about lots of topics including personal branding and social networking. I’ve learned a lot from him and he’s reminded me of things I already know, but haven’t been thinking about lately.

Today, he released a free ebook on personal branding called Personal Branding for the Business Professional and it is available as a free download. You don’t even have to give your email address to get a copy.

I just finished reading the book – it’s only 15 pages – and it has some good tips about building your personal brand and expressing it on your blog, website, and the social networking sites you prefer.

This book is definitely worth your time to download and read, if you are interested in building your reputation and promoting your personal brand.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Are you looking for a list of great social networking sites?

September 1, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 3 Comments
Filed under: Attracting Visitors, Blogging, Business Networking, Promote Yourself, Social Networking 

I have found that participating on social networking sites has helped my business grow and I’ve met some great people in the process. Some have become real friends.

It takes time and effort to network effectively, so don’t think it can be done in a few days or weeks, and don’t try to do it more quickly by using software to speed up the process.

If you sincerely want to network with other like-minded people and you’re willing to take your time and socialize with them – not just spam your ads towards them – then you’ll find a great list of social networking sites on Kelly Stone’s blog:

Want A List Of Social Networking Sites?

I just found Kelly’s blog and I’m finding lots of topics that interest me there.

Yes, I found her through social networking.

I saw her on a Recent Visitors widget on my Squidoo Marketing community and followed the link back to her MyBlogLog profile where I found her blog’s community and then visited her blog.

It sounds like a lot of effort, but it took only a few minutes.

Along the way, I joined her blog’s community and added her as a contact at MyBlogLog.com. Then, I subscribed to her blog via email so I won’t forget to keep in touch.

Have you been using social networking to help build your business and make new friends? It takes time, but it works.

I noticed that she didn’t have a link to www.apsense.com, which has a Google PR of 4, and an Alexa rank of 45,857.

I like Apsense, but haven’t had the time to play in their sandbox lately. It’s one of the things I intend to do more of in the near future.

If you’re not already a member, I’d like to extend an invitation to join Apsense and network with me there.

For an example of what you can do on Apsense, I would like to invite you to visit my profile and business center on the site.

If you would like to network with me on some of the other major social networking sites, please see the links to my profiles on the About page of this blog. I look forward to meeting you. We can probably connect most quickly on Twitter and MyBlogLog, because I’m more active on them than the others.

If you are active on any of the major social networking sites and would like to network with the readers of this blog, please leave a comment with links to a couple of your profile pages. While you’re doing that, I would enjoy reading about your experiences in social networking and your major areas of interest.

So, on which of the social networking sites have you pitched your tent?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Where do you promote your blog?

August 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Directories, Blogging, Business Networking, Forums, Promote Yourself, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter 

You’ve taken the time to research a topic for your new blog and decided there should be enough interest to make it worth the effort.

Then, you created the blog, chose a theme, modified the theme, selected plugins and widgets, and now you are ready to write great articles on all the topics you researched before starting.

Right?

Hopefully, that was your approach.

I think most bloggers throw up a blog and then look for something to write about. I know I did that on some of my first blogs.

I was a lot more focused and took more time to research what I was going to do before I started this blog.

Either way, now you have a blog, you’ve been writing on it for some time, and you want people to find you and read what you have to say.

Ideally, they’ll also post great comments so you and your readers can learn even more about the topic of the article.

So, where do you promote your blog?

There are lots of ways to promote your blog, and I’m sure you know of many that I’ve never used. I hope you’ll share them with us.

Let’s start with some that work well for me.

Create a lens about your blog on Squidoo

My main place to promote my blog is on Squidoo. For instance, I created a lens especially for this blog at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

Syndicate your RSS feed on your other blogs

I syndicate the RSS newsfeed from this blog on several other Squidoo lenses and some of my other blogs, such as you’ll see in the sidebar of my Marketing With Squidoo blog.

Create a community for your blog on MyBlogLog.com

I also registered this blog on MyBlogLog.com and created a community for it at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

There are several benefits of creating a community for your blog there. First, it syndicates your RSS feed as headlines on the page. Second, it makes it easy to increase your business networking as people join your community. Third, they offer widgets so you can see who has visited you lately. This makes it easy to visit their sites and/or make contact with them on other social networking services.

You can see this in action towards the bottom of the left column of this blog. Look at the Recent Visitors widget. If you hover your mouse over the visitor’s face, you should see a fly-out that lists the blogs and sites for which they have created communities on MyBloglog.com. It also makes it easy to join their communities and increase your business networking.

About half-way down every page on this blog, in the right column, you’ll see a section called “New with John Dilbeck.” In that section is a widget provided by MyBlogLog that shows my latest activities on this blog and other sites and blogs I author. It also shows what I’ve been doing on several networking services such as Twitter, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and others.

It has taken a long time to set all of this up, but now, whenever I do something on one of my blogs, websites, or forums, that action is recorded in the RSS feed and is automatically syndicated on multiple other sites. I get visitors from a wide variety of sites as a result.

You can see another example of this at work on my profile page at the Squidoo Marketing community I created. In the right column of the page (and every other page of the site), you’ll see the Recent Visitors widget for the MyBlogLog community I created for that social networking site. In the center column, you’ll see the wider widget from MyBlogLog that shows my activities on my sites and the social networking services I use regularly.

