We want the Google Experiment in Topeka

I’ve been helping with a cause here in Topeka Kansas. We’re trying to get Google to lay their fiber network all throughout our city. Google has announced that they are going to lay 1Gbps fiber line in some test cities. This will be 1 Gigabit of download directly to your home; you can use Google as your IPS of stick with who you have now in your area. If you have a second, I would greatly appreciate it if you would nominate Topeka Kansas. We have a website up and a Facebook group of 6500 members as of this posting. We only started this a week ago, the support has been outstanding. You can submit videos; I’ll include a few for you to check out.

This is the nomination form for google, pass the words to your friends and help us help Topeka.

We’ve also had some outstanding media coverage, and we have a flash mob planned for this week. It’s going to be an exciting month if we get it or not. Google is taking nominations until March 26th.

It is very easy to conceptualize and create your own website in any way you can imagine. But, it is equally difficult to optimize it for SEO and get it to the top rankings in the search engines. There are so many small things and details, which you have to consider like the structure of your website, the content, the unique and general keywords, the headings, the title tags and the Meta tags, the anchor texts and the links.

When you are optimizing your site for the search engines, you have to do many things, which are repetitive in nature. These SEO tools make it easier for us to perform these tasks.

There are many other advantages of using the SEO tools like:

• They save your time, as they are able to perform the tasks within minutes.
• They make your optimization convenient as they automate the SEO at every step, thus making your optimization better organized and more efficient.
• They use proven techniques, which give good results and hence you don’t waste time in using ineffective methods.
• They allow you to multitask, that way you can perform various tasks simultaneously.
• They allow you to analyze all the data.
• They can even work automatically.

Your work history is automatically saved, as the SEO tool collects and archives the information and other changes that you have made, so that you can see at a later stage, if you have made any mistakes. The most important point being that they are automatically adjusted according to the needs if the SEO environment changes.

Now that we are aware of the benefits of the SEO tools, lets us talk about the different types of SEO tools. Depending upon the type of work they are able to perform the SEO tools can be classified as:

Keyword Discovery Tools, which are important to find the keywords that your site needs.

Some of the popular keyword discovery tools are:

• Google Adwords External Tool is very relevant as it gives the actual number of the searches a keyword has generated per month.
• AdCenter Keyword Group Detection, which is a Microsoft’s tool that helps in analyzing the words or phrases.
• Term Extractor extracts the keywords form any given URL.
• Keyword Volume Tools give you an estimate on how many clicks and search traffic has a particular keyword generated. Some of the popular keyword volume tools are:

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool uses the word tracker’s API to get an estimate on the volume generated by the keywords.

Keyword Density Tools help in analyzing how much the keyword is targeted in the specific webpage. The most popular keyword density tool is—

Term Target Tool, which takes the URL and the keyword and tells you how much you have scored.

Backlink Tracker Tools keep track of how many sites are linking to your site. Some of the backlink tracker tools are:

Yahoo “linkdomain:” query prepend, where by typing the link and the domain name, you are able to get the number of links that domain has.

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, You’ll be able to see every backlink to your site if you submit a sitemap.

Site Explorer Tool is the Yahoo’s backlink tracker tool, which keeps and eye on both the inbound links and the outbound links.

Twitter is a simple social micro blogging site. The main page on Twitter has only one message box which you can use to post your tweets. Apart from that you have the followers list and profile tweets of your followers and those whom you follow. On second thought you may be wondering how such a simple site can be called revolutionary! Twitter might be simple. However, there are many third party Twitter applications that are making Twitter much more interesting and integrated.

Tweet Deck is the most famous Twitter third party application. Tweet Deck calls itself “a simple and fast way to experience Twitter.”  It allows you to tweet from your phone. Tweet Deck allows you to integrate many of your other social networking sites at one place. The web is so complex and we do so many things that we do not have the time everyday to see what is happening everywhere. Tweet Deck solves that problem by integrating all your social sites at one browser. You will get to see in a snapshot, which sites are updated and where the action is. Moreover, Tweet Deck organizes the tweets in directory formats which allow you to add to your list, the tweeters who share the same interest as you, much faster! Apart from that, Tweet Deck shows you the most popular tweet lists as well.

Group Tweet is another third party application of Twitter which is very useful. You may have many different interest and ay want to run your campaign or post issues based on certain topics. Maintain group on Twitter and use activate that group on Group Tweet to send messages to relevant groups. This way, the tweet will only be viewed by the people on that particular group list. Group Tweet helps businesses, classrooms, friends of different interest groups or projects to send private messages to one another without tweeting to the entire list of followers.

Digsby is as revolutionary as Twitter itself. Tweet Deck allows the integration of social networking sites. Digsby takes it one step further and allows you to integrate your email and chat accounts as well; Hotmail, Yahoo, AIM, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more applications are brought together by Digsby on one single platform!

Tweetpic and Bubble Tweet, allows Twitter users to share pictures and videos respectively. Twitter was supposed to be a simple 140 character text social micro blogging site! Tweetpic and Bubble Tweet have brought Twitter to another level and attracted many more users to tweet with integrating pictures and videos in the tweet!

There are many more third party Twitter applications on the web. Via trial and error, you will be able to find some applications that you can use to integrate with your Twitter account get more mileage on your Internet marketing activities.

Let’s face it, I’m addicted to vBulletin (3.8)

I couldn’t stay away from the backend of a vBulletin forum for long. With the vBulletin Services that I offer, it’s very helpful to have a site setup to tweak  settings. The dev server wasn’t cutting it and I’m not really fond of vBulletin 4.0.

I’ve always said I wouldn’t start a vBulletin forum without vBSEO, so when a pair came up for sale at a decent price, I had to snag them up. So now I had the script, now what type of forum should I run? Well I’m not interested in another webmaster type forum, I’ve thought about starting several different niche forums but I defiantly don’t have time to manage all that, so I’ve decided to try a “general forums” type forum. Finally it was on to search for a domain; I scanned all over the webmaster forums trying to find a short brand-able .com but wasn’t having any luck. The domain I found has a hyphen it in which I’ve never been fond of, but I think I found a pretty good one considering the site I’ll be running.

I picked up www.General-Forums.com from godaddy.

My plans for this forum are to actually merge several smaller forums into it. I’ve already picked up a small database that has been imported. I’ve put a few bids down on some at digitalpoint, if you know of a quality (no warez or spam) database and/or site, please contact me and send me a link to the auction page.

I’ve been blessed enough that a few people that saw me tweeting about this have offered to help out! I truly have great friends and appreciate every one of you!! If you would like to help than what I would suggest is to register on the forum and shoot me a PM or email and I’ll set you up in the contributors group so you can see the forums as we piece together all the databases.

Once I have a good selection of forums & content put together (shooting for 500K post) and well organized, I’ll open everything up for spiders, guest, and open up public posting for registered users. I’ll than put together an email newsletter to blast out to all the members of the forum. This will be a reminder for everyone across what may be upwards of 20+ sites/databases.

I’m looking forward to seeing this site grow as much as you are.

Do you think it’s wise to start general forums? Would you ever start a forum on such a broad range of topics?

