Basic Stuff

1. Twitter is a Micro Blogging Platform.

2. Posts or Tweets have a 140 character limit.

3. You can Create an account in just a few minutes.

4. Configuring an account with your Bio , Avatar,Web Url takes a little longer.

5. You can start following people immediately, some of whom will follow you back.

6. Once you are following some people you will see their Tweets(posts) and can join in the conversation.

7. When you want to share something interesting with your followers it’s easy to insert a link and to shorten it to keep within your 140 characters.

8. Twitter has its own search function so you can find people to follow in your own area or who belong to a specific niche.

9. To reply to a Tweet you use the @ symbol before the users name, eg @RobinPiggott or @DrivingSchoolEU so they can see who has replied.

10. This is a very brief introduction to Twitter and you will find their instructions quite simple to follow to get you started. After this you just have to be patient  and Look ‘n Learn

There is a Planet load of information on what Twitter is and how to engage with other members or “followers”, but I think the best way to learn is to look,listen and lurk for a while after you set up your account. It’s also a good idea to have a think about what your main purpose is, in joining a Social Media Giant like Twitter.

It could be that you want to increase the visibility for your business; it could be as a purely personal way of meeting new friends and engaging with them; it could be just for a bit of fun once in a while or a serious attempt at building a mailing list for regular marketing purposes.

You could be particularly interested in an absorbing hobby and wish to keep abreast of everyone who is involved, on not just a local basis but perhaps even globally. I think the possibilities are extensive but the end result will take time, effort and perseverance once you’ve decided what your motivation is.

In my own case I was happy to learn as I went and to pick up tips and tricks gradually but I had no idea of where I was heading except that it seemed like a good idea. Didn’t set out a goal and any form of long term plan  but this has now changed.

This is why sharing with you my own exploits on Twitter and those of the wonderfully helpful peeps who have established great followings on the site, may help you to avoid some of the pitfalls.

The posts in this Twitter category here at Baby Boomer Marketing we will try to keep on topic and provide plenty for you to get your teeth into . We like to share our own stories here(together with our own brand of humour)  but also  put you in touch with others who are not only more experienced but are an essential attribute to your Twitter success whatever you wish that to be .

It’s worth pointing out that while there are many millions of Tweeps who will make your time on Twitter very  worthwhile, as with anything new and exciting, you will encounter many time wasters and spammers. Spammers have been a curse on Twitter and will continue to be. Some know exactly what they are doing, others have been duped or sucked in by copying what they think is correct or even cool. We can only sigh and hope they either get banned or see sense!

Finally for this Post here are a few People to follow who are at the top of the Tree:-

@pistachio : @problogger : @kissmyaster :

@plangardengal

@John_Taylor

Actually I must credit the amazing Jim Edwards for getting me started some nearly four years ago.. It would be worth your while checking Jim out since one good idea can sometimes change your life! Jim usually has more than one good idea that he floats around

(1)   These can be published on your Web Site with perhaps a sign-up required to access the full library.

(2)   They should be submitted to as many Article Directories as you can find. I guess that for a Newbie Author perhaps ten or twenty of the top Directories.

(3)   Submitting manually is certainly a chore and they do not all have exactly the same submission systems  which often leads to one false click deleting your handiwork until you are very familiar.

(4)   A major Article can be turned into several blog posts with some variation of the copy.

(5)   Blog Posts that are done on the spur of the moment will often give you an idea for an article or series of Articles.

(6)   Once you get over the Newbie paralysis syndrome you will be surprised how quickly the ideas come. So you need to create a neat folder or workbook to write down these ideas and then categorise them for your future writing.

(7)   It should be possible for someone to create at least three or four Articles a week o r more once you get moving. Momentum is a great force of Nature.

(8)   Once you have submitted your Articles and they have been accepted you should make a point of doing plenty of keyword/phrase searches and you will be amazed how quickly your article and name will start appearing in these places.

(9)   One of our Articles that was not written from a search engine perspective but by chance had in its title, some very often used Key words was showing up in the number one position on a page of 38,000,000 entries. The Article Directory and its high search engine ranking led to this. So if you can do it once by accident you can surely do it over and over again by Design!

(10)   One of the encouraging aspects of getting into a very regular Article groove is that other Web Masters and site owners will, if they like what you have to say and it is in demand by their viewers, publish you on their site. The advantage of this is that your Authors’ resource box will be visible with usually two live links to your Web Site or Blog

We will expand on this technique as time goes on but in the meantime take a trip over to the Webs’ Leading Article Directory http://www.ezinearticles.com and see how it all works. That will be an hour very well spent.

in June 2005 but still appropriate today.

A Guide for Newbies to get under the Radar of the ever increasing mountain of technophobia that faces a Web site owner starting off.

There is of course a huge amount to learn in setting up and running a Web Site, which is why, I believe, that most newcomers tend to put their trust in a web designer, aka webmaster and leave them to get on with things hoping that all will go well. Big Mistake!

It’s only when, having spent quite a lot of money, you find out that your pride and joy is not giving you the results that you imagined, that alarm bells can start to ring. In my own case this took approximately four years to sink in. After a promising start, with some enquiries from the other side of the world, things not only didn’t get any better but got worse!

Of course, if you are running and developing a new business, which takes a colossal amount of time and commitment, you don’t initially have time to worry too much about the success of your web site. After all, a web site will make you a zillionaire quicker than you can spell the long version of SEO! Big Mistake!

I believe it is just as important to designate sufficient time to understanding how a web site is developed, promoted and maintained as it is to spend time on all the other many facets of a fledgling business.

Many new business owners, myself included, thought in the past that just by having a web site and on-line presence AND a webmaster, that everything would be fine. Visitors and sales would surely follow and increase exponentially. Not So!

Probably the pace of change on-line is more rapid than most businesses realise and therefore if you are going to build a site AND do some reasonable level of commerce from it, you have got to study and learn a number of basics.

1. Key word research should really begin before you set about building your site, because it can help with the choice of a suitable Domain name and continue to assist in the titles and scope of your eventual articles.

2. Original and fresh content related to your prospective field is a necessity, and needs to be uploaded on a very regular basis. Unless you are a very large company with an in-house webmaster, this is probably the most crucial aspect of developing a site in terms of getting good search engine results.

3. Writing new pages can be extremely time consuming and unless you have a suitable S.M.S. package installed, enabling you to become your own webmaster, it’s highly likely you will commence the slow but inexorable slide to oblivion, other wise known as Zero traffic.

4. Build your site by all means but make sure that you become your own webmaster, having taken a crash course in the do’s and don’ts. You absolutely must have the facility to control what goes on within your site. If you miss out on this vital aspect of developing a site, the chances are that you will lose interest and stop creating ideas and content.

5. Learning to write your content, even if this seems a bit beyond your reach to begin with is another essential skill to be fine tuned and believe me, once you have got under way it will become easier with each passing day. Looking at how other web sites operate and the standard of their content will help you along the path.

6. Articles on your area of expertise, submitted to a number of reputable Directories, will almost immediately get you noticed and start to build credibility. These can be modified for use as web pages and will provide ideas for new content on a never ending basis. It has been my experience in the recent past that articles can have a very advantageous effect on search engine results. Credibility is something you can never have too much of.

7. Search engine optimization, a very fancy term, with nearly as many, so called, experts as there are sites on the Web and similar in number to the droves of Web site designers! This is a thorny topic and one best left to the experts, for the behind the scenes work. However, it is my belief that the best results come from fresh and original content put up on your site on a regular basis. Results from my blog of only two months existence, in terms of link popularity, are outstripping my web site that has been on-line for five years. This is all down to regular articles on my chosen topic.

8. A newsletter or ezine, is a very good way of encouraging traffic to your site and building your subscriber list that you can eventually turn into clients, customers and sales. Offering an incentive for your visitors to part with their e-mail address can be by way of a free mini course or e book.. In the case of your newly published E-Book, offering a free download of one complete chapter is something worth considering and is a very popular technique. This is all part of the credibility building process. Once you get used to making regular posts to your newly set up Blog, a newsletter should be relatively easy to produce, without too much stress.

9. A Business Blog is I think, the way forward, for many web site owners who would like to see an increase in traffic of a targeted nature. They are easy to set up and have the advantage of being virtually instant. One of the great things that can help you in becoming more adept as a webmaster, utilising your own blog, is that learning the rudiments of html is not the nightmare that it may appear to be. You can practise away to your heart’s content adding and subtracting code from a blog post and see immediately the result in the preview pane. You don’t even need to publish this post. Again, getting used to viewing the source code of other web sites and seeing how they do things will give you no end of inspiration.

10. Control is the key to success in developing your skill as a webmaster. In a follow–up article on the experiences of a complete Blog novice we will have a look at some of the more interesting facts, figures, and activities that will take you where you want to go, and contribute to the success of your web site, providing you are prepared to allocate sufficient computer timeand are not expecting to retire a millionaire in six months!

It is, however, an achievable goal to go from Meek to Geek in just a couple of weeks, with a little effort! (well maybe  a couple of months on second   thoughts!)

