Twitter is a tool that is becoming more and more widely used by bloggers, journalists, businesses, and the general public. It’s free to use, easy to get started, simple, but still highly underestimated and used. Let’s look at how we can use the best of Twitter for having conversations and gathering information all in real time.

Twitter is an experimental tool. It’s your experimental tool

Why is Twitter so underestimated and used? Why do I even say this? Let’s look at the different groups of people that use it that I previously mentioned. We bloggers mainly have used it to connect and socialize with other bloggers and make people aware of our own content. Link love! Journalists or news agencies simply publish their feed. Lots of link love! Businesses are slowly utilizing it to talk to their customers and competition. Finally, the general public is gathering information from the top Twitter accounts, news agencies, and just having conversations with their other friends that actually have Twitter.

After looking at the most dominate forms of using Twitter we can agree that it’s mostly used for spreading links, gathering links, connecting with people, and socializing with people by very many approaches.

Who are you?

In order to use a tool that has the potential to help out people in so many ways, we have to know who we actually are.

Simply put, “who are you?”

But knowing that this is far from simple, what do you feel defines you? I ask, because this question can also be “what is your passion”, and in order to use something like Twitter should establish this first.

For instance, if you are into knowing the latest news and staying updated you will use the best of Twitter than if you were someone who gets their information by talking with people and holding conversations. Or for that matter you could be both. You just have to know who you are.

Twitter is used both for conversations and information and I’ll be looking at the same four features of Twitter to help both out.

Conversations

Conversations are that social connection we have and can hold with one another. We all know that social media has increased this opportunity and frequency. Twitter is certainly a tool to take advantage and utilize for your benefit all while conversing.

Lists

You’ve heard of having groups. Well lists are just like groups and allow you to have conversations with people related to a certain topic, interest, or belief, etc. Many times when you have many followers or people you want to follow you forget who all would talk about what/who. Lists help you out with this potential dilemma. Oh, and if you wish to make a list private, meaning a group just for your use like the “connect” list I have (shown to the right) for people I want to connect with more.
It’s up to you.

Replying

Casual talk is on the rise. Just start a reply. It’s simple as that

Replying is when we decide to talk back, respond, or offer additional input to whatever they have tweeted out.
Say you see someone discussing or talking about a certain thing that interests you, you have the opportunity to respond to them at anytime with extreme ease. Think of it has a geeky (but the next) way of emailing or contacting someone and just to have a very casual talk.

Casual talk has a new meaning and new home, called Twitter. All you have to do is reply to them and all of your followers can see you actually conversing with people. Transparency is at an all time high.

Search

So many are unaware of how to start conversations with people using Twitter if they don’t really know who is all on that would be of interest to them.

Easy solution. Use search.twitter.com and search for a keyword that would be of interest to you to start a casual conversation with that person related to that keyword happy tweet. This is again how people can find you too (keep that in mind). You just never know when someone on Twitter might talk with you.

Third-Party Clients

Third-Party clients are things that allow you to use the basic functions of Twitter, but add more ease and function. Some examples are Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Tweetie, and Brizzly.

All of the ways to use Twitter for conversations I have already stated can all be more ease of use to you and strive for more conversations with people on Twitter through these third-party clients.

Conversations are for starters, but we can get more. Actual beneficial information.

Information

All of the above features I went though (all four) you can use to help you obtain useful and beneficial information for yourself, your followers, and even your blog community.

Let’s go through them quickly:

• Lists: Use lists to categorize the type of information you are in need or want of. i.e. Social Media, Blogging Tips, World News, Gadgets, etc.
• Replying: Respond to people related to each of the lists you have made to gain more information or ask any questions you may have about what they have published, reported, wrote, or commented on.
• Search: Looking for something. Think of this as a real-time Google Search, but keep the search entry short.
• Third-Party Clients:Gain and retain the most information at your finger tips. Here is where you have to dig into each specific client to see which one better suits your needs.

I’ve looked at four features of Twitter for conversations that also help with gathering information, but recognize how you can begin to start using Twitter in different ways.

Yes, there is so many ways to use Twitter. You just have to find the best ways that fit your way of connecting, holding conversations, or finding information. Remember Twitter is your experimental tool .
The video from Chris Brogan (to the right) even has more ways to use the best of Twitter.