Syndicate your blog’s RSS feed as widely as you can

Syndicating the RSS feed from your blog on multiple sites is a good way to get your writing noticed by both new readers and the search engines.

Should you tweet your blog on Twitter?

I use a plugin called Twitter Tools to post an announcement about new blog postings to my twitter profile.

At first I was unsure about this and created a Squidoo lens called Should You Tweet Your Blog? to learn what other people think about the idea of automatically tweeting new blog posts. I’d welcome your opinions and feedback either on that lens or by leaving a comment here.

Link to your blog on forums and in comments on other blogs

I’ve talked about my blog on various forums and in comments on others’ blogs.

Be sure to add value when you post to the forums or comment on someone’s blog. As long as you’re adding to the conversation and helping others, the link to your blog will be welcome, or, at least, tolerated.

If you just jump in and write a post or comment about your blog that doesn’t add any value to the discussion, it will probably be deleted. At the very least, you’ll look like a spammer, and I know you don’t want to do that.

One good place to list your blog is in the thread started by Michael Galante on the ConquerYourNiche forum, Share your active blog here. I’ve found several blogs there that I’ll be reading and I’ve subscribed to a couple of their RSS feeds.

Another good place to link to your blog, especially if it is related to Internet marketing, is in the Members, show off your blogs! thread on Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips forum.

(By the way, I’m one of the moderators of the SMO: Social Marketing & Social Media section of Lynn’s forum, and I invite you to come and share your knowledge and experiences about social networking with us.)

I have links to this blog in my signature file on a number of other forums where I’m active. Each post I make to those forums will link back to this blog.

Make good comments on other blogs

One way you can promote your blog is to make good comments on this one.

WordPress, by default, uses “nofollow” links so the search engines won’t follow links to the site you list when making your comment.

I’ve installed the DoFollow plugin so you’ll get some linklove when you post a good comment here. I also installed CommentLuv, which will try to find the last post you wrote on your blog and will link to it below your comment.

Additionally, SezWho is active on this blog and it will keep track of the comments you make on blogs with SezWho installed. It’s a pretty cool tool and I think we’ll be seeing more blogs using this nice tool as time goes by.

I hope you’ll make use of the rating feature SezWho provides to express your opinion of what I write and the comments others leave. By rating what we say, it will go into the multi-site comment aggregator that SezWho maintains and we can raise (or lower) our reputation based on the quality of our writing.

Now, I welcome substantive comments that are on-topic and I look forward to talking about affiliate marketing with you in any discussions that develop here.

However, I’ll delete your comment if it doesn’t contain anything worthwhile or is off-topic. So, don’t bother leaving a comment that says something like, “you have a good point,” or “that’s great.” I’ll delete ‘em in a heartbeat.

Don’t spam something I write with an off-topic comment full of advertising. Poof! Gone.

But, if you write something about the topic that adds to our understanding of your viewpoint or which offers links to on-topic resources, then I welcome what you have to say.

Do you comment on blogs?

My friend Mitch posted an interesting article called Why Don’t More People Comment On Blogs? on his blog a few days ago.

Do you have any thoughts on that subject?

In Summary

I mainly use Squidoo lenses, Twitter, a community on MyBlogLog, sig files on other forums, and comments on blogs to promote this blog.

How do you promote your blog?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Have you updated your new Squidoo lensmaster bio page?

August 20, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Business Networking, Promote Yourself, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses 

Yesterday, while looking for something (I don’t remember what), I looked at my lensmaster bio page at Squidoo and was surprised to see that it didn’t look anything like it did the last time I saw it.

What!?

I don’t like surprises and I generally react negatively when one of my pages changes without my knowledge or approval. So, I didn’t really like the new appearance of the page.

But, I tried to keep an open mind about it.

I went searching for more information about the change and found an active thread in the Lensmasters Lounge at SquidU.com.

Then I found Megan Casey’s post on the SquidBlog: New lensmaster bio page, live now!

That’s were I learned that what I was seeing was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential information the page could show.

I immediately edited the profile page on my Squidoo dashboard, and you can edit your profile, too:

http://www.squidoo.com/member/profile

I was able to add links to my blogs, websites, social networking profiles, and more. There’s even the ability to feature up to five of your favorite lenses right in the middle of the page.

It took all of a few minutes and now my lensmaster bio page is much more useful to me and I hope to any readers who find it.

I still don’t like surprises, but I do like the features in our new bio pages.

Have you updated your profile, yet?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Lynn Terry asks if you’re in or out with Twitter

August 18, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Business Networking, Social Networking, Twitter 

Lynn Terry has a great discussion going on her blog post and comments at Twitter: Are you IN or OUT?

It took me a long time to see the value in Twitter and that only came after I found the right group of people to follow. Along the way, I’ve followed a lot of people and unfollowed quite a few.

Now, I’m following some very interesting people who are interested in blogging, Squidoo, CafePress, affiliate marketing, and other things that interest me and are a major part of my business.

In fact, I learned about Lynn’s post because of a tweet from one of the people I’m following. Cool, huh?

If you’re interested in Twitter and want to join her conversation, jump on in.

Twitter: I used to be OUT, but now I’m definitely IN.

Act on your dream!

JD

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