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Two Types of WordPress

WordPress.com

There are two types of wordpress that can be utilized for your small business one is WordPress.com which allows you to create a blog for free that is hosted on wordpress. Your blog URL for a wordpress.com site is going to be “yourusername.wordpress.com”. This is a great resource for people who are new to blogging, may not have a full website for their company yet, or don’t want to host incur any additional hosting costs or migration costs associated with creating a blog on their current site. For more information on creating a blog please check our Small Business Blog Development page. Keep in mind that if you do eventually want to host your wordpress.com blog on your website you can do so.

WordPress.org

The second type of WordPress that you can use is a self-hosted wordpress.org blog. This type of blog is directly attached to your website and it will give you the url structure of “http://www.yourdomain.com/blog”. Generally in order for your website to pass any “link juice” onto your overall site you will want to choose a wordpress.org self-hosted blog. For more information on why link juice is important and what SEO means for your company please visit our Link Building Resources.

How to Use WordPress for Business

As mentioned above blogging is a fantastic way to build business for your company. Blogging about your top allows you to become the Industry expert on your product. Generally speaking, informative information, that is relevant to your topic is a great way to build credibility, build links to your blog, and drive traffic to your company. Google specifically prefers to rank more informational material than commercial material. Through the sharing of information on your blog – you have the opportunity to create a lot of extremely relevant and informative content that will increase your search engine rankings through link building and drive more traffic to your website as a result.

What to Write About

Answer Customer Questions: One of your greatest resources for content is going to come directly from your clients or customers. I’ll use my family’s business as an example, many customers ask what the difference between American made and foreign made flags. Chances are if your customers are asking you questions in your store, there are plenty of other people out there looking for the answer to that same question. By creating quality content that will give them an answer to their questions you have opened the door to becoming the authority on flags for them. My grandmother always says, if you have a customer and they’ve gotten great service, they’ll tell at least 5 other people – likewise with online content – if you’re sharing quality content, the readers are likely to share it with their friends. Driving more traffic to your content, and even linking back to it from time to time. This is the type of environment that you want to create in order to maximize your company’s reach on the Internet.

For more topics to write about see our article What to Blog About: Topics for Small Business

Tutorials (Video)

• How to Use WordPress.com
• How to Use WordPress.org Self Hosted Blog

Conclusions and Final Thoughts

Blogging is a fantastic strategy to help build your business. Using a blog as an extension of your business to inform people on topics that are relevant, informative, and of a high quality is a huge factor in raising your search engine rankings. If you’re interested in finding out more about this topic please see the additional resources below or check out our Small Business Blog Development page.

Additional Resources

• Example Link Building Article for Small Business
• Two Easy Ways to Gain TONS of Traffic
• Three Easy Ways to Build Links for Your Small Business
• The Ultimate Link Building Strategy
• 10 Places to Promote Your Business For FREE
• Small Business Link Building Resources
• Small Business SEO Resources

Have Any Questions?

Please feel free to Email Me | Tweet Me | or Connect with me on LinkedIn – I would absolutely love to discuss this article with you or any other general questions you have. Thanks for reading – keep reading, and keep learning – it’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Also, if you liked the article please feel free to share it with your friends and family below. Cheers!

How To Use WordPress.org

Step One – Read

WordPress is a great product. It’s easy-to-use, quite powerful, and flexible. Before you invest your valuable time and energy into installing WordPress, there are some documents you need to read to help you get started. Take a look at the flow chart to the right to figure out where you should get started.

• About Weblogs – What is Blogging?
• What is WordPress?
• WordPress Features
• Before You Install

You may be able to skip a lot of the information in Step One – but if you’re starting out completely from scratch I suggest taking the time to read it. If you’re already fed up with trying to do this on your own we can do it for you.

Step Two: Make a Plan
Based upon the information you’ve just read, including instructions on installing WordPress, you should have a list of the things you need and things to do. If not, make that list now. You’ll want to make sure it includes the following information:

• Web Hosting Requirements Checked and Verified
• Versions of MySQL and PHP Checked and Verified
• Web Host Compatibility with New Versions of WordPress
• Your Website Username and Password
• Text Editing Softare
• FTP Client Software
• Your Web Browser of Choice

The following documents will help you understand more about how WordPress works and how to make a plan for your WordPress site:

• WordPress Semantics
• First Steps with WordPress
• WordPress Lessons

It is important to make a plan about how you want to use WordPress on your site. Here are some questions to ask yourself.

• Will you install WordPress in the root directory, subdirectory, or you just want to make a test site to make sure you want to use it?
• Have you made a list of your site categories to organize your content by groups?
• Have you made a list of Pages you may want to add to your site, such as About, Contact, or Events?
• Have you thought about what you want in the header art of the site?
• Have you developed a content strategy and list of topics to help start blogging?
• Have you thought about how to integrate social media into your WordPress site and workflow?

As you can see there is a lot to consider when making your blog. If you’d like we can develop your blog for you or even consult your small business on the proper ways to build a blog and to use a blog.

Step Three: Install WordPress
The following information are things to consider when installing your wordpress:

• Editing the wp-config.php file
• How to Use the FTP Client and Software
• Changing File Permissions
• Upgrading WordPress
• Common Installation Problems

Step Four: Setting Up WordPress

• Admin Panel
• Set the Blog Name in Settings>General
• Creating Pages with Pages>Add New
• Creating Posts with Posts>Add New
• Install WordPress Plugins

For an entire overview of how to set up a wordpress.org site see New to WordPress.

Tutorial Video (Admin Panel)

Conclusions and Final Thoughts

Wordpress.org is a great platform. We use it all the time. It’s a fairly simple and cost effective way to create an awesome site without having to re-invent the wheel. On top of that, the plugins allow you to completely customize the look and feel of the site as well as optimize the website for search engines. If you’re interested in finding out more about developing a wordpress site contact us today and we can help determine the best solution for you.

Have any Questions?

Please feel free to Email Me | Tweet Me | or Connect with me on LinkedIn – I would absolutely love to discuss this article with you or any other general questions you have. Thanks for reading – keep reading, and keep learning – it’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Also, if you liked the article please feel free to share it with your friends and family below. Cheers!

What to Blog About

1. Answer Customer Questions: Some of your best content is going to come from customer and client questions. If you are being asked something by your customers chances are there are other people on the Internet looking for an answer to the same question. If you can be the person to give them an answer – you’re going to be their expert on that subject. Creating this type of environment can lead to a long lasting consumer relation between you and that person.
2. History of (Insert Topic Here): There are a lot of relevant topics in almost any industry that you’re going to have people interested in. Let’s take the family business for example – they sell American Flags better than anyone in the industry. Many of our clients are extremely interested in the history of American Flags and even American Flag Manufacturing. There – I just gave you Flag people two topics to blog about . Think about the types of “History of” articles that your clients might enjoy.
3. Tutorials – How To (Insert Topic): What are some of the things involved with your industry or product that people might be interested in. Say you sell costumes – “How To Choose the Perfect Halloween Costume”. Or even get more literal with it – “How to tell if you’re buying a real or fake Gucci Bag”. The possibilities for How To articles are endless.
4. In Depth Product Reviews: These have to be sincere. Take a product off of your shelf and explain the intricacies of the product. You can even link to the review directly on the product page. Be honest, if there is a shortcoming to a product – let people know what some issues are that they might have with the product, hopefully you have an alternative. Taking the time to do these types of reviews will help you sell product and also gain exposure for that product over the Internet. Also, if you do a good job at reviewing the product honestly, it will boost your trust with the consumer base.
5. Link Bait Articles: Build lists of things that are relevant to your target audience. They can be specifically regarding your product and brand or they can go a bit off key and be related to what your consumer base is interested in. People LOVE to read lists of things just for the heck of it. They also love to share lists and link to lists. These things are important for building links to your site and gaining exposure across the Internet. One of the link bait articles that did really well for CustomizedGirl.com was Top 20 Most Expensive Celebrity Divorces. This article spread ALL OVER the Internet and we got a lot of links to our blog as a result – but it had nothing to do with our product. It did however interest the type of consumer we were going after and therefore it was a huge success.
6. Today in (Topic) History: Working for the family business we had a lot to work with here but I think that it translates well into other industries. We were able to run a few Today in American History stories that did very well for us. They were extremely interesting to our consumer base and they were also extremely informative. People love to hear their daily facts, so think about some “Today in History” articles that you can write that might be of interest to your consumers and start a series.
7. Contests and Giveaways: Okay so I’m a big fan of giving things away for free to your customers. It goes very far to spread brand awareness, gain fans on social media, and just get people talking about your company in general. There are tons of great places to post your contest – and let’s be honest – who doesn’t like getting stuff for free? Make sure your company is running some good contests and giveaways from time to time and share the heck out of them. Blog about em, tweet about em, and put them ALL over the Interner. Oh yeah, and don’t be a cheapskate on the prize either. No one is interested in your $5 prize so just don’t waste your time, or theirs. Make sure you’re giving away something juicy to get your message and name spread as far and as fast as possible.
8. Technology Updates for Your Industry: People LOVE to read about technology and about advances in it. Even if you think that a new technology in your industry may be small news – it shows that you care about your industry and that you’re deeply involved in it. Make sure that you show people this by blogging about some of the technological advances in your industry.
9. Company Related News: These updates aren’t going to be the most popular across the Internet but they will go a long way in building a long lasting relationship with your customers. Building transparency and giving people a look into the daily lives of those who work for the company and also sharing some company news is always a good way to build trust.
10. Industry Related News: Again these aren’t going to spread like wildfire, but writing about your industry shows that you care and that you’re an expert in your field. This is what you want to create. You want to become the expert in your field on the Internet. Make sure to pop some good old industry news on the blog from time to time.

Conclusions and Final Thoughts

There are a multitude of subjects to blog about that are going to be interesting to others and are going to build brand awareness. Make sure you’re keeping your eyes and ears open for a good topic to write about. Keep a pen and paper around to make sure that you can jot down some ideas when you’re on the go – for me I just plug them into my blackberry – but some people are old school and stil like the traditional pen and paper and that’s okay too . Get started though – blogging is one of the greatest tools you can do to build your business. If you need help getting started check out our Small Business Blog Development Page or contact us through our contact page.

Have Any Questions?

Please feel free to Email Me | Tweet Me | or Connect with me on LinkedIn – I would absolutely love to discuss this article with you or any other general questions you have. Thanks for reading – keep reading, and keep learning – it’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Also, if you liked the article please feel free to share it with your friends and family below. Cheers!

Everyday it seems like I find a story or two from a cities local online newspaper which delves into the topic of blogging and what it’s all about. The story usually goes through a mini backlog of history surrounding the term, what blogging is and at the end of the article, there is usually a list of suggestions on how to get started with the most popular suggestion being WordPress.com. Using WordPress.com is a great way to introduce yourself to blogging but if you decide that you want to turn blogging into a full time job or just want more control over your work, you’ll need to move.

Thankfully, the move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org (WordPress.org being the self hosted version of WordPress) is painless thanks in large part to a great export tool.

To start things off, login to your WordPress.com account and browse to your administration panel. From the menu on the left, click on TOOLS – EXPORT. At this point, you have the option to confine the export to a particular author or all authors. Using the export tool will compile your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. This information is placed into a WXR file or, WordPress eXtended RSS file. Essentially, this file is just a normal XML RSS based file with a couple of custom fields added to it which makes it specific to WordPress. Once you’re finished, click on the Download Export File button and save it to your desktop.

Once you have that file on your desktop, you can breath a little easier considering your half way through the content migration process.

The second part of this guide refers to an installation of WordPress 2.7. Login to your self installed WordPress administration panel and from the menu on the left click on TOOLS – IMPORT. From the list of blogging systems click on WordPress. Next, click on the Browse button and locate the XML file you downloaded earlier. This will upload the XML file into your WordPress installation and will unpack all of the data the file contains. There is one caveat though regarding this entire technique.

Most webhosts for whatever reason still have their PHP.ini configured in such a way where end users can only upload files with a maximum file size of 2MB or smaller. Although it takes quite a bit of content in an WXR file to go over 2MB, 2MB is not a lot of head room. If you find yourself in the position where your WXR file is larger than the maximum file size, I highly suggest submitting a trouble ticket to your webhost and asking them to increase the limit. If they choose not to, then ask them if they can import the file for you. If that doesn’t work, you can pull a trick from your sleeve by uploading a custom php.ini file to your webhosting accounts root folder. This is what my host did for me and afterwards, I took a look at the php.ini file and noticed it had this line in it:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 7M

Apparently, the php.ini file overwrote the settings on the original file and I was able to bump my limit up to 7 Megabytes. This trick is not guaranteed to work. As a last ditch effort, you can also try adding these lines to your .htaccess file. Just replace the pound sign with a number that is above the size of your WXR file.

