Using Twitter For Marketing And Driving Traffic

Well it seems these days you can't go anywhere without hearing something about Twitter. It would seem as if everyone and their mothers are on Twitter including celebrities, athletes, companies and even politicians. Just like with the other websites I have shown you on this site you can generate plenty of traffic and or sales from Twitter with a little hard work.

It's not the easiest site to gain a million followers on, but with some dedication you can grow your followers quite easily. First thing you need to do though is sign up, which you can do here. Just pick a username and fill out your profile included a link to the website that you want to drive the most traffic to. Once you do this you can beginning your tweets. It could be anything that runs across your mind, or you can link to one of your sites or blog posts with some clever saying. Don't concentrate on this too much in the beginning though, because if no one is following you then no one will ever see any of your clever tweets.

So what you need to do is start following people. Twitter has a link up at the top called "Find People" which will automatically go into your e-mail and find out your contacts that are already on Twitter. This is under "Find on other networks". Twitter also has a "Find on Twitter" option where you can simply type in the name or username of anyone on Twitter and find people this way. Go nuts and follow all the people you want at this point. After you have added in all your contacts it is time to take it to the next level. You need to think about what your website is about and some possible keywords that are relevant to your site. Take these keywords and enter them into the search on Twitters homepage on the left side. For example, if your site is all about Fish you can typing in fishing or aquarium or an individual fish even to see if anyone is Twittering about that particular topic. Now you have located the people that are interested in your websites topics enough to Tweet about them, so make start following them, or even send them a reply to their tweet giving them some insight about what they said, or just say hello. Rinse and repeat until you are following about 2,000 people.

At this point Twitter makes is so you can only follow 200 more people than are following you. For example if you are following 2,000 people you need to have at least 1,800 followers. This prevents spammers from completely taking over Twitter. What I do at this point is go back into the people that are following you by clicking on the "Following" under your profile picture. Now under each profile picture that you see it will either say "Direct Message", or it will be blank. The ones that are blank you need to remove, because this means that even though you are following them, they are not following you. No sense following them if they aren't going to follow you because of this ratio that Twitter puts into place. Of course there are exception if you really like the person and don't care if they follow you. Continue to build your followers and Tweet your websites out along the way and you will start to see traffic coming in from Twitter. Everytime you make an update to your site or post a new blog post, tell people by giving out a short Tweet about what you did. If your followers are interested in the topics on your website and in your Tweets they will respond.

Twitter can be particularly effective in selling individual products too, like the ICUcopyclip for example. This is a rear view mirror/note holder that attaches to your computer monitor. So knowing that people would use this at work and especially in their cubicle, I can target people that are Tweeting about their cubicles and even ones that are looking for cubicle decorations just by searching for "cubicle" or "cubicle decorations" on the Twitter search. Then you can follow them or even send them a Tweet about the ICUcopyclip. I am sure you can begin to see just how effective Twitter can be for marketing products and websites.

If you liked this article or you just want to check out my profile on Twitter just click here, if you follow me I will be sure to return the favor : ) You can even leave your twitter URL in the comments below and I will be sure to follow you!

Bring It All Together With Blog Catalog

A site that seems to be gaining popularity and users everyday is Blog Catalog. Like most other blog directories you can submit your blogs and have them commented on and rated. Much like MyBlogLog this site also keeps track of recent visitors and people who subscribe to your site. The real difference is that Blog Catalog breaks down ever site into two categories that you get to choose. This makes it so readers can easily find the exact kind of subjects that your site covers. You can also check out similar blogs to see how they compare to your own.

Blog Catalog is also a place where people can keep track of your activity on sites like Digg, Flickr, Stumbled Upon, Delicious, Reddit, Technorati, Magnolia and MyBlogLog through an "Activity Feed". This is a great way for all your fans to keep track of your activity on multiple sites! Just add in your user names into your profile and Blog Catalog takes care of the rest.

Unlike MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog is completely independent, MyBlogLog is now owned by Yahoo. This tends to make the site a bit more community oriented with a lot less spam. Personally, I like it a lot more than MyBlogLog, but that is just my personal opinion. Not too mention, I have seen a lot more traffic in Google Analytics coming in through Blog Catalog!



Blog Catalog also has widgets that you can embed on your website to keep track of recent visitors, new members of your neighborhood (website), and even a recent discussions widget which will help you keep track of all that is going on in the Blog Catalog community. You can see an example on the sidebar of this page under "Blog Catalog Fans".

