Hey :)

This is the 4th part of the twitter tools sharing process. In total, I think there will be around 14 or 15 posts related to twitter on this blog, so make sure you bookmark it .

Ok, today’s topic: sharing tools – I am going to name a few websites that will help you promote your business, share links and picture, etc … so, here we go:

1. Tweetburner – Create links, share links and track them (only if you’re registered)
2. OdURL – URL Shrink service again. It doesn’t have analytics yet, but it outputs very short urls
3. Ping.fm – Update all your social networks at once
4. TweeTube – Like its name says “share videos on twitter”
5. TwitPic – Image sharing for twitter … moving to a new datacenter lol … why is everybody down when I check them?
6. Ioj – An alternative to twitpic. I didn’t test it, let me know if it’s any good :)
7. TwitterHawk – They say it is arguably the most targeted marketing that you can take advantage of .. let’s see
8. Acamin – File sharing again
9. Twiggit – twiggit is an automated service that lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg.

Got 2 more from my twitter friends (both image sharing sites) :

1. Tinypic
2. SnapTweet

That’s it for today. Happy twitting ;)

Cheers!

Ready for the next set? The post name says everything, so here you go:

1. My Tweeple – Using this tool, you can manage your followers and who you’re following.
2. Twitter100 – Almost the same. Check your followers
3. TwitterLocal – Helps you get tweets from a specific geographic area
4. FriendFeed – See what your tweeple are sharing now
5. Twitter Karma – Helps you manage your followers, who you’re following and gives you the possibility to bulk remove them. To be hones, I didn’t see it working lately, or maybe
6. Quotably – Follow Twitter Conversations (I didn’t really test this)
7. TweetMeme – Hottest stories on twitter
8. TwitterWho – It’s temporarily disabled right now, you might want to check it later
9. GroupTweet – Group message broadcasting for Twitter
10. Who Should I Follow – Suggestions on interesting people to follow.
11. TweetWheel – Find out which of your Twitter friends know each other!

There were few more, but they weren’t up or running fine, so I didn’t include them in this list. Enjoy and share it

As promised, here’s the part 2 of this short e-course. Today we’re going to talk about tools that help you analyse your twitter data and your friends stats.

So, here we go:

1. Retweetrank – A nice tool to find out how many people are retweeting you and how many retweet others.
2. Twitterholic – By using this tool, you can find out the most active twitter users and discover your twitter stats as well. It’s cool, check it out.
3. TweetStats – Like its name says, a twitter stats tool, with graphs & stuff … cool as well
4. TweetWasters – This can really help you optimize your time spent because it calculates the time you spend and … waste on twitter :)
5. Tweet-Rank – Tweak your tweets quality by using this tool and noticing which one generated you new followers and which one let you without some of them

I think 5 of them is enough for now, I’ll post the next small collection tomorrow or the day after. You have enough time to test and play with these ones until then.

Take care

If you have a website, then you might find the following info useful:

Most of your visitors will leave your site after only few seconds. Actually, this percentage is really high for many of the websites. It’s over 70%-80% and it happens within the first 5-6 seconds. Of course, unless you do something about it.

Some of the possible reasons would be:
- your visitor isn’t really interested on your information or what you have to offer
- your visitor landed on your website by mistake
- your headline(s) are weak quality
- your website quality is poor
- bad formatting
- too expensive product
- bad grammar?!

Possible solutions:
- try to target your traffic, so the people who land there really are into what you have to offer
- tweak & test your headline, formatting and elements positioning
- get a kickass website design
- use a dhtml popup engine to grab your visitors attention

Do you think you know other possible reasons? Did you track/test your audience? Do you have in mind other possible solutions? Then reply on twitter to @spreaditfast , I’ll be happy to have a chat with you on this topic. If you don’t have a twitter account simply create one, it only takes few seconds, or go to our blog and comment to this thread

I want to introduce you to SuperLinkMe.com.

You’d wanna use it if:

• 140 characters are just not enough for a life story or what goes through your mind at that moment
• you want to share a store with your twitter friends and don’t have a blog or a website
• you want to share a link and make it short
• you need to cloack a link so others don’t see its final target

Check the URL: http://superlinkme.com

As I was saying in a earlier post, we released our plugin called “wordpress google analytics“. Its purpose is to help people integrate google analytics with wordpress in just few seconds.

The plugin is very easy to use, it has only few options, you just need to copy it to your website plugins folder, activate it and paste the GA code inside.

That’s it.

You can find here the wordpress google analytics plugin.

Anyone who has writing abilities (or simply they just think they have it) has a blog on the internet these days. There are lots of blogging softwares that are easy to use and don’t require technical abilities so everybody can aquire a blog online.

For some of us, blogs are their projects for their daily living, as they talk about their life or bring tribute to friends and family. Furthermore, blogs assume a profound meaning to endorse a product, supply information on a topic, post tutorials, and the list could go on. Simply pick a subject and you can find a blog for it on the internet.

