Ok, so here is what I am thinking.

There are a ton of you that have found little tips and tricks that have been huge in helping you dominate the world of social media. And, I would like to hear from you.

More importantly, I would like this post to be a collaboration of some of the GREATEST tips and tricks available when it comes to social media.

Maybe, just maybe you are on the other side of this discussion and have a challenge with social media that you just can’t solve. Then please take a moment to let us know that that is.

For all of you social media gurus, if you see a question from someone that is trying to create a brighter future for their life, let’s do what we can to help them.

Disclaimer: If you are going to post anything with an affiliate link, I don’t mind. Provided that you provide some good quality content to go with it and a testimonial as to how and why you are making said recommendation.

Thanks in advance for your participation!!

You don’t have to look far to find a couple articles on the power of social media in general and especially the benefits of Twitter. Maybe I should re-phrase that to say a couple million articles on the benefits of social media and Twitter.

There is no denying the fact that when it comes to social media Twitter and Facebook rank as a couple of the giants in the game. While well known at least in the business world, LinkedIn doesn’t quite get the recognition of Twitter and Facebook, but when it comes to the business world of creating professional relationships one would be hard pressed to find a better source than LinkedIn.

Twitter is a GREAT source for creating a following of very loyal contacts that will in many cases re-tweet your tweets to their list and so on and so on. Have this happen just a few times and you now have a message that has reached thousands if not hundreds of thousands of readers.

Provide value, become a solid reputable source of information, don’t spam your followers and in general do all the right things to build a great relationship with those followers and the potential impact to a business can be HUGE.

When it comes to searching the Internet and all it has to offer Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Google dominates the search engine world with Yahoo, Bing and a number of lesser known players lagging far behind the popularity of Google. With that said, talk to any business owner that is working to gain a solid presence in the virtual world and Google is sure to be a focal point of that conversation.

For most of us our search of the Internet via Google consists of opening our browser to the Google website, entering our search term and the shifting through the results to see what we have found.

Simple enough – right?

Google has a very extensive list of “Advanced Operators” that can be used to improve our search results, narrow down to very specific search results and in general aid us in our quest for that all important information.

Never made use of those “Advanced Operators”?

Here is a small sampling of just a few of the options that you have available:

allintext: Google restricts results to those containing all the query terms you specify in the text of the page.

allintitle: Google restricts results to those containing all the query terms you specify in the title.

author: Google will restrict your Google Groups results to include newsgroup articles by the author you specify.

group: Google will restrict your Google Groups results to newsgroup articles from certain groups or subareas.

insubject: Google will restrict articles in Google Groups to those that contain the terms you specify in the subject.

intext: The query intext:term restricts results to documents containing term in the text.

intitle: The query intitle:term restricts results to documents containing term in the title.

While you are at it you may want to learn more about the following operators as well:

allinanchor:, allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl:, cache:, define:, filetype:, id:, inanchor:, info:, intext:, intitle:, inurl:, link:, phonebook:, related:, site:

Additionally, Google has added an Update option when performing your web searches. Users can now zoom in on a specific date or date range based on a very nice timeline tool to pull up Tweets related to their search term. For those of you interested in giving this feature a try you can access the “Updates” feature under the advanced search options. Eventually, Google has announced that they will be offering Tweets back to the earliest Tweets ever posted in 2006.

Do I have your attention?

Think about the power that you have at the tips of your fingers when combining the above mentioned tools.

Are you working on a new idea for a product?

Trying to get a pulse on what your customers are saying about your company?

Want to know where the latest hot topic started that took some website viral?

The list of potential options is literally endless and only limited by your imagination.  In their own rights both Google and Twitter are incredible resources for building your business, learning more about your chosen field of interest, etc, etc. However, combining these to powerhouses and putting them to work for you can be one of the best things you have ever done.

Try a few examples and see what you find:

intitle: “marketing” site:twitter.com

intext: “marketing”  site:twitter.com

allintext: “book * author-name”  site:twitter.com

I hope that this information has been enough to really get your brain to churning on the possibilities of what can be done with these incredible tools. Try it out for yourself and leave me a comment below to let me know what kind of success you are having. For any of you guys/gals that are pros and making use of these two powerful tools please take a moment to leave some words of wisdom that we can all benefit from.

