Twitter in plain English

Let’s start with the video Twitter in plain English. As always a great and very easy to understand video by CommonCraft

Create a Twitter account

OK, so now you understand twitter and want to start. In 5 stips you learn how to create an account on Twitter by Twitip.

Mastering Twitter in 10 minutes with this PDF. You can download the PDF for free, no really you don’t have to leave your email address to get the PDF. Tutorial: Mastering Twitter In 10 Minutes… Or Less It is the 2nd version done by Twitteroid.

Using Twitter… ‘The Smart Way’

A tutorial about how to get set up and use twitter. Especially if you’re looking to use Twitter for business. Again bij Twitip. The basics, applications, etiquettes and tools.

Intermediate Twitter users
You have been using your Twitter account for some time now. You are wondering how to get more out of Twitter.

5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence

1. Leverage Other Profiles
2. Tweet and Tweet Often – But Create Space for Reactions
3. Be Conversational
4. Provide Value
5. Tweet in Peak Times

A great article from ProBlogger Darren Rowse – the guy behindTwitip.

How to use Twitter as a tool

As you may know Guy Kawasaki really uses Twitter. He uses it often to promote his Alltop. How does he do it? He uses Twitter as a tool as explained in this great article; How to use Twitter as a tool

• Forget the “influentials
• Defocus your efforts
• Get as many followers as you can
• Monitor what people are saying about you, your company, and your product.
• Ask for help
• Make it easy to tweet on your behalf.
• Create an email list.
• Make it easy to “post to Twitter.”
• Offer advice deals to Twitter users.
• Tell the complainers where to go.

Twitter for Business

This is a great webcast on how to use Twitter for business. It is done by O’Reilly. It is a long video; 60 minutes.

Change your Twitter background

A great tutorial on how to make a better Twitter background and attract more followers this way. Spoon Graphics gives some great examples and then helps you to design you own in Photoshop.

8 Useful Tips to Become Successful With Twitter
10 Awesome Ways to Integrate Twitter with your Website

Twitter Experts
You are a Twitter expert and still want to learn how you can improve your Twitter skills. These are some great tutorials.

How To Make a Unique Website for Your Twitter Updates

Create a special page/website for your tweets. Looks really nice. Requires soem design to make it cool. By Tutorial Blog

Create a Twitter Box in your Sidebar

Want to make a really cool badge in sidebar of your site or blog, then this tutorial will help you. It requires altering the heading in your site, HTML and CSS. Done by Pink & Yellow media blog

How to Link Twitter to Facebook
How to Auto Follow People on Twitter
How to Set Up an Auto Response Back to New Followers in Twitter

Of course there is also my Twitter tutorial, it is in Dutch; Wat moet ik nu met Twitter?

Source: 30 Essential Twitter Tutorials for Newbies and Experts

Post from: Erno Hannink veel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Essential Twitter tutorials for newbies and experts

Robert Scoble is rebuilding his site from scratch. At this moment his blog on WordPress.com has no styling.

To make a good new start, even when his blog gets lots of visitors, he is aksing out loud what are good resources for SEO and SEM. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing or the optimization and marketing of your site for the search engines. Great content alone doesn’t do it.

He asked this question on Friendfeed – which is much better than Twitter for these kind of questions, because the answers are listed just below the question. The question goes back to the top of the FriendFeed timeline as soon as there is a new reply or like. So you can identify interesting topics easily.

The first and many other replies are by the Google expert himself Matt Cutts. So here is a list of sites with the best SEO/SEM info (crowd sourced).

Is SEO/SEM still relevant? – Mona Nomura

• Mona: yes. Techcrunch tells me 60% of it’s traffic comes from search. – Robert Scoble
• @Mona: …can you expand on your question? What has made optimizing content and Web sites for search engines less relevant? – .LAG liked that
• I’ve recently heard Google changed their algorithm, plus with aggregating sites indexing for us (FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter), there are many outlets and methods of people reaching our media — that is, if we remember to segregate to keep various audiences interested. ie: staying away from ping.fm like services. – Mona Nomura
• Mona, Yes. something like 90% of all traffic starts with a search engine, so unless you are a destination site ,you rely on search to send your traffice. There are times when RSS Subs can be more valuable, like when you are doing loyalty building, but generally NEW users are finding you through a social media or through search. More people are in search than social media..Ergo its still relevant -Brandon Wirtz

The list will continue to grow. The actual list: Who has the best SEO/SEM info? Post URLs here

You can also find a list of the URLs mentioned on FriendFeed on delicious -

I’m adding all these to http://delicious.com/jayneff… thanks! – Jay Neff

Post from: Erno Hannink veel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

The best SEO and SEM information (crowd sourced)

To understand how marketers – thus you as a small biz owner – are using social media, Michael commissioned the Social Media Marketing Industry Report: How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses.

White Paper Source set out to uncover the “who, what, where, when and why” of social media marketing with this report. In this report you’ll find:

• The top 10 social media questions marketers want answered: Nearly 700 open-ended responses and summarized all the major questions that marketing pros want answered, were analyzed.
• The time commitment: White Paper Source examined the weekly hours marketers invest in their social media efforts. This analysis will be helpful for marketers just getting started.
• The benefits of social media marketing: This rather beefy section reveals all the major advantages marketers are achieving with their social media efforts. They also looked at how time invested and experience enhances the achieved benefits.
• Commonly used social media tools: Wondering which social media tools marketers are using the most? Those questions are answered, along with an examination of what the most experienced folks are using.
• Social media tools people want to learn more about: In this section, the up-and-coming tools that marketers are most interested in learning about are examined.
• Other analysis: White Paper Source also analyzed how age, gender, experience, business type and weekly time commitments impact all of the above findings.

If you’re pondering starting social media marketing, these findings will help push you over the edge. If you’re already onboard, feel free to examine what the really experienced marketers are doing (and use this study to persuade others).

Major findings:

• Top three questions marketers want answered: (1) What are the best tactics to use, (2) how to do I measure the effectiveness of social media and (3) where do I start?
• Marketers are mostly new to social media: A significant 88% of marketers surveyed are using social media to market their businesses, BUT 72% have only been doing so for a few months or less.
• How much time does this take? A significant 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week and 39% for 10 or more hours weekly.
• The top benefit of social media marketing: The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, indicated 81% of all marketers, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships.
• The top social media tools: Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook were the top four social media tools used by marketers, in that order.
• Social media tools marketers most want to learn about: Social bookmarking sites were ranked of highest interest, followed closely by Twitter.

The above findings are merely a taste of what is in this report. In the report you will find more than 30 charts that visually convey some of the fascinating findings of this report. Download the report here.

Post from: Erno Hannink veel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

How Small Biz owners are using Social Media to grow their business

Liz Strauss – Successful blogger – is organising this event for the 3rd time. A great event where you will not just sit and listen to the presentations. There is work to do. You will work with a small group on the subject that was just presented.

Liz came up with a great list of speakers for the weekend op 1-3 May. I want to name a few for you:

• Chris Brogan – what a great guy he is. I don’t know where he get’s the energy to keep us all inspired on the web and take care of his family. Follow his trails on his blog and Twitter and you will be amased. We met at CES 09 in Las Vegas
• Liz Strauss – Liz is nice and fatastic in starting and continuing the conversation. Her blog succesful-blog had 8 months ago already over 70.000! comments. There is a WordPress plugin that shows the number of comments in a badge, with her name. To my suprise my Dutch blog enthousiasmeren.nl was listed as SOB in February 2006. We met at WordCamp in Las Vegas 09.
• Lorelle VanFossen – aka Lorelle on WordPress. There is a lady that knows about WordPress. Of course she does understand also a lot about blogging. Love her support for the WordPress community. We met at WordCamp in Las Vegas 09, we actually went together to the Diana Ross concert at the Monster party.
• Chris Garrett – this young man from the UK knows about blogging for business. Chris can learn you a lot about how to use a blog for your business. In 2005 Chris founded a company to help businesses achieve more with Online Media called OMIQ. We met at Social Media Congres 09.
• Brian Solis – knows all about PR2.0. Brian writes incredible intelligent posts about social media in general and on PR on the web. – We met at the CES 09 in Las Vegas (I shot this photo of Brian and Cathy).
• Wendy Piersall – Wendy started eMomsatHome as eMom. In April 2008 she has succesfully transformed this into Sparkplugging – Work at Home Resources & Community for Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs.
• Brian Clark – Copywriting, THE Copywriter, the CopyBlogger. You understand what he is all about? You can not only learn from his blog about great content for your blog. Do check out his community on Teaching Sells
• Melissa Pierce – is the he producer of the interview documentary, Life In Perpetual Beta. We met at CES09 Las Vegas

Read more about it on the website or register right away to listen to 25 Expert Speakers, 5 Mastermind Workshops, “Show the Sponsors” Challenge, and fabulous food!

