Blog Tech Guy

A free “geek’s Guide To Promoting Yourself and Your Online Business in 140 Characters or Less with Twitter” is now available for free from Geekpreneur. For those new to Twitter and it’s benefits then it’s a great guide.

The book is split into four main sections:
1. Why You Need To Join Twitter Right Now
2. How To Use Twitter As A Mini Blog
3. Using Twitter To Enhance Your Online Business
4. Twitter Tools

The book is 48 (short, fat) pages long, with the first section explaining neatly what Twitter is. It has some quick tips on getting your page set up, finding people to follow, and more importantly, getting people to follow you.

The second section gives you more tips and advice on writing tweets (your messages on Twitter are called tweets), while the third part has some good solid advice on building your business and brand through Twitter. Finally the book talks about all the (free) Twitter tools out there that can make posting tweets easier, or help you automatically add blog posts.

Personally, I wouldn’t think too long and hard about, just join and follow me and I’ll be your first follower back :). If you like Twitter then I’m also on Plurk if you want to give this Twitter competitor a try.

As an internet professional I read, and watch, a lot of information online about websites and how to improve them. Here are five quick tips I learned this week about improving the conversion of your website, blog, ecommerce site, newsletter or squeeze page:

1. Use the word “your”. Treating visitors as if they’re people (even friends), and your site is all about them can increase your sign-up or conversion rates.

2. Add video, video and more video. Something I don’t do enough of myself, but it works. Whether it’s a video loading/squeeze page to get newsletter signups, a demo of your company’s services, or even a silent, short video of the product you’re selling, the evidence is that it could be phenomenal for your conversion rate. Don’t believe me? Watch this video on the subject.

3. A flashing arrow can help. Yes, really. I’m against flashing graphics in a lot of situations (and especially more than one on a page), but apparently this can really help. Look, isn’t it nice?

4. Add a Call Me button, usually this is done with Skype, and is very easy to do. Being able to contact someone easily, especially before purchasing something.

5. Tell them what your site is about and how it can help them. Very obvious I know, but sometimes your company name may have nothing to do with what you provide. Don’t leave it to someone to work out for themselves, let them know immediately.

Quick and easy isn’t it?

Social media is more than just social bookmarking, however it does make up a large proportion of it. With so many social bookmarking websites out there, tools have developed to allow you to ease the process of submitting one article to many different sites. I decided to take a look at Only Wire, Post Toaster, Social Marker, Social Poster, Social Submit , Socialize It and Tagenie.

The below list is a matrix of which social bookmarking sites the most popular social bookmarking submission tool websites help you submit to. These tools are where you still have to finally submit the article yourself. They are not automated spam tools, and they don’t automatically create accounts either. They just speed up the process of browsing to the relevant sites and easing the burden of copying and pasting in most cases.

Many sites are in particular niches (and languages) and so may not be relevant for your site, and also some sites (such as Newsvine) don’t allow self-promotion. Also, believe it or not, not all social bookmarking sites are covered here so it’s best to search for ones in your niche that might have been excluded.

Finally this list is up to date as of when this post was published. As I’m not a mad man I won’t be updating it frequently as services are constantly adding sites to their offerings.

If you enjoy this, you may also like my Ultimate Guide To Video Sharing Sites covering 61 different video sharing and editing websites.

If you enjoyed this, you may also like my Ultimate Guide To Video Sharing Sites covering 61 different video sharing and editing websites.

I’m fortunate enough to have not needed to do any advertising yet, but I always like to be prepared so I just got my first set of advertising banners, and I thought I’d share them with you. Warning, there may be lots of flashing!

Banner advertising is still a very popular way of promoting a website/business, and I’m just starting some tests to see how well they convert. Business is great at the moment, but there will be a time I need to promote myself more and testing between banner advertising, Pay-Per-Click advertising and other methods will help me plan in advance.

I used Banners Mall after a recommendation, and was very impressed. Fast turnaround time and unlimited revisions were all done quickly and promptly, so many thanks to Chris and the team there. I paid slightly extra to get the Photoshop versions of the files too so have created an extra design and played around with the timings of the ads.

This is my standard horizontal 468×60: