LGR Internet Solutions » Social Media

The Secret to Getting the Most out of Twitter

LGR — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:55:55 +0000

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Already on Twitter? Follow me. Not on Twitter yet, then join the conversation.
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Tweetbucks – Tweet Your Way to the Bank?

LGR — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:56:42 +0000

It does not take long looking at people’s tweets trying to sell bad informational products and how to turn Twitter into a traffic machine that people are trying hard to make money using Twitter. Affiliate marketing is not new to Twitter, and has now gotten easier for the regular Twitter user. If people were not used to the world of affiliate marketing then getting started in affiliate marketing using Twitter is a lot of work. You need to find products to promote, sign up for programs, get accepted all the while building your following on Twitter so you have someone to promote your affiliate programs too. With Tweetbucks the average Twitter user no longer has to work quite so hard to start promoting affiliate products using Twitter.

The process is simple really. Tweetbucks has partnered with thousands of affiliate programs already. When you are browsing an ecommerce site, like TigerDirect for example, and you find a product you are thinking of getting or want to promote you simply copy the URL into Tweetbucks and it will search for an affiliate relationship and create a shortened Bit.ly link for you to use on Twitter. For example I was recently looking at 24″ LCD monitors. One of the monitors I like is the Viewsonic 24″ LCD. I copy the URL into Tweetbucks, and it creates an affiliate link for me to use on Twitter.

Tweetbucks pays using PayPal with a minimum payout of only $25.00. How long it takes you to reach the payout will depend on how many people actually buy something when you click through your link. If you have a huge following it might not be hard. They are even giving new sign ups $5.00 to start you off so you only need to make an extra $20.00 to get your first payout.

There is a cost to using Tweetbucks though, you do not make 100% of the affiliate commission. For every sale you make 70% of the commission and Tweetbucks keeps 30%. Not a bad commission for them considering they have to maintain the relationships with the affiliate partners. It could make a few extra dollars in your pocket every month.

Tweetbucks makes it easy for anyone using Twitter to start adding affiliate links to their tweets. If you occasionally tweet a product that you want or that you bought it might make you a few dollars. If you are continually spamming Twitter with affiliate links you will quickly lose followers and not make much. I know that some people will be up in arms about the fact that people would use affiliate links on Twitter. There is a difference between people spamming Twitter with their affiliate links and those that are genuine about the products and services they use. I have used the occasional affiliate link on Twitter and it can be an effective way of creating more sales, but again I use it sparingly.

What do you think? Would you use Tweetbucks to let your followers know about products and services you use?Similar Posts:

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Twittering Our Lives Away

LGR — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:26:55 +0000

by Robert Scoble

Everyday there is more talk about Twitter. The media is certainly getting into Twitter with Ashton Kutcher breaking the 1 million followers, and Oprah joining not long ago and already approaching the 1 million follower mark. The number of ways that people use Twitter everyday is growing and changing. I can’t help but wonder if with all of the attention Twitter is getting are we Twittering our lives away?

I joined Twitter for a number of reasons, one was to connect with new people. Working from home one of the things I miss about working in an office is the ability to hang out at the water cooler and chat with my coworkers. Twitter has been a great way to have conversations with people that have similar interests as myself.

I also joined Twitter as a way to help promote my business by tweeting out the latest blog posts. Shoemoney recently made a short blog post showing the amount of referral traffic that he gets from Twitter. I don’t get quite that amount but referral traffic from Twitter did come in fourth for referral traffic. More and more the conversations that I am having on Twitter is bringing in new people to read and take part here. This regularly leads to new work. Twitter has improved my online business be helping me connect with new clients.

How much tweeting is too much? Is there a limit? Do people tweet instead of taking the time to write a new blog post? Is Twitter taking you away from the work that you should be doing? Twitter has only started to change how we communicate but are we Twittering our lives away?Similar Posts:

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Tweet from Google Reader

LGR — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:35:07 +0000

by byrion

I hate doing things twice. There are not many things that bug me but doing things twice has always been one of my pet peeves. Like many people I use Google Reader to read RSS feeds and as TechCrunch pointed out Google Readers social features are lacking. I was often reading posts in Google Reader and then tweeting them out to my followers but that meant visiting the original blog post, then tweeting it out. There had to be an easier, faster way for me to tweet the blog posts that I thought were interesting and might interest my followers?

Google Reader does offer a simple method to share posts that you like. Simply click the Share link at the bottom of a post and Google Reader shares the post with your friends on Google. Those shared items are placed on a new web page that you can find by clicking the Shared items under your stuff on the Google Reader menu in the top left. For example here is my shared items page. Google creates an RSS/Atom feed for this page so people can subscribe to it and follow what stories you are sharing.