Blog Post for NetNewbieprofits.blogspot.com 27.01.06

I am sure what I am about to tell you is common knowledge amongst seasoned Internet Marketers and Business Web Site Owners but it takes a lot of hard graft and several years of trial and error to get any business running profitably. During this start – up phase there will be many sleepless nights and not much in the way of free time. However the exponential growth of the Internet has turned traditional Marketing on its head and provided unheard of opportunities for those who have little start up capital.

Article Marketing And Blogging

One of the ways in which your message can reach a wide audience with breakneck speed is the ability to craft informative Articles covering your particular subject and areas of expertise and get them circulating.

A lot has been written about the importance of getting your articles published and circulating widely, in building confidence amongst your readers and subscribers and web site visitors. Establishing your reputation as a trusted expert in your particular field can be built over time with a constant stream of articles and dramatically enhanced when your work is published elsewhere on the Internet, beyond the boundaries of your own web site. Let’s have a brief look at how you would go about this and what sort of results you could reasonably expect.

With the flavour of the Month now firmly resting with the mighty army of Bloggers, it is worth a quick look at how this could impact on your Article writing career. Blogs have taken the Internet by storm because of the ease with which the every day aspiring writer and marketer can now, without any cost whatsoever, set up a Web-Log in half an hour or less!

I suppose the most popular Blogging Host is Blogger.com and provides a reasonable platform to get started. Many Web Hosting companies are providing alternative blogging software with the more traditionally named Word Press.

It is well worth trying out both these blogging platforms and seeing which suits you better. My own preference is for WordPress but I am using both for several blogs.

Instant Recognition with a Blog Post or an Article

In a nutshell, a blog enables the average person to be published instantly. If you are prepared to take the time to learn the tips and tricks you will soon be posting regularly and will then have the impetus to go a couple of clicks up the ladder to composing fully fledged Articles which will stand along side the best out there.

This was my chosen route during the last year and the transition from wondering would it work, to actually getting going, was the most difficult. Having heard about blogs and articles for quite a while during web research it still took the compelling words of a master marketer to light the fire.

It is not too difficult to keep that fire burning once you see some results, however small they may be initially. In my own case the first and very amateurish blog far outperformed the Web site with links in just two months. The Web site had been going for five years, admittedly with not a huge sum spent on its development, but nevertheless it showed what can be achieved with regular posts or mini articles in a very short time.

Around this time (June 2005) the first articles were published at www.ezinearticles.com including one that had sat on my hard drive for a year and it is the combination of these two separate strategies(Blog Posts &Articles) that works so well.

The key, I was told in the beginning, was to post every day if possible and at least three times a week for the first six months, before expecting any results! The results far outweighed the meagre expectations and continued to grow daily.

I am not going to tell tales of unimaginable riches at this point since it is very early days but I do believe that the combination of Blogging and Article circulation can make a huge difference to any ones’ web presence given plenty of action and hard work with the pen. Of course this is only one of the many avenues of making a viable business online or offline for that matter.

As a post script to this article… in June 2005 as I joined Ezine Articles .com there were under 8000 Authors . Today in December 2008 there are well over 100,000;  some with as many as 10,000 articles to their credit!

Does that give you a clue? I hope so!

If you have been on line for any length of time and been looking through the Marketing sites and blogs you will have seen a recurring phrase “The Money is in the List”

If you haven’t been online for very long don’t fret because that’s what this Blog is all about…helping you to overcome the fear of dipping your toes in the water without it taking a decade or shortening your lifespan in the process!

What does this mean? The Money is in the List?

Well …do you want the Short answer? the Smart answer? or the Long answer ? We’ll go for something in the middle for starters I think!

The List is the Subscriber base you have built up, which enables you to contact your site visitors on a follow up basis…and heaven forbid “sell them stuff”. Ooooh no one said anything about selling or follow up…isn’t that really difficult?

Please relax and read on!

How do you build up your Subscriber base and create this “Magical Mystery List”?

It’s really quite simple actually. In real terms you have to persuade Site visitors to give you their E Mail address so that you (a) know who they are and (b) can contact them again and again and again…over time you understand!

Isn’t this sounding rather like a lot of hard work cranking out e mails to your subscribers? What if I have a hundred subscribers or even a thousand?

The Autoresponder Works its Magic

This is where Technology comes in and plays its trump card! With a suitable Autoresponder account, which is the second most important part of your marketing arsenal, you will be freed of the drudgery of replying or contacting all your subscribers individually.

