Friday, November 7th, 2008
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The power to make or break any website or blog is the amount of traffic and ROI (return on investment) that can be generated from month to month. When your livelihood depends upon your on site internet presence, it pays to think outside of the box and explore opportunities as they present themselves. Last week I introduced you to the Apple iPhones App for getting your blog iPhone ready and a quality back link from the Apple.com site.
Since it’s Friday and a gorgeous hello “Global Warning” day here in Richmond Virginia, I thought I would take the time to show you just another cool little thing I discovered in my mad labs here at Big Oak SEO – Richmond SEO Company.
I love the power of social media and Web 2.0 style sites, and one of my favorites has been Twitter. Yes that little tool that makes you get your point across in only 140 characters. However if you know how to use those 140 characters wisely it can pay off into huge dividends.
On election day, Nov 4th I was cruising around and saw that Yahoo had jumped into the Twitter arena. More importantly the folks that run the elusive Yahoo Directory. With a quick double check I confirmed it was the good folks at Yahoo and not some cyber loser and huge practical joke.
So I had nothing to lose and put my best 140 characters together and sent a Tweet to the folks at Yahoo – Directory.
a simple tweet: @yahoo_directory So you joined twitter, Check out http://www.parentinghelpme.com
11:53 AM Nov 4th from web in reply to yahoo_directory
Well the power of twitter and a decent website got the attention of the good folks at the Yahoo Directory and guess what…
Yup Today I got into Yahoo Directory from a single tweet. I didn’t even have to use all of the 140 characters twitter allows and I made it in with less than 80 characters and 3 days. Not Bad for an Election Day Result and Global Warming hitting Richmond Virginia this Friday November 7, 2008.
PS: You can Follow this site @BigOakSEO or me @bigebiz on twitter
Posted in Blogging, Link Building | 11 Comments »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
No Time to Twitt Mr Jones?
One of the most common complaints of Twitter is that one doesn’t have enough time to spend keeping up with their Twitter accounts. They are to busy doing more important things, such as reading our Blog or the “ranked hard, SEO comic“.
Now I can’t blame them for that, but for the rest of you Non Twitter Time Takers, a new solution is made especially for you.
@ShannonCole has come up with TwitResponse an application that allows you to “pre-record” or “pre-type” your twitter messages and have them scheduled to appear to your Twitter Followers at predetermined intervals in the future.
The program is in BETA but works extremely well. The description from their page reads
“Twitter + AutoResponder = TwitResponse!
Setup unlimited messages to be delivered to your twitter page when you want. Need a message sent 2 hours from now, no problem, setup a TwitResponse.
Having a product launch, upcoming seminar, book release… Setup a TwitResponse to automatically notify your followers.
Make sure you register to see the full effects, and then Twit me in advance, something, in the Future to @bigebiz.
Psst.. You might want to Add @ShellHarris to that list, he may not figure it out right away that your message was “pre-typed” but that’s half the fun of Twitter.com isn’t it?
Pssst…. Chris just joined in as well Catch him @BigOakChris
Posted in Social Media Optimization, Twitter, Website Conversion | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
I found this funny graph at graphjam.com. I thought it was appropriate considering my latest post on twitter. Agree or disagree?
Posted in Out on a Limb, Social Media Optimization, Twitter | 6 Comments »
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
I must admit that I go back and forth on how useful twitter can be. For the last few weeks I have hardly twitted and have read even less tweets than I have written. We created a comic (Jason Calacanis -SEO Has No Future) and that spurred a huge traffic spike in our site’s stas. I knew we were featured on the home page of Calacanis.com so my natural assumption was that our traffic came from Jason’s popular home page.
Looking into our stats I discovered that a small amount of traffic did come from his site, but the overwhelming amount of traffic came from twitter pages. A few seconds of research and I found that Jason Calacanis had twitted about the comic. That twit, directly and indirectly, was providing most of traffic. Amazing, twitter can be useful…if the right people are doing the twittering.
Of course it does help when a lightning rod such as Jason Calacanis (He has over 32,000 followers) is doing the twittering. Feel free to follow me on twitter; I promise not to tell you what I had for lunch.
Posted in Social Media Optimization | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
A very resourceful gentleman by the name of Andrew Baron put his Twitter account on ebay. This account has 1,400 followers who have also been put on the auction block whether they like it or not. You can see the auction on eBay. It was up to $1,550 when I took this screen shot, with 7 days to go. Amazing!
Why is he sellng his account? From his own words:
I really love my Twitter account but I feel like I haven’t been using it the way I want to. Quite honestly, I feel sorry for all of my followers because they wind up with my tweets in their timelines and I haven’t been able to utilize the medium the way I want to. I also participate in another Twitter account over on Rocketboom so I’m thinking I’ll post more over there and start up a new account to do what I want to do next.
So I guess Twitter does have monetary value and you can throw your “twits” under than bus when you sell it. I would personally be a little upset if I was following him, but you have to appreciate the genius of this auction. What is your Twitter account worth?
If anyone has a twitter account they think I might like to follow please submit it in a comment. I’m still not sold on its value.
Posted in Out on a Limb, SEO Tools, Social Media Optimization, Twitter | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
I’m not going to write a review of twitter, mainly because I have only started using it recently and I’m undecided about its practical uses. If you would like to see what others think of twitter you can read a review here or here. I did include two videos in this post so you can get a quick idea of what it is and how it works.
What is Twitter? Twitter is a social messaging tool for staying connected in real-time.
I do find it very cool that I have access to other SEO Experts and even cooler some of them have been kind enough to read what I’m twittering about. If you are interested in what I am doing you follow me at http://twitter.com/ShellHarris. Is anyone else twittering. Please pass along any thoughts on this social media tool.
Update: I was amazed to find the Google pulled an alert for me from a Twitter comment I made. I had made a comment about our newest SEO Comic and my alert pulls any mention of “SEO Comic”. So Google is caching my twitter page. The link are all nofollow, but we know Google follows nofollow they just don’t apply an link popularity from them.
The following videos can demonstrate the genius or madness of Twitter. I am yet undecided.
Posted in Out on a Limb, SEO Research, Social Media Optimization, Twitter | 4 Comments »
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