Since Google Reader creates an RSS feed of your shared posts all it takes is a way to take that RSS feed and have it tweeted out on Twitter. The easiest way to publish an RSS feed to Twitter is to use Twitterfeed. Once you login to Twitterfeed you just need to setup a new feed that uses the RSS feed URL of your Google Reader shared items. Twitterfeed even allows you to prefix each tweet with some text. I simply added “Reading – ” to mine. Now everytime I share an item on Google Reader it is automatically tweeted out to my followers on Twitter.

Now you do not have to do things twice to tweet an interesting post you read in Google Reader. There is also the added benefit that if you read an interesting post on your mobile device, you can share it and have it tweeted out without leaving Google Reader mobile. I imagine you can do with with other web based feed readers. Give it a try with your favourite feed reader and leave a comment about how you share your favourite blog posts from your reader.Similar Posts:

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Guy Kawasaki on Twitter

LGR — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:30:46 +0000

While I don’t always agree with Guy Kawasaki, and I find it rather funny that roughly a year after I talked about AllTop and some ways to improve it those features showed up on AllTop. Guy Kawasaki, does have some interesting ideas about how to use Twitter as a marketing tool and I enjoyed watching this video of his talk in Vancouver on Twitter.

Some alternatives to the services he mentioned in the video.

Tweet Later – Tweet Later is similar to SocialToo, except it offers more options. Even the free version of Tweet Later is more feature rich allowing you to schedule your tweets, manage mutiple Twitter accounts. You can use Tweet Later to automatically follow people that follow you and unfollow those that stop following you. Not to mention the guys that run Tweet Later are from Canada so there is a good reason to use them right there.

Bit.ly – I prefer to use bit.ly for my URL shortener. It gives you some basic stats. No worry about ads. If you add your Twitter account you can tweet right from it. If you want to schedule a tweet you would need to copy the shortened URL into Tweet Later that can schedule tweets.

PeopleBrowsr – I like Tweet Deck, but I tend to like web browser based apps over stand along applications. When I discovered PeopleBrowsr I knew I had found my favourite Twitter client. It is not for everyone, but if you like Tweet Deck then you should give PeopleBrowsr a try. All you will need as a decent browser, like Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

TwitterFeed – He talks about Twitterfeed, which is a great service to automatically tweet your latest blog posts, the professional version of Tweet Later offers a similar service. You can use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet more than just your blog posts, you can set it up to automatically tweet any RSS feed. Every Twitter account creates an RSS feed, so in theory you could automatically retweet tweets from other Twitter users very easily. If you want to get a little more sophisticated run the Twitter feeds through Yahoo Pipes remove tweets you know you don’t want like @ replies and you can in theory automatically retweet as many users as you want on Twitter. Some people might be offended at this idea, so use with caution. I can only see the possibility. It could be useful if you go on hiolidays and actually want to get away from the computer. Sort of like an vacation auto responder.

There are lots of ways to use Twitter to market your website. I know some people will be offended by how Guy Kawasaki uses it, but I can see how some of these methods are worth trying. I think the trick is to actually be available to people when they do tweet you so your Twitter account is not just a mindless robot. There needs to be a person still behind the account no matter how you use Twitter.

Let the games begin! Do you think Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter is over the top? Spammy? Wrong? Right? What do you think?Similar Posts:

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Show Your Tweets on Digg and StumbleUpon

LGR — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:00:12 +0000

If you are like me, you have accounts at many of the different social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and of course you have a Twitter account . Wouldn’t it be great if you could show visitors to your various user profiles your latest tweet, only problem is that the official Twitter badges are flash and javascript so you can’t just add them to most profile pages. That is where TwitterTag comes in handy.

I was recently updating my Digg and StumbleUpon and thought it would be great to let people know that they can also follow me on Twitter. Sure links to my Twitter profile are great but I wanted to show people what my latest tweet was. Just by chance I thought I would try adding a TwitterTag to my profile pages and see what happened. Sure enough I saved my profiles and the TwitterTag image instantly appeared showing my latest tweet to all that visit my Digg and StumbleUpon profiles.

If you want to add your latest tweet to Digg and StumbleUpon simply visit TwitterTag, enter your Twitter username, set the colors and the size of TwitterTag you want to create and create Generate. Copy the HTML link and image code that is displayed. Go to your Digg and StumbleUpon profiles and paste the code in the About You sections to update your profile and save. Magically the TwitterTag will appear and show your latest tweets when you tweet. There might be a slight delay in the updating because TwitterTag caches your latest tweet for a little while.

There might be other social media profiles that you can do this with as well, but these are the two that I have recently updated and tried. If you know of others leave a comment and a link so we can all add our latest tweets to them as well. Using TwitterTag to help promote your Twitter profile on your other social media profiles is an excellent way to let people know about your Twitter account and to gain more followers.Similar Posts:

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DiggBar – Create Easy Short URL’s

LGR — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:40:02 +0000

While I am not a huge fan of Digg, I have been playing with the new DiggBar that was released today and I can see it becoming popular. The bar itself does not require an installation, and makes it easy for people to shorten URL’s for Twitter and if the page had already been submitted to Digg then you can Digg it up easily. In many ways the bar reminds me of the web version of StumbleUpon with the added bonus that you can shorten the URL.

The random button will take you to another URL that has been submitted to Digg. If you are logged into Digg you can Digg the story up or bury it. It makes Digg as easy to use as StumbleUpon, which should be good for Digg. It might even help Digger’s to actually read the pages before the Digg them or Bury them. I could see myself using the DiggBar occasionally to just check what is popular on Digg without having to visit the Digg site because there are no ads that open without clicking, yet.

The thing I do like best about the DiggBar is how you create a short URL. Just type digg.com/ in front of the URL in your address bar and it is magically transformed into a short URL that you can use on Twitter. It is a simple thing that makes me wonder why other URL shortener services have not picked up on yet. I am sure it will be one the list of many soon.

Here is demo product video showing you all the features.

DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

So what do you think, will you start using the DiggBar to shorten your URL’s for Twitter and sharing on Facebook? Will you start using the DiggBar instead of StumbleUpon?Similar Posts:

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Twouble with Twitters

LGR — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:28:30 +0000

I got a good laugh out of this today, and ironically I found it on Twitter. Love the fail whale that tries to eat all of them.

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Digg Ads Open Without Clicking

LGR — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:00:12 +0000

I am not a huge fan of Digg and now I have one more reason to not bother going to the website today. I stopped over at Digg because I remembered seeing a link to a post that I wanted to visit again. All was going fine until I moved my mouse over the ad on the page and all of a sudden my browser opened up a new tab. I thought it was a little odd, I did not hear or notice a click, but I thought maybe I accidentally clicked the ad. So I moved my mouse over and off the ad again, and once again my browser opened the link in a new tab.

I know that ad revenues are in decline on the Internet and that publishers are having a tough time making money by placing advertising on website, but is this not a new low for both Digg and TravelZoo? Do you think I will want to spend any time on either of your websites when you do this to me?

Here is a quick screencast I took of the ad opening. I don’t know if you can see the mouse very well, but I move the mouse over and out of most of the ad and nothing happens. If I roll my mouse over the call to action on the ad and off the ad opens the ad URL all without me clicking on the ad. Perhaps I should be thankful, you saved me all that energy I would have wasted clicking on the ad if I was actually interested.

Just another reason not to visit Digg anymore. What do you think is this the future of advertising? Would you want ads like that on your website?Similar Posts:

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Twitter Noise, Noise, Noise

LGR — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:55:43 +0000

Japanish by fabbio on Flickr.

As you get more and more followers and follow more people on Twitter the problem that many users start to face is the level of noise from all of the tweets that they have coming at them. If you have started to reach a level on Twitter where the noise is starting to get to you here are some things I have found that have been helpful.

You don’t read every tweet by everyone that you follow. Check once in a while and if you see something that interests you then you can reply.
Use a Twitter client, like Tweetdeck. I started on Twitter using the web interface, and TwitterFox, and I still like to use those interfaces, but Tweetdeck does a couple of things that makes managing the noise easier. You can create groups and add your followers into groups so you can still keep track of the people you want to follow more closely. FOr example I have a friends and family group so I can see tweets from my friends and family at a glance.
Update: There is also a Twitter client called PeopleBrowsr that is similar to Tweetdeck but web based. Impressed with it so far.
Turn it off. You don’t need to be on Twitter all day long having conversations with people. I would get very little done if I did that.

Twitter is like a giant party room and as you walk through the room you will have conversations with certain people. You don’t need to hear all of the conversations going on and you don’t need to talk with every person there all at once. Just come and enjoy the party, and you are always welcome to chat with me when you are there.

If you are already on Twitter, what do you use to manage the noise?Similar Posts:

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