So if you are looking for more traffic to your site and a feeling of community look no further that Blog Catalog! You can sign up here or check out my profile here, don't forget to sign up for all my communities when you get a chance. I know there is a lot, but what can I say : )

Looking for more ways to Promote Your Site? First thing is first, you need to submit your websites to all the major search engines, click here to learn how!

Is Mixx A Digg In The Making?

Mixx is a relatively new site, but has been growing like gang busters of late. This site has a format much like Digg and Netscape (propeller) were you vote stories up or down, but also has the added bonus of groups. This makes it possible for you to not only submit your work to different categories inside Mixx, but also to different groups and therefore gain more exposure to your work.

Another great aspect of Mixx is that you get to select who, or what is on your homepage. That's right if you like sports, it will be sports, if you like a certain person's posts you can have them displayed right on your homepage so you don't miss a submission!

Is Mixx going to get you the kind of traffic that you could receive from Digg, Netscape or even Reddit... well no, but it is always good to get in early on a site like this and build your fan base. Plus, they just signed up with CNN, which should certainly bring a few more users in!

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and sign up here or check out my profile here!

Want more ways to Promote Your Site? Check out this post on Technorati or this one on Stumbled Upon!

The Importance Of Tags

A simple, but sometimes overlooked way to promote your site is to use tags. Most blogs like blogger let you add tags to each of your posts. Tags are general terms that help describe your post. For instance, if you have a post all about photography you could have tags like photos, photography, pictures, tips, ect.

When you use these tags over and over again you can click on the tag, and it will bring up every post that had that particular tag in it. This can also be useful if you want to submit multiple posts to a place like digg, netscape and corank.

Plus, all kinds of other sites let you add tags to your submissions. Tags not only allow people and search engines to find your content easier, but they can also help you organize your site. I don't know how many times I have been looking for a certain post and had to click on a tag to even find it!

This is one of the basics, but it is very, very important if you are looking to drive more traffic to your site. So don't forget to add your tags to all your posts...

Sorry for the big delay in between posting... I have been quite busy with my other sites!

Leave Your Mark In This World With Trailfire

A great way to promote your site and organize your favorite websites is to use the site Trailfire. Basically, this site allows you to leave comments on any webpage out there in cyberspace. It also lets you see what other Trailfire users thought of that page by viewing their marks on the page. You can create as many trails as you like, but the idea is to try and keep your trails relevant to a certain subject like photography, videos, politics, games, current events or whatever else you can think of!



You can also use Trailfire as a way to show the world all of your favorite sites or blogs. This way when an individual discovers your trail they can follow your marks from one to the next. As you can imagine this is a great way to not only promote your sites, but it can also be another way to get feedback from other users. An added bonus is that it keeps people on your network of sites longer as they follow your trail.

Trailfire allows you to install a toolbar so you can easily add marks to any page with just one click. So go check it out today and start discovering new trails and marks on your favorite pages that you never even knew existed. You can check out my trails here. Don't forget to add me as a contact if you like and let me know if you have any questions...

Discover Amazing Photos And Get Traffic At The Same Time!

I just started up a site called PhotoRater where you can submit, vote and comment on photos from your websites or blogs. Although the site is just getting started, it is still yet another way to get a bit of traffic to your site and check out some amazing photos at the same time. There are several different categories of photos to choose from including black & white, nature, plants, sun, water, amateur, people, buildings, professional and vanishing points!
It runs through the site corank which if you are not aware of is a lot like digg only you can design and create your own pages to vote on... very cool! You can even build your own site like mine as well and share it if you like.

You can check out PhotoRater and the following address...

http://photorater.corank.com

Feel free to sign up if you like and start submitting your photos! Let me know if you have any questions or problems signing up...

How To Submit Your Website

The first and one of the most important steps in promoting your site is simply submitting your website address to the big three of search engines, MSN, Yahoo and of course Google. It is actually quite easy and all but Yahoo don't even require any kind of registration!

To submit your website or blog to Google just click here, for Yahoo click here and for MSN or Bing click here! Once you have submitted your site it may take a couple weeks before these search engines will crawl your site, but trust me it is worth the wait.

Once you are indexed you will begin to see traffic trickling in from these three search engines. If you are familiar with our site then you know you can track this through Google Analytics. It shows up in the traffic sources section of Analytics. They will show up as Google Organic, Yahoo Organic and MSN Organic. You can even take it a step further and find out what people are typing into these search engines to find your site!

Some of the other search engines including ask.com do not offer site submissions and are a bit more secretive about how they crawl their sites. Your best bet on that is to follow their sitemap protocol which you can find here.

So what are you waiting for go submit your sites today and watch the traffic flow! As always here at Promoting Your Site let me know if you have any questions.

