linkFEST 2012 – links and tips (inc Twitter) 

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Just like linkfest 2011, I am breaking the podcast and blog into categories like tools, services and other goodies.  The first thing we are going to tackle is social media with a focus on twitter.

fakers.statuspeople.com

This is a great site for seeing the quality of your twitter following.  You type in your twitter user name and it gives you the percentage that is fake.  I am happy to say I have only 1% fake profiles following me.  This is handy to know if you are using tweetadder to grow your following.

Tweetadder (tweet adder)

This is a great bit of software.  It is fully automated and has a number of functions. By far the most important function is that it allows you to follow the followers of other people.  Why is this so useful? It is useful because some of the people you follow will follow you back.  Here is a quick guide on using tweetadder.

Get more twitter followers.

• You search twitter and find the leaders in your sector.
• You follow their followers (using tweetadder)
• Some will follow you back.
• You supply tweets that are on target for these followers.  This builds your reputation in a highly targeted group.
• They will retweet you and this exposes you to more people from the group

 

Using this method you can grow a very engaged audience in the thousands.  This is the only affiliate link in the post.  If you decide to get Tweetadder use the code CG20 to get a 20% discount.  It is well worth the money.

Hootsuite.

This is fantastic for scheduling and monitoring your social media.  The one function I have become addicted to is the planner.  It gives you a calendar showing all your scheduled tweets.  This allows you to plan campaigns with ease.  Its analytics are great and you can use it across most of your social platforms.  I have twitter accounts for each of my activities, as well as facebook fan pages and I operate them all from hootsuite.

Social Bro

Social Bro is a statistics tool that shows you your twitter following.  It monitors your growth, tells you who is the most influential followers you have, who is inactive, who is active and many other statistics that helps you focus your social media efforts.  The one feature I would single out is “the best time to tweet” function.  This looks at the activity of your followers and tells you when they are most active.  Great information so you are not tweeting to an empty room.

 

Buffer

The buffer app is great and ties in with everything we have already discussed.  It is available as an application for Android, Apple, as a Chrome extension and as an application.  I like to describe it as a personal assistant for social media.  You set time slots in the buffer app and when you find something that you want to tweet about you just send it to Buffer instead of twitter (or whatever social site you are using it for).  Buffer then makes sure it goes out in the next available time slot.  It also works with Social Bro (or visa versa) so your time slots are focused on when your audience is online.

Commun.it

I don’t use this as much as Social Bro and if I had to choose one it would probably be Social Bro.  But Commun.it has some nice features and I know people that prefer it to Social Bro, so have a look and decide for your self.  The thing I do like is that the interface is very clean and not cluttered with stuff you don’t need.

Blogging and WordPress

Everyone keeps saying content is king.  That is because Google likes up to date content.  It is also obvious that Google will give more weight to a site with 200 pages over a site with 1.  Google wants to give readers the best opportunity to find the right information and that is more likely with a larger site.

So for me the best blogging platform is WordPress.  WordPress is so configurable that you can run your complete website from it.  It doesn’t have to look like a blog in the slightest.  WordPress is completely free and is preinstalled in most hosting packages.  Contact whoever is hosting your site and check out wordpress.

ThemeForest

I have a programming background and have never been a fan of buying templates.  But themeforest has so many top class themes you have to go have a look.  You can buy a wordpress theme from $25 to about $50 and you would never be able to get something this good doing it yourself.  The best thing is that themes are normally configurable so you don’t have to look like everyone else.  You are buying a skeleton and making it look the way you want.  You can spend hours just looking at the stuff at themeforest.

Yoast

Yoast is a wordpress plugin that looks after SEO for you.  The best thing is that it scores your work and makes suggestions on how you can improve what you have written from an SEO point of view.  Making it more appealing to search engines.  Again this is a free plugin for wordpress that you shouldn’t be without.

Tweet Old Posts

This is another free wordpress plugin.  This plugin takes your old blog posts and sends out a tweet to your twitter account to promote them.  You can configure this for as many tweets as you like in a day as well as the maximum and minimum age of a post that qualifies for tweeting.  This is great if you have used tweetadder to grow your followers, you need to give them things to read.  This works best if you have more content.  So keep creating blog posts and you will see your authority grow.

Things to do.

Linkedin

Groups

Join linkedin and subscribe to groups.  This is a great way of building and audience and making valuable business contacts.

Answers

This is a little known gem.  Google indexes linkedin, search for your name and your linkedin account will probably be in the results.  So how do we use this to our advantage?  Go to the Linkedin Answers section on the right of the main linkedin menu (under more) and answer some questions.  You can use the keywords you want (as long as it is appropriate – don’t ruin your reputation by stuffing to much SEO in your answers) and put a link back to your site.  Linkedin is the fourth biggest social media site on the planet and a link from here can’t hurt.

Google Stuff

Google Analytics

Set up Google Analytics on your site if you haven’t already.  This gives you so much information about where traffic is coming from and what they do when they get to your site.  This is a huge topic just on its own, so start with the basics like traffic source and implement more as you go.

Google Alerts

Set up some Google alerts around your name, your product names and your brand, this will tell you when you appear in the Google index.  This is a good way to see if Google is indexing your site as well as a way of seeing what is saying what about you.

Google Adwords

Set up a Google Adwords account to get access to their keyword tool.  You don’t have to use adwords but the research you can do using this tool is incredible.  For example “How to use twitter” and “get more twitter followers” gets searched hundreds of thousands of times a month with low competition for these phrases.  Where “Marketing a small business” only gets a few thousand searches a month but has high competition.  Which phrase you use will greatly impact your success.

Self driven PR

Help A Reporter Out (HARO)

Is a website used by reporters to contact people for news stories.  Subscribe to the site and get two emails a day with reporter’s requests.  Answer these requests and end up in news stories and blog posts it is that simple.

Source Bottle

Source bottle is an Australian version used by Australian reporters.  It has branched out into Europe, New Zealand and the USA.  It works the same as HARO.  I subscribe to both of them and have had great success with both.

Podcasts

As you know I love podcasts.  I listen to a number as well as record my own.  This is the list of my favorites.

Small Business Big Marketing

Tim Reid interviews people about their marketing and gets gold for the listeners.  Every fourth show has Andrew Griffiths Australia’s best business writer on and they discuss marketing from all angles.

Freedom Ocean

Tim Reid and James Schramko discuss internet marketing in great detail.  This is a must if you want to learn how to generate traffic and business using the internet.  James gives you a turn by turn map on how to achieve internet marketing success.

The Bunker Project

This is my blow off some steam podcast.  The show is about social media and black beer.  It is recorded in the Den bar in Vancouver and has a regular group of people attending.  Andrew McGiven and Bob Garlick host the podcast and it may start serious, but the beer and conversation guarantees it never remains serious.

The Beancast

This is hosted by Bob Knorpp and has various advertising and marketing experts on his panel.  These people are real industry leaders, not self proclaimed experts.  They dissect the week, what advertising has been working and failing and why.  You will learn what to do and what not to do.

Marketing Over Coffee

John and Chris are two marketing heavy hitters that look at marketing , product releases and what is impacting on business from and marketing and advertising point of view.

Start ups for the rest of us

Mike and Rob are developers that have launched many businesses and give advice on what not to do.  They discuss their own products in terms of success and failure.  This is incredibly candid and lets you know even the experts struggle with the same things you do.

That’s it for linkFEST 2012.  Check out the people and products in the linkFest I guarantee there are things that will help you.

Remember you can always contact us at podcast@askfindbuy.com or through any of the social media channels.

    

Regards Craig

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