#set max upload file size
php_value upload_max_filesize #M

#set max post size
php_value post_max_size #M

Once the WXR file is unpacked on your self installed version of WordPress, you’re ready to walk through the gates of freedom without skipping a beat!
P.S. This strategy also works for those wanting to go from WordPress.org to WordPress.com.

END ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Conclusions and Final Thoughts

This strategy isn’t necessarily for the novice individual. If you’d like our company can do the migration for you. If you’d like to have us migrate your blog for you please visit our Small Business Blog Development page or contact us today.

Have any Questions?

Please feel free to Email Me | Tweet Me | or Connect with me on LinkedIn – I would absolutely love to discuss this article with you or any other general questions you have. Thanks for reading – keep reading, and keep learning – it’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Also, if you liked the article please feel free to share it with your friends and family below. Cheers!

How To Calculate Value of #1 ranking on Google

Step One: Find the Search Volume

Google Traffic Estimator gives you a look into how many times any given term is searched per month. It allows you to customize the search based on an exact search query, broad search, phrase search, or as entered. It also allows you to localize a search so that you can determine how many people in your area are searching for your key terms. Pretty cool tool.

Here’s an Example:

Here I entered the search term “Plant Lady” which is the brand name for a lot of different companies who are in the plant industry. I tossed in a big number of $75 for Max CPC because if it’s too low then you run the risk of limiting the results and not seeing all of the data. I chose to keep the advanced settings to “as entered” and localized it for the USA. As you can see each month this term is searched 12,100 across the globe and 5,400 in the United States EACH MONTH. That’s a lot of searches – being the top result could result in a lot more traffic and business if you can rank well.

Step Two: Calculate the Click Through Rate (CTR)

To calculate the click through rate we’re going to use the most recent and relevant data from Search Engine Land showing CTR based on ranking position. Below is the chart that we’ll be working with taken from their report.

Some numbers to point out are the fact that roughly 72.4% of search query clicks are made in the top 5 rankings for the given search query. Additionally 36.4% of the clicks are given to the #1 ranked result for any given query.

The Calculation Formula: Click Through Rate

The formula for calculating how many searchers will turn into visitors for the search query is as follows:

# of searches per month x % of Click Throughs

In this instance we’ll take our data and make the calculation as such

5,400 searches x 36.4% CTR = 1,956.6 visitors per month from that search term

Step Three: Factor in Conversion Rate

Now the next step is to figure out how many of those 1,956.6 visitors are going to turn into customers each month. To do this we need to factor in the most relevant information based on conversion rate – Some businesses may already have this information readily available others may not. If you don’t have this information available to you this is the number that I use 1.5% conversion rate – I don’t like to overestimate numbers and end up missing the bar so I choose 1.5% which is half of 3% (3% conversion rate being a good conversion rate for MOST industries)

The Calculation Formula for Conversion Rate

# of visitors x % conversion rate (1.5% in our case)

So here are the numbers for our experiment:

1,956.6 visitors x 1.5% = 29.48 sales converted per month

Step Four: Calculate Search Term Value

Now that we know 29.48 of our visitors each month for the search ranking of #1 for our search term are going to become customers it’s time to calculate the actual value of a #1 ranking. To do this we need to know the number of conversions for the search term and the Average sale for the company. In this case we’ll use the value of $200 which was given to us by the potential client.

The Calculation Forumla: Search Ranking Value

# of Conversions x Average Order Value (AOV)

In our case the calculation looks like this:

29.48 conversions x $200 AOV = $5,896 per month for a #1 ranking for this term.

Conclusions and Final Considerations

There are variables that are ultimately involved with this equation – I’ve used this calculation multiple times for my clients to determine the value of a given search ranking and the numbers always come within a few percentage points of my final calculation. You shouldn’t take these numbers to be completely literal but they do give you a solid look into how much business could be brought to your company for a given search term. In this case ranking #1 for the search term Plant Lady has the potential to bring around another $5,896 in business to this client for that search term. Additional things to consider and factor in are the localized factors of the data – some people may only want to deal with their local “Plant Lady” and those people may end up not converting a sale with the top ranking Plant Lady. These numbers are tested and have proven to be very accurate for me in the past.

Have any Questions?

Please feel free to Email Me | Tweet Me | or Connect with me on LinkedIn – I would absolutely love to discuss this article with you or any other general questions you have. Thanks for reading – keep reading, and keep learning – it’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Also, if you liked the article please feel free to share it with your friends and family below. Cheers!

The question small business owners constantly ask is, “why is social media important?” Well someone who works for facebook might say that there are over 500 million reasons to use facebook (the number of people with accounts). To put that in perspective if you walked into a room of 13 random people odds are at least one of them has a facebook. That’s great you say but, what does that mean to me as a small business owner? Facebook and twitter are platforms, platforms to share ideas with hundreds even thousands of people reading them. Let’s take a micro example; I trust my friend Harry, everyone knows that Harry likes to go out to eat, and generally he gives good recommendations. So when Harry “likes” a new restaurant on facebook I am inclined to trust his opinion.

Twitter on the other hand adds a new and interesting dynamic to any recommendation. Twitter boasts 175 million members, with the average person having 126 “followers.” But, what is truly interesting about twitter is only 20% of its members access the site online. That means 80% of the people using the site are on their mobile phones, and let me emphasize the important word is mobile. Let’s go back to our example Harry is now on twitter letting his followers know about his new favorite drinking establishment. I check my phone see that Harry is having a good time and invite myself to join. And that is the true power of Social Media!

The client is a pain relief center that has semi-recently added the highly competitive weight loss service to their list of services. I had the opportunity to head down to Atlanta to visit their facility, speak with the owners and staff, and see how everything worked. I must say that I was extremely impressed with their service offering, the professional nature of the staff, and just how well they were able to conduct their business – needless to say I was excited to get started on their work.

Keywords Targeted

The client’s facility is located about 20 minutes south of Atlanta in the town of Jonesboro, GA – surprisingly they not only have a lot of competition in Atlanta but in Jonesboro as well. After doing some research behind their competition and of how people would search for their services the following is a list of keywords that I felt we should target in order to help them compete.

• Weight Loss
• Pain Relief
• Jonesboro, GA
• All of Their Pain Relief & Weight Loss Services Offered

The goal of our work was to not only completely revamp the website with an appealing and easily navigable site – but to dominate the local competition for all of their major services. We accomplished just that.

Slideshow of Rankings

Here is a slideshow showing our clients rankings for their terms. I cleared the cache of my browser and all browser history as to start with a fresh Google Browser.

[good-old-gallery id="1462"]

How We Targeted the Terms

To target these terms we used a lot of the standard SEO practices. Title optimization, keyword rich url, keyword rich descriptions, as well as critical linking structure.

• Main Keyword Terms : (Weight Loss, Pain Relief, Jonesboro, GA) For these terms we expanded the company name from “Trinity Pain Relief Center” to include the Weight loss term on the main page, “Trinity Pain Relief & Weight Loss Center. Additionally in the page description we continued this trend by making sure that we kept the flow of our description as informative and keyword rich as possible. Additionally, on the home page we added strong keyword rich content to many of the sites inner service pages that were relevant to the weight loss service and pain relief services. Finally targeting the term Jonesboro, GA in all of the main titles allowed us to make sure that we were properly optimized for the company’s location. Having strong, informative, keyword rich, and easy to read content on the homepage allowed us to rank well for many key terms.




• Key Terms for Service Pages : Having a strong number of relevant links pointing to the weight loss & pain relief services page was key to ranking quickly for the sites key terms. If you check the companies home page you’ll notice that we made the main weight loss services page a focal point in much of our content and linking strategies. We even linked to a specific service within the weight loss services section of the website directly from the home page (see Food Sensitivity Testing). Paramount to the success of these inner pages ranking is a strong url structure. The most optimized structure for a URL is “www.domain.com/keywordrichterm.” Having too many “/” in your URL structure hides the content deep in the site and makes it less likely to rank well because it will not be crawled as often by Google or other search engines.
  
  
  To make sure that we were going to rank well in Google’s search engine we added in a lot of informative and relevant information to each of the services as well. Additionally – we added a fair amount of strong FAQ’s on many of the subject for users to reference should they have any additional questions. The content and titles of each of the pages were targeted directly at the specific service for each respective page as well as to the overall term (i.e. weight loss) that we were targeting. This gave us an advantage over many of their competitors who were not doing such things.