An Autoresponder account which doesn’t cost the earth, will do all the contacting for you All you have to do is to create a sequence of suitable replies or recommendations and these will be sent automatically to your subscribers at whatever interval you deem appropriate.

There are several really good Autoresponder companies out here but the one with the best reputation and the one that we use along with most successful marketers is A Weber. They have great flexibility, great staff and as many features as you need for a successful operation.

We are not in the business of sending floods of email every day or even every other day. Some marketers do however and if you subscribe to too many lists (there we go again) you will regret it and probably become a little peeved in the process. So be warned! We will talk more about how many subscriptions are sufficient and how many is too many in another post.

Next question is how to you persuade visitors to part with their E Mail address?

What’s In It for Me?

Simple …you have to make it worthwhile. You know the WIIFM adage. What’s in it for me? If you can satisfy this primeval desire with perhaps a newsletter subscription offer or better still a freebie of some kind you will be well on the way to your first 1000 subscribers.

We’ll talk about the kind of freebie that gets visitors clicking and parting with their e mail addresses in the next post. Read each part of the equation and understand it before moving on to the next.

In each section we will give you a link to a site we recommend that will, when all the parts are integrated, add up to your Marketing Information Start up Strategic Toolbox  or  MISST for short.

Now go get a Coffee …you deserve it!

P.S Here is another Boomer Site we recommend.

Go check out Rosie’s excellent:-

www.bloggingforboomers.com

P.P.S  getting an account on Twitter could be a very useful strategy as you start to build your Blog.Go take a look:-

http://www.twitter.com/RobinPiggott

Basically that’s an excuse for saying we haven’t got our act together yet! Stick with it  or us and  you will learn from our mistakes I’m sure.

If you are a perfectionist (like I was!) then you should leave now because you might be disappointed until we get going!

I believe it’s important to get going, no matter how disjointed your blog might be because if you don’t, you will analyse yourself to extinction! That was me …but not anymore!

Get used to Your Desk and bring down your Coffee Maker!

One of the first essentials to getting going online is to get to know WordPress.

Let’s repeat…GET TO KNOW WORDPRESS. You don’t need any other platform. Forget  Blogger and their free Blogspot blogs.

Everyone and his Mother in Law and Pet Rabbit have a Blogspot Blog. We have them because it was a way to learn without spending money and it was a valuable easy way to go behind the scenes and get somewhat aquainted with HTML.

We’ll provide a Duffers Guide to Web Terminology in due course.

Very briefly:-

(1) Get familiar with WordPress.

(2) Decide on your Niche.

(3) Research and Register a Domain name. You could use Hostgator.com

(4) Get Web Hosting , preferably with the C Panel included. A good choice would be Hostgator.com

(5) C.Panel with Fantastico will enable you to get your blog Up and Running.

(6) Choose a Theme and upload and you are good to go.

(7) You may need help in getting a Header graphic installed to make your Blog unique.

Some of these points will need further explanation but see how you get on, on your own first . For each point you can go to Google and enter a search phrase and take it from there.

We will see you soon. Remember get started…it aint going to materialise of it’s own accord!

About Us and Why you Should Listen

A Twitter account which is simple to set up, can get your message out there and provide you with an instant reach to people interested in what you are doing currently. Its rather like an instant text message but distributed on a massive scale to your followers.

Followers sign up to your Tweets and everytime you post, your message will show up in their time line. Every time the people you follow make a post this will show up in your time line.

This is a very simplified explanation of the Twitterverse as it is known by all who lurk there. The best way to find out what it going on and to join in the communityactivity is to sign up for an account and spend some time checking it out.

We’ll give you some guidelines on protocols and do’s and don’t in the next post. In the meantime have fun! I can tell you that you will discover many interesting people to follow that you would never encounter any other way.

Here is the link to our own Twitter profile to get you started:-

http://www.twitter.com/RobinPiggott

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There are probably as many secrets to effective writing as there are Days in the Year or Blogs on the Blogosphere. But a few key elements stand out and I would like to share a couple with you in this post.

First and foremost, since it’s difficult for most of us to even start to write anything at all then it’s essential that when you are in second gear and accelerating that you don’t pull into the nearest lay by for a coffee and a sandwich. Basically what you should do once underway is to keep going and forget the spell check, the punctuation, the grammar and paragraphs.

If you are going to be stopping and checking email every few minutes which some of us do when at the computer (coz it’s fun and you never know who will be writing to you) you sure ain’t going to get anything worthwhile completed.

Completion that is the key to any success in life; a half finished project is pretty much worthless, in fact it can give you nightmares for months. So no matter what the distractions you must finish your project and this type of laser focus will bear fruit.

Ok so you have kept writing and ideas keep flowing and flowing and flowing. The page looks a mess but you have the outline. Going for a spell check or even a visit to the bathroom can interrupt the flow and then when the phone or doorbell rings you will be sinking without a trace. How do I know this to be true? Well I wrote the book on the subject but never got round to publishing it! so there!

If like me your typing skills are a little last century, then the ideas will be coming faster than you can type so it’s vital to keep going at the keyboard. An alternative would be to record you r thoughts and then transcribe but for me the thought of having to clear the desk and get those microphone thingies all set up just creeps me out. Yes I wrote the book on being Technically Challenged but couldn’t fathom out either PDF or FTP (this is being looked at as I write!)

The first hurdle is achieved if you have 500 -750 words and garbled paragraphs on the page because now you have something to work with. As you format and spell check you will inevitably come up with new ideas which will be useful in the same or other articles so that writer’s block will never be a problem… I like to read out loud as I type and also when doing my sentence and grammatical structure

When you have done your first draft you’ll then have a much better idea of what is working and what needs modifying for your reader .You do have readers don’t you? After all this is the whole point of the exercise!

So that’s a quick how do you get started and how you prepare to finish what you have started. We’ll talk more about dealing with the second draft in the next post sometime somewhere but don’t wait up you’ll be disappointed!

The comment below which was posted to Boyd Productions just a couple of hours ago was in response to an Alert from the software in our Learner Drivers niche.The post we responded to had only just been published and we were the very first to comment

“Looking forward to seeing the Documentary. It’s about time the whole
Teen Driving Syndrome is exposed for what it is! Mayhem on Wheels!
Each generation of new drivers come to the table with preformed ideas which they have garnered from their Parents.

Parents behaviour behind the wheel and their attitude to other road users is picked up by kids from the moment they are strapped in the Baby seat restraint. As time passes, certain behavioural traits become accepted as the norm by kids, to which is added their own interpretation.

It should be no surprise that the figures for Teen fatalities are as high as they are. Here in Ireland we are no exception to the rule and our figures, which are starting to improve with better legislation, have been amongst the worst in Europe for many years.

It’s about time Parents the world over took the lion’s share of the responsibility for the demise of their offspring. It always irks me, no I will be more vociferous and say it annoys the hell out of me when the local Parish Priest gets rolled out to say “they were a lovely family”, after yet another fatality.
We continue to write extensively on this subject in our blogs and web site for those who might want to hear it from the inside track.”

As I write this post more alerts are continuing to arrive from Blog Talk Monitor which will keep you rather busy I suspect when you sign up and install this fantastic tool.Don’t wait until your competition beats you to it.Be Quick off the mark for once and you will reap the benefits!

Effective Blog Commenting

Here is something all bloggers will benefit from, whether you are just starting off, planning on setting up a blog to promote your business or have already done so and have lost your way!

It is a well known fact that placing suitable comments on another persons blog is an effective strategy, particularly if the host blog has plenty of street credibility. You will gain some knock on effect from this. Comments get placed in search engine results so this could be a very worthwhile strategy if pursued regularly in your particular niche

One of the ways to improve your own reach with comments is to be quick off the mark when new content is posted and be one of the first to express an opinion.

The days of posting something on the lines of “Great blog you have here… please visit my blog on blah blah blah” are well and truly over unless you belong to that exalted group of the Spam 2.0 Community! Spam posts are a pain in the proverbial so you are going to have to stretch yourselves somewhat with some useful and pertinent comments if you are to obtain any benefit.

We have just discovered an amazing piece of software that can help you in your quest to becoming a recognised expert in your particular field and thereby generate more traffic and a loyal following to your blog. Blog Talk Monitor is quite simply an astounding concept and once installed, the software will inform you instantly a new post or piece of content, relative to your chosen niche, appears on the Web.

This will enable you to review the content, create a response quickly, or even produce some fresh slant on the topic for your own blog or web site. Writers Block will be a thing of the past and Blog Talk Monitor is your solution. It’s quick and easy and you have the facility to set up different keywords related to the niches you operate in .You could very easily become an authority on the subject before your competitors have even struggled out of bed.

Once in a while someone comes up with an idea that is simply awe inspiring and in this case it’s stating the obvious. We are using it to great effect and think you should give it a try yourself. You’ve nothing to lose especially since it is readily affordable. The Price ? Well there isn’t one! It’s free gratis, although I have my doubts as to the sanity of the author who is the renowned Jack Humphrey of Authority Site Center