Internet Marketing For Small Business

Here are some more Twitter tools and tips to help you get tweeting.

I use Tweetdeck.com to organize all my Twitters.

I search Twitter with search.twitter.com. Search for your subject, your name, your company’s name, your competitors’ names etc. to see what people are talking about. Start talking with them, and building relationships.

You can also search for hashtags on Twemes. Hashtags are a tagging system on Twitter where you put a # in front of any word you like. They are kind of like Technorati tags that way.

Use #hashtags to groupd your tweets on one subject. More info on how to use hashtags here.

Use RT – this means ReTweet – to take someone else’s Twitter post and send it to your followers. To use it just add RT to the top of your tweet, followed by @originalsendername, and their original message.

RT @originalsendername original message

Search Twitter users bios on Tweepsearch. Find people in your industry or genre to befriend.

Share photos on Twitter with Twitpic.

Check out popular videos on Tweetube. Share videos on Twitter with Tweetube. 

Why did someone unfollow you? Check out Tweet Effect to find out which of your Twitter updates might be responsible for people following or leaving you.

TweetLater is an excellent tool for Twitter automation. You can automatically follow those that follow you – and send an intro message with it. Some marketing experts say this is the best way to build authority. Others disagree. Your choice. Tweetlater also lets you program your tweets to send at specific times, though I think that’s kinda crummy. You’re not in a dialogue if you’re not there.

Visit the TwiTip (Twitter Tip) blog which is edited by Darren Rowse from ProBlogger Blog Tips. Follow Darren on Twitter.

Vist the Twitter Fan Wiki to look for tips or info, or to add your own.

How To Get more Followers
Kevin Rose just put out his list of how to get more Twitter followers. Kevin would know – he is the founder of Digg and has over 88,000 followers on Twitter making him the second most followed after President Obama.

Want to check your stats or see who else has loads of followers? Top Twitter users posted here on Twitterholic?

Follow me on Twitter – Twitter.com/ireneduma

I just found this Facebook marketing tips guru who actually has really smart and doable tips. Her name is Mari Smith, and if you subscribe to her emails, she will send you 7 easy marketing tips for Facebook. I am up to day 4 so far find them very worthwhile.

Tip #1 is all about setting up your profile page properly. Tip 2 is your profile pic, Tip 3 is about how to make your blog posts appear in your Notes section of your site automatically, and Tip 4 shows you some cool business applications or tools that you can use with Facebook.

Mari also has a Free Facebook Tips ebook  (and non-free social media classes and VP courses.)

Mari is also a Twitterer and posts her Facebook tips on Twitter too. You can see them all by using this Twitter Search Tool and querying Mari Smith and new #FBtip = Mari Smith’s #FBTips

Did you notice this  # sign in front of a word #FBtip  – it’s a hashtag. Learn  what are hashtags here.

Tags: hashtags, Mari Smith, Facebook tips, marketing with Facebook

Twitter was quickly adopted by kids to broadcast what you are doing. Adults quicky called it fritter. But surprisingly Twitter has grown quickly among lots of time-challenged adults who dig the micro-blog limit of 140 characters and it has quickly become a tool of choice for social networking geniuses and advocates like Gary Vaynerchuk of winelibrarytv.com and Chris Brogan who writes about social networking business strategies.

So – the bottom line is Twitter is yet another tool you can use to build brand, fans, and community. The question is -

Should you Twitter?

I think if you have a business or are your own business, like many artists are, then yes, I think you should consider Twittering, or definitely know why you are not. And here’s why. This is where the new business is going – it’s going to the web and since this is how they play, then if you don’t want to be left behind, you might consider playing there too.

The good news is Twitter is easy, Twitter is quick, and that makes it a good place to start practicing this new “dialoguing” business that’s changing the rules and the game.

How to Twitter?

Twitter is touted as mini-blogging or micro-blogging. You are allowed only 140 characters to write a post so they are very short posts, kind of like a Facebook status. You can update often throughout the day, and let people know what you’re doing. You can update from the web, or by texting from your cell phone.

But there’s no sense in jumping on the Twitter bandwagon if you don’t really know why you are doing it. To that end, I found this great article which outlines a Twitter strategy for bands. It is super comprehensive and smart, and explains how to make Twitter a part of your branding and marketing plan. It’s written by Ariel Hyatt of Ariel Publicity, a music PR firm, but this strategy will work for authors, artists, filmmakers, photographers, entrepreneurs or the self-employed too.