Twitter is considered as one of the mostly used and visited social networking websites. Once it was on a much smaller scale and really small traffic used the website. But with the immense shoot up in the social networking concept, websites like Facebook, myspace and twitter have become extremely common, famous and well known. It is really hard to come up in a saturated market of social networking websites. But Twitter has tried really hard in its business and got the stage.  There are many reasons why people prefer twitter. In this article, some of the core reasons will be discussed why twitter is so much popular.

Easy and Simple:

One of the main reasons why Twitter is extremely common among all age groups is the ease and flexibility is provides to the user. Every age group is able to access the twitter interface with an extreme ease and simplicity. From microblogging to photo sharing, the easy to use interface allows everyone to share their life with their friends and colleagues. Other social networking websites are much more complicated and hard to learn. But twitter is extremely simple and does not contain any hidden buttons or features that require one to ask from some other.

Twitter does not appear very fancy and stylish in its main page. This is the reason why it is extremely fast and accepted among a number of people. Twitter has an easy to understand interface with simple and easy buttons to use. At the same time, Twitter also offers features to savvy people. Searches and trends can also be found on twitter as well.

Applications:

There are a number of desktop as well as mobile applications hosted by twitter. It makes it extremely flexible and useable from any part of the world. A long list of applications can be learnt from their own website. There are applications for each and every age group. People can find different application for their requirements and their own specified type of fun.

Dozens of applications hosted by third party are placed on the twitter website. This is because of the fact that twitter has launched its API. It allows almost every third party like Zynga to have their applications on several social networking websites. The applications are about anything and you can play a wide variety of games using these applications.

A community place:

This is the main reason why every social networking website flourish and become extremely common and well known. A better community place allows your friends, family and colleagues to join their hands, have fun and gossip at one place.

In addition to these features and advantages, twitter offers a worldwide acceptance encompassing each and every walk of your life.

Summary:

Twitter is a very common and well known social networking website allowing you to meet with millions of people around the world, share photos, share your ideas and creativity. It is proved as a hub for the people of all of the continents. In addition to learning activities, twitter also provides you a lot of business and marketing opportunities. (@BrandonSheley)

Strange Facts and Figures about Twitter

Twitter is such a large social networking service that it gets more than 15,000 tweets per minutes. There are a number of facts and figures that are related with the twitter. Few of these facts are given below while other can be searched and experienced over twitter itself.

1)  62% of the twitter users belong to United States of America. This shows the popularity of social networking services in America and the interaction between friends.

2)  The largest cities in the world which use the Twitter social networking service also belong to United States of America. New York City is among the cities which mostly use the twitter service. After New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and San Francisco hosts the largest number of twitter users.

3)  Brazil is ranked as 5^th in the overall traffic ranking of Twitter. It is a strange fact because Brazil is not an English speaking country while English is the mostly used language in the twitter networks.

4)  The number of women on twitter is much more than the total number of men. Though there is a huge contribution of teen age and youngsters, but in even adults, women exceed men.

5)  Twitter is mostly used to tweet texts which can contain any type of information. No matter what you are sharing you will definitely see a link to “Tweet” on a number of related websites. Facebook, Myspace and other social networking websites also hosts twitter.

6)  Mostly, people below age 25 are using twitter. A number of applications and tools are used to post and tweet messages. Other tools are also in use to manage those tweets.

7)  73% of the total users of twitter joined twitter in the first five months of the year 2009. This shows the immense popularity and fast growth of the twitter in such a less time.

8)  15% of the twitter users posts more than one update every day. Though the percentage is comparatively less but 15% of total twitter users make it in millions.

9)  There are also a great number of people who have never posted a tweet. About 20% of the total registered users have never posted a tweet.

10) It is a very strange fact that the 75% of the overall activity of twitter is hosted by less than 5% of the users of twitter. That’s truly strange.

11) Most of the Apple iPhone users who use twitter belong to United States of America. This shows the high usage of twitter from USA.

These are very few facts which are associated with this social networking service of Twitter. There are a number of other hidden facts about twitter which you can learn in a number of forums and blogs.

Summary:

Twitter hold millions of users every day tweeting almost each and every walk of life. There are a number of facts and figures associated with Twitter. The most important figure is that most of the people who use twitter belong to United States of America. After USA, Canada is hosts a lot number of twitter users.

Do you think the United States will always have the majority of Twitter users?

Don’t forget to Follow me on Twitter.

Advantages and disadvantages of using Twitter for Internet Marketing

Twitter is a great tool. There are millions of people who are tweeting this very moment and the phenomenon is not going to end anytime soon. The idea of tweeting “What are you doing right now” has caught on so well that we see even President Barack Obama on Twitter! Twitter is here to stay, at least for a while till something much simpler than Twitter comes on the net.

As such, should you get on the bandwagon and tweet your Internet marketing collateral online? Twitter is a great business platform and it helps the consumers as much as it helps the businesses. However, just like any other thing, Twitter has its good points and bad points. Using Twitter for business purposes, hence, has its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of Twitter

Your Internet marketing can be done free of cost if you use Twitter wisely. Your target market is out there for you to seek and understand. Understand from their tweets, their passion and interests. Do your research on your target market by following the tweets of your target market for better understanding. Identify the strategies used by your competitors by following their tweets as well.

Twitter allows you to network efficiently and with large groups of people. Twitter and its third party applications allow you to segregate and interact with your target markets effectively. You can direct your Internet marketing campaigns at relevant groups efficiently by using Twitter

Twitter allows you to communicate directly with your target market instantly. Normally, the process of communication takes time. For example, if you have a Website, the communication would be via polls, which are not personal or though contact forms which are time consuming and impersonal as well. With twitter, you can expect instant communication with your target market. You may have just posted a tweet, but a reply from your target market could come in an instant as well. Twitter helps you to gather real time intelligence from your very own target market as well as obtain valuable feedback. The speed of communication is just fantastic with Twitter. Moreover, your near approach helps to builds lasting relationship as you will come across as a company that cares for its consumers instead of just hard selling.

Disadvantages of Twitter

Twitter is the number one site for spammers. You will have to filter and weed out spammers from your lists from time to time, if you want to have a good gauge of your target market. Otherwise, the followers total will be an inflated number which will not help in your Internet marketing campaigns. Filtering spam tweets is a lot of hard work. Other means of Internet marketing may seem feasible in the long run.

Twitter is addictive. It is very easy to get distracted as you join in the conversations or receive tweets outside your business interests. You will have to strike a balance with getting friendly with your followers and meeting your Internet marketing objectives

In conclusion, how you want to use Twitter is up to you. Like any other means of communication, Twitter has its own advantages and disadvantages. Advantages far outweigh disadvantages. Hence, use Twitter for your Internet marketing needs and ensure that Twitter is used sparingly. Your tweets can be classified as spam as well, if you are just posting tweets with inks and not connecting with your followers.

When a new online business is starting up, their main issue usually falls at marketing, the problem that is usually faced with both new and existing business marketing is the fact that they are not getting the number of sales or online traffic that they desire, a solution to this problem may include consulting with a search engine optimization company.

