What do you know about using hashtags in Twitter?

December 30, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 6 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Twitter, Western North Carolina 

As you may, or may not, already know, I’ve decided upon two main areas for my marketing activities for 2009.

1. Affiliate marketing will continue to be the main thing I do and I’ll probably devote about 75% of my time to this.

2. Promoting my adopted hometown of Murphy, NC, and the people, events, and businesses here. This will probably take less than 25% of my time.

For the last several years, I’ve been testing several websites for my local town and county. I wanted to learn how much effort and time it would take to keep them current; how much interest there is from local residents and business owners; and how effective they would be in achieving my marketing goals.

I have answers to some of those questions, but I’m still seeking more answers.

I’ve decided to focus on Murphy, NC in particular and not on the whole county. Since there are only two towns in the county, that means I’m not going to be covering activities in Andrews, NC. I’ll leave that to someone else.

Now that I’ve made that decision, I’m looking for a simple way to tie blog posts on my other blogs to Twitter in a way that it makes it easy to find everything related to Murphy NC without introducing tweets about people named Murphy and other tweets that include NC, but are somewhere else in the state.

I thought this would be relatively easy, but I’m learning that it isn’t.

I’ve tested using the hashtag #MurphyNC when tweeting, and I can reliably pull out just the tweets that use it. While I should be able to consistently use it, I’m wondering how much effort it will take to get others to use it, too.

By adopting a local hashtag, those of us who may be interested can easily search for the tag and Twitter will even generate an RSS feed (in Atom format) that can be syndicated on my Squidoo lenses and blogs.

This will also eliminate the tweets that casually mention the town, but aren’t really related to what’s happening here.

I’ve tried using the advanced search options at Twitter to find only tweets that contain #MurphyNC OR “Murphy, NC” OR “Murphy NC”, but the search still returns tweets that mention Murphy or NC even though I’m looking for exact matches to three terms.

So, I’ve been wondering whether it makes more sense to syndicate just the tweets that contain the hashtag or to use more criteria which would result in tweets that aren’t really related.

So far, I prefer searching for just the hashtag, even though it would mean I’d have to educate others to include it – which shouldn’t be much of a problem since there aren’t many people tweeting in this area.

This concept can be applied to other topics as well, such as when mentioning specific products and services, but that may involve stepping on the toes of others who are using obvious hashtags already for other purposes.

Here’s an example of a search for just #MurphyNC and another for “Murphy, NC” OR “Murphy NC” OR #MurphyNC and you can see the differences in quality of the search results.

Who knows? Perhaps I’m trying to solve something that someone else has already solved.

Do you have any experience with this? Can you offer any advice?

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: ,

Did you know you can syndicate your SquidCasts by RSS and email?

December 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 6 Comments
Filed under: John Dilbeck, Lenses, RSS Syndication, Squidoo Lenses, email marketing 

As I’ve written previously on this blog, you can treat your Squidoo lenses as a sort of mini-blog by sending a SquidCast whenever you create a new lens or make significant updates to an existing lens.

The SquidCast is a very limited posting (500 characters maximum) about the lens. This is added to the RSS feed for that lens.

For example, the following URL is the RSS feed for my John Dilbeck lensography lens:

http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/John-Dilbeck

Each lens has a similar RSS feed.

In order to make use of this, you must remember to send a SquidCast whenever appropriate. Fortunately, we are reminded to do this whenever we publish a lens.

You can treat this RSS feed as you would any other. It can be added to feed readers, syndicated using RSS modules on other lenses or your blog, and it can be syndicated via email, if you want.

I got to thinking about this because I read a post by Linda Martin on her blog: Offer Email Subscriptions to Your SquidCasts

She has created a new lens, Offer Email Subscriptions to Your SquidCasts, that explains the process of offering updates via email for your SquidCasts for all your lenses.

Essentially, her method uses the RSS feed for all a lensmaster’s Squidcasts, provided by thefluffanutta’s SquidUtils.com, and syndicates it using the free services of FeedBurner.com.

Each lensmaster can get an RSS feed through SquidUtils.com that includes the SquidCasts you’ve made for all your lenses, combined. The URL for my feed is:

http://squidutils.com/squidcasts/from/johndilbeck.rss

Feedburner.com provides tools for publicizing your RSS feeds, including syndication via email. It is a free service, and you can syndicate as many RSS or Atom feeds as you want.