If everything goes as planned I will be joining you. For this event I will just need a sponsor for te trip + hotel + registration. Working on it, your support is welcome.

Post from: Erno Hannink veel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

SOBCon 09 – The ROI of relationship

OK, when you want to remove comments from your blog once in a while, it is good to show on your site that you can do this. You may want to remove offensive comments in your blog. Especially comments that are not against you but other people.

So what pages should each small biz blog have.

1. About page

Every blog (and website) should have an about page. When a new visitor lands on your site it could be on any page in your site. On average more than 50% of your visitors do not land on the homepage. The about page would explain your new visitor who the person(s) is behind the site. It is all about building trust with your potential customer.

You want to give the new reader reasons why they should subscribe to your RSS and/or newsletter. On this page you do not just write about yourself but what is it to the reader.

2. Contact

How can they contact you? Use a contactform. There are great plugins available for WordPress; like Enhanced contact form WP plugin by Joost de Valk. This is convenient when the reader does not have their email program available, e.g. when they are on the road.

Your address information could help to establish trust. Also a telephone number or your mobile number could be helpful for a potential client to contact you directly. Via Skype and Google Talk I receive a number of calls from potential clients. It is very easy to use, just one click and you have contact.

3.a Disclaimer

In this page you can explain why you blog or why your company blogs. What is the relation from this blog to you products and/or services. If you write reviews is there a commercial connection, i.e. do you get paid for a reference, is it an affiliate link or do you review for money or the product. This page should make it very transparant what the intention is for your corporate blog. It is also good to know what you (the blogger) do in the company, i.e. what is your position.

3.b Privacy

What do you do with the information that you collect via the blog, i.e. analytics, cookies, newsletter, RSS. Do you work with cookies how long will these be saved. What do you do with the email addresses that you collect for the newsletter or other ‘free’ information.

3.c Comments policy

Are all comments allowed? Do you remove certain comments? Do you use anti-comment-spam software. Are there restrictions to place a comment on your blog. Be as transparant as possible how you deal with comments. Removing comments or parts of comments, and you have no comments policy stating that you can do this, may cause difficulty with freedom op speech for the commenter.

4. 404

When a visitor comes via a link to your site or blog on a page that doesn’t exist they will see an error page. The so called error 404 page. The 404 means that the page does not exist in this site. This may happen because somebody is referring to an incorrect URL in your domain.

To place a custom 404 page on your site could get the visitor to explore your site in stead op bailing the 404. Create your own 404 page. Create a 404.php in your template, add some links to your best content, point to your RSS and add a search field and your done. A 404 page that converts visitors.
There are also several 404 trace plugins for WordPress so you can see what URLs generate a 404 page.

5. Archive

On many blogs I see limited possibilities to search deeper. As a reader I may want to read more articles on the subject. Tags and categories are 2 ways to explore your site on topics.

A page that gives an easy and fast overview of all the articles in your blog is very convenient. It also builds trust if there are lots of articles in the archives. A nice plugin for WordPress to do this is the Clean Archives Reloaded. This page is also very good for the search engine, easy access to all your pages for the search engine bots, especially if there is no sitemap available.

6. Subscribe

A page to explain to the visitors how they can easily stay up to date with your site. Maybe a short introduction to RSS and what a good RSS reader is. An explanation of the process to subscribe to your newsletter is good. What mails the subscriber may expect in their inbox. This way they can prevent that your valuable newsletter ends up in the email spam filter. Also explain what you do with the collected email addresses.

7. Best articles

A sort of home page where every visitor can find their way in your blog fast. The best articles in your lead subject. The best articles for beginners, best of all times, your favorites. A short introduction into the subject of your blog. I like how Problogger made the home page.

8. Clients / customers

It is good to describe what your most favorite customer looks like. What does she/he do? What is his/her business? What are their problems? It helps potential customers to show that they are in the right place. If they are not your target customer it is no problem that they leave. Not everybody can be your customer.
If you aim for everyone – no one will find you.

9. Services/products

We are talking about your small biz blog, most of the time a very personal written blog. Since it is your business it is good to show what you are selling. Do not just list the products or services. Talk about the difficulties your target market has, make it very clear that it is a urgent pain they need to resolve as quickly as possible. Then show what it will bring them if they fix that problem. Then, only then, show how you can help them to do this.

10. Testimonals

Of course you can scream from your site how good you are. It is better if other people say nice things about you. Somehow this is more trustworthy :0). It is good to have a page where you show off what other people are saying about you and your products or services.
A decision to buy something is more and more based on people’s opinion.

Bonus

11. FAQ

It is good to answer the most frequently asked questions. Writing a good page about this will decrease the number of emails in your inbox. So questions that you see repeatedly in your inbox try to answer them in a FAQ page.

Inspiration: ProBlogger 20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider and 10 pagina’s die elke bedrijfsblog nodig heeft

Post from: Erno Hannink veel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

10 pages every small business blog should have

Since I need some structure I thought it would be a good idea to find first a publisher and then start writing the book. This route should give me some deadlines that I need to finalize the book at all.

The first contact with my publisher started via my friend Martijn Aslander. He invited some friends to the Lifehacking Academy. These publisher friends, that published the Dutch translation of the book ‘Upgrading Your Life‘ by Gina Trapani, were in my presentation during that day. The presentation was about online networking. An article or two from lifehacking.nl that I wrote is in this book.

During my trip to Las Vegas in January 2009 (Dutch article on it) I met some great people. Some of them wrote books that I wanted to introduce to the publisher. The book that really got my interest was that of Rohit Bhargava – Personality Not Included. I read it during the flight back and at the airports and in the train back home. By the time I was home I almost finished reading it.

It is a great book! I love the way it is build up – 2 parts. The first part is the theory and the second part is about techniques, guides and tools. The book is well designed. The website for the book is fun and smart. Rohit is a very nice and smart person – SVP of the Digital Strategy and founding member of the 360 Digital Influence group at Ogilvy Public Relations. You can read a lot of his writing online for free at the Influential Marketing blog.

So I introduced the book with A.W. Bruna and they loved it too. After a month or so they purchased the rights to publish the Dutch translation of this book. So this book will be out in October 2009 in Dutch!

At that first meeting with Bruna I also talked about my idea to write a book. They liked the subject that I want to write about. So now I had to write an outline of the book. A proposal about the subjects that I wanted to discuss in the book.

After another month it was clear, A.W. Bruna was ready to accept the publishing of my book. I received a contract and now I need to start writing the book. Luckely I already write a lot and don’t find it difficult anymore. The subject is in my vaines. It is all about strategy and structure now. Every Friday for the next 4 months is now blocked in my calendar.

So today I started to collect books that I want to use for the book either as a reference or for more information on a subject. See the collection:

So now I am analyzing the books to determine my book strategy.

What I like about the book (the hard cover)

• titel can be reduced to PNI
• Personal note on the bookmark with icon (chicken) and email pnibook@gmail.com
• References in the book to ’secret’ parts on the site
• Book in 2 parts
• Tabs on the side for chapters 1-6 ith the theory
• Theory with 2-3 examples
• Part 2 with Techniques, Guides and Tools

What do I like about the site for PNI

• Order book on home page
• icons on the right
• readers community facebook
• readers community backcover
• bibliografy met alle boeken in een eigen Resource bookstore op Amazone
• Media Kit – with photos on Flickr
• Reviews & Buzz with links from Delicious
• Blog – of course
• Making of – that is what I want to start already so you can enjoy the journey

Rohit also created this great presentation

How To Write A Book: The Making Of Personality Not Included

Post from: Erno Hannink veel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Writing a book

It is very nice and easy. There is not a lot of detials that you need to add to open an account. Of course, like always, I advice you to give as much details as possible. It makes the connecting more easy. Finding a possible connection through the books that you read and checking the profile makes it easier to connect.

This is what my bookshelf looks like now.


It was very easy to fill the bookshelf. You can browse books by subject. I started looking at the business section, that is what I read. With the mouse you go over the book that you want to read, are reading, or have read. Select the appropriate options, including if you own the book or if it is on your wish list. Done.

Also I went through some of the bookshelves of the people that I am already connected with in other networks. You can find some interesting reading there.

Why it is that I started making this account today? There are probably a couple of reasons for it:

• I was sent to Shelfari by a friend via Twitter
• This week I was on the Google Talk with a friend. We used our webcams and he noticed the full desk on my site. The remark hit me and later that day I made some space in my physical bookshelf and cleared my desk. Pfew it feels good
• Tomorrow (March 13, 2009) I will start my first day in my new life ;0). I will write on the first setup of my book. This setup must be completed in 2 weeks. I am planning to write every Friday for the next 5 months. The book (manuscript) is due August 1, 2009. To be published in October this year. My first book. Wow.

Post from: Erno Hannink veel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Discovering Shelfari

Meeting a lot of foreign people made me want to start an English site and blog. This site should also give me the opportunity to offer my services outside the Netherlands.

Post from: Erno Hannink veel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

New Blog in English