What the these business owners need to know is that marketing is not just putting out a few ads and hoping for the best, but rather a process that involves lots of strategies and planning. Although marketing is a process, it does not have to be complicated; you would simply have to set a goal and then make a plan with strategies on how to achieve them, if you have a website, this can be done with the aid of a search engine optimization consultant.

Depending on the type of product and / or service that you offer, you may want to get the services of a search engine optimization company who will help you to select the correct keywords and implement them in the correct places on your webpage. The aim of this will be to increase traffic to your website and in turn increase your sales and revenue.  If you are not clear as to what a search engine optimization service can do for you, simply ask your search engine optimization consultant to give you an overview, but all you need to know is that persons search for products on services on the web by entering certain words that they think will give them a list of websites that offer the type of product or service that they are looking for.

These are called keywords or key phrases; this is what leads a prospective customer to a website, as the search engine will return a result page with a list of websites that matches the keywords that were entered for the search. It is therefore imperative that your website has the correct keywords necessary to ensure that your webpage is among the results lists. Any professional search engine company that you choose to hire will already know how to perform a search engine optimization on your web pages to get more traffic to your website, and not just random traffic, but traffic that will lead to optimized sales and a better ROI.

Another simple and inexpensive way to get your business out there is to utilise the many social networks on the web, you can start by creating your own blog or forum which will talk about your company’s products or services, customers can leave comments and prospective customers can ask questions.

While advertising is always a good strategy, try to add other forms of promotion in the mix and if you company is an online company, get yourself a search engine optimisation package  from a search engine optimization company, all these put together will promote customer growth and sales.

This last set of video’s are from Leo’s ER trip this last week. You can read more about it on Alissa’s blog about Leo’s 2 trips to the ER. You can also read some info about it on my Facebook page, or Alissa’s.

After this set, I’ll post video’s once a week or so, but they won’t be back to back post like these last 3 were. I apologize for that, I was waiting to hear back from “thFlip” camera company, they have an affiliate program but apparently horrible support so I’ve given up on them.

Anyways, here are 2 more videos of leo, the first one is him in the hospital still, and the 2^nd was one I shot earlier today.

Hope you enjoy them, I’ll be back to posting on Search Engine Optimization and Social Media early this week.

Here are another set of Leo video’s that I had been waiting to post and I just can’t wait anymore..lol

These are all taken around Christmas time like the last set.

Thanks for checking them out. As before, if you want to bookmark or subscribe to my youtube channel, that would be great

and I think this was was posted using my cell phone, so the quality isn’t as good.

Thanks for checking them out, I have one more set and than I’ll be back to posting Social Media stuff

So I had applied for the Flip affiliate program but I’m getting tired of wait, it’s been over a month and their support sucks so I’ll just get this post out of the way. We got a Flip camera from Christmas, some of you may know of my old videos on qik that I recorded from my jail broken iPhone, it did a good job for instant video but the detail was poor. The Flip camera is a HD camera and it very quick to start up. (Handy for trying to get cute pics of Leo)

This post will have several videos in it, I’ll try to update future post with 1-3 video’s each.

I’ll start at the oldest and work are way forward to his recent visit to the ER (1.15.10)

(I would suggest you bookmark or subscribe to my youtube page as well)

Actually, I’m going to split these video’s up into a few post so it’ll load faster.

When an online company makes the decision to get a professional SEO service, the aim is to have more traffic coming to their website from the implementation of a good search engine optimization service. Not only will they have a higher traffic rate, but they will also have that traffic being converted into customers and thus increasing revenue. Search engine optimization services and the use of search engine optimization company can significantly aid a business that is looking to market their online company. As a matter of fact search engine optimization is become essential as most business owners for these online companies do not know how to make there web pages keyword and content friendly so that they have a good ranking in search engines and generate traffic.

There are many companies that extend a search engine optimization service and are on high demand by online companies who wish to make there website and company do better. There will be lots of people who claim that they can help to optimize a web-page, but as a online company owner, you must be wary and vigilant in your search for a search engine optimization company, because some of them will try to incorporate some forms of black hat methods that may work for a brief period and then result in your website being penalized or worse; banned. You must therefore ensure that you select a professional SEO company that offers good search engine optimization services.
Once you understand that search engine promotion is not a short term deal, you should set about finding a search engine optimization specialist who understands the terms and conditions ser forth by the search engine companies, but also the strategies and methods that will result in your business being more popular and result in a higher ROI. SEO services are not just limited to keyword optimisation but also incorporate an overall revamp of your website. A good search engine optimisation consultant will know if the content on your webpage needs to be more user friendly, if your web page design needs to be altered to be more eye catching, they will be efficient in link building and the management of par per click programs (PPC).

The major benefit of hiring professional SEO services is that your site will have the vital tools and these experts know precisely what needs to be done in order to ensure positive results. In addition to all the various SEO techniques, the company which you hire will also help you generate a significant social media presence. Enlisting for professional SEO services is very affordable and just by getting onto the internet and with a few clicks of the mouse; a website owner can find all sorts of relevant information that is connected with companies that offer these types of services.

With the assistance of a search engine optimization services, online companies can now have there websites rank higher in the search engine index, thus leading more prospective customers to their websites, because the higher the rank of a website, the more likely that they will fall on the first page of a result list that is generated from a keyword search.

Marketing is an essential part of business, be it a small or mid or large scaled business. Marketing is a form of advertisement of a service or a product. Advertisement can be done through newspapers, radio, television, banner, hoardings, pamphlets, word of mouth, street plays, and Internet. Is your business based on Internet? Do you want to increase its visibility? Do you want more customers to boost your business? If the answer is yes for all these questions, then you can adopt Internet Marketing. Through Internet marketing, even a small business reaches the entire world, and can increase the sales of your business. Without proper planning and marketing, small businesses cannot target proper or appropriate clients. Moreover, if you want to save some money, and are not inclined for Internet Marketing, you may end losing the business itself.
There are different forms of Internet Marketing. They are

1. Pay per click advertising
2. Banner ads
3. Interactive advertising
4. E-mail Marketing
5. Search Engine Marketing
6. Blog Marketing
7. Article Marketing

You may have a small business; however, for Internet Marketing, you need a web site, because a good web site can market your business. To get a web site, you can even try the small business promoters who can design, develop and host a web site for you, and submit your web site to the search engines and directories. However, it is very important that to get good visibility and effective business, you need to remember these points:

1. Your web site should be professional and not jazzy.
2. Language used in the web site should be simple, professional and to the point.
3. Brief about your business should be in an effective manner without any jargons, or unnecessary and vague words.
4. Make sure that the web site is not cluttered with too much information. Neither keeps the pages too small nor too big, but appropriate and informative.
5. Make sure that the advertisements on your web site do not disturb your customers.

Before developing the web site, you should know the type of customers you are looking for, how to attract them to your web site, and how to avoid large businesses from squeezing your business. After going through the preliminary planning, then try Internet Marketing.

Email marketing, the least expensive form of Internet Marketing, which allows you to send emails to old customers, by being sent as ads in emails of other companies, and potential customers, who would have just registered themselves with you.