If you have been using Twitter for more than just the occasional glance to see what your friends are up to you, there is no doubt that you have seen a hashtag. As a matter of fact now that I say that you may not even know what I mean by the term “Hashtag”.

Let’s start there. A hashtag is nothing more than a word, maybe two with the “#” symbol attached to the front of the words. To make it even easier for you to get an understanding of which hashtags may currently be trending, login into your Twitter account and you will see a list of current hashtags listed in the right-hand column of your Twitter account. For example at the moment the top listed hashtag that I am seeing is “#nowplaying”.

By default your account will be showing hashtags that are trending on a worldwide scale, but you can narrow that down to your location or a location of your choosing.

Ok, so who cares?

If you are spending time on the Internet to make your living or at least supplementing your income, you care. Hashtags are nothing more than a way in which you can catalog or categorize your Tweets, so that they are more easily found by the people that are interested in your chosen topic. Additionally, due to the fact that hashtags tend to spread very quickly it is highly likely that your Tweets will be found by people that are not currently following you.

Trying to build a large following of Twitter users?

Do you have a specific event or marketing campaign that you are trying to promote?

Are you working to build some buzz around a new product launch?

The short answer is that hashtags are your key to building a large Twitter following, increasing the size of your blog subscribers, and as I would assume most business owners would be interested in, improving your bottom line.

And, now for the bad news: As with everything on the Internet, there are people that have begun to abuse hashtags and surprise, they have become a vehicle for spamming. If you want to maintain your reputation and build a reputable following online, never ever use hashtags in a Tweet that does not pertain to the content of your Tweet. This is nothing more than maintaining proper etiquette, integrity and plain being honest about how you conduct yourself on the Internet.

So, for those of you who are thinking ahead and asking yourself how you can leverage current trends to give your following, marketing and/or website traffic a boost, let’s discuss that option. You’ve done some research and found that there are a number of current hashtags that are trending and you are wondering which ones you can leverage. The simply answer to this question is that it totally depends on how you are using your Twitter account.

In my case, I happen to read a lot and absolutely love quotes from people in all walks of life and in many cases they make me laugh, give me new ideas or simply provide inspiration for the day. As such a large number of the Tweets that I send out are quotes that I have come across and feel that there is someone else out there that might enjoy the quote as well. Additionally, I spend a lot of time helping entrepreneurs and small business owners leverage the power of the Internet and Tweet on subjects related to this endeavor.

As such it would make NO sense for me to be Tweeting on the latest trends in the entrainment world, Tiger Woods or any subjects like this that are totally unrelated to my primary theme. Additionally, do NOT use hashtags in every Tweet that you send out. Use your common sense. When in question, ask someone that has more experience than you and simply be smart about how you are using your Twitter account.

Lastly, please, please make sure that to the best of your ability you are providing value to the people that are going to be searching on the hashtags that you are using in your Tweets.

While this is in no way an exhaustive discussion of how to use hashtags in your Twitter account and the Tweets that you are sending out, I think you get the idea. If you have additional questions please feel free to leave me a comment and let me know how I can help.

Have some great success in using hashtags to grow your business, please take a moment to leave a comment and share with us all. I personally, always look for tips, tricks and ideas for people that have more knowledge than I.

As always: To Your Success!

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There is this funny sequence of events that seem to keep showing up and as such I figured it was time for me to simply put it in writing. Considering that I spend a considerable amount of time helping business owners leverage technology for their business development needs, you can imagine that one of the more common topics of conversation center around Social Media. Additionally with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn being so popular I tend to field lots of questions related to how best to leverage these sites as part of their overall marketing and business development. At this point I have lost track of the number of times I have been asked the question:

What would be better for my business a Facebook Fan Page or a Facebook Group?

Not so surprising is the fact that I had this question come up again this afternoon with a client. Typically one of my first questions back to them is: Why do you think that you are limited to one or the other? In reality if you have the time and resources to do so, I would recommend creating both in order to leverage the strengths of both of these tools. For most small business owners this simply is not practical which brings us to the point of this article.

While I had planned to do some writing today, this was not the topic that I had scheduled to write about, but that has never stopped me before.

First and foremost there are two major differences that I like to make business owners aware of:

1 – Facebook Fan Pages are indexed by the search engines and therefore visible to people searching the Internet via Google and other search engines. As such your entire page is visible to Non-Facebook prospects via the Internet.

2 – Facebook Groups allow you to send out “bulk invites” to all of your Facebook friends (you can easily invite all of your Facebook friends to join the group).  With Facebook Fan Pages you only option is to manually invite your friends to join your Facebook Fan Page. Therefore as you can easily see groups are better for viral marketing. This becomes even more powerful when you learn that any group member can also send bulk invites to their Facebook Friends.

Now before you get too excited about the viral marketing abilities of creating a Facebook group I would highly recommend that you learn about some of the other details that may very well have an impact on your decision.

The primary reason that you have the viral marketing capabilities of the Facebook Groups is simply due to the fact that Groups are tied to your Facebook profile. As such if you are interested in having some separation between your personal Facebook Profile and a Facebook Group that you have created for marketing your business, this becomes difficult.

What is the point of creating either a Facebook Fan Page or a Group if you don’t or can’t communicate with all of your members? With communications being such an important aspect of any of your marketing you will want to make note of the following details on communicating with your members.

With Groups that have fewer than 5000 members you are allowed to send messages to all members and that message will appear in their Facebook Message Inbox. Facebook Fan Pages allow you to communicate with all of your members regardless of how many members you may have as fans. The difference here is that your communication will go to your members update section of their profile. For me personally this was a serious concern, but after some research it does not appear to make a major difference.

Something that many people do not realize is that both Facebook Groups and Fan Pages allow you to use advertising as promotional tools. Keep in mind that Facebook ads are a paid feature, but are very useful for attracting membership. A big plus of running an advertising campaign when you have a Fan Page is that when you’re ad appears on someone’s page, if one of their friends is a fan of your page that friend’s name appears below the ad as “Jane Doe is a fan”.

Another big plus for Facebook Fan Pages is that once your page has acquired 25 fans, you can create a custom URL. If you have read about the importance of having search engine friend URLs you will understand the importance of having a URL like www.Facebook.com/businessName. With the groups your only choice is the typical Facebook URL that no one would ever remember and isn’t so great for the search engines. For those business owners that understand the importance of branding, search engines and simply having user-friendly URLs there isn’t much else to say

That brings us to the fact that Facebook Fan pages are indexed by Google and other search engines while Facebook Groups are not. While I made mention o f this before I think it is important to note that if someone finds your Facebook fan page from outside of Facebook, they can see the full page and all the information even if they are not logged in. With Facebook Groups your visitors must already be Facebook members to see the details of your Group.

With Facebook Groups the creator and/or admin has much more control over who can join. Groups over you the choice of having your Group completely open, where anyone can join, or they can be set to secret so that only people specifically invited even know the group exists. Facebook Fan Pages however are completely open and that is the only choice you have as a creator/admin. Anyone can find the page and anyone can join. Keep in mind that even with Facebook Groups that are open you can require that new members must be approved by the administrator.

For me personally, one of the biggest pluses offered by Facebook Fan Pages is the fact that Fan Pages are highly customizable. They’re far more options that can be added to a fan page such as having an opt-in box, selling from your site directly from your site, application API for Facebook Connect, etc, etc, etc. Please keep in mind that some of these options will require a high level of technical savvy or a good friend who you can call on to help. However, for a professional business that is trying to leverage the marketing potential that is offered by having a presence on Facebook this is a VERY important point to remember.

Have you created a group or a fan page for your business? Please leave a comment telling everyone why you made the choice that you did.  Have both? Great let everyone know how you use them to maximize the benefits of each.

To Your Success!

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As a blogger you should be leveraging all the resources that you have at your disposal to generate and sustain traffic to your website. The challenge with this theory is determining which of these resources are really worth spending your time. More importantly you want to know which are going to be a huge waste of time.

