Twitter Tools is not tweeting about new blog posts

November 3, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 16 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Twitter, WordPress 

I just noticed that Twitter Tools, a plug-in that I’ve come to rely upon, is not tweeting about my new blog posts.

In fact, it appears that it hasn’t been working for the last couple of weeks.

I’ve been using Twitter Tools for some time on several of my blogs and have come to rely upon it. I wonder what’s happened.

One more thing to look into and see if I can fix.

What about you?

Do you use Twitter Tools? Is it working for you?

Act on your dream!

JD

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What can Twittorati do for bloggers who are not in the top 100?

July 31, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Twitter, Web Services 

I received an email this morning from Technorati telling me about a new service they have just introduced: Twittorati.

It combines the top bloggers with Twitter and currently ranks the top 100 blogs, as welll as tweets and tags.

I find it interesting to have a list of the top 100 blogs and there are a few that I’ve never seen before, so eventually, I’ll look at them and see what I can learn.

They say that other blogs will be added in the future. I wonder what Twittorati can do for those of us who aren’t even close to being in the top 100.

I haven’t had time to think about this, yet, but wanted to pass the word along and see what you think about this new service.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Will new tax law kill affiliate marketing in North Carolina?

June 19, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 10 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Amazon, Twitter 

I don’t even know how to start writing about this. Sigh.

I’ve been a busy boy this week working on developing a new website (fortunately not related to affiliate marketing) and have been slow to read my emails.

This morning, I opened one from Amazon.com with a subject of: Important Notice from the Amazon Associates Program

Normally, I read these when I’ve finished more pressing matters, but I didn’t realize that this really was an important notice until I read the following paragraphs…

We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of North Carolina.

Please note that this is not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Associates Program. All referral fees earned on qualified traffic will continue to be paid as planned.

But because the new law is drafted to go into effect once enacted – which could happen in the next two weeks – we will have to terminate the participation of all North Carolina residents in the Amazon Associates program on or before that same day. After the termination day, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com nor will we accept new applications for the Associates program from North Carolina residents.

That’s just the first three paragraphs and I won’t bother quoting the rest, because this basically tells the story from Amazon.com’s point of view.

I didn’t even know anything like this was in the works and now I find that it is scheduled to be passed into law and take effect in less than two weeks, on July 1, 2009.

(It doesn’t make it any more pleasant that July 1 happens to be my birthday! What a nice birthday surprise.)

So, this morning, I’ve been scrambling and found someone who is leading the fight in NC on Twitter: Rich Owings.

They’re tracking the issue with the #ncaffiliatetax hash tag on Twitter. (You’ll need to go to Twitter.com and search for that hash tag. I’ve tried to link to it in several different ways, but – for some reason – none of them are working properly today.)

I found a couple of newspaper articles on Rich’s Twitter stream…

From the Asheville Citizen-Times: Proposed Web tax rankles local businessman.

From the Greensboro News & Record: Amazon warns N.C. affiliates about tax issue.

Now, I know that North Carolina is facing budgetary problems, but I think this is a misguided move by our politicians. Of course, I’m biased.

For the last six years (or more), I’ve earned 100% of my income from affiliate marketing. This new law will decimate my remaining business revenue, most likely.

I used to earn more with Amazon.com than I have in the last couple of years, but this step by Amazon may be the first bad news I’ll hear from other affiliate programs.

I’ve been an Amazon.com affiliate since shortly after they started it over 10 years ago and I’ve depended upon commissions I received from affiliate marketing as my sole source of income for over six years as I was my mother’s full-time caretaker and could not leave the house.

Unfortunately, she died last November, and I’ve been planning ways to diversify my income. Some of those plans are starting to produce results, fortunately.

My friend, Mitch Mitchell, who lives in New York, went through this months ago when the NY legislature passed a similar law and Amazon.com canceled all affiliates in his state.

As of today, it appears that Amazon.com is no longer accepting new affiliates in North Carolina.

Last September, my business took a real hit with the sudden downturn in the world economy. I lost between two-thirds and three-fourths of my income at that time, and it has only now showed any signs of recovering from that drastic slump.

If other affiliate programs, in addition to Amazon.com, cancel my participation, there goes my affiliate marketing business.

As much as I would like to sit here and whine, I’m not going to do it. If this happens, I’ll face it and make new plans that don’t involve affiliate marketing – even though it will mean a huge shift in my business plans.

I hate to think about the thousands of pages I have on my various blogs and websites that will need to be updated to remove links to Amazon.com.

I don’t know what other surprises my birthday will bring this year. This will probably be the biggest one.

It appears that this new law is on the fast track to passage and many of the legislators that Rich Owings has contacted don’t even understand how it will affect very small businesses like mine across the entire state.

I won’t have to wait too long to see what happens.

Act on your dream!

JD

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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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Site Build It! or WordPress? Which is Best? Why?

January 16, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 82 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Opinions, Sitesell and Site Build It, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter, Webhosting, WordPress 

This is a question that I have been asking myself for months.

Today, I created a new TwitterStorm (Twttrstrm.com) asking Which is better for building an online business? Site Build It! or WordPress? Why?

What’s a TwitterStorm? This is a new site powered by Squidoo. Now you can ask a question of your Twitter followers and easily gather all their answers in one spot.

I know that the majority of people who will see this post are probably happy WordPress users. I’m one, too.

Still, after years of building websites and blogging on a lot of platforms, I still keep coming back to thinking Site Build It! is a better choice for building a business website.

Is it better to blog or build?

When Ken Evoy first raised this question, I was leaning towards blogging and disagreed with some of the things he said about it. Now, however, after months of blogging, I’m not as in favor of WordPress as I once was, especially when building multiple blogs.

As part of my goals for 2009, I’ve decided to do more to promote local businesses in Murphy, NC. I already have several blogs and websites related to Murphy and Cherokee County, NC. I’m really not happy with any of them.

I’m considering mothballing all of them except for my Murphy, NC 28906 blog, which needs serious updating. First off, I have to upgrade to WordPress 2.7, change the theme, add plugins, add widgets, and then I’m faced with finding things to write about, in addition to updating the blog software whenever necessary.

I can probably get the blog to where I want it in a couple of days without too much of a problem, because I’ve been doing this a long time and know what I want to do. I’m going to change it and fashion that blog after this one.

One of the problems with blogs is always having to manage the software and that takes away time and energy from actually writing content.

My Act On Your Dream! site is powered by Site Build It! and has been sadly neglected over the last year or more. Now that I can devote full-time to building my business, I can put more effort into building it into the site I have planned. Still, even with little work on my part, it continues to attract visitors and makes a nice profit.

There are lots of things wrong with that site, however. I’ve only built a small fraction of what I have planned for it, and there are a couple of main reasons for that.

For over six years, I was my Mom’s full-time caretaker and the duties associated with that took precedence over everything else. I am happy that I was able to care for her so long when she needed it.

The second reason is that I wasted a lot of time and effort testing a lot of different ways to build websites. I’ve lost track of how many different blogging platforms and content management systems I’ve tested. What do I have to show for it? A lot of neglected or abandoned blogs in my wake. Of all the blogs I’ve started, there are only two or three that I’m going to continue updating.

What do I do with the others? Some of them get traffic and even earn a profit. Do I delete them and redirect the domain to a page on a site I’ll keep? Or, do I just throw them out with the rest of the clutter and delete them and then let the domain expire?

It’s hard enough to build traffic to a site. I really don’t like the idea of just deleting a site that actually gets visitors.

Is it better to keep the domain and put up a static page explaining that the blog has been taken down and link to one of my related sites, or is it best to just let the domain expire and forget about it?

Being a packrat, I tend to want to do the former, but I’m thinking this is a good time to declutter my online life as I unclutter my offline world.

I continue asking myself this question: Why do I have so many blogs?

I think the main answer is that the cost of entry is so low that it’s easy to throw up a blog on the spur of the moment and just as easy to lose interest in it somewhere down the line.