Blogs can be written by politicians, sports people, musicians or even kids. The fact that anyone can compose and regarding any subject matter under the sun, complaints about certain write-ups are an issue. A lot of blogs are mentioning names. So, please bare in mind that you have to be very careful and take a lot of responsibility when posting to a blog and avoid saying things that can become controversial.

Why having a blog?

1. Simply as a hobby or daily dairy – You can write about your daily activity, friends, what’s going on with your life or how you feel in a given moment.

2. Topic blogs – these blogs are focused on a single topics, like sports, politics, computer hardware, etc. They are frequently read just like magazines.

3. Marketing blogs – corporations are into blogs as well. A blog can be a very powerful instrument for business communication forming eagerness and anticipation regarding their products and services offered, or used as tool within the company, keeping employees well informed about company issues and news.

Build your own vs. others software

Maybe a lot of software developers will tell you that using ready made sofware packages is pointless. Well, they’re right somehow, because we all have our own needs and requirements and you cannot find a solution ready to meet all of our requirements. On the other hand, the existing sofwares were built after years of research and many of their features aren’t just random picked. Besides, building your own, even if you’re a developer can take a lot of time and resources to build one from scratch and since the blog is the place you need to write, you better focus more on writing posts rather than code.

Where to host my blog?

It’s simple. You have 2 choices: one would be to pick an existing platform that provides a hosted service (like blogger, typepad, live journal etc). You can have it setup really fast and in only few minutes you can start writing. A second option would be to have a self-hosted solution. Of course, there are few advantages and disadvantages. It is better because you don’t rely on anyone and you don’t risk to have your blog shut down for no reason (which can happen on hosted platforms) but at the same time, you’ll be needing some techie skills to be ready to start. The most used platform for self-hosted blogs is wordpress, but there are few more like Movable Type or Textpattern.

Few weeks ago I wrote a post on this subject. If you didn’t read it you can find it here.

In that post, I was talking about 2 different ways of integrating google analytics with your wordpress blog. One was by editing your theme files and the other one by using a plugin (actually in reversed order). Well, the problem is now that those guys that wrote the plugin are not giving it away anymore to the public, but integrated it in a bigger software package and are selling it for $295 (I’d say it’s a little too high for many people’s budget).

I noticed that few days ago when a reader of this blog told me I was pointing to an expensive software as being free so I had to tweak the post a little.

Anyway, the point is I’ll write my own plugin very soon (I plan to release it at the end of this week) so if you want to grab it when it’s up, just leave your email in the box you can see in the upper right corner and I’ll shoot you a message when it’s the time.

Take care

The default permalink structure for wordpress is something like his: http://blogname.com/?p=123, where “123″ is the internal ID of the post. I totally disagree with that structure and I’m not the only one in this world who thinks meaningless and useless for SEO purposes. It doesn’t help in any ways your rankings or your placing in the SERPs. This is obvious because one of the most important rules for SEO is having the keywords in your URL/titles. Honestly, I don’t understand why they choose that as default, but that’s not so important.

The pretty structure is something like this: http://blogname.com/2008/10/27/some-post-name. Now, the big question is: which permalinks structure is the best one? I’ll let you decide that, but, for me, one thing is for sure: the post name has to be in the URL. WordPress comes with few options for the permalinks structure:

• Day and name, which is actually ‘year, month, day and name’. This helps the reader too as it’s like searching through the blog archive. You have the year, the month, the day, so you can easily find the post.
• Month and name, which is almost the same with the first option just that the day is missing
• Category and post name, for instance http://blogname.com/some-category/some-post-name. This format is used on a lot of new blogs lately. Some say that the category name is relevant to the post name, and hence improve SEO.
• Post name, meaning just blogname.com/some-post-name. This 4th one is used on a lot of blogs as well.

WordPress offers you the possibility to go even further with your imagination, using the structure tags in your permalinks to create a custom permalinks structure. According to ‘codex’, these are the structure tags you can use in your permalinks settings page:

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
• %monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05
• %day% – Day of the month, for example 28
• %hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15
• %minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43
• %second% – Second of the minute, for example 33
• %postname% - A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%)
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
• %category% – A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
• %author% – A sanitized version of the author name.

You can use ‘-’ or ‘/’ to separate them, eg: /%category%/%postname%-%post_id%/

This isn’t a SEO blog so I’ll let you decide which one is the best permalinks structure for your blog. I personally support having post name and id and nothing else. Why? It’s because your post name will contain your keywords. Therefore, if the URL is short, the keyword density will be high(the concept is called relative weight of keywords). I don’t encourage having only the post name in the title, and here’s why: if you do that, the rewrite rules may make it impossible to access pages such as your stylesheet or the /wp-admin folder. That’s why it’s best to include some numeric data in the post, for instance the post ID. This will prevent you from having 2 posts with the same URL (I know you wouldn’t name 2 posts the same, but you might have 2 posts with the same name in different categories, etc … you never know).

One thing I forgot to mention is that if you already made some posts and published them with the faulty structure, there is a plugin that will help you redirect the old URLs to new ones. Here’s the link.

Hope this helps,

Peter