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 From that list eliminate all the profiles that are dead (no longer updated) and start following the remaining ones.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 »

Intensedebate wishlist

This morning I got an email from Intensedebate asking for feedback. Well, I thought of turning this into a post.

The good news is that I like the idea and the current implementation. But, nobody is perfect, at least in the early stages, and here is my wish list:

• I like the fact that they promote the fact that you can leave their service and take the comments with you. This means freedom and is important. But the sad part is there are no tutorials or tools on how to do this. I am aware that technically this is not possible for Blogger based blogs, but they can build up some wordpress tools.
• Comments provide feedback to blog owners. But more than that they provide unique content for search engines. Due to the fact that Intensedebate is javascript based this factor dissapears. Again. Make a php script for WP blogs.
• Search. Where is the freakin search on my Intensedebate account?
• Details about the commenters. Wordpress gives me the IP of a commenter. A service like Intensedebate can offer more than that (IP/Country/Browser etc)
• Create ghosts accounts for those that are not already users. This implies that an account is created for each person based on his email address. By doing that a ghost account can be claimed through email validation
• Give me an option to stay logged in. I hate logging in every day.

This are a few things that came up in my mind. I’ll add more if I remember any. I am very aware that the things I’ve listed are not a piece of cake. But this is what I want
P.S. Please guys pay attention to the javascript. I had 2 sites down for a few hours because of that. If that happens again I am out. With or without comments

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

Buy Blog Comments

I was writing last time about a new form of intelligent blog comment spam commenting. This new form implies that instead of mass, automated, crappy comments on low value blogs you get some medium quality comments made by humans, with links that are going to stay for a while.

Jon Waraas  has just started a business out of this. The packages that he offers are:

• 100 comments: Get 100 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $24.99.
• 500 comments: Get 500 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $123.99.
• 1000 comments: Get 1000 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $239.99

What those packages mean in fact? You get PERMANENT links at ~0.25$. Not for month, not for year. But as long as the target blog will last. That implies links that get old on pages that in time gain PR. And links not on non related pages but targeted to your niche. That’s quite a bargain.

Why is this better for blog owners and is different from common, crappy comment spamming? Well:

• The blog gets unique content
• Those comments are very likely to stimulate conversations. Remember those are human made and on subject

After all is a win/win situation, the only ones who’d might not like it being the Google engineers. But this form of comment spamming is pretty hard to catch, so they’ll have to deal with it

Posted in Blogging, SEO Tip, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

A few points on blog commenting

1. “Intelligent” comment spam

The classic, automated, blog spamming seems like is living it’s last days. This is basically the result of two factors:

• Stronger and better spam filters (read Akismet)
• Better informed blog owners

Because of those two factors a new spamming industry is on the rise and I think that’s here to stay. Human comment spam. This consists of companies that deliver medium quality comments in niche blogs for those interested in getting quick links. Lately, with no activity on this blog, I got a lot of those. My choice? Let it be. They provide unique content for the posts and might encourage genuine readers to interact. In the future? No ideea

2. The nofollow scare

Latest Google PR update has hit pretty bad on some of the SEO industry ego’s. What really surprised me were the denial reactions and later the cowardness. Search Engine Journal, if my memory is good, was one of the first and only SEO sites that removed the nofollow tag from their comments. A pretty brave and intelligent step, not because they were against Google’s rules but because they figured out the way to get more people interacting. Today, to my total dissapointment, I saw that they have added it again. I have no ideea when that happened but I bet that this came after they were downgraded by Google. I just hope that DaveN won’t do the same under Google’s pressure.

Note: I have removed the nofollow tag from this blog a while ago

3. Comment spamming protection fee

If I said previously that automated blog commenting is dying, for the Mafia it might not be true. Just look at the following (non-) spam comment I got:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

This was beyond hilarious and this dickhead qualifies for sure for the Idiot of the Year Award.

P.S. It seems like the “Mafia” is pretty busy, a simple search for the idiot’d ICQ number returning 10.900 results. Or for the black hats 10.900 blogs with comment moderation turned off

Posted in Blogging | 3 Comments »