I’m sure that you all have your one twitter tip. Well, how are you using Twitter to benefit you the best?

Related posts:

1. Are You an Effective Tweeter or Just Another Bird on the Wire?

2. Twitter – The Double-Edged Social Sword!

3. You Can Now Follow @Blogussion on Twitter!

Finding the best style to blog with is a tough task, and many just can’t get it down. Christ Scott from BlogTap shares some useful tips for improving your style of writing.

No one likes proofreading. Especially if it’s your own work that you are proofreading. Unfortunately, most individuals who make money from blogging don’t have the resources to hire a copy editor nor would it be cost-effective, in many blogging-for-profit ventures, to hire one. That’s why you must develop eagle-eyed copy editing skills to minimize unclear phrasing, incorrect sentence structures and grammatical goof-ups

But what standard should bloggers consult for highly subjective word styling decisions that don’t necessarily have a right or wrong answer?

Where are the standards?

Bloggers suffer from a lack of objective style standards. The print media use standards like The Associated Press Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Styles and The Oxford Guide to Style — but where do bloggers go to find out whether the abbreviation to denote the first twelve hours of a day should be a.m, AM or A.M.? How does the average blogger determine whether website should be spelled with one word or two?

Of course there is a very easy and simple solution to all of this: bloggers don’t have to use standards. They can just pick and choose styles based on wishes and whims. That’s the incredible beauty of blogging, there aren’t any real standards to follow.

Here are a few reasons why you should NOT practice the above “standards of writing:”

• What you might think of as acceptable (i.e. spelling Internet with a lowercase I), readers may not.
• You might get away with using your own intuition for styles for one post but it will be very difficult to stay consistent across your entire blog because you have no absolute standard.
• No objective standard for styles will give your blog a less professional look. Especially if your blog has a very large audience.

A very simple trick to keep your style choices consistent

At this point, you are probably expecting me to give you the link to buy a book titled something like The Blogger’s Guide to Style. Unfortunately, there is no such book. That is why you are going to have to use a method that you will probably consider to be a bit unorthodox to remain consistent with styles across your blog.

The unorthodox method is as follows

1. Type a word or words you are having trouble with into Google.
2. Examine the first 5-10 search results and see how that word is used.
3. If you find that the majority of the results use the word in a particular style (i.e. the “I” in Internet being capitalized), chances are you can use it as well.

But wait! I know what you are thinking: how do you know the consensus of the first 10 search results is the correct style? It’s hard to explain exactly how this card trick always works, but below are several compelling reasons why you should be safe.

• Google ranks sites for keywords based on reputation. Despite all of the millions of SEO experts out there that try to work the system — the system still works. If it didn’t work, people would not be using it and Google would not be investing millions of dollars per year into it.

  The fact of the matter is that Google searches work especially well for short-tail, broad keywords (which is what you will typically be entering in if you are looking for the correct style for a word) and the sites that are ranked first will often be the most reputable. In the world-wide web, Google is the rule and measure of all things, including style.

• When you are looking for the correct style of a word, for any medium, you are looking for a consensus. The individuals who wrote the Associated Press Stylebook for newspaper writing did not pick and choose what they thought were the best styles (based upon their own fancies) and put them into a style book. They found a consensus by surveying what the top, most reputable newspapers did. You are essentially doing the same thing when typing a word into a search engine. You are looking for a consensus.
• The odds of one site making a poor choice of style for a particular text and then many other sites all making the same error, and getting high rankings, is very small.

Although this method might seem unconventional, using it actually makes perfect logical sense. Bloggers need a way of identifying correct styles for their copy. But more importantly, bloggers need to maintain copy style consistency that will reduce occurrences of sub-conscious grimaces felt by readers every time they come across the same word styled differently.

Copy style may not seem like a big deal. But there are commercial reasons why newspapers and magazines use objective standards for their word styles. The publication that uses consistent and objective styles reaps the subliminal benefits of a well-conformed and unified body of work which pleases the human cognition. The same rules applies to blog content — especially the blog content that is consumed by a large group of readers.

What’s Your Style?

I talked a lot about keeping a consistent blogging style here, and I’m interested in hearing some things you try to achieve with your posts. Do you like to engage your readers a lot by asking them a lot of questions, or do you like to make them laugh with some humor? Whatever your style is, I’d love to hear about and discuss with you in the discussion below.

Related posts:

1. Capturing Readers with Creative Leads

2. Why Google’s new favicon gets more attention than your blog

3. Your Audience, Your Content, Your Success.

Today, I want to share with you 4 things that I thought of in my head through the day. It’s unusual and quite random. I was just thinking a few ways, I could take Blogussion up a notch or two – and came up with a list of potential ways anyone could acheive the different aspects of blog-promotion.

Eventually, after some moderation on the list – I was left with a handful of random and disorganized tips and tricks that could help you either directly or indirectly in promoting your blog. What do you think?

Try misspelling a few words.

Purposely misspell commonly misspelled words and just watch the free traffic flow in. You would be surprised to see just how extra traffic will cumulatively build up – as you exploit this underlying loop-hole. It might seem a bit morally – wrong but we are not abusing the system… just making it easier for the lazy.

Try tweetin’ from your desktop.

To be honest, I’m not as active on Twitter as I would like to be. Well I wasn’t anyways. The concept of tweetin’ from your desktop has been around almost since Twitter’s launch but I never got around to using them. I’ve tried a handful over them over time but none of them… fitted my needs.

That was until I came across TweetDeck. I just cannot emphasize the value it has added to my Twitter account because with it – I feel like doing what Twitter was designed to do in the first place; tweet about everything that happens around me! It’s just an awesome tool, in fact I might even dedicate a whole post on the program and outline every single feature of it!

Try video marketing.

It’s not that hard: Get a web cam, some video-editing software + a free Youtube account and with a touch of your imagination you can potentially reach millions of people on the internet. This depends on your niche, obviously but if your in a market that can grow virally – just give it a shot. It can be anything from a game-play video with your narration to you singing the ABC 123 backwards!

It’s up to you, make something people want to watch – that has a direct relation to your blog; then just promote it.

Try to reply to your blog’s comments.

You can raise your blog’s awareness internally, as well. Writing up an article is just half the task, you need to then follow it up with promote it and once you do – act upon the response it gets. Most likely, the responses will be reflected on the comments and it’s absolutely critical to reply to most, if not all of your visitor’s comments.

Replying to comments goes a long way; because it entices the visitors to return to your blog and check up on the responses. It creates a more friendly environment and a warm feeling of community. Personally, I reply to every comment except those simply dropping by a Thank You, but everyone now and then – I reply with my appreciation for their contribution.

Related posts:

1. 49 Tips to Become a Better Blogger

2. 10 Tips to Prevent Hackers

3. 45 Link Building Tips To Help You Promote Your Blog

In an ever changing approach by bloggers to keep up with the Google SERP algorithms, many of us get carried away with our “SEO Techniques.” It’s not a surprise nor a shame, because without this experimentation, we are bound to hit a plateau in progress.

Unquestionably, even here at Blogussion – we try many new things, in combination with the old to help build on the traffic from search engines. Whether it be validating the site using the W3C Markup or just typing a new category-description, Search Engine Optimization is a never-ending process that evolves on a regular basis and it is our duty to keep up with it.

However, in trying new things – we shouldn’t forget that some techniques will never die out and must be practiced as regularly as possible. I would just like to outline 45 tips that will help you build quality back-links to your site, with minimal to no costs!

Quality back-links serve two main purposes. Firstly, it helps crawlers find and locate your site. Once this is accomplished, the search engine crawler goes about indexing your site. The next purpose; back-links help crawlers identify how important your blog really is.

The first purpose obviously only applies to new blogs, but the second one will still be valid even 10 years down the track. These back-links also help the Google Crawler to assign your pages with a Google PageRank. Simply to put, the more authoritative websites that are linked to your site, the more important it is perceived to be.

List of 45. Starts Here.

Getting Links for Writing Content

1. Write content that is useful – Writing resourceful content will always attract links, hands down. If you write an article that is overflowing with useful and resourceful information – people will link to it.

2. Don’t forget trackbacks – This handy feature for WordPress can be great way of returning the compliment for a dedicated link.

3. Remind your readers to link to you – After each posts, just throw in a quick reminder that your article can be socially bookmarked or linked to.

4. Make a Top “X” List – Alex’s post on “100 Lists To Become A Better Blogger” is the most successful post on Blogussion, to-date. This just goes to prove how much people love “lists posts” such as your “Top X [Something]”

5. Debunk a Myth – There’s only one thing better than coming up with an idea, is to prove someone else one wrong. People love opposition and to see a debate bubble up, so don’t be afraid to challenge other people’s opinions.

6. Write with a touch of conspiracy – Just reinforcing tip #5. If you can create that atmosphere of retaliation, it will always raise a few eyebrows.

7. Spread the Love – Dedicate a post or two per week to link to other blogger’s posts that you found useful. More often than not, they will tell their readers “Mr.X linked to my post, how cool!”

8. Trade articles with webmasters – Similar to guest posting, just swap articles with a fellow webmaster.

9. Release a Press Release – This guide shows you how to write + submit a good Press Release.

Freebies/Giveaways for Link-Baiting

10. Hold a contest with an incentive. Contests are great for link-baiting because when people talk about it, there will always be “Check it out here” tagged along with it.

11. Release a free design. If you can make/buy a custom WP-Theme then release it for free to your guests, you can really kick off on a viral market. Just don’t forget the “Designed by [YOUR LINK]”

12. Release a free plugin. This serves a similar purpose as a design, but not so much with a direct back-link. Instead, if your plugin is useful, the incoming links will just grow exponentially.

13. When running a contest, reward your referees that bring the most referrals. This will encourage them to blog about your contest.

Connecting With Communities

14. Become active and post on relevant forums

15. Become active and comment on relevant blogs.

16. Try not to forget your signature on forums, otherwise the whole thing is an epic fail.

17. When commenting on blogs, try to use post URLs instead of just your Blog URL – This can help regulate your links evenly amongst your blog, and not just solely to your front page.

18. DON’T spam communities with your links to your site, offer a reason for them to visit and contribute with a purpose.

19. Submit your blog to directories – These are still helpful when it comes to getting indexed, especially these directories listed here.

20. Search up DoFollow Blogs/Forums – These will carry the most significant back-links.

21. Browse Craigslists and they can provide you with a free or cheap link.

22. Build on your Technorati Profile

23. Become a Sponsor – Whether it be a theme, whole website or a small project; the sponsors always get mentioned.

24. Run for Charity, and request others to help spread the word.

25. DON’T spam. This tip cannot be reinforced enough. A deleted comment will server no purpose.

Directories, Social Bookmarking + Discussion Groups.

26. Write content for Article directories – Publish content for directories such as eZineArticles, GoArticles or iSnare. In the “About Author’s” area, you can leave a link to your website.

27. Build a Squidoo Page – It’s easy and if you have the time to develop it, it can be very authoritative. If you don’t there’s heaps of services out there to help you out.

28. Join Discussions over at Yahoo! Answers – Providing useful answers, along with a link is an easy way to earn a back-link.

29. There’s also Google Groups – It’s almost the same as Yahoo! Answers, but owned by Google.

30. Submit your voice on Digg – First build a solid profile, where you have a network of loyal diggers. If you can hit the Digg front page, you are likely to get linked to by a lot of web-masters.

31. Build on your Twitter profile then link to your site using your “Bio Area.”

32. Tweet about your posts using Twitter, then request retweets from your followers.

33. Offer a “Tweet This Post” link on every post your write, this will make Tweeters easier to tweet about your article.

Direct Link Building

34. Contact your fellow bloggers with a personalized email – asking for an reciprocal link exchange. However, keep this to a minimal and be very selective in who you choose to trade with.

35. Post around on forums asking for reciprocal link exchanges, but yet again be warned on your selection.

36. If you are a part of organizations, clubs or schools – Ask them if they can link to you, because these types of websites are more often than not; authoritative.

37. DON’T ask Darren Rowse, ShoeMoney, Matt Cutts or Yahoo, MSN and Google for back-links. It’s just a waste of time, especially the last three “contacts”

Paid Link Building

38. Buy a Review – Most sites that offer reviews will naturally link to the reviewed product/site.

39. Many webmasters buy links on popular blogs for authority, even though it’s against the Google TOS (Use at your own risk)

40. Rent links from others website – Text-Link-Ads is most likely your best option.

Using Blogussion for Link Building

41 Leave a comment – All our comments are do-follow, so the link you chose as your URL will get link-love automatically.

42. Top Commentators  – As you can see on the sidebar, we use this awesome plugin. Every month, our most contributing members will be rewarded with a link.