Using the method Linda describes on her lens, anyone who subscribes to the email updates will be notified whenever a lensmaster updates any of his or her lenses. This may be a very good way to keep your fans updated if your lenses are about similar topics.

However, if you have a lot of very different types of lenses, it may not be the best approach, necessarily.

Linda provides a caution on her lenses reminding the subscriber that they’ll receive updates on all her lenses, not just the one they’re subscribing from.

On the other hand, you may want to restrict updates to just the lens that’s being read.

You can do this by syndicating just that lens’ RSS feed via Feedburner, instead of the combined SquidCasts feed provided by SquidUtils.

That way, your readers will not be surprised by updates totally unrelated to the lens from which they subscribed.

So, which is better?

Do you want an easy way for your readers to subscribe to your SquidCasts for all your lenses combined?

…or…

Do you want an easy way for your readers to subscribe to just the SquidCasts about the lens they are currently reading?

I think syndicating the SquidCasts for all your lenses may be more useful, unless you have a lens that will be updated frequently. There’s not much point to subscribing to updates to a lens if it is only updated every few months or so, is there?

Fortunately, you can do either – or both – depending upon what you think is best for your readers and the particular lens they are visiting.

Thanks for the reminder, Linda, and for providing clear instructions on providing our fans with another easy way to be informed when we make changes to our lenses.

If you set this up, don’t forget to offer it to your fans on your lensmasters’ page, too.

So, what do you think about this? Is it something you would want to offer to the readers of your Squidoo lenses and to your fans?

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , , ,

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

Tags: , , , , , ,

Is Squidoo another blogging platform?

August 18, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Marketing, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing, Twitter 

Aussie Sire asked a question on one of my twitter update posts and suggested that I rewrite my reply as a blog post. I think that’s a great idea.

He said:

Hi John, I had a look at your Squidoo page and I must say it is very impressive. I have heard of Squidoo and lenses and such but never really looked into them. It seems like another blogging platform but I assume there is a difference?

Hi Sire, thanks for the kind words about my Squidoo page for this blog:

21st Century Affiliate Marketing

Squidoo is not a blogging platform, but it works well with blogs. I try to build a Squidoo lens for each of my blogs for one specific reason: I can syndicate the RSS feed on the lens and Google likes Squidoo lenses. That means that some people may find my blog indirectly via the lens I create on Squidoo.

Squidoo is more of a simple webpage builder and they call each page a lens because the object is to focus on a single topic per page.

You may understand Squidoo a bit more if you read my lens at:

Marketing With Squidoo

That lens syndicates the feed from this blog, my social networking community for Squidoo lensmasters who enjoy marketing, and my blog specifically about marketing with Squidoo.

It also links to other lenses that have information about marketing using Squidoo.

You can build as many (or as few) lenses as you want and it’s always free. In fact, if you build lenses that attract visitors and get clicks, you can earn money from your lenses. Some very few people earn over $1,000 per month; a few dozen lensmasters earn around $100 per month; and most of us earn less than that. Your earnings come from sharing with Squidoo the commissions from Adsense and Glam ads on your lens.

I get a welcome deposit from Squidoo into my PayPal account every month.

Since you already have several blogs, perhaps you could start by building a lens about the main topic of one of your blogs.

You can get started here:

Join Squidoo and start building your own lenses.

But, I earn much more than the payment I get directly from Squidoo, because I promote affiliate links on my lenses and don’t have to share the proceeds from those commissions with Squidoo.

I also promote my CafePress shop on a few of my lenses and link back to some of my websites on other lenses.

So, I use Squidoo both as a traffic generator and as another profit center. It’s also great at cross-promoting lenses, blogs, forums, websites, social networking sites, and other web presences that share common themes and topics.

If you have a blog and you’d like Google to pay more attention, you may want to build a lens about the blog’s main topic and syndicate your RSS feed on the lens. You can also recommend books and other products from Amazon.com.

You can even recommend products from CafePress without having to join their affiliate program, but you’ll be sharing the commissions with Squidoo. It’s worth it because the CafePress module makes it so easy to promote the products you like on CafePress. There are thousands of shopkeepers selling their designs on CafePress and you can select from millions of product/design combinations.

Once a lens is built, it doesn’t take a lot of work to keep it current, and your blog’s feed is automatically updated on the lens on a schedule you can choose, i.e. every hour, every six hours, etc.

