Is your Twitter Profile URL Pulling the Plug on Your Followers?

February 21, 2010 By Jeff 2 Comments

There is a relatively new person on twitter that I started following because of a recommendation from a Twitter Friend (@lolaaugustine) who I have been following her since I got onto this Twitter thing.  When I visited this new person’s profile earlier this week I noticed one of the SPAMMER warnings that jump right out at me.  She had been using an ow.ly shortened URL as her profile, not as bad as bit.ly, but still made me cringe.

I have noticed that most of the people using a shortening service like ow.ly or bit.ly on their Profile link to trick you into clicking it and then signing up for something.  It happens enough that people like me, and a lot of people I know on Twitter, will simply not follow you if see that.  I brought this up at a Tweetup once and there were a number of people at the table that said they will automatically block them without a second thought.

Now how to fix it

If you are one of the culprits and don’t even realize it.  Maybe a friend set up your account for you, well it is easy to fix.

All you need to do is to go to http://twitter.com/settings/profile and in the WEB box put your “real” URL, to get this go to your website and in the address bar at the top of the browser grab the entire thing there starting with http://.  If your web address is a Facebook page, and you also have a blog I would recommend using your Blog address as it will allow you better control over your traffic.Then to point your blog visitors to your Facebook Fan page you can use a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-fan-box/. If you are not sure how to set that up, I can help just send me a note using the Contact Us page or a comment on this post with your email.

Hope that helps you gain more Twitter Followers with your efforts.
Cheers,
Jeff M
Filed Under Tutorials Tagged With , , , ,

Karma Friday – The Premeir

February 19, 2010 By Jeff Leave a Comment

A couple of other blogs that I have in my reader do a weekly link dump of sorts.  Gala Darling does – Things I Love Thursday, Dr Pauly does various Link Dumps, and there are a few others that I can’t think of right now.  Now I am going to have my own Karma Friday where I will be pointing out the cool or important posts that I come across during the week.

  • Clickbank Case Study – Clickbank is not something that I have had a lot of luck with over the years, but maybe it is time that I take a simple approach to it and see where it takes me.  Dan Walker did a very simple Case Study that started me thing that maybe it was me and not them

So after just over a week, I’ve earned $100 from a spend of $55, an ROI of nearly 100%. So how did I turn $55 into $100 with literally half an hours work a week. Schimples.

  • Top 5 Crucial Internet Marketing Tips for 2010 – This is from Winning the Web, I am not sure if I agree completely that the longer you wait the harder it is going to be start making big money online.  Maybe it will be harder the way that people do it today, but that is similar to saying that it is getting harder to start any business.  The fact is that it is not easy no matter when you start, and if you do it right anyone with a good idea will be able to profit from it.

The most important thing is to keep hustling and working smart in the new year to see success. Consistency and persistence are always rewarded.

  • How Graywolf manages a Wordpress Site – This is a great post for everyone, I have bookmarked it to read again later when I have more time.  Rather than use Thesis for my theme framework I like to use Genesis.  The community is not as large for the child themes but Studiopress is a great little company that has been doing good things.

Why Wordpress and not another CMS? It’s easier to administer, easier to get writers to upload and format their own content, and it has RSS and other social tools built in or that can be integrated very easily with plugins.

If you have link/tweet that you think I would like be sure to let me know.  The easiest way for it not to get lost in the shuffle is to tweet me at The_Bluenoser but if you are not on the Twitter drop me a line using the Contact Form.  I love to hear from you…..

Cheers,

Jeff M

Filed Under Me Rambling Tagged With

Blog Updates February 2010

February 17, 2010 By Jeff Leave a Comment

One of the things that I am going to be doing on this site is monthly updates on the backend of the blog.  It is in these posts that I will be talking about the plugins that I have installed, explain why I have each installed, any tweaks to the site that I may make.

I have a rather selfish reason to be doing this.  I have a habit of continously tweaking a site and not really keeping track.  By documenting everything that I do it will both slow me down, and teach you on what works and what doesn’t and more importantly why.

Since I just completed a major overhaul of the site and have moved hosts this post will not cover everything.  In subsequent Blog Updates I will do reviews of the plugins and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of them.

I am also thinking about a permanent blog brand that I will be developing over the next 6 months.  At the end of this time I will have a new theme designed that will work on top of the framework theme that I have installed now.

The Host:

Well I moved the site from my old host to ThisWebHost. I yelled out to Twitter and a couple of my followers suggested them. I have read as much as I could online about them and they seem to be an up and comer that is either going to grow huge or get bought up by one of the current big players.

I bought the smallest account that they have for this blog for now.  It is just a tester and if I like what I see then I will be buying larger accounts from them and moving my other sites.  This is not an insignifcant task, so I want to be sure that it is the right move so that I won’t have to do it again for a long while.

The Plugins:

  • Akismet
  • Google Sitemaps
  • WordPress Mobile Edition
  • WP Super Cache
  • OIOpublisher Direct 2.0
  • Pretty Link
  • Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
  • Feedburner Feed Replacement
  • Google Analytics for WordPress
  • Twitter Widget Pro

So these are the plugins that I have installed and activated right now, a lot of them are self-explanatory for anyone that has been around Wordpress for a while, but they are all very basic and with the exception of OIOPublisher and WP Super Cache.  However not all of them need to be installed on every blog, in fact the only plugins that I install on all of my sites are the first 4.  These I will give a little more explanation.

Akismet:

Akismet is a comment spam plugin that comes right from the makers of Wordpress.  When it is installed it takes a look at every comment that someone makes on your site, compares it to a hug DB of comments, IPs, emails, etc and decides whether or not that comment is worthy on your site.

This plugin will save you hours of maintainence on your blog when you are approving comments.

Google Sitemaps:

This plugin is relatively self explanatory, what it does is create a Google friendly sitemap of your site that you can submit to Google using their webmaster tools.  It helps Google with finding the relevant information on your site and indexing what you want.

WordPress Mobile Edition:

This is a newish one to me that I have been using a lot more.  It takes your site and if it notices that your visitor is on a mobile phone it will output a page that is very light and vry easy to use on a mobile.

The importance that I see in it is that it allows the use of social networks to link your site that people may be using on their mobile.  All the major social networks have mobile programs and this allows your friends, follows, etc to click through to your site and not feel sorry about it.

WP Super Cache

This one may not seem that important to the small blog, but you never know when you are going to “go viral” and you want to make sure that your site can handle the load for as long as possible.  There was a couple of times over the years that I either got Stumbled hard or was linked to on Fark that my site died after a couple of hours.  Who knows how large of a lost opportunity that was now.  But I do know you don’t want that to happen to you.

I will review/explain the other plugins in future posts.  Keep reading here, add the site to your RSS reader, or follow me on Twitter to stay current on everything Bluenoser.

Cheers,

Jeff M

Filed Under Blogging, Me Rambling Tagged With , , , , , , , , ,
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