I already have a reseller account on HostGator, so I can add a new domain for basically no cost, except for registering the domain. So, there’s little to stop me from testing an idea.

But, I look at those blogs and consider that I am paying over $500 per year just for domain registrations. For that amount, I can get two subscriptions to Site Build It!

I’ve already decided that I’m going to buy a new subscription to SBI to build a new site promoting businesses in Murphy, NC, because only SBI provides all the tools I need to do it right. That means that I’m going to be deleting several sites that I started over the last few years. I hate to do it, because they’re ranked well in the search engines, but I’m sure I can get page one listings on the keywords I want with a new site powered by Site Build It. I know, because I’ve tested it.

So, all of this boils down to my dithering over deciding what to do this year. When it all boils down to the essentials, the only real sites I have that I should keep and maintain would be this blog, Act On Your Dream!, Murphy, NC 28906, and a new SBI site for Murphy.

I’ll probably keep JohnDilbeck.com, but it will be trimmed to a much, much smaller size.

Of course, I’ll continue to maintain my brother’s site, Georgia Drag Racing. There’s not as much to do on that site now that he’s unable to continue building it as he wants. Still, it gets a lot of visitors and there are a lot of people interested in the subject.

I’ll also keep a couple of communities I created on ning.com.

I have a couple of forums that I’ve been trying to build for a couple of years, but they aren’t gaining any traction, so now may be a good time to shut them down, too.

So, in looking at all my sites, blogs, forums, and communities, I can probably drop the number from over 60 to just a half-dozen or so and actually accomplish more with less effort. I don’t know this for sure, but that’s the direction I’m leaning.

When I build a site with Site Build It, I make a commitment to my own success by paying the $300 upfront for an annual subscription. I just don’t have that commitment when I create another free site somewhere.

I often wonder how many other people have gone through these same experiences. Have you?

I’ve read many messages on the members-only SiteSell forum where SBI webmasters tell their stories of floundering around until they find Site Build It and finally concentrate on building a successful business website.

On the other hand, I’ve read many posts on blogs and forums from people who feel that WordPress offers them the best set of features for the lowest cost.

All I know for sure is that I have gone through my testing and learning phase, and I’m ready to implement what I’ve learned.

One of the keys to success is to focus on what you want to do and then put all your effort into manifesting what you imagine. I just don’t believe that can be done when we try to do too much.

I’m really having a hard time making this decision. Part of me wants to simplify everything and focus on affiliate marketing and promoting local businesses. Part of me doesn’t want to lose all the other sites I’ve started. I have to make this decision and implement it, soon.

I welcome your comments, advice, and suggestions. I value the opinions of the people who read this blog.

Who knows? I may have a bunch of domains to sell or give away.

What do you think? Join the Site Build It! or WordPress? twitter storm and share your opinion.

Leave any other comments you’d care to share here.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Twitter Grader – find local Twitter elite

January 13, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Communities, Social Networking, Twitter, Web Services, Western North Carolina 

This turned out to be an interesting morning. I just spent several hours doing something that wasn’t even close to being on my to-do list, but it worked out well.

It started out innocently enough.

Brian Hawkins left a comment and I went to visit his blog. I was reading his Extreme Ezine Makes The Grade post and it reminded me of Twitter Grader.

After visiting Brian’s profile page on Twitter Grader, I went and had a look at my Twitter Grader profile page.

I had been there sometime in the past, but never really paid a lot of attention to the site. I’m somewhat leery of sites that tell us how much our sites are worth and how we rank for whatever they’re covering.

This morning, however, I stopped and really looked over my profile page.

One thing I noticed is that the link next to the “Full Name” label is a link to my Twitter profile. That certainly makes it easy to follow someone.

I also noticed that it had a link to the Twitter elite in Murphy, NC. Of course, I had to visit that page.

When I visited the page, it turns out that I am the Twitter elite in Murphy. I’m the only one listed on the page. I guess that’s one of the benefits of living in a small town.

It’s also one of the benefits of listing your town and state in your Twitter profile, if you live in the USA. I’m not sure how it works if you live elsewhere.

It also is a good opportunity for others who live in Murphy to establish their presence by starting to use Twitter regularly.

I wondered who would be listed as the Twitter elite in Asheville, NC.

I found a list of 50 people and visited each of their Twitter profiles. I think I followed about 20 of them.

This is a good way to find other proficient Twitter users in your local area and to meet the ones with similar interests.

But the twisting path I followed this morning continued along to places I’d never seen.

One of the Twitter elite from Asheville had just joined a Twitter Group for Asheville, NC and I went to take a look at the group.

When I noticed the #asheville hashtag code for the group, something clicked.

If you’ve been following my blog for the last few days, you’re already aware that I’ve been looking at ways to use Twitter to promote what’s happening here in Murphy, NC. I’ve been experimenting with the #MurphyNC hashtag.

So, I read the FAQs at TwittGroups and decided to create a group for Murphy.

There was only one thing to do before creating the group.

In December 2007, I created a half-dozen communities on Ning.com, but closed all of them in June 2008 for reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that it really pays to read the terms and conditions of a site before putting a half-year of effort into it.

When I was fully aware of the terms, I resurrected one of the communities for Squidoo Marketing and have been enjoying sharing with others in the community for the last six months.

One of the other communities I’d started was for Murphy, NC. This morning, I checked to see if the subdomain I’d previously used was available. It was, so I reopened the community.

Then, it was time to create the TwittGroups group for Murphy.

All of this took a few hours and it opens the door to much more work in the near future, but part of this was already in my plans for this year.

I’m not going to do anything with the Murphy community on Ning until I line up one or more businesses to sponsor the site. For the last few years, I’ve been promoting the area and some of the businesses for free, but it’s time to stop doing that.

As soon as I’ve lined up at least one sponsor for the site, I’ll start rebuilding it.

This time, however, there will be more tools thrown into the mix, including Twitter.

If you are in Murphy, NC, and you are a Twitter user, come and join the group for Murphy.

If you’re not in Murphy, you may find that Twitter Grader and TwittGroups may be tools you’ll want to try out, especially if you’re promoting a local area.

As with all experiments, part of this may prove to be worthwhile and part may be a waste of time. I won’t know for sure until I’ve worked on it for a few months.

Thanks, Brian, for linking to your TwitterGrader profile page. It made for an interesting morning!

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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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

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Have you seen Twitter Me Fun?

December 16, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 11 Comments
Filed under: Social Networking, Twitter 

A few days ago, Tim Linden, owner of the StartXchange traffic exchange, created a fun script to see if he could help us reach new followers on Twitter.

I had a few spare minutes, so I gave it a try. As a result, I’ve gotten nearly 100 new followers on Twitter and I’m in the process of meeting and getting to know some new people – hopefully, some of them will become friends over time.

As part of the process, I also ran across several people who have been friends for years and now we’re Twitter friends, too.

Late yesterday, I added a couple of items in the right column of this blog. Right below the form for subscribing to new postings, you’ll see an image that shows the number of people following me on Twitter. Right below that is another graphic showing how many fans I have on Squidoo.

Since working through Tim’s script, I’ve picked up nearly 100 new followers, but not all of them came from there.

I make it a point to follow everyone who follows me, and it took maybe an hour or so to follow the folks who followed me the last couple of days. That’s not much of an investment in time, especially if I meet some new friends, reconnect with old friends, and learn something here and there.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to continue following them. If someone posts too much drivel, does nothing but advertise, or is rude, I’ll stop following them in a heartbeat. However, I don’t mind if someone posts links to their blogs or websites, as long as they also post more general tweets that help me learn something about them.

I’ll also drop someone if they tweet dozens of times every day. I may have time to enjoy Twitter while I’m waiting on other things, but I’m not that interested in anyone.

All in all, it was an easy thing to do and produced excellent results.

Are you looking for more people to follow you on Twitter?

Learn more about it. Go to Tim Linden’s blog and read: Twitter Me Fun

Let me know what you think.

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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