Often times new bloggers get caught up in spending their precious time on activities that they assume will be productive only to find that their time has been spent in futility. One thing for sure is that one of the best resources available for new bloggers for researching new content for their blogging activities and promoting their blog is StumbleUpon.

Not getting all the exposure that your blog deserves?
StumbleUpon is one answer to this problem.

Need to complete some research for your relentless blogging activities?
StumbleUpon is a GREAT resource for staying up to date on your areas of interest.

When starting to use StumbleUpon you have the ability to set your areas of interest, so that you can then search through websites that others have submitted. Due to the fact that StumbleUpon includes so many detailed categories StumbleUpon makes it is easier and quicker to find very relevant content thereby saving you time. Unlike your typical searches through search engines such as Google which are searching through much larger categories of content StumbleUpon allows you to narrow your searches to content more closely related to your interests.

As I mentioned above StumbleUpon is also a GREAT resource for promoting your WordPress blog to aid in the generation of the traffic that is so important to the success of your marketing efforts. If you can dream it up, there is a strong possibility that there will be a place at StumbleUpon for your content. In terms of the vast number of Social Media sites that are available to bloggers you will soon discover that depending upon your type of content you may or may not have success on any given social media site. However, with StumbleUpon it is much easier to generate new visitors and traffic based upon your specific category of interest.

From a marketing perspective this is one of the biggest reasons to get up to speed with StumbleUpon. While it appears that there are more people that focus a large majority of their social media efforts at Digg I can promise you that most of these people never see any results. While if you hit it just right Digg is awesome because of the large amounts of traffic that can be generated there are very few websites that get this privilege. The huge benefit to StumbleUpon is that it can send you a few hundred or thousand visitors with just a few thumbs up. While you may not get the rush that can come with Digg, Reddit, or Yahoo! Buzz you’re much more likely to generate some traffic from StumbleUpon.

While the large amounts of traffic that can come about as part of social media can be great when you are on the winning side keep in mind there are very few people that get make this claim. As one of the most popular social media sites, StumbleUpon has a massive number of users, and it continues to grow. Regardless of the subject of your blog you can be sure there are users on StumbleUpon that would be great to have in your network. StumbleUpon also has some great networking aspects for connecting with other users that other social media sites simply don’t provide. If you are not yet using StumbleUpon, don’t underestimate its potential for building a strong network of bloggers.

StumbleUpon is also different from other social media sites in that it can send visitors to your pages for a long time. While Digg and most other social media sites will only send traffic for a few days, StumbleUpon will send less at first, but will send more over the course of six months or a year. Lasting traffic is much more appealing to me because it will keep your stats more consistent, it won’t crash your server, and it’s better for branding and name recognition.

Something else that really sets StumbleUpon apart from other social media sites is the usefulness and functionality of the StumbleUpon toolbar. You can quickly give a thumbs up to any page as your surfing, and assuming it has already been submitted to StumbleUpon there’s nothing else you need to do. Additionally, toolbar makes it simple and convenient to use StumbleUpon on a daily basis without requiring additional time. Yes, there are numerous other social media sites that have toolbars, but I think you will find the functionality of the StumbleUpon toolbar to be one of the best you have used.

There are numerous things you can do so that other users will pay attention to your profile and it’s possible to stand out and brand yourself in this way. While your avatar will have a big impact on this, you can also post information about yourself and your blog on your profile page that will enable others to remember you. Building a strong and recognized StumbleUpon profile can help to increase the visibility of your blog.

Please take a moment to comment and pass along to your favorite social media sites with the link below….Thanks!

To Your Success.

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While I have titled this Twitter versus Blogging, the heart of this debate goes much further than simply comparing Twitter to your blog.  I am sure we must all agree that Twitter has become all the rage for a number of reasons, not the least of which are high profile celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, and Oprah Winfrey just to name a couple.

With all the hype and new found stardom of Twitter, there seems to be a large number of people that are forgetting where the true power lies in the use of Twitter. While in some circles there are starting to murmurings of Twitter replacing other websites such as blogs. My first thought was: “In what world is that even possible”.

First of all blogs are not going to go anywhere and it is not likely that Twitter will have any impact on the growth of the blogging community. While there are numerous options when it comes to blogging one of the most popular is WordPress and a quick check of the WordPress site will show that there have been in excess of 3.5 million downloads. Keep in mind this does not take into account the numerous sites such as Blogger, BlogSpot, WordPress.com or TypePad that all provide bloggers a means to get started with a new blog within minutes of creating an account.

While blogging is not a new technology, it is still gaining in popularity as witnessed by the large numbers of small businesses, news sites, Radio stations, TV stations, large corporations and let’s not forget the non-profits who are adding blogging to their marketing on a daily basis.

What is Twitter after all?

Twitter is a communication tool that when used effectively can be a very powerful channel for making new connections, promotional purposes and driving traffic to your primary website. Often referred to as a micro-blog I would contend that that statement is a bit of a stretch. From my perspective Twitter is a very powerful texting program combined with many of the features you would find in a chat room environment.

While my blog posts tend to run on the long side of what you would typically find in a blog posting, in what world could you ever adequately cover any topic of interest in a Tweet? While I will not claim to be as creative when cramming a thought into 140 characters as many, I will be so bold as to say that if you can get all your thoughts into that 140 character space…. I think I will stop that thought while I have not put my foot in my mouth.

The point is that if you truly want to discuss issues important to the growth of your business, challenges faced when just starting a new business opportunity, the importance of personal development as it applies to your success, etc, etc there is simply no way to cover topics of that level of importance in a Tweet.

Your blog (and/or website) are core to your marketing efforts on the internet. They really are the foundation of your internet presence and all of your other marketing efforts online are in support of that foundation. If you are effectively using the tools available to you, at any given time you will be able to pull the important statics about where your new leads are being generated, what keywords brought them to your site, which social media sites provide a constant stream of traffic to you, which pay per clicks are generating the best quality prospects/leads, just to name a few.

Twitter is simply a piece of a much larger picture that you must keep a handle on if you are truly going to make the most of all that is available to you as a result of the new strategies being created by Web 2.0.

With all the hype of the Twitters of the world it is easy to lose focus of the big picture and before long you will find that you have let your most important online resource suffer due to a lack of attention.

When talking with someone new that is venturing into the world of internet technologies, online marketing and social media, I always try to stress the importance of having a well define marketing plan. I find time and time again that people are jumping into online marketing in hopes of creating a huge online presence without having first put a marketing plan together. In all honesty this is simply a mirror of what happens daily with traditional business. Talk to any number of small business owners and you are likely to find that they have no business plan, no marketing plan and are really flying by the seat of their pants just hoping things work out.

Don’t fall into this trap!!

While it is important to put some thought into your marketing plan it does not have to read like an encyclopedia when you are done. As one or two page marketing plan with some simple guidelines will be plenty to get you started and more importantly to keep you focused on the right tasks.

While Twitter has gained huge numbers of followers and is getting a lot of media/internet attention, there is no chance of it replacing anything. If you don’t have a blog, start one. For those of you that have already dove into those waters keep it up and don’t lose sight your original goals.

What are your thoughts on this subject? I would love to hear from you.

To Your Success!

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Have you ever experienced those times in life where you felt as if you were participating in the movie “Ground Hog Day”? For the benefit of those who have not seen the movie, it is a comedy based around the premise that this guy is caught in some type of weird phenomenon whereby he keeps repeating Ground Hog Day. After he begins to figure this out he starts to have some fun with the fact that he knows exactly what is going to happen before events take place.

Well enough about the movie. In my case it would seem that over the past week or so I have found myself in what would appear to be repeated discussions centered on Twitter, Facebook and social media as a whole. With the under lying concern being how do I make use of these tools and not have to give up my life away from a computer. Believe it or not there are people who still enjoy life, stay busy with life in general and have challenges with thoughts of being tied to a computer more than they are to date.