Other Important Factors

Additional factors that are important to consider are the relative competitive nature of the field. Localizing for your town may allow you to rank better than if you try to rank for larger areas. The most surprising keyword for this specific client to me was the fact that we ranked so quickly in the highly competitive weight loss field. We even had many of our inner pages ranking for the terms in a very short amount of time.

Following closely Google’s search guidelines of creating strong informative and relevant content is always the strongest way to make sure that you’re putting your site’s future in the best possible place that it can be. It’s important to think about ALL of these factors when creating your clients’ website – you need to understand the client’s end goals, where they want to and can compete in the market, how their company works, and how others in the market are competing in order to make sure that you’re going to put them in a position to flourish.

Many in our industry make SEO an afterthought, or an additional service on top of the development of a clients website – to me this is a cop out. If you’re not thinking about SEO throughout the entire development process then you aren’t giving your client the best possible chance to succeed and might as well not work with them at all. Keeping SEO in perspective throughout the entire content and website development process is EXACTLY why our client did so well for themselves in such a short amount of time.

Have any Questions?

Please feel free to Email Me | Tweet Me | or Connect with me on LinkedIn – I would absolutely love to discuss this article with you or any other general questions you have. Thanks for reading – keep reading, and keep learning – it’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Also, if you liked the article please feel free to share it with your friends and family below. Cheers!

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of deals on TV and all over the Internet advertising a quick and easy website for small businesses to get started online. Let me give you my personal experience with a lot of these websites – they are pieces of crap. Buying into the quick set-up, low cost model of Web Development & Marketing, is like buying a stationary bicycle – sure, you’ll be able to exercise but you’ll never be able to go anywhere with it.

At our company we take the time to ask all the necessary questions about the company, I want to understand as much as possible about the industry that they work in, who their target market is, what there short and long term goals are. In my mind (and in our development work) these are essential to the end product. When you’re buying a website from Espire Marketing you’re not buying a website customized to make sure that when we launch, you have all the right tools in place to reach your end goals – and to be effective in your market.

In this industry there are many options, sometimes it’s overwhelming to my potential clients because they simply don’t understand many of the things that I’m talking about. As a small business developer and marketer, I feel that it’s important that I educate my clients on the tactics that I’m using and why they will be beneficial. We have no secrets with our clients – the tactics that we put to use are put in place to make sure that our clients have the absolute best chance to compete and excel in their market.

Here is the real difference between what we do, and what the other guys do – when you get a website from us – every single aspect of every page – every keyword, link, button, and picture – is put in it’s place to maximize the usability and marketability of your website. I would rather lose money on a project than give my customers a product that doesn’t meet our high quality standards.

The entire reason that I started this business was because I really CARE about small businesses. My family’s company paid a lot of their hard earned money for a website from a company that was a grade A piece of crap. When I was hired to come in and clean up the mess – it took us almost a full year (and a few thousand dollars) to clean up all of the mess that the previous development company left for us to clean up. That – is unacceptable to me.

We build custom websites for our clients using the absolute best technology available that is not only beneficial to them now, but will carry their business into the future. If our clients are successful using our products, then it means that we did our jobs. No two businesses are the same – while they may sell similar products – each small business has it’s own character, special offers, and story to tell. There is no ticky tack solution in the world that can capture the imagination and entrepreneurial spirit that your business has to offer. Why settle for a pre-packaged, poorly planned, and terribly executed website – when you can build a custom website with us that will take your company into the future? For my company – and hopefully for yours as well – we don’t settle for just okay – we expect the best. And that is why we build custom websites for our clients. Thanks for reading.

Normally in the #smallbusiness world we’ll find all sorts of business advice from other tweeple.In 1 hour Mr. Broadhead tweeted 25 times about “small business” with his political agenda that he deems to be relevant to the conversation. Take a look at just a few of them with this screen shot here:

Judging by his Twitter statistics (2,951 tweets, following 163, and followed by 84) no one seems to think his posts are relevant or informative. His miniature audience is even getting annoyed as he’s lost 3 followers in the time it’s taking me to write the article.

So that’s your lesson in how not to use twitter hashtags – don’t do what he does. If you’d like to use them the correct way make sure you are posting to relevant locations. It’s not about saying a million things, it’s about being relevant to the people in your field, sharing valuable information, and building relationships. If done correctly the networking possibilities on social sites will be extremely powerful. Really this goes for anything on the Internet – share value with others, and they’ll share value with you. Cheers!