1. Useless Information.

It is true that many Twitter users update their Twitters with completely useless information. Do you really need to know that someone just finished their second cup of coffee or is leaving the office early for a pedicure? The good news is that if you find that you do not particularly enjoy a person’s tweets, you do not have to continue following them. But do not eliminate this option altogether. One of the most important aspects of Web 2.0 is engaging people in all aspects of their lives, even the mundane stuff. Share yourself, welcome the opportunity to let others share themselves with you, and you will go a long way toward building a loyal customer base. People are much more willing to do business with you if they think you have a vested interest in their needs and thoughts.

2. It is a Waste of My Time.

This is probably the most valid reason of all. But the truth is that many marketers generate traffic and leads when potential customers find them through Twitter. When the content you share is relevant and high-quality, you can drive visitors to your website to learn more. Twitter is simply another tool for online marketing, so do not write it off until you have given it a shot to see what it can do for you. Do some of your own research to discover the multitude of business uses for Twitter and you might just be convinced that It is not a total waste of time after all.

3. It is Time-Consuming.

Like any online endeavor, you can blow a lot of valuable time following your streams and entering your own tweets. But you can salvage some of your time by using RSS feeds to follow relevant conversations. Visit http://search.twitter.com and click on the link to Feed for this query. You can then follow the conversations that are most important and relevant to you and your business. If that is not optimal for you, simply discipline yourself to check only once or twice per day.

4. Twitter Does not Cater to My Customers.

Before you decide that your customers are not on Twitter, look for yourself. Go to http://Search.Twitter.com. Search for the name of your company, the name of your product, and keywords relevant to your business. If you are afraid that your market may be too niche-y for Twitter, remember that your job as a marketer is to find people where they are. If there are a few folks on Twitter within your niche, put yourself there as well.

5. It Could Lead to Bad Press.

Whether you are on Twitter or not, people are still talking about you, and you need to know about it. Even if there is poor feedback on Twitter, you need the opportunity to let folks know that you are aware and that you are going to do something about whatever it is that has disappointed them. If you respond quickly to the concerns of your detractors, you will go a long way towards putting out potentially damaging fires. Thoughtful responses make a huge difference in customer attitudes. Remember that if a critical mass of bloggers pick up on negative press and write about it themselves, things can get out of hand very quickly. On the other hand, you can make a great name for yourself if you address customer concerns promptly and tactfully.

There you have it. No more excuses for avoiding Twitter. Even if you think It is the most ridiculous tool ever invented, you still need to check it out for yourself. Give it some time and see what it can do for you. Explore different applications of this valuable tool and let it help you grow your business.

About the Author: Seomul Evans is an internet Marketing expert with a leading Search Engine Optimization specializing in Top Meta Search Engines and a contributor to Moe’s Online marketing Articles.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

5 Reasons To Avoid Twitter, And Why You Should Not

Hands up if you’re a Twitterholic. Yes, my hand’s up too. If you love the micro-blogging platform Twitter as much as I do, then keep reading.

I’ve put together a list of the coolest plug-ins and apps designed for us Twitterholics and scored each out of five on the *must have* scale.

Twitter Specific Tools:

1) TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ status on Twitter and lets you make posts from your browser status bar. It also allows you to switch between multiple Twitter accounts in one click. This is my #1 must-have, deal-breaker, cannot live without Twitter plug-in.

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

2) Retweet This is an application designed for use with the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in. It allows you to append a retweet button to the end of each Twitter entry to encourage your followers to retweet your posts.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

3) Classify Twitter Users is a script that allows you to classify Twitter users and decide whether they are worth following based on their friends, followers and post ratios. Another Greasemonkey app, it’s a great tool to help you weed out the Twitter spammers and fan boys from the socially healthy.

You can set the script to use your own Twitter user scales (e.g. spammer, social climber, social rock star) or just gather more information about people you are following.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

4) TwittAd allows Twitter users to monetize their account by accepting advertising on the background image of their Twitter user profile. You decide the duration and price advertisers pay for exposure and get paid for every hour you serve the ad.

Must Have Scale (2): • •

5) TwitterCounter lets you add a daily updating TwitterCounter to your blog so everybody can see how popular you are by the number of persons following you.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

6) TweetBeep is just like having Google Alerts for Twitter. It enables you to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products or your company via email. You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog. It’s a great tool for online reputation management and you don’t even have to be a Twitter user to benefit from it. TweetBeep is another one of my personal *must haves*.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

7) Twitter Grader measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user, calculated by the pace of their updates, the completeness of their profile, their number of followers and the network power of those followers.

Twitter Grader displays as a score out of 100 and is consistently updating and adapting as your Twitter account grows. Based on those grades, Twitter Grader lists the Twitter Elite globally and in each country, just like Technorati does for bloggers.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

TwitPic, as the name suggests, is a photo sharing tool for Twitter. When logged in, it allows you to upload photos and post them with comments as a Tweet. It works with a range of Twitter clients such as Twitterific, Twhirl and MobileTwitter and stores all your photos in a single location with updated viewing stats. As far as Twitter image sharing goes, this is king for reliability.

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

9) Twuffer is a Twitter buffer. It allows Twitter users to compose a list of future tweets, and schedule their release. Twuffer is ideal for making hourly, daily or monthly announcements or send post-dated birthday greetings or reminders to people about upcoming events. It’s also perfect if you’re the type of person who wants to give the impression that you never sleep.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

10) Twistori I have a real soft spot for this one. One of the developers is Amy Hoy, one of my favorite speakers from Webstock 2008 and a goth geek to boot. Twistori is a social experiment that taps into the Twitter conversations revolving around life’s central activities: Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel, Wish. You can click on any of these emotions and witness a live feed of Tweets that use them. It’s voyeuristic and utterly compelling.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

11) iTweet is another interface for Twitter. It has built-in auto-refresh, search and hash tags and features full follow, block and notifications features. Users can view and post user bio, location and URLs inline with their tweets. Another cool feature of iTweet is the ability to Retweet a user post with a single click.

Must Have Scale (3): • • •

12) Twitturly is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter. Similar to Digg, on Twitturly, people “vote” for a URL. The more votes it gets the better it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the home page and as the votes increase it gets displayed higher up the home page. Twitturly differs from Digg in that instead of voting on their site, you vote by participating on Twitter. Each time that you send a link to your followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes a note of it and applies your vote to that URL. It’s a great way to follow the loudest global conversations.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

13) Mr Tweet is another big favorite of mine. Similar to LinkedIn , it looks through your extended network and makes suggestions to help you build effective relationships on Twitter. For example, which of your followers should you be following in return? Who are the most influential people you should be following? Who are your followers following?

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

14) Twitter Search is Twitter’s own built-in and oft-overlooked search tool. You can use it to search for other Twitter users, keywords, hash tag topics and a range of cool shortcut items.

Must Have Scale (4): • • • •

Non Twitter Specific Tools:

15) FlipTitle is, not surprisingly, a tool that enables you to flip text upside down. It’s great for Twitter because sometimes your tweets can get lost in the conversation. Using FlipTitle makes sure they get noticed.

Must Have Scale (2): • •

16) Bit.ly is a very cool URL shortener that also includes click-thru statistics. Why is it perfect for Twitter? Because the length of the converted URLs is generally much shorter than other URL converters like TinyURL. When you are tweeting, space is premium as your whole post can only consist of 140 characters including spacing.

The other neat thing aspect of Bit.ly is that it keeps a record of clicks that your URLs received and where they originated from. It even provides a share button so you can re-tweet your URLs on Twitter or send them to friends on Facebook, Gmail or another email client.

Must Have Scale (5): • • • • •

So there you have it, 16 cool tools to help you indulge your Twitter addiction.

Happy Tweeting!

About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

This website goal is to bring together adventist blogs from all around the world. The Website is made in English language for a larger access. The proposed blogs are organized by languages and by blog content. Submitter may propose new categories.

We accept Institution, Organization, Church, or Seventh-day Adventist member blogs that have content in accordance with the Seventh-day Adventist Church doctrine.

If you have an adventist blog you can submit it at www.AdventistBlogs.com :
- free submission – with a reciprocal link to AdventistBlogs.com
- $10 USD/year – regular link (no need to add a reciprocal link to us)
- $50 USD/year – featured link in its own category (these links shows at the top of each detail category page)

To submit links and articles you need to first register:
http://adventistblogs.com/profile.php?mode=register

Then, after you login, click on Submit Link. For Category choose one at the section Adventist Blogs – English language.

You can also click Submit Article button to propose an article to our website.

Lucian Web Service is an Internet company for web hosting, quality small business and corporate website design, e-commerce, content management system, media, domains, online stores, advertising, web school, online marketing, located in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada.

INTERnational Christian Education & Relief Society, operating as Intercer Canada, is an Adventist non-profit Organization based out in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. Intercer Canada’s goal is to promote Gospel through Internet and volunteer for social services.

We wait to see your blogs submitted @ AdventistBlogs.com!

God’s blessings,

Lucian Mihailescu
www.LucianWebService.com
www.InterCer.ca

Moved from its old location within the Google Groups framework to a brand new home within Google’s own support site, the Webmaster Help Group has received a much-needed technological upgrade. Gone are the old ‘Usenet Feel’ and the clunky, unresponsive, plain-text interface, replaced with a slick new look, rich-text functionality and the ability to cross-reference answers, post live links, cite resources and even embed video, all of which combine to turn the group from being a great webmaster resource into a truly outstanding one.

Another major improvement in the new group is the introduction of user-levels, ranging from 1 through 6 [One being a new user and six being a Google employee], with increasing access to the group’s new functionalities as users gain reputation and progress through the levels. And, since a user’s level is clearly displayed next to any posts they make, it is now much easier for new forum members to distinguish whether the person answering their question is also a new user, a regular, a top contributor or even a Google employee.

So, from a sheer technology & functionality standpoint, Google Webmaster Help has taken a huge leap forward

But, like so many things, a support group of this kind cannot function on technology alone; it needs expert members, capable of dealing with the myriad problems webmasters around the globe will ask it to address.

As things stand currently, some three and a half years after the group’s inception, Webmaster Help is inhabited by a colourful assortment of professionals from around the globe, always ready to answer the many questions thrown at them by close to 42,000 members. During the past year, the group has also seen the ever increasing participation of Google Employees (affectionately called Googlers), with even such ‘celebrities’ as Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik, John Müller and Susan Moskwa answering the occasional frustrated query.

Indeed, given the ever-growing number of Googlers regularly frequenting the group, Webmaster Help can now safely be counted as the best place to get your website questions answered by Google’s own staff, given that the company fields no means for webmasters to contact them via phone or email.

However, the Webmaster Help Group’s strength lies not simply in the participation of Google’s staff, but mainly in its population of resident experts, dubbed Bionic Posters by Google. Currently numbering fourteen, the ‘Bionics’ are an eclectic crowd of experts in subjects ranging from site design, CSS, Java and W3C compliance to more SEM-specific topics such as improving conversion rates and SEO Consultancy, who freely donate their time each day to help webmasters and frustrated site owners who reach the group in need of some expert advice.

Ultimately it is this little crowd, along with a growing number of less frequent regulars, who answer the vast majority of users’ questions, be they about Rankings, HTML, Penalties, SEO or whatever. And, thanks to the new group’s architecture and facilities implemented by Google, they will now be able to answer those same questions far more efficiently.

And, with persistent rumours of a group companion-site, laden with answers, statistics and diagnostics tools coming in the New Year, Google’s Webmaster Help Group is poised to further extend its reputation of being the single most comprehensive resource of its kind on the internet.

Having spent a substantial amount of my spare time around Webmaster Help since August 2006, I have witnessed a great many changes and improvements to the group, though none on quite this scale. I have also been privileged enough to be part of an online community which has taught me more about web design and online promotion during these last 28 months than any other resource on the web, and would heartily recommend anyone reading this article to take a look at the group and learn from the wealth of knowledge shared by its many inhabitants.

As a technical writer and SEO consultant with a career spanning almost fifteen years, Sasch Mayer has been living in the Republic of Cyprus since 2005. He has helped countless webmasters and online business owners to diagnose problems with their websites and is rated as a Top Contributor by Google in its Webmaster Help Group. His company, IceGiant Web Services also undertakes graphic and web design work.

By Sasch Mayer

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Google unleashes its new Webmaster Help Group

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