Another thing you can do to build interactivity into your lens is to add a guestbook, set up polls, start a duel (conversation/argument), and there are other modules that are of interest, too.

There are a lot of things you can do with Squidoo easily that are more difficult on a blog. I think the two of them work very well together.

Again, you can learn more, if you’re still interested at:

Marketing With Squidoo

I hope that helps you get the idea of what you can do with Squidoo.

One other lens you may want to visit is my lensography, where I write about my lenses, link to some of my blogs, show my Twitter tweets, and more:

Who is John Dilbeck?

If you have any other questions, I’d be happy to do my best to answer them or refer you to another site with the answers.

I almost forgot. There is a social networking aspect to Squidoo where you can meet other highly-motivated lensmasters and help cross-promote each others’ sites, lenses, and blogs.

For example every time you add a quality comment to another lensmaster’s lens, you’ll get a link back to your lensmaster page.

Then there is the ability for a visitor to your site to join your fan club. Whenever you post a SquidCast about your lens, people in your fan club and anyone who has marked that lens as their favorite will see the SquidCast on their favorites page at Squidoo.

You can even get a chicklet to show how many fans you have and it links to your lensmaster page:

A lens is like a blog in one respect. Each time you publish your lens (after the initial build or whenever it is updated), you can send what is called a SquidCast, but which is really a posting that is added to the lens’ RSS feed. Then you can ping that update to spread the word among the large RSS aggregators.

Of course, the SquidCast is also shown on the favorites page of your fans and the people who favorited that lens. It is also promoted on the Squidcast Twitter feed.

So, there are a lot of reasons to include Squidoo as an integral part of your marketing mix, even if you are a blogger or webmaster, already.

And, don’t forget, you don’t have to join Squidoo because you want to make money. You can build your lenses on the topics of your choice, so tell your stories, publish your poems, or show photos of your kids and pets.

Are you an expert on something? Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

New 21st Century Affiliate Marketing Lens

July 17, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, RSS Syndication, Squidoo Lenses 

I just created a new 21st Century Affiliate Marketing lens on Squidoo to work with this blog.

By cross-promoting between this blog and that lens, more people will eventually find their way to read what I have to say about affiliate marketing in the 21st century. I’m syndicating the RSS feed from this blog on that lens.

I’ve been running my affiliate marketing business for several years and I’ve watched the nature of the business change. Now, there is much more competition, more things to divert your attention and drain your bank account, and, also, more quality affiliate marketing opportunities for you.

There are also a lot of “me, too” products that don’t add anything worthwhile to what’s already available. One of the struggles is to provide quality information and insight that’s not available everywhere on the net.

The area I choose to target, which is very highly competitive, includes tools and resources to help affiliate marketers promote their products and services online. It’s a hard niche in which to compete, but my interests lie mainly in building a home business and helping others to do the same.

I’m sure you can make more money, more easily, by concentrating your affiliate marketing efforts in other less-competitive niches. In fact, I know that’s true, but I’ve not been able to find a niche that interests me nearly as much as this one.

So, I’ll write about things I learn about affiliate marketing and pass them along to help you.

I’ll also be pointing to other high-quality affiliate marketers and they’ll help you, too.

You won’t find me promoting the latest “flash-in the pan” product just so I can reach into your pocket and take money out of your wallet. That’s just not my style. I know I’ll earn less by not being a ruthless promoter of all things, but I think I’ll live better with myself by only promoting products and services that I know are worth buying.

I’ve tested hundreds and only promote a few.

So, I welcome your comments here on this blog and on my new 21st Century Affiliate Marketing lens. Go to the lens and vote in the polls and have your say in the duel. I hope you’ll take the time to rank the lens and leave your comments. You’ll need to be a logged-in Squidoo member to participate on the lens.

It’s a brand new lens and I’ll be updating it considerably over the next few weeks.

Also, I’ve been testing several dozen blogs and I’ll be closing most of them. This blog will become one of my top two blogs and may eventually become my primary blog.

Currently, my primary blog is John Dilbeck and Friends and is powered by Manilla from Userland Software, which was the best platform I could find when I started it. However, over time, WordPress has overtaken it and offers more features and easier customization, so I’ll be evaluating if I should move my primary emphasis to this blog.

I updated this blog to WordPress 2.6 earlier today and like what I see.

I also added a new plug-in called Tweet My Blog which should post an update to Twitter whenever I post a new article to the blog. This post will be the first test of the plug-in and I’m not ready to promote or recommend it at this time, but it looks promising.