Then there is the issue of the learning curve required to make effective use of Social Media and all that comes with it. More to the point, when it is all boiled down to the foundation what you are really addressing is the marketing of yourself, your company, your products or whatever your goals may be.

In looking at some of the most successful people and businesses in any industry, you will find that many of them focus their efforts on their strengths while outsourcing their weaknesses.  Does that cost them money (or something)? The answer is a resounding: Yes.

However, when outsourced to the right people this business expense should actually be earning them far more than what they are spending. What takes most people out of the game is that with any marketing or advertising, very seldom do you see the returns on your investment overnight. Then just before they would begin to reap the rewards of the time, effort and cost associated with their marketing/advertising campaign they pull the plug, not realizing the rewards that were just cancelled.

If you are one of these business owners still sitting on the side lines when it comes to social media because you have not had the time required to learn the answers to all of your questions, keep in mind that for many of you, your competition has a head start on you.

Take some classes, hire a professional or simply schedule the time that you need to START!

I personally have been fortunate enough to meet some VERY qualified professionals in my area through many of the networking events that are available to me on a monthly basis. My guess is that most of you reading this have networking events in your area whereby you would be able to meet the social media professionals that could take your business to the next level.

For those of you who live in isolation somewhere, there are lots of people on the internet that would be willing and capable of helping you in these areas. Like you may imagine, there are many masquerading as social media professionals that would have trouble spelling it, much less helping you. Ask for references; get referrals or whatever you need to do to ensure that you are working with someone who can in fact help you.

As many of you already know the two social media platforms that gain the most press time are Twitter and Facebook. In direct proportion to this you will be able to find the most help in these areas. However, for many of the more generic principles, they will apply equally well to any number of other social media platforms.

More of a hands on type person or you have a limited budget because you are building your Network Marketing business part-time, there are options for you as well.

Later I will give you a short list of some of my favorite tools, but keep in mind that these tools do not change the fact that you are now filling a marketing role in your business. As such you will need to be able to write effect marketing copy to be able to maximize the benefits of your marketing efforts.

Let’s say that you have created a fantastic following via Twitter and Facebook. More importantly these social media sites are not driving large amounts of traffic to your website. Now what?

*How much of that traffic are you able to convert?

*How many of the site visitors are returning to your website after the first visit?

*Based on your written marketing plan, are your results measuring up to your goals?

While this list of questions could continue, and they are equally applicable to those who have outsourced and the do-it yourself readers, I am sure you get the idea.

Keep in mind some simple guidelines:

*Have a written marketing plan containing specific goals that can be measured

*If applicable, define a budget that you can maintain long enough for your marketing efforts to become self supporting and eventually begin grow your business.

*Do-it yourself type person: Work smarter not harder. Make use of the tools available to you so that you are able to maximize your time invested.

That last guideline brings us to some of the tools that are available to you and your social media efforts.

Tweet Later (http://www.tweetlater.com/) – Schedule tweets and keep your Twitter stream ticking over with new tweets even when you’re not in front of your computer. Publish tweets when your international followers are online and you’re asleep….much more.

Tweet Deck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) – TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. The default columns can contain All Tweets from your timeline, @replies directed to you and direct messages. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the live tweet information.

Twollo (http://www.twollo.com/) – Never miss out on a conversation. No longer hear only one side of the story. Tell us what you like, and we do the hard work of finding the conversations that you should be involved in.

Twitter for WordPress (http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/twitter/) – Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

HootSuite (http://www.hootsuite.com/) – HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, add multiple editors, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success. HootSuite lets you manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface.

While I could fill pages with all of the tools available to you, above you will find a few to get you started.

Regardless of your objectives, be it simply growing a following on your website, building a traditional business, growing your online business or raising awareness for your favorite cause, social media is a marketing channel that you cannot afford to overlook.

Whatever it takes to get started, start today. Hire a professional, take a class, or schedule the time to dig in and start learning for yourself from one of the many online resources.

To Your Success!

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As many of you know or should know Social Networking is one of the best ways to gain added exposure for your Blog, Online Business, your favorite Cause or whatever the case may be. And, no doubt many of you know and understand the power of using Twitter as part of your overall marketing.

Personally, whenever I can and it makes sense I try to combine the power of Twitter with that of my blog. This morning as I was making some updates to WordPress I came across this awesome plugin. How about if you could allow people to ReTweet directly from your blog? Well the GREAT news is now you can without any effort. The “Tweetmeme” plugin integrates a small little button titled “ReTweet” at the bottom of your posts.

Now for the really COOL part: When someone clicks on the button, the script will ReTweet your posts via that persons Twitter account. How TOTALLY awesome is that? While I will say that I have some very useful and cool plugins for WordPress this may be my favorite. If you have a blog and have not downloaded this plugin I would highly suggest you copy and paste the link below as fast as you can and add it to your blog.

Please do me one favor before you leave. Take a moment to move your mouse down to my “retweet” button and send this out to all your followers. Thanks!! To Your success.

Click Here to Download “Tweetmeme”

Twitter slapped me. Seems that over the past few weeks I have heard more and more people express that they had been slapped by Twitter. Since beginning to tap into the power of Twitter and other Web 2.0 sites, I have seen numerous variations of getting slapped. Before going any further I guess I should explain that getting slapped by any of the social media sites is a nice way of explaining that you have stepped outside of the rules and paid a price for doing so.

While many of you may have heard of the “Google Slap” where Google inflicts some sort of punishment for not following their guidelines, most of the other slaps that I have heard of are not that extreme.

While I am not going to recap the rules and regulations for using all of the various Web 2.0 sites, I would highly recommend that you take a brief moment to briefly familiarize yourself with the rules of the sites that you most frequent. The reason for this is very simple, because if you don’t in extreme cases you may find that your account has been completely removed. Ouch!!

In the case of Twitter it is not nearly that extreme, at least not from what I have seen. The one difference is with many of the spammer accounts that where making use of Twitter as a means of constantly streaming promotional content. Again, while I did not personally experience a lot of spam there were a number of my friends that had run into this problem. The good news is that Twitter has removed a lot of accounts that were identified as spammers.

In the case of Twitter, you may be having fun posting your tweets, following more people and just in general not thinking about the numbers that are totaling in your account. As it has been explained to me once you start following 2000 people, Twitter examines your ratio of following to followers and if you fall outside of their parameters, then they s don’t allow you to follow anyone else, until you get your figures in order. In terms of getting slapped by any of the Web 2.0 sites this is a relatively minor inconvenience, but something you will want to fix. The good news is that your account is still intact and you can correct the problem.

While you can go to your listing of followers and go page by page to discover who you are following verses those who are following you, this can be a very time consuming a tedious process. Not being the most patient of people I wanted to find a better way of managing my Twitter account. While a quick Google search will turn up more Twitter tools than you can imagine, I will list a few of the tools that I am using and have found to be very helpful. Now with that said if you have found a tool that has helped you in managing your Twitter account I would love to hear about it. Personally, I am all about working smarter and not harder.

Below you will find some of the tools that I am using to make my Web 2.0 life a little easier to manage, at least with Twitter:

Friend or Follow (http://www.friendorfollow.com) – Friend or Follow easily identifies who are you following that’s not following you back. And on the other side of the coin they show who’s following you that you’re not following back.

Tweet Later (http://www.tweetlater.com/) – Schedule tweets and keep your Twitter stream ticking over with new tweets even when you’re not in front of your computer. Publish tweets when your international followers are online and you’re asleep….much more.

Tweet Deck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) – TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. The default columns can contain All Tweets from your timeline, @replies directed to you and direct messages. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the live tweet information.

Twollo (http://www.twollo.com/) – Never miss out on a conversation. No longer hear only one side of the story. Tell us what you like, and we do the hard work of finding the conversations that you should be involved in.

Twitter for WordPress (http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/twitter/) – Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

Twitoria (http://www.twitoria.com) – Twitoria tries to reduce Twitter’s clutter by revealing friends you are following that haven’t posted an update in a while. It can, for example, easily track down those pesky friend spammers that post no content, or people that have abandoned Twitter for another status updating service.

