Another great find by Blazing Minds had me start investigating the online service called Tweetons which allows you to create campaigns and contests for marketing and branding on Twitter.

Tweetons is designed to allow you to reward twitter users for promoting your brand on Twitter, you can setup a single one time reward "Sweepstakes" style or provide a reward at set intervals (1 per day, or even a coupon per user) who retweets your contest or promotion.

You can also collect some awesome analytics from Tweetons including exactly who tweeted your promotional campaign, when it was tweeted, how many followers they had as well as what the reach was from all contestants (how many total people reached from the campaign).

You can get a % of retweets and how many of the retweeters are following you.  Typically if somebody retweets something of yours and they weren’t following you, either they are retweeting the tweet of a mutual follower or see your tweets in a twitter list (you can have people in a list and see their tweets without following them).

Tweetons also gives you the automated ability to follow anybody who follows you on Twitter and even auto respond to anyone who retweets one of your tweets.  I found both of these to be unwanted for myself personally because many times poor quality twitter accounts will follow you that you may not want to follow back and in the case of responding to a reply automatically I tested this with @BlazingMinds and retweeted three of her articles to get 3 of the same generic responders back in one day which I didn’t particularly care for.   I just have don’t like autoresponders very much and would rather thank people personally or not thank them at all, sometimes it is better not to send out 50 "Thanks for the RT" messages per day as they are not providing valuable content or information for your followers.

That being said adding a hashtag with every thank you has snagged some companies getting their brand "trended" on Twitter which can go a long way for publicity so it is not such a bad idea.  I may succumb and use an autoresponder in the near future if it pays off in spades for BlazingMinds and I will be watching her Twitter following closely with TwitterCounter and see how fast her account grows with her Tweeton autoreplies.

So for my test of Tweetons, I decided to run a simple giveaway of a 125×125 ad space on DragonBlogger.com.  I ran the contest from Monday through Friday August 2nd to 6th only on Twitter.  You can create a custom landing page too for anyone who enters the contest, which I thought was pretty neat.

You can see how it graphs the number of tweets each day my contest received. 

The usage shows you the # of tweets, how many followers had the potential to see your message, the % of retweeters following you, and % of retweets.

You also get a list of everyone who tweeted or retweeted the contest (including yourself) and whether they are eligible or non-eligible.  For my contest I said users must have at least 20 followers and must be following me.

When the contest is completed Tweetons will pick the winner, and if you want it to randomly pick another winner you have that option as well. 

Overall I wish I could tell you how many extra twitter followers I received, but I was not able to attribute a direct method of following from the contest itself.  I was however able to confirm that my contest generated 30 tweets and reached over 73,000 people and one person now has a 1 month ad on my blog as a result of the contest.

I enjoyed Tweetons to use it regularly to run various Twitter promotions and contests and believe it is a good way to help generate some buzz for your site or business.  Just use it wisely and think about the contest you want to offer, make sure you know how many winners you want there to be.  Don’t give a prize away per day unless you are sure you are going to do that.

-Dragon Blogger

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I have spent time recently thinking about offline methods of promoting my blogs or websites that will be an effective return on investment and I was comparing what other sites/companies do to promote their products and services.

One thing I did consider heavily was having a custom tshirt designed with my Dragon Blogger logo and URL on the front and back.  A black T-Shirt would be fitting, I just don’t leave my house more than once a week sometimes and not sure it would be the most effective form of advertising.

However, I have seen other companies get lots of promotion and even good responses from various T-Shirts promoting their products and services.  Some companies thrive on selling custom tshirts as well.  But advertising your blog isn’t as simple as slapping your logo on some sports tshirts and then just assuming that someone will see the URL and be curious enough to be drawn to your site.

I do actually wear a custom tshirt for my wife’s blog, but her blog is a local Arizona music production company.  Whenever I assist her with Rock Along Productions events, I am always wearing her company T-Shirt as it is an important part of the image.  I think this works very well since her company has a physical presence and relates to the AZ local scene.  The fact that whenever I go out of my house it is usually to assist my wife with her events means I wouldn’t have time to wear my own custom tshirt anyway which only further reduces my return on investment.

My wife actually went through six variations of tshirts from several companies and recently purchase t-shirts from someone giving a great discount ,but unfortunately was very new to the T-Shirt making process and was creating them from his apartment.  As a result the quality of work was not consistent with some shirts varied shades of color than others, so it pays to go to a reputable company if you do decide on getting a T-Shirt to promote your business.  Don’t try to save too much and go with a company that doesn’t have an established reputation or else you may suffer a Death by T-Shirt from all the frustration you may end up with.

Some other items I considered ordering are:

Blog Business Cards

Again, I barely go out in public who would I distribute them to?  I could drop them off at local restaurants in their "free lunch" jars and maybe get some traffic that way, but this hardly seems like a valuable ROI.  This would be different if I were to attend a blog convention in Las Vegas, in this case Business cards are a must.

Car Magnet or Bumper Sticker

This may be of some value, having a car magnet or bumper sticker promoting my site.  I see many people do this for local businesses and my wife had bought magnets for the side of her car and they were noticed at a local drive thru.

USB Drives, Mouse Pads, Mice…etc

If you can get them in bulk and give them away in contests you may find some value in purchasing computer accessories branded with your image/logo/url and then give them away in contests.  Who couldn’t use a free 4GB USB stick, but the problem is while you can buy plain ones for about $10-12, it costs twice that to brand them and this can add up quickly.  This option particularly works better for larger companies than for a small blogger.

Bottom Line

Unless your blog/site is very pertinent to the local geographic location of where you live, I haven’t come up with a valid reason to invest in physical branding of materials to help promote my blog site.  This would be different if I ran a blog for a local company or specific to Arizona or Phoenix where I wanted locals to visit, but I just don’t see it bringing in even less than 1 person per month visit to my site.

Have any other bloggers experimented with T-Shirts, Bumper Stickers or other promotional materials?  What was your experience, was it worth it?

-Dragon Blogger

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There is a great plug-in for wordpress called “Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress” this plug-in once downloaded and installed allows you to configure a sitemap for your blog. If you aren’t using a sitemap for your blog, you definately should be. First off let me explain what a Sitemap is.

Introduction: What is a Site map?
A sitemap also known as a Site Index is basically a listing of every resource in your website or blog in a flat file for easy searching and indexing by major search engines. This is typically an XML type of file. A sitemap will help get all of your blog posts indexed by Google and other major search engines so pages are not missed.

• First step: Download and Install the Sitemap Plug-In

Go to Arne Brachhold’s web site and download the google-xml-sitemaps-generator for wordpress
Save the file to your computer
Ftp or scp the file to your web server
Put in the wp-content/plug-ins folder of your wordpress installation and make sure it is unzipped there

• Step 2 – Enabling the Plug-In

Open your WordPress wp-admin site
click on Plug-Ins
Activate your “Google XML Sitemaps” Plug-In

• Step 3 – Configure the Plug-In

Click on your Settings XML-Sitemap
This will take you to the configuration generator for your XML Sitemap

Make sure the following items are check marked:
Sitemap Files Section:
Write a normal XML File
Write a gzipped file
Building Mode:
Rebuild Sitemap if you change the content of your blog

Update notification:
Notify Google about updates of your blog
Notify MSN Live Search about updates of your blog
Notify Ask.com about updates of your blog
Notify YAHOO about updates of your blog (if you have a yahoo account)
Modify or create robots.txt file in your blog root which contains the sitemap location.

Advanced Options
Build the sitemap in a background process
Post Priority
I do use Post Priority and have it set to prioritize the post by number of comments

Location of your sitemap file
These you should leave default directory and filename, make sure the sitemap.xml exists in your web site root.

Sitemap Content
Include homepage
Include posts
Include static pages
Include categories
Include tag pages
Include author pages
Include archives

Change frequencies
I left most of these default but I noted these:
Homepages and Posts I set to daily because sometimes I make daily updates to POSTS especially opportunities
Static pages, Categories I set to weekly
Archives I set to daily since those grow daily
Older archives I set to yearly
Tag Pages and Author pages I also set to weekly.

Homepage 1
Posts .6
Minimum Post .2
Static Pages .6
Categories .3
Archives .3
Tag pages .3
Author pages .3

Click Update Options or Build your SiteMap Manually (whenver you change these options you should build your sitemap manually).

• Step 4 – Confirming your sitemap

Now go ahead and hit your sitemap and make sure it is indexed as you want to see it.
type your URL/sitemap.xml
You should see a sitemap page like mine below:

Now just wait for the search engines to update. Once they do you can try doing searches for your own posts and see how often they come up in the search engines.

-Dragon Blogger

If you found this post helpful let me know via comment or email contactme@dragonblogger.com

• Update:

Daily-reflection.com reviewed my Google Sitemap instructions and was able to use them to tweak her configurations and settings and recommends my instructions on her blog.  Thank you Colleen.

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I always think giving the ability for your readers to quickly and easily promote your blog increases the chance your site will be submitted, dugg, or stumbled. I certainly have seen an average of 2-4 retweets of most of my blog posts since I installed Tweetmeme so I presume the same can happen with other social submitting sites.

I also have used many different plug-ins to find the best mix of social sites, and then I found Social Bookmarking Reloaded, which has more social submitting buttons than any other plug-in I have seen. They are very small and placed at the footer of your blog post, in one or more columns that you can specify. You can trim down the number of sites that are submitted to, but I would leave as many as you can just to capitalize on someone who may see a digg button, or stumble button, or mixx button and submit your site.

This is one decent plug-in to have and from my initial testing it doesn’t seem to draw much cpu or memory for the PHP process so shouldn’t risk going over memory, it doesn’t track how many submissions were done for each post (the plug-ins that do that tend to draw the most ram). If you are serious about adding social submitting buttons to your blog, you should check out Social Bookmarking Reloaded.

-Dragon Blogger

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