I have spent the last 72 hours becoming immersed in twitter on my free time and I believe this will be one of the most comprehensive posts on how to use and leverage twitter as not only a social networking tool, but a way to promote your blog and blog posts. First off I want to say Twitter is ideal at finding and connecting people within your local area and state, you can follow hundreds or thousands of people in your city and state and at any time see what is on peoples mind. I have seen people post about traffic accidents local news and announcements and using twitter to learn whats going in in your local area is one great use of the tool. This direct instant messaging type communication with anyone who is a member makes it probably the most ideal method of real time communication with a large group of people on the same topics that I have ever seen. I was blown away at how great this tool is.

Second people can use Twitter solely through the web browser, and I will post all of the functions to do so. Then at the end I will post about this tool that was recommended to me called TweetDeck which put so much power at my fingertips and made sorting tweets so much easier.

So lets begin this post shall we?

• What is Twitter?

Here is what I can describe of Twitter, it is a hybrid of Instant Messaging Client, Myspace, and Chatroom into a single combined interface. This interface allows the freedom to talk to mass groups of strangers as a chatroom, the ability to follow and join up with friends, and the searching and finding topics, people and genre plus the personalization of your custom page like MySpace. (Though there are no widgets or anything, it is pretty much just a background, logo and some text about yourself).

All you do with Twitter is chat and read chats period. Twitter is a communication tool, much like AOL Instant Messenger you just type and press enter or click submit. And your text is seen by the world, and anybody that follows you. If you care to have a private network and only have a personal list of friends follow your communication you can set your profile to private, where what you type cannot be read by the world and people who want to follow you must send you an email requesting to become a follower.

• What is a Tweet?

A Tweet is your message that you type and submit. Twitter limits you to 140 character messages, but you can compress links that would normally take dozens of characters to only use up a handful of characters with TinyURL. Tweets are your personal communications with the world and the communications that you read from other people.

This is a tweet:

When you type a tweet you often will want to include hyperlinks to your blog posts such as http:///blah/blah. These hyperlinks can be quite long and really take away from your 140 characters. This is why twitter implements “TinyURL” which encodes your URL string to a handful of characters, that decode to your correct site. Now, if you just type your URL in the Tweet Box, and click submit, it converts to TinyURL automatically. However, this still restricts you to 140 characters and a long URL may prevent you from posting all you want, so use the TinyURL Creator Plugin for Firefox, to shrink your URL and then cut/paste it into your tweet so that you can fit more of what you were trying to say. The Twitter Application known as TweetDeck does this too, more on this later.

Here is your FULL URL in TWEET Box:

Here is the FULL URL converted to TinyURL in Tweet:

Be careful, if you are having a conversation with someone and you are using the “Reply” feature, these tweets are still visible to Everyone. you just see an @user in the tweet message, but everyone can see these. The only way to have private tweet communication is to “Direct Message” someone.

• Okay I Signed Up For Twitter Now What?

Twitter Home Profile Page (click to enlarge):

Now you have signed up for twitter and are at your home profile. You see your “Tweet” bar where you can type your messages, your # people you are following, your followers, and the number of updates you have made. Underneath your Tweet box is a list of all active tweets from the people you are following.

If you have nobody following you, then people will only see your tweets if they are viewing “Everyone’s” tweets or have searched for a “topic” and your tweet had a keyword match that will make it show up in that persons list. So in order to leverage Twitter you need to build a list of people you follow and people who will follow you.

Think about what you are looking for as Twitter is for people with something to say, who is your target audience, and who do you want to read your messages?

One of the first things I did when signing up for twitter was find local people in my state to follow.  This is a good way to get to know what people are talking about locally.  Without followers and a following not very many people will read your tweets unless you happen to use a keyword that someone is searching for, so start building a network as quickly as possible.

Searching for followers is a simple as going to http://search.twitter.com, then type in what “Keyword” you want to search for.  This will display a list of all tweets that have your keyword in them.  This is a good way to follow people who talk about your favorite topics.  An example of this, is I did a search for anyone who mentioned “Arizona”

Arizona Search (truncated to only first 2 results):

After you do the search, you would click on the people’s Twitter Name and get their profile page, then you would click “Follow” to see tweets from that person.

