Blogging & Communities

The Lion King 1½ ipod

Apparently all commentors fit into categories (via Alexia), which are you?

Also if you lurk here and read but don’t comment – what would make you comment (and which category would you belong in!?!?).

I’ve not posted since the 8th when I discussed making money on Twitter, I’ve twittered a bit (as I’ve found I can do that whilst I’m messing with other bits and bobs!), made some new Twitter friends…

Training Day divx

I’m wondering whether I should integrate Twitter more tightly with this blog for weeks like this, does anyone know any good tools for doing this?

I already use Twitter Tools, to get my latest Twitter “Tweets” under “What I’m doing…” on the right, it’s capable of converting all my tweets into blog posts (that would seem daft given the randomness of my Tweets in just 160 characters!), and I definitely don’t want it posting a daily digest (the updates wouldn’t make sense to half the people!).

How do you integrate Twitter with what you do and your long term blogging goals?

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of weeks now, and much as I shunned it in the early days I’m quite enjoying it!

Not for the:

“I’ve just got up!”
“I’ve just had a cup of coffee
“I’m bored!”

type Tweets – more the quick fire posts (when I don’t have time to right a full blog post), the chit-chat, and instant notification of people who’s blogs I follow adding a new post. My own posts get notified in my twitter timeline – which has lead to a few followers recently.

Making Money

I sat thinking about it this morning and couldn’t work out if there was any real way to make money from Twitter (never one to miss a trick if it’s possible!), so I went and did a bit of digging (for information not the networking site!).

This search lead me to bookmark a few new feeds in my reader (needless to say I’ll probably end up following these users on Twitter as well!), a lot of what I read was about how Twitter itself can make money – much as they probably need to I’m not going to get anything out of it – so I quickly skipped over those!

Any twitter money making idea seems to revolve around promotion or marketing, and before you can do that you’ve got to have followers (it always makes me smile people listing how many followers they have – like some great leader!):

• Direct Advertisement seems to be the key if you’ve got a lot of followers interested in your niche market and your own product to sell.
• Affiliate Marketing is something I know a little about, it still relies on you having a reasonable amount of followers, but also means you don’t have to promote your own products – you can promote other people’s and take the commission.
• Paid Reviews fall in the same category as Direct Advertisement in my opinion.

All in all this all looks a bit spammy to me, if you start pumping advertisements to your followers their pretty soon going to unfollow (can’t blame them really)…

So, is Twitter really just a networking site (as Uberaffiliate discusses) – with no opportunities to make money at all – or should it be viewed as a gateway to your main site? Any thoughts?

A few companies have sprung up to try to monetise (or monetize), but I’d be interested in hearing the views of existing users of these services:

• TwittAd seems to rely on users visiting the profile pages of users (this comes under the same thing of how difficult it might be to make money from RRS feeds).
• Adjix is an interesting alternative, TinyURL is used by lots of users to people on Twitter to place shortened links in their 140 characters. Adjix does the same thing, but frames the page you want them to visit with an advert! ($0.10 for every 1000 unique views and $0.20 for every valid, unique, click-through – more on this here.

There appear to be a few books around on the subject of how social networking can improve your business, maybe I should read one of these!

All in all, I don’t think there’s a real trick to be had (not often I say that, I know), so I’ll stick to just Tweeting about random stuff! Obviously, f you know different I’d love to hear about it!

I’ve been subscribed to Caroline’s blog for several months, and now I’ve finally got into Twitter I started following Caroline this week (not in a stalking kind of way, but on Twitter!).

Caroline has just Twittered (or should that be Tweeted?) about some personal development blogs…

A few of my exisitng favourites are on there, but I think I may have found yet more subscriptions for my Reader….. And there was me telling Lottie my reader was organised.

I read an interesting post today by Lorelle at WordPress (now given the article Lorelle wrote that will sound just like spam, but it’s not….. Lorelle makes a really interesting point in her article).

The interesting point isn’t about the spam, although she quite rightly points out some of the comment spam that you can look for that you may have let through in a weak moment (drunk, tired, had enough, just shutting down the PC etc.).

The interesting point is the fact that rather than just deleting the spam comment, if it adds value to the discussion you might as well keep it – but if you do decide to keep it, remove it’s value:

• Change the commenter’s name.
• Remove the links in the comment.
• Remove the link in the URL/address form.

You have the right to edit the link on your blog!

I need a Gravatar, you know one of those funky picture things that appears alongside comments on other peoples blogs (when I feel like commenting that is).

Thankfully there’s one centralised place for dumping your picture and most people can then access it on their blog (it’s actually built into WordPress 2.5+). But now comes the big decision…..

Do I want a photo of me or some online persona?!

Two Lovers rip

I started out a Avatarist not really finding anything I particularly liked except:

and

Both quite good, and very apt… But not really completely me….

I might just have to resort to my ugly mug, unless anyone has any bright ideas….

I never realised how much time you could save if you could comment on a blog directly within Google Reader….. Think about it – no more opening up 72 tabs, commenting, remembering which ones to close etc etc.

With the amount of items in my reader I really, really don’t have time for all of that!

Then I saw Lorelle’s post on using a Grease Monkey script to read full blog posts and comment on blogs all from within Google Reader:

Google Reader Preview Enhanced

You’ll need the Grease Monkey extension before you can use it – but it does look fantastic, I’ll be giving it a go when I get a chance.

Alright I admit it, I got to the end of writing this – had a quick scout around for opinions on this and just had to install it. It’s fantastic!!!!

photo credit: yoshimov