43. We use CommentLuv – Every comment you post, will carry a link to your latest blog posts.

44. Link to our posts – We utilize the uses of ‘trackbacks.’ Hence any links to our posts, will automatically be rewarded with a back-link to them! So, Why not share this post with your readers and followers?

45. Buy a Paid Review – We link to our reviewed sites/products.

That’s it!

There’s many more link building techniques and tips that I haven’t mentioned in this post, but these are just some of the ways you can always rely on for Link Building.

Naturally, following these tips will reward you with a higher PageRank too!

Lastly, is there anything you want to add to this list? Please leave us a comment below

Related posts:

1. Boost Your SERPs with these Link Building Techniques

2. Press Release Submissions

3. 49 Tips to Become a Better Blogger

Recently, I contacted Yan from ThouShallBlog – a blog about blogging that both Alex and I have been closely following – and I asked him if we could guest post.

To my appreciation, Mr. Yan replied within 24 hours and asked me to send over a review of the guest-post article. After reviewing and a few amendments later, he decided to publish the article with much appraisal!

Alex and I are both pleased we could acheive such a feat, simply because of how strong Yan’s readership is. He has in excess of 700 Subscribers but the big positive is that most of them are actively involved with his blog.

It’s been less than 24 hours post-publishing but the article has already seen 22 useful comments! ThouShallBlog has a simple but a very, very effective method to engage the reader – the author must reply to each and every comment.

It really helps convincing more readers to comment, because they can be assured a reply. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but a method that has seen Yan much success over the years.

Here is a quick excerpt of the article “49 Tips to Become a Better Blogger”

Would you agree that Blogging is an art, which can only be mastered with experience?

Well I believe it is, because not everyone can blog. Then the ones that do conjure up the determination to do so usually give up in a few months.

As you go along, you pick up tips and learn new techniques which can’t be bought for money. Unless of course you go for “classes” but there is a lot of things that just can’t be taught through a 1 hour lecture. The only way you can expose yourself to these learning curves is by getting your hands dirty – in a metaphorical sense, of course.

Related posts:

1. 10 Tips to Prevent Hackers

2. How to combat the evils of Procrastination?

Following up on my “10 Tips to Prevent Hackers“, I want to bring more emphasis on our number one tip – Strong Passwords. The effectiveness of security of increasing the length of a password by just one more letter, symbol or number grows in a very,  VERY steep exponential rate.

In other words, for every extra digit you add on to you password you triple, quadruple or even 5x the different possibilities. The longer the password, the more effort required to discover it. However, longer passwords also means more difficult it is for users to remember it.

So, what if I tell you that a simple  password would take a human hacker 580 million years to crack or even a super-computer up to 59 years?! Now, that would be optimum security wouldn’t it?

Average Time to Discover Password

This table of data consists of possible characters from A-Z and numbers 0-9. Human discovery assume one try every 10 seconds. Computer discovery assume one million tries per second. Also the “Average time to discover” assumes that the password would be discovered in approximately half the time it would take to try all possible combination.

Example of Average Time to Discover a Password

Let’s say for example – for a one character-password there’s 36 combination consisting of letters A-Z (26 possibilities) and numbers 0-9 (10 possibilities) When, we apply the assumption that each HUMAN attempt takes 10 seconds – hence a human hacker should take 360 seconds or 6 minutes to break the code.

Then we apply the second assumption that the hacker will discover the password exactly half-way through – therefore they will discover the password in 3 minutes which is referred to as the “average time to discover passwords.”

Exponential Growth – What is it?

Below you can see a visual representation of what I meant by the “exponential growth” earlier. Just by adding one extra digit you open up so many more possibilities and make it much harder for hackers to get into your sensitive files.

As you can clearly see – by just adding one more digit to your 3-letter password you decrease the chance of a “random guess” by such a value that it is almost impossible for a human to hack. I cannot stress enough on how significantly your security status improve for every extra digit you add – but don’t go overboard because you just might forget your next 20-character long password..

Now, Implement & Good Luck!

Hopefully all of that made sense. So, take this into consideration and use as many different digits as possible. Remember you are not limited to just numbers and letters – symbols such as “!@#$%^” are always good for extra unguessable protection.

Related posts:

1. 10 Tips to Prevent Hackers

2. 6 Simple Ways to Build Traffic!

3. Creating more appealing posts in 4 simple steps

Today, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of what to write for the next few weeks – then I came across this article I wrote ages ago, but it’s so good that it’s worth mentioning again! Yes, I’m blogging even on Christmas day, and it’s 3am here. Oh well, here’s the “Top 10 Reasons Why YOU Should Start Blogging, Today!” I’ve titled it “V2.0″ because there are few edits and improvisations;

Blogging – it’s been one of the most steadily growing aspects of the Internet and today we have millions of bloggers writing everyday! As many of you are probably blogging yourself here’s on little fact you might have not heard before – there are almost 20,000 blogs created everyday! If you are one of the very few that are sitting out – you should be asking yourself one simple question… WHY?

Blogging can be about absolutely anything, from a personal diary dedicated to your pet mouse to teaching folks how to make a reasonable income online. There is nothing you can’t blog about – if it’s a topic discussable in society you bet there’s a blog about it somewhere on the web! Heck, there’s even blogs out there that cannot be discussed in public…

Thinking about what to write, I came up with a “Top Ten List” on why I think you should start blogging before experimenting with other means of website development.

Countdown from 10…

10) Speak your mind & be who you want to be – Blogging allows users to speak their mind freely – because if someone else doesn’t like or agree with their comments, they’ll just have to bear with it. Bloggers can talk about almost anything and with given time – they will find a group of unique visitors who are interested in the topic. Just for the record – I’ve seen a blog about “How I built my swimming pool” that is considered very successful for anything blog on any niche!

9) Easy to set up – Blogs are extremely easy to set up and it is recommended that when you first enter the world of web-publishing – you start off with a blog, simply due to the simplicity of getting one online as soon as possible.

Organization hasn’t been simpler – Many website owners struggle to organize and updated their content regularly but with blogging that wont’ be a problem, guaranteed. Blogging allows users to sort their content with tags and categories for future reference or search engine optimization.

7) It’s FREE! – I was deciding on whether or not if I should post this as the “number one reason” because you simply have nothing to lose! Most blogs such as Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal are all free to use – so you can up and running with no costs involved.

6) It’s simple & It’s CMS – CMS stands for Content Management Systems and it is exactly what it’s name suggests – Helps you manage your content! Blogging makes it very easy for webmasters to write up their content and publish it on the internet without worry too much about HTML, JavaScript and other computer languages!

5) RSS Feeds made simple - If it’s anything that I love about blogging – it would simply be the ‘ease’ of implementing a RSS feed for your content. Many blog hosts come with pre-installed RSS Feed Systems and it can greatly help your readers keep track of the latest articles.

4) Helps SEO & SERP – Their are millions of malicious claims on the internet, but here’s one that might not have proof – but I strongly believe in. Blogs have a slightly better liking from search engines especially Google over normal websites. Why I believe that? Google loves fresh content, and what better way to attain that with bloggers writing 4-5 times a day!

3) Uniqueness comes standard - The title is quite an oxymoron (Two concepts that do not go together). Using blogs you can really customize it according to your needs and skill level. Many free and premade themes allow you to bring a sense of uniqueness without knowing too much about coding – but with a little bit of background info you can personalize it to a great new level!

2) Unlimited Features – Plug-ins and Widgets are created almost every day by users like you and me all around the world! Widgets can expand many parts of your weblog and make the reader’s experience quite a remarkable one! Also you can optimize it for performance by incorporating plug-ins that help fine tune your weblog.

1) Make Money while Blogging – No matter what bloggers say, MOST (not all) started blogging with either this in the back of their head or as their complete and ultimate achievement – Earn Money Online. I mean, who can blame them? If you were paid to do something you love – the heck I’d do it and may of us – including me – are.

That pretty much summarizes why I believe blogging is the way to go – regardless of your skill and experience level. Hopefully it has given you an insight on blogging and will help you get started or simply keep you motivated with your blogging career!

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