One thing I have notices is about 10% -15% of the people you “Follow” will follow you back out of courtesy or because they have seen something in your tweets that interests them. As of this writing I was following about 444 people and about 85 were following me, most were people who followed me only because I followed them first.

• Advanced Searching

Now that you have learned to find topics and see what people are saying about your keywords, it is time to find people based on advanced criteria.  Go back to http://search.twitter.com and this time click on the “Advanced Search” Link.

Now you can search for words, phrases or multiple words in the top part, but my favorite part is the Places search.  You can specific a city and then choose how many miles from this city.  I did my Advanced search for Phoenix and within 15 miles.

Advanced Search by Location:

So find many people in your immediate area, one thing I have learned is that there are something called “TweetUps” where twitter folks in the same city get together and have lunch or dinner and meet each other. This is an ideal social tool for not only inviting people to become followers of your blog, but also to make friends as well.

• Twitter Etiquette

Now that you have signed up for Twitter and gained some followers and a small social network you should know a few things about twitter etiquette.  Don’t spam the same tweet over and over repeatedly, if it is something important that you want to share, send updates every few hours, like a link to a special post or a special message.  Think about random people reading your tweets and try to make your tweets make sense.

• Twitter Tips

Ok, one of the limitations of using twitter through the browser is that on your home page it doesn’t update unless you hit the refresh button.  Secondly, it is hard to screen your “Replies” from everyone’s Tweets.  The first thing you want to do is go to tweetbeep and setup some email alerts.

Tweetbeep allows you to setup alerts, so that if your specific keywords you specify are typed in a Tweet, you receive an email alert. This is a great way to find new people as well, as you can type any topic and get email alerts as to who is talking about your topics.

• TweetDeck

TweetDeck is by far the most useful Twitter application I have found to date.  This application allows you to see all messages in pretty close to real time (1 minute updates by default).  You have multiple columns, you can have one for “Everyone” which means everyone you are following, then you can have columns for your @ Message Replies, and another column for Direct Messages.  You can also create additional columns based on search criteria, and you can have up to 10 columns total.

If you hover over someones picture in TweetDeck in a tweet, you see symbols where you can reply back to the user, or direct message them. You can also click on the little tiny i button next to their tweet username at the bottom of the tweet, this will popup up that users profile and you can click on follow them right from tweetdeck.

You can also cleanup clutter by using the trashcan symbol to empty your twitter columns so that you can easily see when new messages arrive.

From within TweetDeck you can do searches for keywords and get another column that matches all your keywords, you can select Local or Global. Local only searches the keywords on the people you are following, global will catch everyone which allows you to find and follow new people. I wish Tweetdeck gave you a column for “Location” and showed you all tweets from people in a certain geographical location but this is a minor wish.

Without a shadow of a doubt, I liked twitter 100x more when I learned of Tweetdeck and installed it, you can get so much more done, and keep track of your tweets much easier. Plus when you go to sleep and come back in the morning, you can easily just catch up on your direct replies and messages without having to go through all the tweet clutter.

If you use Twitter and you want to be serious, give Tweetdeck a try.

• In Summary

Okay, so this about sums up my blog post about Twitter.  I wish Twitter lets you link multiple sites for your profile, as I am only able to list one blog site for people to see on my profile.  As a result however, I have only been using Twitter for 2 weeks and already 3% of my blog’s traffic comes from Twitter, Twitter has resulted in over 100 hits to my blog site this week.  And I really have only started to power use twitter for 2 days.

I will also show you that Twitter users have an average of 70% bounce rate, vs 96% bouncerate for Entrecard visitors, which means people visit and read your content on your site.

I am going to follow up with more statistics and twitter updates in the future, stay tuned.
Also, you can Follow Me on Twitter, and just say hi.

-Dragon Blogger

I have received numerous requests via email on how I have gotten my blog to under 1000 IzeaRank in only its first 35 days of existance.  I have to say that one of the biggest tools that I use to achieve this is Entrecard.  First of all, I want to say that though my visitors to my site are high, I have a high bounce rate of 84%, which means that if I were to stop using these social networks, I would lose 70% of my traffic within 3 or 4 days.  I don’t have sustainable traffic yet, it takes about 1-2 hours of upkeep per day to keep this much traffic coming into my blog at this point.  I still strive for blog sustainability and I only believe this will happen with time and high quality posts about topics readers want to read about.

