Everyone is interested in growing their blog audience.  Twitter is a great way to get more people to visit your blog. 

When you tweet you can get people interested in your content.  Actually retweeting others tweets is even better.  The person you retweet will generally see that you have an interest in their information, and they will respond in kind.

I am not interested in tricking people to visit my site.  I just want as many people as possible to look at it.  If they like the content, they will be back.

I came across this site called Digerati Marketing a while back and I was intrigued by a post about creating a twitter bot.  This is a well done tutorial that will enable you to automatically post to your twitter account based upon the topics you select.   I would rate the process of making this automated ReTweet Bot a little complex for the novice user, but the tutorial walks you through each step. 

How to Make A Twitter Bot With No Coding

Be sure to check out some of the other posts on this blog.  He doesn't post too often, but when he does, the content is well done.  As the author of the post comments, don't let people try to sell you a bot when you can make your own.  One of the extra benefits is that you will learn how to use Yahoo Pipes.  Pipes is an excellent application that I never knew existed until I dug into this Bot building project.

So go ahead and try it!  Create a twitter bot see how your traffic can grow.  Let me know how it works out for you.  You can visit my Twitter Site to see how it is working out for me.
http://twitter.com/theteachingbox/

-Loren

Here is an excellent article that gives a Checklist of items you should use when you set up a new website.  I agree with the author.  Even if you have an "old" website these items are essential.  Credit to the Author is at the bottom of the article.

A great read.  Enjoy!

-Loren

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Stop! Before you push your fledgling site from the nest, here are 8 simple steps to ensure a successful launch.

In fact even if your web site is already live, there is no harm in going thru the checklist.

Marketing Value for You – Value for Your Web Clients

The 8 Point Pre Flight Checklist can easily be turned into a spreadsheet based checklist and applied to all your new sites. Then after all checks are complete, you can mail the checklist to your new site owner(s). This small marketing effort will demonstrate to your new customers that you are serious about giving them value for the money that they just spent on their new site.

The 8 Point Pre Flight Checklist

1. Page Title (the very first line in your browser)

From a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point of view, this is the most important piece of text on any web page. Check each page and make sure that:

Remember that the first 60 odd characters of your title text is what really counts. Remove all unnecessary stop words like and, the, a etc.

Important:  as part of your title check, it is also a good idea to check that each page’s keywords and description text are loaded.

2. Cross Browser Testing

It is surprising how often a user will point out to you that one of your sites does not work properly in such and such a browser. I once had a client with a site that did not work at all in Firefox. He took a year before giving us the go-ahead to fix it, because he was not too concerned about Firefox (lol!).

There are two ways to do cross browser testing.

i)  You can use a cross browser test system (various are available) – we use crossbrowsertesting.com

ii)  You can do the task manually after loading the various browsers onto your PC.

At very least check your site in Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox and Chrome. Go thru all links and check all pages work as advertised. Don’t forget to check any pages that have forms with validation.

(If you have the time check multiple versions of the browsers – like IE 7 and IE

3. Check Links

It is best to make use of an automated link checker tool, such as the free W3C Link Checker too. The tool can be found at http://validator.w3.org/checklink. After pointing it at your site (you can usually ignore the options), it will detect and check all links and then return with a report of all broken or redirected links.

You can also of course, as part of the above (Cross Browser test) – manually click on each and every link on the site to make sure that they open properly.

4. Check Forms Work

Check all contact forms actually work. This means that the validation works and that the requisite emails get fired off and arrive in the correct mailboxes. Most forms send a copy of the input to the site owner/webmaster/support person and also a thank you to the person who filled in the form.

Make sure that this process works. There WILL be a war with your client if contact mails are not firing as they should be.

5. Proofread All Content

Try and re-read all text content on the site. Check for misspellings and syntax errors.

(If you are the site owner, now is a good time to make sure all the words make sense and do try to cut out any text that looks superfluous. Less is always more with text)

6. Sitemap

The site should be using an automated site map creation script. Although it is possible to do this manually, this is not advisable. Manual site maps quickly become a high maintenance and are prone to unnecessary errors.

Check that the sitemap works.  Look to see that all your pages appear in the automated XML output.

7. Analytics Code

Make sure that any code required for the analysis of web stats is loaded on every page. Also make sure that the stats are actually being collected by checking to see if your testing gets recorded.

Google Analytics is a good system to use. It is low cost (free!) and produces brilliant results. Irrespective of your choice of analysis system – make sure it is working and recording stats.

8. Favicon

The site icon is an important part of the visual branding of your site. (It is often found as favicon.ico in the root folder of a site) Check to see if it is showing. This is a small but important part of a site’s branding, which also appears as part of the site bookmark in most browsers.

Suggested Options

1)  Add the site to Google Webmaster Tools (also Bing), there are many tools that deliver great value that are included in the tools.

2) List the site in various important directories. Especially Google and Yahoo and any popular local directories.
 

I am guest blogging over at Arrica Lee’s blog RandomToxic.  The topic is PageRankToday.com.  I give a short post on the features and fun aspects of learning about your Google Page Rank (and other things).  Stop over and give her website a look.  RandomToxic is an eclectic collection of fun posts.

I provide some more "geeky" content about Computer and Technology to this fun site.

See you over at RandomToxic!

-Loren

This is a companion posting to one that I wrote on in my Blog at Today.com.

Illarterate.co.uk gets the credit for making me think about my Blog Posting.  What is the “Perfect” Blog Post.
For Me a perfect Blog Post consists of the following:

• Visually appealing
• Keeps the readers attention
• Gets a good ranking on Search Engines

Regardless of the Blog topic, my purpose is to build a readership base and keep them coming back for more.  The most eye opening part of the Illaterate blog post was the statistic that the average Blog reader stays on the page for 30 seconds.

In my post on Today.com I talk about how Academia loves words.   The more words your paper contains the better it is.  This will NOT work on the internet.  Lots of Blogs tend to be wordy and not visually appealing.  There is really no excuse for this.  Even the rudimentary tools in WordPress allow formatting and graphics insertion.  Hyper-links are not hard to add either.

I think that it might be better to break up large thoughts into smaller snippets across multiple posts.  Brief posts can be read easily.  Here is the quandary.  SEO (Search Engine Optimization ) doesn’t like short posts, and one commenter on the Illarterate posting said 300 words is the minimum.  I will do a bit more research on this, but for now here is the plan for my posts:

• Length = 300 Words
• Minimum of 1 Graphic
• Use Formatting (Bold, Bullets, Colors)
• Compelling First Paragraph

I will try my hardest to stick with these 4 points in my Blogging, and will let you know how they work.  I don’t like long lists, so keeping it to these points should be attainable.

• What do you think about my plan?
• What is your definition of a perfect Blog post?

I am not a professional writer.  Take a look at my friend over at PathToSuccessBlog.  Her posts fit my definition.  Send me some of your examples.

-Loren
http://www.theteachingbox.com