Pssst! Gotta Tweet?

Robert Plank has been at it again, this time he is invading Twitter.

He created a plugin for the members of his and Lance Tamashiro’s Blog Invasion System that he calls Twitter Invader.

If you look at the bottom of this post you will see what it does. (Yes, I am a Blog Invasion member, it never hurts to learn something new and Robert’s and Lance’s brains are good ones to leech off of.)

Just looking at it you might not be able to tell why it is special. It looks like just another Twitter Tweeter but it does have one noticable difference you can see it asks for your Twitter name and Password.

Personally, I don’t like the password request but it is needed to automatically send the tweet and then bring them back to the same spot without ever leaving the page. When they come back there is a new message that can be a link to take them to a reward for tweeting.

In the settings area for Twitter Invader you can set up the text that will be presented when the tweet is completed and link it directly to reward or bribe. It makes it quick and simple to bribe and reward.

But there is another advantage that you won’t see. When a person tweets your post they will automatically follow you. AH! So you get a tweet which might bring you some traffic and you get a person following you. It doesn’t mean that they won’t unfollow you the next day.

If this is set up the proper way I can see it building your following on Twitter and getting traffic to your blog through the tweets but I want to know what you think.

Is this a plugin you think could make you money?

Is it a plugin you would be willing to pay for? Don’t worry I am not selling it I don’t have those rights. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it is available to anybody except the Blog Invasion members.

Give it a ride, you will end up following RandyTheHermit but I use tweetlater and I will auto-follow you too.

You should also know that I did tweak the appearance of the box a little to make it stand out a little more so if you don’t like the appearance remember that.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. If you don’t want to use it let me know why not.

NOTE:  I have disabled the Tweet Rewards until I actually put a reward on it.  When it is back up and running you will see it on every post!

It has been brought to my attention that I have never made a post on simply how to blog.

I actually thought I did but after reviewing the post on this blog I saw that I really didn’t cover the basics of how to blog.

Basically blogging is just writing that is shown on the internet for the whole world to see. That is all it is and to blog all you have to do is write.

The key is to (as Wizzer would say), “Do It Now!”

That’s right to get started just write, don’t worry about RSS, SEO, widgets, plugins or anything else just get your first post up and available for the world to see.

Why do I say the secret of how to blog is just getting that first post up there?

Simple a lot of people want to blog but they don’t have any idea what to blog about. Getting that first post up is a major step in blogging and it could be in a niche that will be profitable for you or is could just be about the weather but if you can’t make one post then you will have a hard time posting every week.

This doesn’t mean that you should blog about just anything, if you want a profitable blog you need to stick to subjects that people read but this can come later.

The key point is to get comfortable with writing a post. This can be on a free service like WordPress.com or you can install WordPress on your site.

Please note that I only recommend free services for getting started I don’t recommend them for running a profitable blog because of the limitations in what you can do, but for starting out the key thing is to get started.

The more post you write the better you will get at coming up with ideas and the more comfortable you will be at entering your posts on your blog.

Once you are comfortable creating post it is time to get serious, you need to find a topic that you are interested in that can be made profitable. This is called finding your niche.

Once you find a niche you like that you know people look for you can just start blogging and hope that you will turn up in the search engines or you can do some keyword research and target the keywords that people are searching to get targeted traffic to your blog. I have actually seen both ways work but if you the target the keywords people are searching for you will get visitors to your site much faster.

The reason that the just start blogging method will work is because if you create enough posts on any topic you are sure to cover some of the keywords people are searching for and this will get you some ranking in the search engines. But if you know your keywords and work on them you will find traffic coming to your site much, much faster.

With that said there are a couple of things that really contribute to the demise of a blog.

1. Burnout

2. Giving up

Burnout comes when you post constantly and you end up feeling obligated to post every single day or multiple times per day. This makes it seem like work instead of fun. Blogging should be fun! Yes, it is good to post everyday but if you get burnt out and stop posting will you still get traffic? That depends a lot on how the blog was set up, but we aren’t covering that here.

To avoid burnout write when you are inspired to write, this can be one post per day, one post per week or 20 posts in one day. When you have extra posts schedule those to be added to your blog in the future instead of posting them all in one day. This way you are covered if you feel like taking a day off.

Giving up, a lot of bloggers give up because they don’t see a lot of readers and think what they are doing is just a waste of time. I hate to say this, but it might be a waste of time in that niche or it could just be that you haven’t cracked the keywords that you need in the search engines yet.

They keep writing posts and when they look at their blog they don’t see comments and they don’t see sales through their affiliate links. This actually adds to the burnout because it is harder to write when you don’t think anyone is reading it.

But here a not so secret, all blogs start with very little traffic, very few readers and very few comments on the posts. From looking at my traffic stats I average about 1 comment for every 500 visitors and most of those are from regular readers. If you have done your homework for the niche and keywords you will end up with visitors sooner or later so just keep posting and use some of the other techniques to get traffic to your site.

How To Blog synopsis:

Do it now, get your first post up. Don’t worry about appearance or anything else that can come later.

Your topic should be something you love or at least like this will help you avoid burnout.

Once you are comfortable writing a blog you should do some niche research and keyword research but if you aren’t comfortable writing something for the whole world to see you probably shouldn’t be blogging.

Once you have found a niche you can work in it is time to actually set up your blog the right way and get your traffic from the search engines, social sites, RSS feeds and anywhere else you can get it from but the key on how to blog is to get your first post up for the world to see.

This is a post that I am creating using Windows Live Writer and I am curious as to how it will turn out on the blog itself.

So I will insert an image below and see what that looks like. I will also have the option of putting a tilt to the image and putting a custom border so I will play with that.

So I tilted it a little and picked the drop shadow border.

You can insert a map quite easily too.  To bad there aren’t any good maps of St. Thomas on there.

Now I am going to play with the text to see what comes up.

With the text you can do the standard

bold

Italic

underline

Strike Through

But if you notice above I couldn’t turn the bold off on the italic and I couldn’t make it italic.  Must be a bug.

You can get fancier with the text including using all the fonts available on your computer but I doubt these fonts will show up properly unless the person viewing the post has the same fonts on their computer.  This is hard to test so I am going to put some unusual fonts below and you can tell me if they show up right.

Jokerman font this should be a font with dots and dashes on it if you don’t see that font let me know.

Story Book this is a very curvy font

It will be interesting to see if the fonts get embedded so they show up on all computers.  But it is hard for me to check because I have the font on my computers.

I am sure there are other things you can do but that is enough for now except I will try a few of the plugins.

There is a cool plugin for smileys that lets you choose from msn & yahoo

This should also be tweeted and a digg button should show up when I publish but maybe not we will see