Here is an overview of Entrecard.

First you have an entrecard account, I recommend an account for each and every one of your blogs, but you can link them all together (more on that a little later).

You create a 125×125 pixel ad for your blog, make sure you have your blog’s name or URL inside the 125×125 ad.  Having a picture with no blog name or URL makes it hard for people to know who you are or what your blog URL is.  You want this to stick in their mind even after they see and recognize your entrecard picture.

Once you create an account you will go into your dashboard as seen here:

The biggest thing to note about your dashboard are the following:

1. The amount of credits you have (this is your advertising credits, EC’s)
2. The amount of cards you dropped today / all time
3. The amount of credits it costs to advertise on your blog
4. The amount of cards dropped on you today / all time

• Entrecard Credits (ECs)

These are advertiser credits, like online dollars. Each site you want to display your entrecard on costs a certain amount of ECs per day. You purchase advertising in 24 hour chunks for a set # of ECs from a blog site.
The more popular a blog is (the more drops it receives) the more it costs to advertise on that blog.
You get 1 EC for each drop you perform on someones blog, and you also get 1 EC for each drop that is made on your blog. You also get ECs from advertisers who purchase spots on your blog, but these ECs are paid only when the advertisers AD is displayed not at time of purchase.

• Dropping Cards

Dropping cards is one of the best ways to get ECs as well as get your blog visited by other Entrecard users.  When you first start out and link a blog, you will use the “Campaign” button at the top and do a search for blogs related to your blogs topic.  If you write poetry, do searches for “Poem, Poetry, Writing”…etc and then visit each and every one of these blogs sites and drop on them.

Tip:  Hover over the little Entrecard of the Site and hold Control Key and then click on “Visit Site”.  This will open the site in a new Firefox or Google Chrome tab.  This allows you to mass open a bunch of sites at the same time, then flip to each of the taps with Control - Page Up or Control - Page Down, click the drop, then Control + W to close the tab.  This is a little trick which allows me to make dozens of drops very quickly.

Here is another note, look for sites that say “Drop For Life” or “Drop U Back”.  You know these people will almost always pay you back with a drop.  Secondly, look at blog post before you drop.  If you visit a blog that has a last post > 30 days ago, pretty much assume there is a good chance it is a less than active blog.  Drop if you like the topic but don’t necessarily expect a drop back.

I always try to read some of my dropper’s posts on their main page before dropping, and I comment where appropriate.  This is because even though they appreciate the drop, dropping and running will give the blog a high “Bounce Rate” and though they get the Unique Visits, it shows that their content isn’t keeping people on the site for a follow up click.

• Drops Inbox

After you have done many drops and you notice people start dropping on your site, go to your Drops Inbox as often as possible, at least daily.  Remember you can only drop once time per 24 hours, and if people are doing 2 drops on your blog but you are only returning 1, they aren’t inclined to keep dropping as often.  Entrecard requires a little bit of work, try to drop on all people who drop on you every day.  I set aside 1 hour per day to just perform entrecard drops and advertisements.

The funny thing is, when I was doing multiple Entrecard drops per day, I was losing track of which droppers I was returning the favor on.  I now use the “Show only people I haven’t dropped on” drop down menu, to show all the Entrecards of visitors who I haven’t dropped in the last 24 hours.  This way if you check your Entrecard several times a day, you know who is left to drop on for that day.

• Advertising

Okay here is the fun part, when you start off a new blog you need to advertise it, but you won’t have very many EC’s so you want to click on Campain, and click on Search, then Sort by Cheapest. But beware, many of the cheap blogs either are decomissioned or have never updated in months so they are cheap for a reason. New blogs sometimes don’t have a badge setup yet. Visit every site before you pay to advertise on the site, make sure the site is up, the site works, and doesn’t have content that conflicts with yours. Also visit their profile and see how often they accept or respond to advertisers, and note what their reject rate is.

When people advertise on your blog, visit their site first before just accepting.  Make sure its content is appropriate.  Secondly, reject some way off topic advertisers.  By doing some rejections, you actually make your blog more popular in the long run as you don’t look like you pander to just anyone.  But don’t reject too many or people won’t even try to advertise.

• Handling Multiple Blogs

This is one of my favorite parts about Entrecard is the ability to have multiple accounts and link all of the blogs together so you can switch back and forth between your Entrecard accounts.  You can only do 300 drops per day on one account, but if you have multiple accounts you can drop up to 600 cards per day.  I often try to get 300 drops per day, and I usually do at least 20-30 additional for my secondary blogs for about 400 drops per day.

The switch tab near your email at the top is very useful, this lets you see linked accounts and transfer ECs between your blogs so you can give your baby blogs more advertiser credits.  This also allows you to easily switch back and forth between your accounts, to check their dashboards for advertisers, and visit the drops inbox to return drop favors.

• Dragon Blogger Tips

Last but not least now I will explain how I use Entrecard.
I always drop everyone who drops on me, and if there wasn’t enough people dropping on me to fill up 300 drops, then I start campaign browsing. Honestly, I sometimes do Random searches, and drop on random people. I always give preference to bloggers who list “Drop U Back” or who list their Top Droppers on their blog, as these people tend to show more odds to return the favor. Secondly I drop on my advertisers, even if they aren’t in my drops inbox, because they advertised with me, I drop them. I also sometimes blog chain, and I can knock off lots of drops this way. This is when you visit a blogger’s site, and open the entrecard ad in their site to another site, then do the same over and over again. Dropping on each site as you go. This causes me to reach out to random blogs, but it also lets me see the blogs who really are advertising like crazy out there. When I see one blog having ten or twenty ads on other blogs I know they are heavily promoted.

I buy advertisments on expensive sites where I can, and cheap sites when I don’t have the credits for the big sites.  If I don’t have any ads running in the next 24 hours, I will sort my searches looking for blogs that have no ADs in the queue.  I try to have at least 3-4 ads running every day on someones blog somewhere.

I do visit the Statistics page and look at top droppers…etc and I will do a follow up blog on leveraging the Entrecard Analytics.

Happy Dropping my friends,

-Dragon Blogger

As many of my blogger friends know I started this blog on August 23rd 2008, and today is Saturday September 27th 2008.  My blog has been in up and running 34 days so far and this is my 101st post.  This morning my blog finally jumped from a Google PageRank of 0 to PR2.  I am quite happy and excited to finally get a Google Pagerank # above 0, and am continuing to ensure my blog will stay on course to generate traffic and readers.

For everyone out there who stumbles across my blog I consider my blog successful for being only 34 days and I put hard work into making it more so.  I have several tips for new blogger’s and even bloggers looking to try something different.  Look at my “Blogging” category and read all of my posts on blog promotion, design, analytics and my methods for bringing my blog from 0 - an average of 176 viewers per day for the past week.

I have said this before and I will reprint it, the three most valuable social networking tools I find myself using every night are:

Entrecard - This is a must have for your blog, create a good appealing 125×125 ad, don’t use a generic one from Entrecard, it must say your blog’s name on it as well, don’t just have a picture without at least saying your blogs name on the logo.  Drop often and find people who have “Drop For Life” or “I will Drop You Back” on their sites, these people will return drops.  Join my Entrecard Generator, and use it.  It will open many quick links to Entrecard sites for easy drops.  (My generator is still being build, I add new links every few days)

SocialSpark - This is another must in my opinion, not only do you get the analytics, but you also get to browse other peoples blogs by category and link up with people in like genre’s.  Many people are helpful and I get alot of my viewership from SocialSpark people checking out my blog.

Zimbio - This is a really nice way to get your blog promoted, and to find nice articles and well written blogs.  I don’t get alot of traffic from Zimbio, but when you post your articles, you can easily get 90+ links on Google External Links from Zimbio.  I like the concept of Zimbio, the whole blogs turned into online magazine articles.  I am still trying to figure out how to leverage it to get more traffic flow, but I think Zimbio will be a more major player as more people start to use it.

Remember don’t get discouraged, it is easy to get euphoric when you see your blog have 200+ visits one day, and then get depressed when you see the next day it drops down to 20 visits.  You want to remember to have quality content posted, keep readers coming back with unique topics.   I also believe in some variety, there is benefit to specialized blogs, but if you make a technology blog and focus too specifically without somewhat reaching out to other topics once and a while, you will have such a restricted audience.

I advertise my blog over and over as 50% Internet & Technology (I consider posting about blogging, promoting analytics Technology), 25% Entertainment (My Heroes Reviews, TV Shows, Comics…etc), 15% Personal (Local reviews, social life…etc) and 10% Advertising (Paid Posts and Sponsorships).

This is a healthy mix in my opinion, as I try keep a little bit for everyone, but people who are interested in blogging, science, technology and politics will come back to read my latest on these topics.  Ironically, I have 101 posts, and my 5 most popular posts by far are:

1. Mozilla Songbird - Managing your iPOD with Ubuntu Hardy Heron
2. Dragon Bloggers Review of Heroes Season 3 Premiere - Part 1
3. Downloading YouTube Video’s to your iPOD Nano
4. Dragon Blogger Review of TNT Network’s Raising the Bar
5. Dragon Bloggers Review of Heroes Season 3 Premiere - Part 2

I was having trouble with both of my 2 blogs Dragon Blogger and Rock Along Productions where the 404.php page would render very poorly.  My sidebars wouldn’t render correctly and the text “Page could not be found” was either not readable or would not display at all.  After searching the Internet for solutions, I even copied in the default theme 404.php, but this would display even worse.

I found the easiest solution in the world.

Open up your themes “singlepost.php” and copy/paste all of the text from this file into your 404.php page.  Then just change the wording to match what you want to say.   Now all of my 404 pages render perfectly with the columns and even tell the user to go back to the home page and try searching for the topic or category.

Try this little tip out if you don’t like your 404 or Page Not Found appearance, it worked pretty well for me.

-Dragon Blogger

Ok, if you are the type of person who likes to check your Linkbacks daily, then this is a service you should be using.  Setup a Google Alerts account and add your blogsearch criteria as alerts.

Or just do your blogsearch and then scroll to bottom and turn it into an alert.

Create 2 alerts for each of your blogs, so you can accurately track Linkbacks to both types of URLs.

link:http://yoursite.com

link:http://www.yoursite.com

You can set your alerts to notify you immediately when google picks up the link, or have a daily report.  If you get many linkbacks a day, you might want to even set weekly to prevent spam attacks.  Or some people like to know exactly when it happens, so you can be quick to plug the blogger or site who plugged you…etc  The choice is yours.

Here is Image of Google Alerts for my Site:

-Dragon Blogger

Do you use Google Alerts?

I was experimenting with wondering why I when my fellow blogger’s Linkback to my website, I don’t see the Linkback in my Wordpress admin or when I do blogsearch link:http://www.dragonblogger.com

Well I have discovered the answer, google considers http://www.dragonblogger.com and http://dragonblogger.com two completely separate URLs even though they end up on the same site if you hit either one.

So when I go to Google Blogsearch and type:

link:http://dragonblogger.com

I found 8 additional Linkbacks to my site over the last 30 days on top of the 10 Linkbacks listed for http://www.dragonblogger.com.  This means my total Linkbacks for the month so far is 18.

My question is:  Even with my Dreamhost account set to redirect http://dragonblogger.com to http://www.dragonblogger.com, it doesn’t affect if someone links back to http://dragonblogger.com.

Remember this, if you are checking Linkbacks, don’t trust the Wordpress Admin fully, make sure you Google Blogsearch both your www.domain.com and your domain.com and combine the two.

If my fellow bloggers knew that this worked this way, let me know how you deal with your tracking, or if you know of any way to make Wordpress admin count both the www.domain.com and domain.com when it shows the Linkbacks.

-Dragon Blogger

I am learning each and every day about blogging, I have been blogging since June 2008 with my first blog, but then started a replacement blog Dragonblogger.com in August 2008.  So I really have only been blogging for about 3 months and only seriously and with wordpress for about 4 weeks.  Each and every day I am learning new things about blogging, how to write more engaging blogs, how to promote your blog, how to market and properly praise other bloggers…  Tools, Techniques, Tips…etc

A new blogger starts out with the following in mind:

• 1)  Do I want to blog and why?

Find out why you want to blog, what is the purpose?  Is it just to share your opinion and thoughts and life with the world, is it to make money online, or maybe a little of both.

• 2) What type of blog service should I use?

If you are doing a personal or diary type blog, with only casual advertising pick up, or if it is your first blog then I would recommend using Blogger, or a Free Wordpress blog.  If you want to develop a professional blog, or you want to have a string of multiple blogs, then you will need to pay for web hosting and install and configure a wordpress blog.

• 3)  What do I want my blog to look like?

This is one of the hardest things, how to style your blog.  Many bloggers like artistic and wildly colorful blogs and many of them look great.  I kind of fashion the following rule:  If you are blogging about art, music, entertainment then I think an artistic blog is much more attractive and fits the bill.  If you are doing a political blog, having a theme with flowers and kittens is a little out of character.  Plain generic white themes with 2 columns are also the most popular, and functional, but personally in my humble opinion I like to see a little “Personality” in a blog site.  Even if it is a colorful logo, or some borders.  Generic white blogs to me tend to reek too much of “Regurgitated content” and my initial impression is that maybe someone didn’t put time into stylizing their blog because they aren’t that serious.

That being said, plain simple blogs are fine for many people, and there is nothing wrong with them.  I may use one for one of my blogs, but I tend to like a little color and a little style that makes your blog stand out a little from the rest.  That being said, my black with silver theme is fairly common too, I have truly seen some really nice templates out there.

I recommend having a blog with no less than 3 columns
Content Column - Where all your posts lie
Advertiser Column -  Where you can put all your 125×125 ad buttons or links
Social Column - This is the column where you put all your social traffic stats, rank badges…etc.

Some people just have 2 advertiser columns and mix and match advertisements with badges, traffic…etc which is fine as well.

If you use Entrecard put it at the top of your site, so that people can find it easily.  It is very annoying to bury it down at the bottom of a site, or in the middle where people have to scroll and search really hard to find it.  This tends to prevent people from dropping and may hurt your drops in the long run.

• 4)  What widgets, plug-ins and text links to put in:

I highly recommend getting a Google PR badge, Alexa Badge, Izearanks Badge, and Technorati Badge as the starters.  I would also recommend getting a Feedburner or other RSS plug-in which displays your readers.  A feedjit feed is also good and fun, the map isn’t necessary, but its nice to show a list of people who are visiting your site.  It is also cool as heck to watch the real time live feed, where you can see people pop on your site from around the world.

Create some “Advertise Here” and “Hire Me” buttons, this tip provided by my good friend Damien Riley.  You want to let advertisers and companies know that they can hire you or sponsor your site.  Create a Hire Me page, with a contact form “cforms II” is my favorite forms plug-in for wordpress.

• 5)  Create your first 10-20 good quality posts

Before you even start advertising, you need to establish some base content.  First create an introduction page, include a disclosure agreement as a widget, or in your introduction page.  Then create 10-20 good quality blog posts about your chosen blog topic, or if you are a personal diary, write about some recent things.  These posts should be at least 250 words in content and have no more than 2 links out per post.  (Too many links out of your site, will hurt your site rating I am told).

• 6)  Join Socialspark, Entrecard, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati…etc

Join as many social networks as possible and create accounts and information about yourself and your blog.  This will help you get established and start building a network of friends.  Some people can be very helpful and others not so much.  I have made some great friends already, people whose generosity really makes me glad to have started blogging and met them.  Don’t overkill and spam people to visit your site, just casually add people to be your friend, or visit their blog, and leave a comment on one of their posts.  Find people who use commentluv, which will link back to your blog.

• Final Thoughts

Those are some of my tips for today, I will post more as I learn more.  I will be posting soon about setting blog goals for yourself after getting an established blog.  Remember, blogging is about expressing yourself and your thoughts, opinions.  Don’t regurgitate content if you can avoid it, if you find an article you want to quote, put it in your own words, and then link to the original article.  Don’t cut/paste content verbatim from other sites just to fill POST quota.

Enjoy Blogging, I really am finding it quite an addicting endeavor

-Dragon Blogger