You can even adopt Search Engine Optimization, a popular and widely used form of Internet Marketing used by mainly small business or businesses that are just budding. Search Engines use a specific program that searches for particular keywords that a user wants to know about and displays the results in the Search Engine Resulted Pages or SERP. Most of the users would not be interested in checking the results in more than three pages of results. It is very important that your web site be listed within the three pages. Therefore, use appropriate keywords in your web site. By choosing this method, the relevant keyword’s ranking is improved while searching for them, in turn improving the ranking of the web site featuring them, if the website’s structure is revamped in such a way that it is easy to find relevant topics.

What are your thoughts on Internet Marketing? How have you used the forms above, or do you have suggestions on items I may have overlooked?

I’ve been playing with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook for a little over a year now, but really got into them the last 10 months when I saw the enormous opportunity to get my name out and find others with similar interests as myself. I’ll outline a few of the tools I use, how I use them, and examples of what I’ve done. This article is going to be geared towards vBulletin owners and using Twitter to build traffic and brand recognition, but could easily apply to other websites.

I’ll try to keep this thread updated if you have any questions, along with any new tips or tools I find along the way.

The Tools of the Trade

First off we need a few Twitter accounts. They are easy to make, take less than 30 seconds and you’ll have your very own Twitter account. You might want to start with one, but if you get all the tools that I’ll talk about, it’s a good idea to make a few and build them all at once. You might be asking yourself what username I should use. If you have a site of flying kites, and “square red kites” is one of your busiest sections @square_red_kites might be a good username to get. I would suggest checking out the google adword keyword tool and see if you can refine your username a little more. Maybe “red square kites” gets more searches. This just takes some playing around with, I wouldn’t suggest something real spammy like @free_free_kites, you can always change the name later but I would try to get it right the first time.

This is the tool I use to auto-follow users on Twitter, it allows me to follow users by a search phrase or follow users who follow others, or who they follow. I could also upload a text file if I had a list of users I wanted to follow. I’m sure there are many tools like it, a quick search of google for “twitter adder” will show quite a few. I paid $10-$20 for this program 10 months ago. It was a right place at the right time deal for me, getting it when it was in early beta stages. I see a purchase link for $50; I would look around if you are considering getting a program like this.

Next thing we’ll need is a Twitter client, I’ve been using Seesmic lately but started off with Tweetdeck. I really liked the look of Tweetdeck, you can make columns and searches to see “live search” updates of anything you want. I would use it to see if; anyone was talking about me or my business, and to see if anyone had questions I could answer such as “vBulletin” questions. I’ve been using Seesmic lately because of the ease of managing multiple Twitter accounts in one small easy to navigate screen. I suggest checking both of them out, as well as the numerous other Twitter clients available for your computer or phone.

Twitter has following limits, so sometimes you need to unfollow a few people to follow more. You can find out who is and is not following you. I would suggest if you do have to unfollow a few people in order to follow more, you unfollow those who aren’t following you back. A great webpage that will show you who is and is not following you is called Friend of Follow. You don’t need to hand over your login, just your Twitter username and it’ll display a list of your friends. You can than manually click a user and unfollow. When I started I would use this and unfollow those who hadn’t even changed the default icon, which at the time was the ugly brown o_O. These next two tools ask for your username and pass, I’ve been using both these for 10 months and NEVER had a problem. There are many bloggers who have written about these, I trust them but use at your own risk. Twitter Karma is a page similar to what you’ll see with Friend or Follow, but you can sort all by those not following, one click and check all, and one click and unfollow all. It’s a great tool, but has a limit of 10,000 follow/following count. Once I hit 10 followers, I had to find something else, I found Twitter Mutuality (now version 2) This tool is very straight forward, it will find all who aren’t following you and start unfollowing. You can stop it at any time by closing the browser.

Oh, btw.. The reason why we follow more and more people is because I’d say 4 out of 5 will naturally follow you back, the other 2 might considering what you tweet about.

Okay, so now we have a good twitter account with a high number of followers, we have to give them some content. You can do this a variety of ways in vBulletin, the easiest is Twitter feed. If you want to do it the right way, I would an application for the section or forum as a whole and user vBulletin Tweet poster by Milad. It’s a great product that will give your forum it’s own “source link” which doesn’t have the nofollow attribute attached. The idea is that you have an RSS feed of your forum or category, and we can make our Twitter account post updates with links and snipits to the threads being created.

Examples of what I’ve done

Here are a few examples of what I’ve done, 2 will be with forum sections and 2 will be with local blogs that I’m a part of.

We have a lot of Wordpress styles that are posted on the forum, so I made @Wordpress_Styles to help distribute to those looking for free Wordpress themes.

I’m part of this program called Driving Revenue that will credit your account if someone clicks a link to a site like ebay from your site. I have a webmaster auctions section that I use RSS feeds from sites like ebay and other sites, to post the latest deals. I made @Driving_revenue as more or less a test account just to see what I could do as far as building traffic to that section.

Here is an account (@TopekaTweetup) I made for a local tweetup group I’m helping with. I use Twitterfeed to publish the lasts post as well as tweetup updates. We use the same #hash tags when we talk about the tweetups.

Another one I have is @TransformTopeka, it’s one of the “automated” ones that we as a group try to actually chat with local users with as well as it publishes are feeds. Both these Topeka ones also will update the status when someone on facebook comments on our Fan Pages (which I strongly recommend building for your business but that’s for another article)

My best example is my old vBulletinSetup account, @vBSetup is the one I use each and every day to carry on conversations with our members, with local people and with strangers who are talking about things I’m interested in

The one I’m working and focused on now is my @BrandonSheley account, I’m just over 7,000 followers as of this post, but I’m been growing about 1500 new followers each month and that will grow exponentially as I get more followers and can follow more. You can follow 10% more then the people following you.

To wrap this up

I suggest adding your forums icon or a category icon to your Twitter account. You can also upload your own background. Branding your background with your forum or category logo is also a good idea. You want this account to be an extension of the support you offer to your forum members. As you may notice from above, my strongest account is one that I carry on conversations with other users on Twitter. Speaking of conversations, a tool I didn’t mention because I ran out of time is Tweetboard. It’s a fabulous addon for any community that is tapped into Twitter.

As I said, I’ll try to update this post and reply to any questions you may have. I may even be back to write another article on getting the most out of Facebook and LinkedIn. If you want to read a few more articles on Social Media I have a few on my blog.

Marketing is an essential component for product proliferation and adoption across the targeted audience. Conventional marketing strategies have always been associated with a hefty budget and market research requirements. As the world is becoming smarter and more efficient people across the globe have started realizing the benefits of Internet Marketing. Internet has been able to penetrate all parts of the globe. Businesses and humans are not limited to a particular geography and all corners of the world are facilitating from the ease and use of Internet marketing initiatives.

There are too many advantages of using Internet marketing as the modern tool and strategy to draw more customers to trigger unprecedented growth. Let’s explore some of the key ones:

• Internet marketing has been more effective when measured on the aspect of product meeting the eyes of an end user.
• You can design and woo your customers in a better way without much time and investments on an Internet Marketing enabled campaign. With less cycle time you can meet more needs of your customers when compared to conventional channel.
• One of the best aspect of an Internet Marketing campaign is that it meets the eye of the target much faster and in a concentrated way.
• You can manage your leads and convert them into opportunities in a faster manner too.
• It has proven to provide a clear cut communication between the customer and the service provider.
• Internet marketing leads to product innovation. Vendors are informed about the preferences and likings of the end user and they manufacture or present the services in a desired manner.
• Proliferation of your service portfolio is pretty easy and simple online. Within no time you can create a campaign and send it across to major social networks including LinkedIn. Twitter or Stumble Upon. You can better your online revenues and increase your bottom-line over the period of time.
• With better customer satisfaction and increased bottom-line you are sure to become a prominent entity in the segment of your industry.
• More people admit to the fact that Internet marketing and an online presence can provide a more trustworthy image of self or business online. It has helped in new customer acquisition and growth even in the challenging times of recession.

Internet as an arena is growing year by year. More number of users are buying or are interested in buying products and services online than ever before. Challenges will lie ahead for the vendors to differentiate themselves in order to stay in the hunt of customer acquisition, Retention and growth. Innovation through Internet and Internet marketing can help companies to stay afloat and nurture their talent pool and strengths in correct direction.

So if you have been interested all this while in carrying out Internet Marketing efforts, make an attempt now. Just ensure that you know your niche and the demands of customers well enough. You are sure to grow your online business if you can offer value to your customers online.

As an online marketer you have noticed social bookmarking websites and social media. However, you still have apprehensions about the impact of social media on the way you conduct your online business. Read on to discover how you can benefit from the social bookmarking world.

• Bookmarks get indexed faster than your website content. Therefore by submitting the content to social media sites like Twitter, Reddit and Yahoo Buzz can be more beneficial.
• If SEO has been a concern for you, sit back and relax. All you need to do is concentrate on your keywords and include them while providing the title in the social bookmarking platform.
• Enhance your reach and share your stories, news and articles in public.
• You can market your competencies and strengths in no extra cost and discover new business opportunities through social web platform.
• You can form your communities and target your audience. If they are interested in your business you would even like to gain more from them through a dedicated marketed campaign.
• Bookmarks help you generate organic traffic through search engines. As the pages get indexed much faster, you can expect a good traffic base within few days.

You can benefit from the social media endlessly. However ensure that you provide quality stories to your readers. After all, the web world lacks quality content and if you can provide cutting edge stories to your readers you are sure to emerge as a winner. Get your act together and identify who is your audience, segment them and position your products and services accordingly. Always remember that you are out there to socialize and share. Therefore make friends and followers who share similar interests. Forming a social group of people with alienated interests won’t really help. Discover enormous business possibilities through social media and increase your web presence.

Social bookmarking has been around for quite some time now. More number of people are resorting to social bookmarking through popular networks – Twitter, Stumble Upon, and Delicious.  So what is social bookmarking? To put in simple words a social bookmark is similar to your book’s bookmark where you keep a placeholder to start reading again the next time you open the same page.

Social bookmarks categories your website based on its niche. You could submit your website on all popular social bookmarking sites based on the categories – Social Media, Business, Websites Updates etc. You may get to choose your site as blog or content management system or any other platform.

Tags, Title and Description of your website are some of the essentials that you would require while marketing your website through social bookmarking sites. It is imperative to note that social bookmarking also draws a sizable amount of traffic on your website. And if you have been wondering how is that possible? The answer is that major search engines including Google and Yahoo are friendly to the bookmarking sites. You can achieve a higher indexing rate if you bookmark, needless to mention that they also act as a source of a back link for your website.

Bookmarking your website is pretty simple and easy. You can explore some of the popular social bookmarking sites by creating an account with them and submitting your website. Within few days you would experience an increase in traffic and better indexing of your content on all major search engines. You are all set to earn through affiliates once you start to get a sizable amount of traffic through bookmarks. So what are you waiting for? Get set going and submit your website or blog to major social networks and start realizing the benefits.

Yesterday Internet Brands (owners of Jelsoft) released their vBulletin 4.0 Gold edition just like they promised us earlier this year. Less than 24 hours we had our first patch release; I wouldn’t be surprised if they had another update or two before the end of the year. There has been a lot of negative discussion about the iNet take over and it all started for me with the leaked screenshots back in May. At the time I was a little upset about the price hike but looking back, it really wasn’t that big of an issue. I don’t currently have an active vBulletin site, but I do have a dev site setup with vBSEO and I’m testing a customized setup of URL setting based off what Brent uses on Mustang Evolution. These will be very short URL’s and easier to remember. I don’t have plans as of now to open up a vBulletin forum, but I need a dev site to stay up to date if I’m going to continue offering vBulletin services.

What are your thoughts on the new 4.x series so far? I like the forums; I think they could use some fine tuning. I haven’t tested the blogs but from the quick glance it didn’t seem like they changed much. I don’t really care for the new vBCMS. I don’t like the fact that you can’t place your CMS in the root and forums in a subfolder. It just seems rough around the edges but what better what to get feedback than to release the product to the masses if it works like advertised or not.

I’ve been playing around with IP.Content on IPBSetup.com and it isn’t sold as a CMS, but you can make one with it pretty easily. That’s what I’m using on the home page, and here is a demo page I had made a few days before testing things out. Right now I’m just using a free CSS template I found on google, but you can see I’m able to add blocks (like the recent post feed on the right hand side of the home page) I can make database pages to, I need to play around with it, but I like that you can just past HTML into an editor and make a page. This is another thing the new vBulletin CMS is lacking.

Over the past 2 or 3 years I’ve had the pleasure of watching Chase Speers excel with his state specific forums. He’s won a number of awards for his flagship forum (TalkDelaware.com) including BOTM on my old forum “vBSetup” as well as on vBulletin.com & vBulletin.org. TalkDelaware also won best website in Delaware for 2007 beating out the local newspaper! Chase has a state forum for Pennsylvania called TalkPA.net which has also won a few awards and honorable mentions.

Chase started chatting on forums about 5 years ago on a cell phone forum. He enjoyed it so much; he soon offered his help moderating the forums and became good friends with the owner Steve. That forum eventually was sold. Chase & Steve started up a few more forums, but Chase wanted full ownership of a forum, just had to think of a good topic. That’s where TalkDelaware comes into play, there is an “official” Delaware website that Chase was part of, but it didn’t seem like management had a full understanding of what could be done with their forums. Chase was determined to make a better forum for the state of Delaware, and that’s exactly what he did.

The official Delaware site was full of spam, trolls and just about every nightmare we as forum owners can think of. It was full of rude people who didn’t care who they pissed off and weren’t afraid to let their voice be heard. Chase was optimistic about the good people on this forum, and that’s who he would target when setting up his own forum. Chase became a very active user on that forum helping out everyone he could, all the time having his new Delaware forum linked to from his signature and maybe in some of the post as well. This can be a long process, but will get you quality users over time and in some cases; they will add your forum link in their sigs, thus recruiting more users. The only thing I would caution you about using this method, if you don’t want to get labeled as a spammer or possibly kicked of the forum you’re recruiting from, so test the waters and see what you can get away with.
If you look at the TalkDelaware forum, you’ll notice a custom style that matches icons seen throughout the state. This is the same on TalkPA as well, and I think it was a vital decision in his forum being successful. You want to let your members feel comfortable, and what’s a better way than tying in some of the great historical points of your state, into your forums.

To quickly summarize what I’m trying to get across in this article; don’t ever give up, be passionate about your topics and give your members what they want. Having a unique skin will help if it’s tied to the subject matter like TalkDelaware is. Provide help across all forums will help your membership grow, just like Chase did on the old Delaware forum, he offered his help and the members followed him over to his new and better forum. Chase also provides help on webmaster forums, including graphics help and suggestions to managing your community, which I feel he knows a great deal on both topics. Provide help to your members, and offer them incentives to stay on your site, and they will help advertise your site without you even knowing about it.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first article in my series on being a successful forum owner, please comment and let me know what you would like to know about in my next article.

My thoughts on vBulletin and IP.Board.

If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I ran a vBulletin powered forum for many years and just recently sold it. I’ll try to outline a few of the reasons why I “switched to the dark side” and setup an Invision Powered Services forum. The number one reason I would have even considered sticking with vBulletin is the vBSEO product. IPB does have SEO mods but they just don’t seem to match up to the power that vBSEO brings to the vBulletin platform. With that being said, I made a thread on the IPB support forums titled “How to SEO our IPB forum” I’ve picked up a few tips which I’ve implemented on my IPBSetup forum, but there has to be a few more options I haven’t found yet.

I didn’t have a problem at first with the buyout of Jelsoft to internet brands, but after seeing all the old developers leave and the drastic changes that have taken place; I see why people were getting so upset over it. I like how Invision actually uses their CMS for their homepage, vBulletin.com just has some generic html pages up which do look good, but it’s not showcasing the ability of their suit when they are pushing hard for sales. I had a chance to do some early beta testing on vBulletin and boy did it have a lot of bugs. I know it was in beta but I would of thought some of the major issues would be been fixed in development, it seems they just want to push something out and make it appear as if they care about the end forum user. I think they are really just interested in their own network (iNet) but I could be wrong and I hope I am because I still have a lot of friends that use vBulletin for their forums.

One thing I really like about IPB and wish vBulletin would consider adding this to their lineup is the search box in the admin control panel of IPB. You know how on yahoo if you start typing something you’ll get a dropdown box with suggestions? You’ll find the same thing in the IPB admincp area; it’s been very helpful for me since I don’t know my way around IPB yet.

I don’t think it will be long and IPB will be the #1 forum software for professionals, especially the way iNET is running Jelsoft. I do wish everyone the best, I still love vBulletin but IPB is climbing up with every chance I get to mess around and figure things out. My next big purchase is going to be IP.Content and I’ll have a tightly integrated CMS that will match my forum. This is something I had always wanted from vBulletin and even with the new vBCMS, it just doesn’t fulfill my needs like IP.Content will.

What are some things you like about vBulletin over IPB or IPB over vBulletin? I look forward to your comments. This is a dofollow blog, so search engines will spider your links.

I’ll go over what it really takes to be a successful forum owner and how you should go about building your empire in the following weeks. I have a few people that I’ve already mentioned this blog post to, and they are very interested in being showcased. If you’ve built a successful forum and would like me to do a blog post on you, please contact me via email and I’ll consider adding you to the list.
Some of the topics I’ll highlight will be.

• How you can easily build backlinks and traffic to your forum.
• What you should consider when building your community (members point of view)
• What topics/threads should you start up on your forum?
• Should you use a CMS?
• Types of sites you can build to support your forum.
• What forum script I would suggest.
• Check out the competition.

I’m looking forward to writing these reviews, I’ve had the privilege of watching these forums grow up while I ran vBulletinSetup and I’m honored to have known these admins.

Here is my first article in the series. (I’ll update this list as the articles get published)

• How to run a successful state niche forum

I’ve been running vBSetup for years, since June of 06 actually. I’m not going to lie and say I won’t be sad to sell, but it had to be done. I just don’t have the time to commit to the forums like I did before Leo came around.  I’ll still visit the forums a few times a week, but not having to worry about software/hardware updates and issues is going to be a huge relief for me. I announced to the members yesterday of the purchase and had an overall positive take on the acquisition. I look forward to seeing what Crowdgather does with the site. I know they have some great resources and can really push the forum to the next level. I’ll miss being able to email or market anything to 12,000 users with a flip of a switch, but I think I’ll still be talking to all the active users via Twitter or other forums.

I’m not leaving the forum scene all together; I had purchased IPBHelp a few months back when I was thinking about expanding my services to IPB. I got a job with the state shortly after I purchased that license and URL and didn’t really have time for it. I still don’t have a lot of time, but enough to tinker around with it once a week. I’ve already added a WordpressMU to the root as well as IP.Converge which will allow users to login to the forum and their blogs with the same login (email & pass). I don’t have it working 100% yet, but it shouldn’t take me much longer. I’ll always love vBulletin, but doubt I’ll ever own another vBulletin license unless I win the lotto and free up all my time, which I don’t even play so that’s not likely..lol

Everything else is going great; Leo is crawling and getting close to walking. I’ve been busy “baby proofing” the house because Leo likes to open the cabinets and any drawer he can reach. He is finally sleeping through the night which is AWESOME! It only took him 7 month but his mother and I are very grateful for the added hours of sleep.

Well that’s a short update of what’s going on, I plan to post a disc golf blog post at some point, so that will probably be the next update you see on this blog.

Have a good one everyone, and thanks for reading this blog post. Please Retweet it (if you’re on Twitter) or share the link with your friends. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising.

This weekend Alissa and I attended the first Podcamp in Topeka Kansas; it was at the library and was hosted by David Lee King. You can check out his notes from the Podcamp Topeka, which has a pretty good outline of what we talked about. We were using the #podcamptopeka hash tag;  and there were about 50 people from across Kansas that attended. I helped lead a discussion on how to setup your Facebook and Twitter profiles. I also talked about some of the tools I use, like ping.fm, and Tweetdeck and how it helped me manage my networks. I’m looking forward to the next podcamp, as well as interacting with all the great individuals I met at the podcamp. Social media is such a great thing, it’s really important that everyone at least try to take a part in it if you are interested in meeting others who may be interested in the same topics you are. If it wasn’t for Twitter and Tweetups, I wouldn’t know half the local individuals that I chat with every day. I’ve never really been had an outgoing type of personality, but Twitter and facebook has really changed that. It’s not unlike me to go up so a new person at these events and just start talking to them.

Here are a few more links about the PodcampTopeka – TSCPL

Here is a video on Selling yourself @ 30 FPS by @T_Rave, he was part of a group from Kansas City.

This looks like a video David had done before the podcamp.

Here is a promo WIBW did, they were also a sponsor.

I saw KTKA was there, here is a short story they published.

I think that’s about it, if I find anymore links, I’ll edit this post and add them.

If you didn’t hear, I’ve pushed all vBulletin work that was coming into Sheley Enterprises, to the forums. This is because I was recently offered a Web Application Developer job at KDOT and between that and my family; I wasn’t going to have time to work on vBulletin forums. 

I took the interview and 4 days later I was offered the job! I’ve been there one week and it seems like a perfect fit. I’m able to continue to work on the web and learn new things. I’m working with Visual Studio 2008 at work; I’ve installed the free version at my home office. (Visual Studio Express) I’ve been learning how to use ASP.NET, Visual Basic and C#. I’m going to be taking some classes on MySQL and modifying the database of our sites. I’ve taken a few pictures, I’m really close to the capital building, and this is the look from our lunch area on the 4th floor.

Leo has been going to Alissa’s cousins (Lindsey) house for babysitting. She has a little boy a few weeks older than Leo names Owen; they seem to have a good time together. We have a backup babysitter to check out this weekend, in case Lindsey is sick or wants a break. Speaking of Leo, he is growing up so fast; he’ll be crawling around before too long. He’s such a sweetheart, we just wish he would sleep a few more hours in a row at night..lol

You may have noticed, I moved all the content from brandon.sheley.org to this URL and blog, that was an older blog and I’ve redirected everything from it to this one, so you may want to update your bookmarks if you had been following along.  I may do the same with SheleyEnterpirses.com after I close that business down later this year.

I’m going to move my sites to a new server in the next 2 months. I’ll do my best to limit the amount of down time, but with a few dozen sites, it will take me time to move all the files and setup the databases again.

Life is good and busy, I’ve been working on a few other sites as well. TopekaTweetup has been going real good, we’ve had a few Tweetups and look forward to many more in the future. Another site I recently started is IPBHelp.me, it’s going to be one day a support site for IPB fans, I already have vBulletinSetup.com, time to branch out to IPB. I’ve had a few members from the vBulletin forum sign up and check it out; it’s just a place to allow the vB guys/gals to see what can be done with IPB. We’re working on a few sites for TransformTopeka like ReThinkTopeka and a Topeka Transit site (not open yet) that are turning out nicely.

As always, you can follow me on twitter under @BrandonSheley or @vBSetup (my active account) as well as Facebook if you want to see what I’m up to day to day.

If you are an online business owner, your first priority after developing your product or service is to find the people that will make your business a success. Marketing your business is a huge task and Twitter can help you immensely in that regard.

If you are developing a plan to marketing your business or you are in the process of doing so. It may include article marketing, social network marketing and viral marketing. In the social network marketing section, you should focus on Twitter.

Twitter is more than just a site for keeping up with the status updates of everyday life. Sure, you’ve heard that celebrities and others tweet about their dinner plans, vacations and pop culture but those same people can be hearing from you about your business.

Twitter is a micro-blogging type of forum. You can talk to anyone who will listen to you. It’s the quickest way to get people interested in new product offerings, contests, prize giveaways plus much more. Twitter is free to use so you can post a link to your Twitter account on your business website or blog. (@BrandonSheley)

One thing that is hard to keep up with is customer service. Providing timely customer service is the key to customer loyalty and increased sales. It is hard to manage email accounts when you are trying to market your business and fill orders.

As an alternative – turn to Twitter. When a customer posts a customer service question on Twitter you can reply or direct them to different areas of your website that offer support or answer their question. Instead of sticking by the telephone or using an answering service (especially for small businesses), connect with your customers from your PC or your mobile device.

The platform is favorable for real-time communication with a group of people (w/ hash tags) or one person at a time (via @reply). Twitter allows you to send update your status with new product information, and all your followers will see it instantly. Your customers can tweet back or follow the link in your tweet to the website page with your new products. The best scenario is that your followers will retweet (RT) your message to all their followers.

You can use various Twitter tools to make your business account easier to manage. Applications, such as TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Twhirl, Seesimc and TrackThis can be used to manage business groups, get Twitter notifications, send draft tweets to all of your customers, track packages and/or backup all business communication from Twitter.

Check out our site to see all the social networking articles and tools available. Twitter is just one tool that every business owner shouldn’t live without. Hopefully I’ve enlightened a few of our readers, and if you’re already on Twitter, we would greatly appreciate it if you would retweet this article.

While at the AAF-Topeka Social Media panel discussion, a panelist made a statement that wasn’t entirely true. “Links on social networks will get indexed and help with your rankings in Search Engines.”

Really, this is only half accurate. The text in the update you’ve made on your social network profile will be indexed, but the search engines will not follow the link and index the site you are linking to.

What exactly does this mean? Let’s use Twitter for example, the text and info in your “status update” will be indxed, but the search engine bot will not follow the URL you’ve linked to and index that site. Now you may ask, why even link to your websites in the first place? Even if Google doesn’t click the links, your friends will and it gets out usefully information they may not have seen otherwise.

I just want to touch on the power of your friends or followers, again using Twitter as an example, but it can also be said for Facebook and LinkedIn as well. When you update your status on Twitter, your followers will all have the chance to see it. Let’s say you have 1,000 followers, and each of them have 1,000 followers.  If even one person ReTweets (RT) your post, it will have a chance to be seen by their 1,000 followers – new people that you don’t even know, and if one of them RT’s it… well, you can see where this is going. So if you have a catchy headline and good information, your single post can potentially be seen by several thousand people seconds after it’s been posted.

So how can I tell if these links will be followed by search engines or not? Look for an HTML attribute called the “no-follow” attribute. You can see this by highlighting a link, right clicking and viewing the source of the web page. If you don’t want to do that on every site you visit, install a toolbar add-on. I use an addon for Firefox called SeoQuake, (they also have an Internet Explorer version but I’ve never given it a try). I’ve been using SeoQuake for a couple years, and have even had the developer comment on our forums. SeoQuake has several options, but the one that deals with the no-follow tag is a strike-though. In other words, if the links has the no-follow tag, it will look like this.

Hopefully, I’ve cleared up some misconceptions about how you’re able to get traffic from search engine via your social networks. In honor of this blog post, I’ve disabled the no-follow tag on this blog. As you now know, that means the search engines will be able to find your website  and crawl your URL if you link to it when leaving your comment.

How do you follow so many people on Twitter?

I get asked this all the time, I’ll try to explain what tools I use and how I can possible listen to thousands of followers at once.

Here is a quote I overheard on the net; which is better, someone following 10 people with 10,000 followers or someone following 10,000 people with 10,000 followers. I say the second one and here is why. I learn so much from the users I’m following and I chat with many of them every single day. I’ve been able to get several great job leads and have also been able to help out many users with the information that I know such as vBulletin, SEO or Managing an Online Community.

Twitter has turned into the new google search for me, if I don’t know something I’ll ask on twitter before searching for the answer on google. The reason why I like searching twitter is because than you can talk to people who are actually using the products or scripts that I’m usually asking about. This may not work for everyone but it’s been very helpful for me.

Twitter is a great way to see breaking news as well like the plane that went down in the Hudson; there were pics on twitter before any news station was even on the water. How could this of happen if it hadn’t been for the power of Twitter?

