If you have a look at this post called Twitter Smarter with Greasemonkey you can read how you can remove all the pain and effort by using a Greasemonkey script that they have developed to automate your Twitter posting.

The author states that ”

After you’ve followed a bunch of people, just sit back and watch the follow backs roll in. We’ve found that about 12% of the people with an interest in SEM have an automatic follow back set up. More will follow you as the day goes on. Give it a few days, then go to your followers page and drop the ones that aren’t mutual. If they’re not in to you, then it’s time to just move on.

I started the week with around 50 followers.  After a few days of testing this script and really not working very hard at it I’m coming up on 500 followers. Sure, I’m no rock star, but having a conversation with 500 people that share my interests is, well, interesting!  ”

I haven’t tried this yet but it looks well worth a shot.

Technorati is good and an excellent source of short term visitors for your main keywords before your entries are indexed by the large search engines. An issue with it is the lack of feedback when sites tags are not included within the Technorati search. This can become painful when you blog a topical entry and then wait and wait and wait for Technorati to pick it up.

One major reason for the posts to be ignored by Technorati relates to your feed.

Although it is not explicitly stated on the site Technorati needs full content feeds and not extracts.

I have proven this with several blogs I maintain. Technorati and I lived happily together. I would post, five minutes later the post was indexed under the selected tags.

A switch to extract only feeds suddenly resulted in me being ignored and several posts were not indexed in any way, not in the tag search, not in the natural search.

The proof of the pudding was in the change to full text feeds and hey presto the post, and all the previously missing posts, appeared in the correct tag categories. As final confirmation of this theory you can check whether this post and the two before it are in Technorati.

So, before you complain about Technorati, and remember the team is providing a free service to you, check your feed.

Tags: Technorati, blog, rss feeds, feeds

If your feeds are set to full text you could be delivering your latest insightful thoughts less any revenue generating adverts, such as Google Adsense carrying publishers pay per click adverts, direct to the desktop of your readers. They will be able to read your full article in their feed reader and then move on to the next site. Meanwhile you have received no income for your hard work.

Over time this could be a good policy and allow you to build a community of regular readers but in the short term you could be harming your income.

Look at your web visitor logs to see what activity is recorded for your site. Do you see many single visits from IP addresses requesting your feed with no subsequent pages being served from your site?

This could be because your posts are not engaging your audience, it could be because they have no need to visit as you have just served up the full article without the need to visit you.

I suggest you change your feeds to be excerpts or partial text for a while and monitor the results. Do you now see feed requests followed by pages served to the same IP address? If you do you have been successful and you are serving your site plus adverts to your readership.

Monitoring is essential as you do not want to loose your readers so try this for a short while and review the results. Remember you will be posting new articles regularly, so if it has an adverse effect you can always revert bacjk to the previous feed structure.

Tags: rss feeds, adsense, blog income, google adsense, google

I was careful to mention that you should create informative articles on your blog, not merely generate worthless pages. This practice is a form of spam and over time will devalue blogs as a source of informative content, possibly leading to their exclusion from certain search engines or search results.

Whilst there is a positive business use to a blog there are also many negative uses and a splog is the worst form.

Some people generate a fake blog to hold content gathered from other sites via their RSS feeds (syndication of content) and use these postings to generate visitors. Vistors are converted into ‘stolen’ revenue through clicking on adverts delivered through the Google Adsense Program.

What can you do about it: -

1. don’t stray into this practice
2. don’t click on the adsense adverts if you stumble onto one of these sites
3. consider reporting the site to services such as Splogfighter. This is run by an anonymous American, was so incensed by this practice that he started a one-man war. He has been prompting Google to delete thousands of splogs a day from Blogspot.

The war is on.

Tags: website, indexing, articles, Splogfighter

The nature of blogs is to encourage and develop a sense of community with cross linking encouraged. Comments help to enhance posts and develop the subjects under discussion.

In addition to this the interactive nature of blogs, through comments, offers attractions for corporates. Allowing key employees to develop blogs and present a more human persona rather than the more traditional image portrayed through a more formal web site.

Whilst there are attractions there are also barriers, change barriers.

Are blogs too new, too technology based, too threatening resulting in a slow adoption by corporates and their pr departments or are the enlightened in the ascebndancy?

The jury is out – do you have any good examples of large corporates with effective blogs?

I can think of Microsoft and Macromedia as two ….. but they are both software companies.

Tags: blogs, phenominal, evolving, community, comments, enhance, posts