Using twitter to create a community

It seems like twitter is having his momentum right now, with more and more people joining. So, here is a quick tutorial on how to use it in order to accomplish the following goals:

• Bring constant traffic to your site
• Create an interactive and dedicated community

First of all, this quick guide doesn’t apply to any of the black hat projects that you’d might have. It simply doesn’t work this way.

You will need to have a site that:

• Is community oriented: this implies one or more of the following:
  • visitors can create accounts on your site
  • visitors can create content on your site
  • visitors can comment on the existing content
  • any other way of interaction between the visitors and your site
• Is not static: this implies that you have periodically fresh content (news/articles)

Using twitter for traffic and community has 2 ways:

1. The passive way. This is pretty straight forward. Create a twitter account, announce that on your site, make a link on the homepage or on your template, add your website to your twitter profile and start using twitter. That rest will follow. Slowly but steady.

2. The active way. This is what this post is about.

• First of all, start doing the steps from the passive way.
• Than use twitter for 1-2 weeks, periodically adding content
• Identify twitter users that might be interested in your site. Do that by searching in Google for: site:twitter.com [keyword]. Where the [keyword] represents the main keywords for your website. If you do that, you’ll get as results people that have used on their twits that keyword. Some of them have used them accidentally, but most of them will have a real interest in your topics.
• Make a list of all the profiles identified. From that list eliminate all the profiles that are dead (no longer updated) and start following the remaining ones. Many of them will reciprocate.
• Start interacting with the followed profiles, try to answer any conversations.
• Make periodical announcements of new content on your website and be active in answering any feedback.
• If you have an RSS feed for your site, for your own good don’t be an idiot and add that to your twitter account. Is one of the most annoying and lame behaviors and will soon result in people following you to use the block button

Well, that’s it. happy twitting and if you will use this mini guide, feel free to post in comments any results that you will get

Posted in Blogging, General, Social Traffic, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

How To Do It: Age verification

There are a few reasons why a site does age verification:

• Due to the nature of content, the law requires is
• Marketing / demographic purposes
• both

This tip doesn’t refer to porn sites. Over there is a simple 2 buttons solution: Are you 18+? YES / NO

This tip is useful for sites  that fall under the 3rd category, sites that require age verification for both legal and marketing purposes (ex: game websites)

There are 2 ways you can do this:

1. Dropdown boxes
2. Text boxes

The correct answer in this case is to use text boxes. This is so because by using dropdowns your demographic data will be false. This happens because in general users are too lazy to go through a scrolling list and identify the correct values. They will just scroll enough to be the legal age and that’s it. If you use dropdowns, don’t be surprised if the web marketing department will say that your latest gory shooter is played by persons aged 50+.

By using text boxes, users are forced to input some data and in this case they just too lazy to lie about it and they’ll input the correct values.

Posted in Information Architecture | 1 Comment »