Okay, so I said I would explain how I manage all the people I follow, so I might as well get started on that. I already posted a video in my last update “The Twitter Addiction” on how you can use Tweetdeck to follow 15,000+ people; I’ll go into a little more detail on how I use Tweetdeck and other Twitter applications.

When I’m on the phone I use an app called Tweetie, it was 3$ and worth every penny. There are other free ones but I felt this was the fastest with a large following group. It does pretty much everything other app will do but just quicker. I’m able to make search terms so I can filter out different groups that I want to read up on. I can also see what Tweeple are talking about around me within X miles, which is all adjustable and configurable from whatever area I’m in. Tweetie is great but I often max out the API which is set at 100 request an hour. That isn’t hard to do with a few searches and a few RT’s and you’ve already used 20 or 30 request, so use it sparely. If I max out my API and I’m on the phone and want to get a message out, I’ll use my AIM account and ping.fm to send it out. If you don’t know what ping.fm is, I strongly suggest checking it out. I signed up for it almost a year ago and added all my social networking sites (20 options at the time). They’ve since added more services, it’s a great program and well worth the time to connect all your social networking sites.

I run Tweetdeck along the same lines as I mentioned with Tweetie. Make groups and searches to manage the nonstop flow of information from the Tweeple you follow on Twitter. I run into the same problem with Tweetdeck as I do with Tweetie and the API maxing out. When that happens I use another desktop application called Seesmic. I think it’s pretty new, at least I hadn’t heard of it until a week ago. It does the same thing as all the others, unfortunately I haven’t found out how to export my groups from Tweetdeck to Seemic, so I have to start all over building and filtering out the groups on it.

I also use a small application called TwitterLocal, it allows me to see what people are talking about X miles away from my zip code. This doesn’t have an API request, so it’ll never max out, but if you block someone from Twitter, it will still show their updates in TwitterLocal. Other than that small annoyance, it’s a great window to have up.

Twitter is a fun tool for me, I hope it’s fun for you as well.

-Brandon Sheley

Do you have a Twitter addiction? Are you a Twitter addict? I think as of this post, I have a bit of a Twitter addiction. I’ll explain how and why I use Twitter every waking hour of my day, along with some Twitter statistics to help motivate new users to Twitter.

Some of you may not even know what Twitter is, there is a nice video on YouTube that breaks it all down. It’s called “Micro Blogging” and you might be doing it already on others sites like Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn and not even realize it.

This month marks my one year anniversary with Twitter. Altho I’ve only started taking advantage of Twitter the last 5 months according to this TweetStats chart. The first part of my year I was just using Twitter with Ping.fm and updating all my social networking sites at one time. I think it was finding TweetDeck that really made Twitter work for me. I’ll post a video I found that will show you how to take advantage of TweetDeck even with 15,000 followers. That was the biggest problem for me, how to read what 100’s (at the time) of people are saying, there is no way to digest all the content in a timely fashion.

So the million dollar question is how you build up your followers count. The simple answer is, you follow people. Follow people that are interested in the same thing you are, and chances are they will follow you back. You’re not going to get a new follower for every person you follow, but you will start to get more and more. You also need to post updates, I’m into a few things but “vBulletin” is a big part of my live and I’m always talking about it. So than when someone uses Twitter Search, and searches for “vBulletin” I’ll likely be on the front page and usually get followed. The same thing goes with any topic, the more you talk about it, the more followers your get that are interested in what you have to say. My next suggestion is to drop the default icon and background. Do a google search for Twitter Backgrounds and you’ll find tons of sites that will help you generate one like I’m using @BrandonSheley. I’ll go through my followers when I get time and stop following anyone that has the default icon. If you can’t tale 10 secs to upload ANYTHING, a picture, your logo, than I doubt you have anything good to read.

Twitter will place caps on the number of people you can follow, so from time to time you’ll need to unfollow those who aren’t following you back. For that I use Twitter Karma but when you get above 10,000 followers/ following Twitter Karma doesn’t work. At that point I search around and found Huitter.com Mutuality, it doesn’t give as many options as Twitter Karma did, but it works just the same.

I wouldn’t try and follow more than 500 people a day; twitter will tend to suspend your account, so take it slow and build your content. This is just like your real blog, Content is King, and a quality membership takes time to build but well worth the effort.

This post got a little longer than I thought. There is just so much good info on how to build a relationship with your followers and how to find perspective clients using Twitter tools. I’ll stop this post right here and continue a part two in a few days. I’ll explain what Twitter tools I use on my phone and the power of the ReTweet (RT) and why you should be using it.

Brandon Sheley

Hello everyone, I’ve put together this site to show some links of my other sites and what I’m all about. I live in Topeka Kansas with my wife Alissa Sheley and son Leo Sheley. I work from home running Sheley Enterprises, which I started in June of 07. I enjoy disc golf, ping pong and soon to be little league. I’ve taken 2 years in PC repair and networking, but have taught myself everything to do with online marketing and how to manage a large memberbase. It doesn’t hurt that my wife works in social media at the best advertising agency in Topeka..lol

Sheley Enterprises

I’ll go into a little detail of what Sheley Enterprises entails. I’ve been offering vBulletin Services since before I started Sheley Enterprises, it had gotten to a point that I had to make a company to stay organized with the work I was doing. Here is a short list of some of my past vBulletin clients, as well as a few Testimonials. I’ve also done a number of jobs (generally local) that weren’t “vBulletin” sites, rather blogs or static pages. I like to pride myself on the fact that I’ve never had an unhappy client. In fact, I don’t ask for anything upfront, just to make sure the client is happy with their work. This is a bit risky on my part, but it hasn’t backfired yet. (knocks on wood) In most cases, I like to talk with the clients on the phone, this works best because some clients don’t really know what their forums are capable of and ten minutes on the phone can really clear things up.
Here are a few other sites with information on what I’ve done.
Brandon Sheley on LinkeIn
BrandonSheley on Twitter
Sheley Enterprises (Official Business site)
Brandon Sheley (Official Blog)
Brandon Sheley on Facebook
As well as a variety of forums, I’ll list off just a few
loco.m on vBulletin.com
loco.m on vBulletin.org
Brandon Sheley on vBSEO.com
Brandon Sheley on vBulletinSetup (Moderator)
Brandon Sheley at The Admin Zone (Moderator)
Brandon Sheley on V7N Marketing Forums (Moderator)
Brandon Sheley on AdminFusion (Moderator)
Brandon Sheley on AdminAddict (Moderator)
Brandon Sheley on vBHackers (Moderator) [Retired]
Brandon Sheley on Bloggeries (tech admin)
loco.m on Digital Point

Thanks for checking our BrandonSheley.Org, hope to see you around the forums or blogs, and don’t be afraid to Contact me with any questions.

Hello Everyone,

First off, thank you all for visiting this blog, it really means a lot to me!

I’ve registered www.BrandonSheley.org and I’m going to be blogging from that site from now on.

This will allow me to do more than I can with the WPMU script I’m using here.

I’ll keep the twitter updates on this blog, but will be posting all info on BrandonSheley.org or SheleyEnterprises.com

Thanks again for the support.