Is CoRank The Next Social Phenomenon?

Corank is a site that I have run across lately that seems to be yet another great way to promote your website it will get at least a few more eyes on your hard work. For all of you familiar with the site Digg you will get the hang of this real quick!

It essentially works the same way as users get to submit and vote on stories/articles. The only real difference is that you get to choose your sources for the articles. This way you filter out a lot of the junk on sites like Digg and you get your own personalized spam free front page. Another slight difference from the mighty Digg is that you simply vote if the story is interesting or just "not for me", they also give you the feature to save stories. Of course, no social news site would be complete without the comment feature and Corank is no exception to the rule.

It is on a much smaller scale then digg, but it seems to be growing at a nice clip and every link to your site counts so what are you waiting for? You can go sign up here or you can view my Corank profile here. Don't forget to add me as a source if you like... enjoy!

Spicypage Takes Another Step Towards Becoming The Next Digg

For those of you who haven't heard of Spicypage you will be soon. Just recently they released a feature to submit individual articles on the site in addition to the entire website or blog. The major difference is that the articles that you submit are not voted on like digg, but are just sorted by the number of views. You can still vote for the site that the article came from though, so it seems to be a win-win for the author of the site/article!

Spicypage has also added a group feature to the site. This can be another way to promote your website or blog. All you need to do is start a group that revolves around your site. People can join your group and give you feedback on your content, design, ect.

While the site is nowhere near Digg just yet, it is gaining popularity and has a much better layout and more options then Digg gives you. So if you haven't signed up already now is the time... you can learn more about Spicypage here! You can sign up here or view my profile here!

Stumbling Through The Internet

A fun way to promote your website or blog is to submit your content to the website Stumbled Upon. This site is a bit different from any of the other social networking sites out there and seems to be snowballing around the Internet. Basically, as with all other sites the first thing to do is to sign up. Once you do that you should begin to edit your profile, avatar picture, interests, personal info ect. Stumbled upon will download a toolbar that works with Firefox or Internet Explorer which is great for submitting sites, seeing what your friends are stumbling, keeping track of your favorites and for finding new and interesting sites.

Now is also a good time to tell stumbled upon what kind of topics you would like to see. This way you filter out most of the junk that you just don't care about! That is the real beauty of Stumbled Upon! If you are a fan of the next blog button on blogger you will certainly love this as the content tends to be of a higher quality and less spam. For example if you are interested in photography and science then you can choose only to view photography and science sites. Very, very useful as it narrows down the sites you are looking for quite well.

Like other social networking sites it also has groups, friends, networks, forums, and it also saves all of your favorites much like delicious. It acts like a one stop shop for all your social networking needs.

The website Stumbled Upon is also a great way to try and target your exact audience for your website or blog. For instance if you have a site all about poetry you can submit it to Stumbled Upon under the poetry section and watch the targeted traffic roll in. It blew my mind when I saw all the different topics to choose from on the site! Like most other social networking sites, the more people that like the site the more it will be shown.

The site is growing everyday and I have seen the traffic results myself in Analytics. So go sign up and start Stumbling today. You can view my profile here or you can get started here.

Drive Traffic To Your Site With Photos

Do you enjoy taking photos? Do you want to showcase your work and drive traffic to your site? The Nature's Wallpaper network of sites can help... Just send us an e-mail with the picture you would like to have displayed along with a link to the site of your choice. We will take care of the rest!

Soon you will see your picture displayed on one of the sites and the link to the site you requested directly under the pic. We will then e-mail you to see if you would like any changes to be made. Here are the three different sites your work could be displayed on...

The Blog

The Page

The Original

Now sit back and relax your job is done! You can now track the traffic coming in through Analytics or any other tracking program.

Here are some of the sites that are already participating...

A New Day
Norpas
Amazing Stuff
Photoholics Anonymous
Brownies For Breakfast
Better Than MTV
Lynda Walldez

As you can see your site doesn't need to be a photography site, it is all up to you. So what are you waiting for... send Nature's Wallpaper your photos and start driving traffic to your site!

Simply Del.icio.us

Another great way to help promote your site is to use the site del.icio.us, especially if you have multiple sites/blogs. This is one of the original sites that started to use "social bookmarking." This simply means you post your bookmarks/articles and share them with people in your network on del.icio.us. This might not seem like much, but it is a great way to get a few eyes on your work.

Delicious also keeps track of all the people that bookmark your posts, so you can check out their work/bookmarks as well, and best of all you can access these bookmarks anywhere in the world from any computer. Like a lot of other sites nowadays Delicious uses tags, so you can easily sort your bookmarks. For example, "blog" or "photography" or "funny" or "scary" could all be useful tags. They are a great way to help organize your website/blog and these bookmarks as well.