In the Musicians Twitter Roadmap article above, Ariel interviews Laura Fitton, who explains how to use Twitter to create a community and promote yourself even if you are new to “social networking.” They talk about how to sign up and set up your profile, create the right brand, linke to Your Mobile Phone, how to find friends and follow them, who to follow and more, in nice and easy to understand English.

What to Twitter?

There are lots of gurus out there telling people what to Twitter. The thing to remember is that Twittering isn’t about the direct sell, but about building relationships and trust. This is becoming more important as the consumer public is becoming more knowledgable and wary of the hard sell or scams, and also more apt to do a ton of research online before buying. There is a general trend toward more authenticity and transparency too – fans want to know you and hear your thoughts and opinions, not those that your PR person made up.

One way to build fans and friends is to join in on the conversation. Do a search on Twitter using this Twitter search tool for words like your name, your book titles, your genre or your topic of expertise – and you can reply to people using the @ sign. Add your two cents worth, or point out a link to that subject on your or someone else’s blog.

Use twemes.com or tweetchat.com and do a search for hashtags – those are like Technorati tags for Twitter. What are Hashtags you ask? Click on that link to find out.

How to find Twitter Friends.

Social networking is all about friends. The more you have the better. The article above explains how to find friends. A new tool launched just 3 weeks ago can also help.

Mr Tweet helps you find friends by analyzing your current network and suggesting new friends and members whose feeds may be of interest. Just follow Mr tweet then wait for a DM, or direct message from the service. I did, and just got myself a load of new friends to follow.

Automate Twitter
But just a bit. Die hard Twitter users and social networkers frown on automation because it’s the antithesis of the spirit, which is all about communication, dialogue and transparency.

But I think setting your Twitter posts to automatically update your Facebook status is fine. To do that go to your Facebook account and install the Twitter application. Then set it to allow status updates from Twitter. You can change this anytime.

I think sending Twitter updates to your MySpace page is also ok, especially if you are like me and don’t go there very often anymore. Twitter has created customizable “badges” which are widgets that you can embed onto your MySpace pages as well as onto other websites and blogs, which will show your latest tweets.

My fave Twitter friends

I like having “friends” who are really smart and passionate about their subjects, go deep into it, and have no trouble sharing what they know. When I pop onto twitter via the web, I am always guaranteed a link to a fascinating article, post or news item from Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan, or Ken Nichols to name just a few.

They are also good examples of how to Tweet useful tweets. I really don’t care that you are eating breakfast, or are tired, or are going somewhere – unless I am stalking you. If I just admire you, I’d rather you spare me and just tell me what you learned when you got there.

Twittering isn’t for you if:

• your audience doesn’t use it
• you absolutely don’t have time
• you don’t care about listening
• you don’t like sharing

Should Screenwriters Twitter?

How serendipitous is this? My new Twitter friend Jill Golick whom I met via Ink Canada Facebook Edition just posted an article called Twitter and the Wired Writer. How did I find it? She Tweeted it.

More Tips on Twittering Real Good from some bright minds
Check back often as I will be updating this whenever I come across a great article.

• How To Use Twitter by Guy Kawasaki, the power entrepeneur, explains how he uses Twitter as a Twool. Excellent advice and some more great reasoning on why you should use Twitter as a marketing tool.
• Twitter Power Guide eBook. For the more advanced Twitter user familiar with Google Reader, RSS and Yahoo Pipes, this FREE ebook is just out from Christopher Penn – savvy marketer, blogger, podcaster and podcamp founder. Not to be missed.
• To get up to speed with Google reader, here’s my How To RSS guide with Google Reader.
• Darren Rouse of Problogger and Twitip writes his thoughts on the blogging VS Twitter debate, and how the two platforms compliment each other.

Last but not least Follow Me on Twitter

Do you need a privacy policy for your web site? Maybe you’ve never thought of it?

Either way, it’s a good practice to have one on your web site. Especially if you are doing things like collecting addresses or using cookies. Google likes these too.

If writing a privacy policy makes you want to procrastinate by pulling out your eyelashes one by one, try this instant Privacy Policy generator.  

It takes the pain away and makes it easy.

Just copy and paste into your policy page.

[tags] privacy policy, privacy policy tool,  privacy policy tool,

Hi friends, media peeps, small business owners, and starving artists. Here is an amazing list of over 400! tools for Photographers, Videobloggers, Podcasters & Musicians compiled over at Mashable.

Mashable, for those of you that don’t know, is a site dedicated to finding the scoop and the latest news on what’s happening in the world of social networks online – or in other words – what’s new for web sites and the Internet and ultimately we who use them. I know that’s simplistic, but as time goes on I see no need for differentiating web sites from social networks or 2.0 apps or other labels. It’s the way the web is growing.