That’s one of the things I can’t easily do with my older blog.

(You are invited to follow me on Twitter.)

So, this may be a time of transition and consolidation for me as I close other blogs and websites and concentrate more on what works the best to build my marketing business.

Maybe some of what I learn will help you build your business, too.

Although I’m a social liberal, I’m a fiscal conservative and I hate wasting my money. You probably hate wasting your money, too.

The object of affiliate marketing is to earn money, and the goal is to earn more than you spend – preferably considerably more.

The art is to evaluate and recommend appropriate products and services to the right group of people.

Now that my multi-year testing and experimentation phase is coming to an end, I look forward to working just as hard, but focusing my efforts more on high-quality products that produce reliable revenue rather than testing everything that comes down the pipeline.

I welcome your comments and questions, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll do what I can to help you find it.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , ,

You can extend the reach of your Merchant Circle marketing

October 3, 2007 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Blogging, Business Networking, Merchant Circle, RSS Syndication 

There are several ways you can promote your business on Merchant Circle: the contents of your basic listing, any items you post to your blog, coupons you create, photos you upload, and the bulletins posted on your directory listing page.

I just learned about Merchant Circle a few days ago and I’ve jumped all over using their system. You can see the profile I’ve created for Dilbeck Marketing on Merchant Circle. I’ve taken the time to use most of the tools and love their system.

(Your business is listed at Merchant Circle, right? If not, you can create a professional looking online listing for your business with our easy to use tools. Free! – MerchantCircle.com.)

There are probably other things you can do at Merchant Circle that I haven’t discovered in the less-than-a-week that I’ve been a member of the site.

What you may, or may not, already know is that every time you blog, create a coupon, upload a photo, or post a newsletter, these things are added to a newsfeed for you, automatically.

At the top-right of your listing, you’ll see “Subscribe to blog and coupon feed” followed by an orange chicklet that says “RSS/XML.” This is a standard news feed that can be syndicated on many services and can be read by anyone using a news feed aggregator or a news reader. Even without sending emails you are broadcasting to the world – potentially.

I’ll write a post later to explain more about making use of this. For now, suffice it to say that you can blog in one place and have it automatically republished in multiple places. This makes it very powerful for getting your news out.

If you don’t know anything about RSS, let me suggest that you read What is RSS?.

One place you may want to syndicate your feed is at Squidoo.com.

To do this, you’ll need to be a member.

Are you an expert on something? Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it.

Of course, you’re an expert on your business, so join Squidoo and create a lens about it. It’s worth the effort to learn how to build free lenses on Squidoo, and it’s a perfect place to syndicate your Merchant Circle news feed.

For example, I’ve created a Squidoo lens about Merchant Circle and I’ve syndicated (re-published) my news feed and Merchant Circle’s news feed on that lens.

Also, as part of that lens, I’ve created a list where you can add a link to the Merchant Center listing for your business. I will be syndicating that list on some of my other websites, so you’ll get free advertising just by adding your link to the list. If you don’t understand, just comment on this topic and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , , ,

firstRSS provides outstanding RSS syndication in WordPress 2

August 29, 2006 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Musings, RSS Syndication 

firstRSS, by Chris Hatcher, is an outstanding plugin for syndicating (publishing) RSS feeds in your WordPress 2 pages.

Previously, I was using CaRP for this purpose on static PHP pages and dynamic WordPress 1.5 pages. It continues to be my script of choice for static PHP pages.

However, when upgrading several of my blogs, including Blog Feed Syndication and 21st Century Webhosting, from WordPress 1.5 to version 2, all my feed syndication died. I was using the plugin runPHP to execute CaRP commands in my blog pages, but it didn’t work when I upgraded the blogs.

I tested several solutions before I found firstRSS, which worked the best and was, by far, the easiest to use.

All you have to do is install the plugin in WordPress 2, activate it, and use a very simple call to list headlines or show full RSS feeds in your WordPress 2 pages. It is supposed to work in postings, too, but I have no need at this point for doing that and I have not tested it.

Converting from runPHP to firstRSS did require editing all the pages that were publishing remote RSS feeds, but it was easy to do, if a bit tedious.

I heartily recommend firstRSS to you if you want to publish RSS feeds in pages on your blogs powered by WordPress 2.

Thanks, Chris, for an elegant and easy-to-use way of syndicating these feeds.

Tags: