Three reasons why Twitter is worth using
According to who you talk to , Twitter is either a gigantic waste of time or the best thing since sliced bread. Personally, I’ve found a middle ground that works for me: it’s worthwhile as long as you have a clear purpose in mind for the time you spend there.
The reason I say that is because Twitter can be incredibly addictive. It’s VERY tempting to power up TweetDeck and flit in and out of conversations all the live long day. However, eventually, you do have to get to work, right? Right!
Here’s why I use Twitter, and why I keep using it. Your experience might be different; this is what works for me.
Interact with people in my industry. That’s pretty much a fancy way of saying “talk to people that do the same thing I do for work”. I love chatting about various Web developments with people from all over the world that “get it”, plus, I almost always come away with something pretty cool because these people are way smart, and love to share their knowledge with me. Win!
Keep track of key phrases. You can do this with TweetDeck; just set up a search and TweetDeck will instantly install a column that will ping you everytime that particular word or phrase is mentioned in the literally millions of tweets that occur daily on Twitter. Amazing technology, no?
Track yourself. This one is a little bit vanity (just a tad), but mostly it’s to make sure that if anyone is talking to me or about me, I can answer back in a timely manner. I get questions all the time from readers or from potential readers, and I don’t want to rely on Twitter’s hokey (and hidden) system to keep up on these.
What do you use Twitter for? It doesn’t have to be anything particularly groundbreaking, yall. Just share what works for you.
12 sites for free WordPress themes
One of the first things you’re going to want to do when starting your blog is make it look good. Fortunately for those of us who are, shall we say, “design impaired”, there are PLENTY of great freebies out there that will transform you blog into something you’d be proud to take home to Mom. Here are my 14 go-to sites for free WordPress themes; yes, they’re pretty much all WordPress, but some of them have additional blog platform templates available (honestly, though, why wouldn’t you use WordPress? It’s the best bet for starting a new site!).
How to import your feeds into Facebook using Facebook Notes
Want more exposure for your site or brand? You need to be on Facebook, and you need to import your site’s RSS feed into your personal or public Facebook page content. Facebook has made this about as non-intuitive as possible to do, especially with the newest redesign, but here’s a quick how-to:
First, get to your Facebook page. On the left-hand side, you’ll see a menu with a link for “Applications”. Click on that link.
Once you get to the Applications page, you’ll have to scroll all the way to the bottom. You’ll see a menu with multiple categories: sports, entertainment, business, etc. Click on the Business link.
Once you arrive at the Application Directory, click on the “On Facebook” link (are you starting to see why I said this was so janky?!?!? Good Lord.).
Type “Notes” into the search box. Facebook Notes should be your second result.
You’ve arrived at the Notes fan page. Click on “Go To Application”.
On the right hand side, you’ll see a little box that says “Note Settings”. Click on “Edit Import Settings”.
FINALLY, we get to the meat and potatoes. Here’s where you can add your site’s actuall RSS or ATOM URL, or, you can just add in your site’s URL. Click the box that says you have the right to import that content.
And you’re done. Facebook will give you a preview of your feed and ask you if you approve; click “yes”, and guess what? Your feed is now integrated with your personal or public Facebook content. Every time you publish something new, it will show up in yours and your friends News streams. Note: Facebook Notes are VERY buggy, and sometimes they will tell you that they “can’t find the URL specified”. Give it an hour and try again; I had to do this about three times (!!!) before they added my feed.
Five reasons why WordPress is your best bet for starting a new site
When I started creating Web sites several years ago for other people, I used the standard tools of the day: WYSIWYG authors, Notepad for HTML, DreamWeaver, etc. I was able to get the look I wanted eventually after a lot of tweaking, but I knew that I needed something easier (not to mention faster) that I could get up and going with a minimum of fuss.
Enter WordPress, a state of the art content management and publishing system that not only looks pretty, but offers some pretty powerful tools on the backend. Once I started using WordPress, and finding out what it could do for me, I was hooked. Here are five reasons why WordPress is the best bet for anyone, at any skill level, to use for their new site or blog:
You can use it for your own domain. If you already have a domain name, you can plug WordPress in there and use it to power your site. All it takes is a simple Fantastico install process (or you can just ask your hosting peeps to put WordPress on your domain, they’ll do it happily). No more fiddling with HTML editors, no more putzing around with browser compatibility. Just install WordPress and you’ve instantly entered the realm of Yes, My Site Is Up And You Can Look At It.
You can download free themes. I love Web design. In fact, I subscribe to several design sites that make my jaw drop on a regular basis. How do they DO that? I would love to know, however, I’ve just got too much other stuff going on to learn and you probably do, too. That’s where WordPress can save the day yet again; they have thousands of free WordPress themes that can meet pretty much any of your design requirements. Just find one you like, download it, upload to your domain via FTP, and you are good to go. Note: watch out for WordPress new theme addiction. It can strike anyone, at anytime, and will take hours out of your day. Not that I would know anything about that.
You can add plugins to increase functionality. So your site needs some extra features: a reader participation form, spam protection, social bookmarking platforms, ecommerce? You can do all that and more with free WordPress plugins, little bits of ingeniously programmed software that will burrow into your WordPress platform and upgrade it from a Pinto to a Ferrari. No joke. Plugins are AMAZING. Whatever kind of need you might have for your site, there is probably a WordPress plugin to address it.
You can tap into the community. As I’ve gotten more proficient with WordPress, inevitably I run into things that I just have no idea how to even begin to resolve. Instead of paying someone on the other side of the world hundreds of dollars for five minutes of so-called “tech support”, I can just tap into the WordPress community and find the answer to my problem, for free. I haven’t run into a WordPress issue yet that I haven’t been able to resolve this way, and there’s always someone willing and able to help me out (thank goodness).
It’s incredibly easy to use, with a wide variety of functions. WordPress can be as simple or as complicated as you want to scale it. If you need a straightforward blog, say, about your cat JoJo, you can use WordPress as a publishing platform. If you need an ecommerce support system, you can tweak WordPress to include product uploads, inventory management, and online payments. How about a forum? A database? A wiki? Yep. WordPress can do all that. Plus, they do all the backend work for you, depending on your level of customization.
I’m sure I could think of many more uses for WordPress, but those are the big five. The longer I use WordPress, the more I appreciate it. There’s no other content management system on the market that even begins to touch it for simple elegance, ease of use, and customization, and that’s why I use WordPress for all of my personal and business-related sites.
Sub Id Tracking for Beginners
If you are interested in any kind of Internet marketing, be it affiliates, PPC, media buys, social media marketing, etc., you’ll want to track what you’re doing in order to tweak campaigns, see what’s shakin’, and do a little bit of split-testing (making different sets of ads for the same offer with small differences to see which ones convert better). An easy way to do this is with sub ids. Sub ids are simply tracking mechanisms that you append to the end of the URL. That sounds fancy, but basically, they’re just words or numbers you latch onto the end of your affilate URL in order to figure out where clicks are coming from. These could be anything – shoot, you could put “i_love_my_cat” on there if you wanted to.
Sub Id’s sound like some kind of complicated nerd thing that nobody cares about, but they’re actually quite useful, and pretty easy to implement in your ad campaign. Plus, they’re free. Here’s a quick and dirty explanation of the basic mechanics of sub id’s:
Go to your affiliate network (Google Adwords, Azoogle, CJ, etc.). Log in and find an offer. It doesn’t matter which offer for the purposes of this exercise. I chose one from CJ since I just fooled around with them today doing this.
Okay, so CJ’s links are a big mess, but if you look carefully, you can see the link ends with top”>. That’s the URL we want to mess with, and that’s the URL we want to add our sub id tracking to. You can se that above the URL is a box labeled SID. That (obviously) is where we’re going to put our handy-dandy sub id. Check it out:
Yay! I just put my cat sub id in there, clicked update, and voila! Super awesome affiliate URL with sub id tracking.
Now, how about affiliate networks that don’t add your SID in there for you? Here’s what you need to look for in the URL:
“&s=”: this means “and sub id equals”. Your tracking label will go right after the equal sign, so “&s=yahoo”.
What if you want to track multiple offers? Just add three different sub ids to three different URLs. Easy peasy. This is the bare bones explanation of what sub ids can do for you; I’m sure there are a lot more applications that you can think of!