But back to this amazing list. It has been compiled from previous posts written on Mashable and is a must see if you are a photographer, videoblogger, podcaster, musician, artist – or any other person who is producing your own media, or own publicity for that matter.

The list is lovingly divided up for Photography Gods, Video Gods, Musicians etc. I can spend weeks here exploring them all and probably will. Here are a few that are particularly calling out to me.

• MUSIC SHARING APPLICATIONS AND WIDGETS
• PHOTO PRINTING/BOOK CREATION
• STOCK PHOTOS
• VIDEO MASHUPS

Oh, but there’s a link to a whole new page that lists 33 Ways to Watch Free TV Online.

Gotta run.  Bob Wiseman is discussing his multi-media performance work at The Rock Can Roll Festival 4

There’s always something going on here in St. John’s.

Tags: tools for photographers, tools for videobloggers, tools for podcasters, tools for musicians, tools for bands, Bob Wiseman, Rock Can Roll Festival, list of tools, mashable 

I love taking photos and while I certainly appreciate purism, I also love playing with Photoshop and “colouring” my photos. It’s more like painting, and you can really get some beautiful effects.

This is my favorite tutorial on how to paint your photographs with Photoshop – Blurbomat’s How to Turn an Ordinary Photo Into an Extraordinary Photo. Read more

This is a beautiful tool for those who need to make vectors. Vector Magic takes bitmapped images and turns them into beautiful vector images.

Huh? What’s that mean?

Well, very simply, it takes photos or other complicated graphics and turns them into line drawings. Line drawings that can be enlarged to infinity.

Here’s an example. That’s the original photo on the top left. The other 3 squares have been traced using Vector Magic’s three settings – high, medium and low.

Yup. A Stanford University team has developed a tool that makes vectors from bitmaps a super easy to do, and does it better than most other auto-tracers, like the one in Adobe Illustrator.

Why would one need a vector graphic?

Basically, there are 2 ways a computer can draw pictures:

1. with tiny little squares, or pixels, called bitmap, or raster.
2. with a command that says something like “draw a circle and make it red with a circumference of 10 pixels. ” This is called a vector image.

The trick is to know when to use which one.

For example, ever try to take a jpeg and make it bigger? It turns all squarish and jaggedy – or pixelated – meaning you start seeing the individual pixels the image is made of. If you shrink the same image, it will get all blurry.

That’s not good for some things, such as logos. For those, you want them to be either teeny weeny, or something large enough to paste on the side of a skyscraper. If you want scalability – you want a vector image.

Now I can’t tell you the number of times I have received bitmaps instead of vectors when someone sends me their logo. This can be a big headache, especially if it’s sitting on a background colour.

Not anymore. If i get one of those nasty things, I will shoot it up to “Vector Magic: The Online Tool for Precision Vectorization” and change it to a more usable form for logos.

In fact I had to use this myself. I never made a proper logo for Bitter Tonic as I was in a big rush to get content up, and so a friend just made a great header for me. And being too busy, I never got around to doing the work. So I tested this by uploading a TIFF of my logo to Vector Magic.

I gotta hand it to them, it makes traces beautifully and the site is easy to use too. And even keeps your photos stored online for a whole month. Check out the difference. The top is a bitmap.

Magnifico!

Did I mention how fast it is?

I wish this team would develop for my ridiculously not-easy-to-use cell phone.

Vector Magic is not free, but when signing up you get 2 free tokens, so you get to try it out. Subscription is $7.95/month, or you can buy a desktop application at $295. Both the online and the desktop editions work on both Mac and PC.

Click here for great vector making by Vector Magic

Tags: free tools, online tool, vector making, auto tracer, Vector Magic, line drawing, make logos, making vectors, Stanford University, make vector, tracing tool

Get it now before September 1, 2007, as this is a good deal.

The Avid Free DV video-editing software is geared towards students and those just starting out making videos. It is meant to introduce, and then hook people to the Avid interface and software, so that they upgrade and buy the pro video-editing tools which have a lot more functions and power.

It’s got what the new or casual user needs to start with. The Avid Free DV includes basic video and audio editing capabilities, up to two streams of real-time effects and support for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X platforms.
Avid’s professional line of products include the Avid Xpress DV software and Avid Xpress Pro systems. You can compare Avid’s products here.

Avid was the standard video editing software in the industrly until Apple’s Final Cut Pro came on the scene.

Non-techies listen up – now you too can have a WordPress blog set up and running at your own domain.

The how-to instructions on how to do a manual install of WordPress can be rather intimidating. This is because you need to set up a database on your web hosting server to run WordPress, and in order to do so, you need to get into the “tech guts” of your server. Spooky.

That’s why One-click installs are great – all you have to do is follow the instructions set up by your web hosting company, which usually amount to clicking a few check boxes. The trickiest part in the operation will be naming the database, but that’s basically all you have to do: name it. The rest is done for you.

Another thing that is great about One-Click Installs is that they make handling updates to the WordPress software easy. The kind WordPress developers keep making their software better and safer, and so it is a good idea to keep updating to the latest version of WordPress. With one-click installs, the web hosts will upload the latest software for you, and when you are ready to install it, it’s just another click away.

Here are a few reputable companies that offer one-click installs. Sign up with either one and you could be blogging in about 10 minutes.

Hostgator

We are happy to say we have started using Hostgator as a web site hosting company and are delighted with the servers and with service. With packages starting at $7.95 USD per month, Hostgator is a sweet deal. It is also the host of choice for many pro Internet Marketers who use the Reseller Package to host all their web sites. It boasts Cpanel and WHM control panels.

• Click here to check out the Hostgator web site or to sign up for an account.

Dreamhost

Is probably the most popular one-click install company, probably because of their very popular affiliate program. There are as many Dreamhost evangelists as there are detractors, but the one thing you can be sure of is that Dreamhost’s newsletter will make you laugh, as it boasts the wittiest corporate writing out there.

A big plus – the company is very honest about what’s going on with their service and have a blog and wiki set up so that you can stay up-to-date with what is going on with your server’s status.

Dreamhost’s Crazy Domain Insane! package costs $7.95 a month if you sign up and pay for 2 years up front. This will get you 150 GB of web host space, which increases weekly by 1 GB. Yes, this incentive is quite unique, but it seems to be working.

Your allowed bandwidth or transfer amount increases weekly too, starting at 1.5 TB and increasing weekly by 16 GB.

With Dreamhost, you can host as many domain names as you like on this package and have unlimited MySql databases running – enough to set up a blogging empire. You also get 1 year of free domain name registration.

I am currently hosting this site and a few other blogs with Dreamhost and I have had very little problems with them and found their support service quite speedy.

• This way to review the Dreamhost package in more detail.

Midphase

Is growing quite a strong fan base. Their packages tend to be a bit more costly, but advocates swear the service is worth it.

Midphase’s basic package is $7.95 and will get you 200 Gigabytes of space, a domain name for life, and 3oo GB of bandwidth. You have to bump up to the $11.95 pro-phase package to get unlimited domains.

• More about Midphase

AN Hosting

An Hosting is offering a lot of great deals recently. Their usual package is 250GB of disk space, 2,500GB of bandwidth, 20 fully hosted domains and a free domain for life, all for $6.95 a month. But if you wait for sale time, you can get some pretty good deals – like this $4.95 a month special that is available until Nov, 22, 2007.

• More about AN Hosting

As usual, do your research to choose the right company for you. A quick Google search of any company name above and you will find tons of fan mail, heated debates, as well as a few horror stories. But I think you will be safe with any of the companies above unless you plan on getting millions of hits a day, which in that case you should be able to afford a dedicated server (one that you do not share with anyone else.) And that is a good problem to have

This post is part of my “Blogging with WordPress Made Super Easy – Well, Almost” series. More coming soon.

Tags: wordpress, blogging made easy, one-click installs, web hosting, blogging for beginners

I just came across this Classified ad site which has just launched called Canuck.ca, which is offering Canadians the opportunity to advertise their goods for free.

Free is always good, but Canuck aims to go a bit further by becoming the first Canadian Classifieds website that enables people to include free video into any classified ad -  the idea here being that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video should sell the object itself.

They also have a button that allows you to switch to a French text version of the site. Truly Canadien.

Organized by main city, the Canuck site has a pretty interface (that means design or look basically) and is divided up logically into 8 main categories; For Sale, Animals, Personals, Jobs, Community, Motors, Services and Housing. From there it is further subdivided into a whole bunch of subcategories.

Each subcategory has its own RSS feed, so that you can be notified when a new post is added to it. If you want to learn about RSS feeds adn how they can save you time, I’ve written a cheat sheet on They also have button that allows you to switch to French text.

Canuck is brand new and still in beta, so if you run across a problem, let them know and they will fix it. In the meantime, distinguish yourself by being one of the first to post on a brand-spanking new web site.