If you happen to be one of those networkers that are approaching the 2000 mark of those that you are following, I would highly recommend taking a look at the number of followers verses the number that you are following. If in doubt, you may want to take some preventative measures to keep from running into trouble.

From what I understand you can also be slapped if your account is growing too fast, but I don’t know of any details regarding this slap. I have one person explain to me that they were adding too many people to their account in a given period of time and ran into some problems. Again, I don’t know for sure if this is a problem, but something you may want to keep in mind if you are one of those people capable of growing your account by hundreds or thousands over night.

We have all heard that when it comes to getting your website ranked high in the search engines “content is king”. While that statement carries a lot of truth, there is another very important piece to that equation. Having backlinks to your website, more importantly backlinks from sites that carry a high page ranking from the all important Google is a critical component in your SEO equation.

While marketing strategies such as Social Networking sites, Article Marketing, PayPerClick Marketing, Social Media (YouTube) sites, etc, many online marketers still do not take advantage of content sites such as Squidoo or Hubpages. Imagine being able to establish yourself as an expert on a topic of your choosing with a wide range of control over the page design, layout, content and of course links back to your site.

Many of you may be thinking that the point of article marketing is to establish yourself as an expert as well as creating backlinks to your site. And, you would be very correct in that statement. However, the major difference here is that with most article marketing sites you are limited to one or two links in your signature block. Additionally, you have no control over the layout of your article, you cannot add images to your content, and you certainly cannot make any money directly from those articles. Do I have your attention now?

In case you did not catch the last part of that statement Squidoo and Hubpages actually encourage you to make money as a direct result of your content which Squidoo calls “lenses”.  While there are thousands of other sites that allow you to publish your content (articles) Squidoo is unique in that they allow you to easily create web pages, packed with graphics, content, and interactivity.

Hubpages, among some other Web 2.0 sites allow a certain amount of marketing to take place, but they have stricter rules in place about what you can do with your pages which make it harder to use the site for generating a profit. As you can imagine a content rich site such as Squidoo attracted a large number of true marketers, but as with anything spammers soon joined the ranks. Have no fear as Squidoo was quick to take action by removing some of the features like iFrames that made it easy for spammers to abuse the system. Squidoo also went so far as to ban four major spam topics from the site.  This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google, what became known as Google’s Squidoo Slap.

As a direct result of these problems Squidoo also instituted policies regarding to quality of lenses that required a more substantial amount of content to be published before the lens would show up in searches on the Squidoo site itself.  For spammers that simply wanted to put up a page with minimal text packed with keywords combined with multiple outbound links, this was a death sentence.

With all of that behind them we need to look at the real reasons for using sites such as Squidoo.

Generate traffic to your website or blog
While you can create links on your Squidoo lens to channel people to your own website, blog or your affiliate URL, don’t forget that you can add images, banners and text ads. For those of you who have an MLM business make the most of this by sending people to your own site where you can build a true network of contacts. Do NOT send people to a replicated website where you are marketing a company/product and not yourself.

Establish yourself as an expert/leader
Squidoo was designed to enable you to provide your readers with information about a topic of your choice. As you develop your lenses, you establish yourself as a leader and expert in your chosen profession.

Quality Backlinks
Google has given Squidoo a high page ranking which means when you place your website link on your lens you have just created a very valuable Backlink to your site at no cost.

Cross Promotion for better Rankings
You have the ability to cross-promote your lenses. By building a master topic lens and then building a number of more targeted lenses you increase your contents visibility and chances for higher rankings in Google.  With Google and Squidoo once again on good terms lenses are able to achieve page 1 rankings for many competitive keywords and phrases.

As we now know Squidoo, developed by Seth Godin, is based on the principle that everyone is an expert in some area. You now have the ability to create a Squidoo lenses (Squidoo website) on topic of your choosing and more importantly you can create as many lenses as you would like. Squidoo has now achieved a critical mass and will continue to grow exponentially by using the momentum, information and technologies created by other major Web 2.0 providers such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube.

If you have an online business, you are an internet marketer or you simply need to breathe new life into your MLM business now is the time to catch the next wave of internet marketing. To Your Success!