My favorite part of Delicious though is the "linkrolls." This is a very useful tool if you have multiple blogs like me. Basically, it is a list of the most recent posts to Delicious from any blog/site. You can add these linkrolls to any of your sites, Delicious writes the HTML for you all you need to do is cut and paste it into your template. You can see an example here below this post on this blog or here very near the bottom. This is a great way to promote all of your posts from different sites in one handy dandy list that is automatically updated every time you post another bookmark. Pretty cool! Plus you can also direct people to other sites besides your own that you think will interest your viewers. This is a great way to keep your links looking fresh and new and help cross promote your sites. So go check it out and start keeping viewers on your network of sites longer. Sign-up here or you can check out my delicious profile here.

Is That A Spicy Page?

Ok, so you have heard of Digg, Netscape and Reddit but have you ever heard of Spicypage.com? Chances are you haven't just yet, but the site is really starting to gain traction. Spicypage works in a lot of the same ways that digg does. Users vote on content whether it is a thumbs up or thumbs down and can comment on the sites as well. The part that I really like about Spicypage is that it is the entire website or blogs that is voted on, not just an article from a site. Users of this site can also submit websites that they do not own or operate like google, yahoo, or youtube, all three are all ready in the top 100 list on the site. Spicypage also has the social aspect to it like mybloglog! You can send messages to one another and gain "friends" through the site as well. Now like I said in the beginning, this place is just getting started so now is the best time to submit your content (less competition.) So what is it that you are waiting for go sign up and start voting... you can sign up here or you can view my profile here. Tell them the 1greenthumb sent you : )

Mybloglog The Social Traffic Exchange

Mybloglog.com is another useful way to promote your sites with a nice social twist to it. Basically, you sign up first, then I would suggest adding your different blogs/sites to your profile. Once you hit the "Add site" button Mybloglog will take a snap shot of your site, you then add in a description and you are all set. Your site is now called a community according to mybloglog.



People then can sign up for your "community" and become readers/fans of your site. They track all of the people that sign up for your sites so you can also visit their blogs and check out who is in fact looking at your website or blog. You can also post messages to users or just to their communities, this is were the social aspect of it comes in. You can actually put a face to these blogs that you are reading. They also have widgets available that you can add into your sites to track stats on your sites including links in and out and the number of readers on your site!

As you may know though it was just bought by Yahoo so I hope they don't mess up a good thing... while I am still relatively new to Mybloglog I can already see serious results in Google Analytics! So what are you waiting for you can sign up here or you can check out my profile here.

Reddit And Netscape Better Than Digg?

So I am sure you heard about how I made it big on digg.com, so I decided to search out sites that were similar to digg. The two sites that I see that have the most promise are reddit and netscape, yes I said netscape. I was surprise to find out the old netscape is rising from the dead and is looking quite a bit like digg. In fact the only real difference I see between the two of them is that netscape has a lot less users. Reddit on the other hand is a very primitive site, but still has the potential to draw traffic to your site. In Reddit you simply submit the url of the page and nothing else, not even a description. Since there is no description at all your headline becomes very very important. So got out into the brave new world and submit your stories/article to digg, reddit, and netscape and watch the traffic pour in... By the way, I had even more success with digg when I submitted this story, watch out though it appears to be a very dangerous topic, but it did get over 2000 diggs...

Using Digg.com To Generate Traffic

So I finally hit it big on digg.com, I have been posting there for a while and I would get a few diggs, but nothing like this. First let me give you a little background of what digg is. Basically, digg.com is a site where users can submit their articles/videos about anything from politics to comedy. Once it is submitted users can "digg" them or bury them if they so choose. The site keeps track of all the diggs that you get on your article/video. The more diggs you have the more chance you have of making it on the main "popular stories" part of digg. You see when you first submit the story it goes into a "upcoming stories" section of digg, then once you receive many diggs they upgrade you to the "popular stories" part of digg. Once you make it there you can sit back and watch the traffic jump, it was really amazing.

When my story made it I had over 12,000 hits in one day alone, which is pretty impressive for sites like mine that are still in their infancy and don't have any real page rank. You can see all of my stories that I submitted to digg here and you can see the story that gave me the 12,000 hits here.

The beauty of digg is that the stories are chosen by the viewers and not some editor so everyone has a chance of making it big. So what are you waiting for go sign up and starting digging, it is a great way to promote your site. Who knows maybe this article will be the next to make it big... hmmm diggers digging a site about digg, I guess it makes sense.