Whenever someone builds a brand new website, he or she usually needs a leg up in order to get the traffic ball rolling. Before I tell you an easy way to get just a wee bit of help from me, I want to point out something about the "leg up" American idiom.
This is a really simple Twitter contest and it should be a lot of fun (at least for me). Who are you competing with? You're only competing with yourself and my time.
This is a challenge for you to write your best. It's a writing challenge as well as a contest. I can't guarantee that I'll use what you submit, at least not immediately, but I'll try my best. I'm constraining myself to one post per day (and two on Sundays, or something like that) in an attempt to continue producing quality versus quantity.
Before I answer the question, I need to tell you a little bit about Twitter. Twitter is a mass communications tool that's not used exclusively for answering the question of "What are you doing?". There are people on Twitter having long conversations, with most of it being public.
Quickly approaching 2 days since my last post, some of you may have wondered what happened to me. It's quite unlike my normal routine of posting 1 or more articles per day. Never fear, I am still here.
I'm not going to go into a routine of whining about reasons. If you ever doubt that I'll be around tomorrow, next week or even next year, then you need to read "Never give up. Never surrender." to read my thoughts on it.
I'm going to quickly give you a rundown on the things I've been doing in the background as well as the things I plan on doing in the next few days, or possibly even hours.
Weekends
What is that ancient commercial slogan? Weekends were made for Michelob? Something like that, I'm sure. If you monitor website traffic, have you ever noticed that your traffic slows down from Friday night until about Sunday afternoon?
I didn't say it stops. It just slows down. I see about two thirds of my normal traffic (and what's normal?) from Friday night to Saturday evening in the US. I know quite a few people back in the states and I know they don't hop back onto their computers until later in the weekend. Friday nights are for movies and running around with friends doing God knows what.
Unlike my counterparts over there, I don't have many friends here in the Philippines and movie-going is a major outing and not to be done at night. There's only one local theater and the choices are limited.
Keyword Order
Does the order of keywords in a post title make a difference? How about in the content itself? I have verifiable proof that it does. Just Google for "twitter twirl" and see where my previous post, "Twitter, twhirl and Guy Kawasaki", shows up in the results pages and then do it for "twirl twitter".
The first search showed my post at #19. The second showed it at #5. Your mileage may vary. It's amazing that it showed in the index this quickly. It hasn't been 24 hours since it was posted. I was confused about ranking in the wrong order until I figured out that I had misspelled "twhirl" as "twirl" in the post content. Apparently, other people misspell it when searching for it too, as I noticed in the searches for it in my log.
Changing the search to "twitter twhirl" and "twhirl twitter" yielded #4 and #52. I rank better for "twirl twitter" than "twhirl twitter". Amazing.
Website Traffic Changes
I started experimenting with keyword stuffing, density and different types of posts and topics in January of this year. I've also reduced my social interaction with other blogs and websites, without becoming completely antisocial.
I've noticed my daily search traffic rising and my social traffic sinking. It's exactly what I expected to happen.
There's Always A Reason
The biggest reason I'm become less socially active in the blogosphere is because I'm reading the same things over and over again. Rehashes of rehashes. I'm looking for things that inspire me and I'm not finding the inspiration I'm looking for.
On the flip side of that coin, I completely understand that people won't want to return to visit this blog for the exact same reason. If I continue to harp about the same things over and over again, and then rehash what someone else already wrote about (even unintentionally), it makes for a mundane reading session.
I joined Twitter a few hours ago, after being invited twice. Okay, so I'm slow and I know it's been around a while. I was reluctant to join because of my less than perfect experience with Pownce. I'm not going to compare the two of them, just in case that's what you're expecting, because umm… I don't want to.
Anyway, so I joined and then followed a few people that I'd been in contact with. Some of them have followed me in return (you can follow me at http://twitter.com/rtcunningham, if you wish). Shortly after joining, Lin Burress of "Telling It Like It Is" straightened me right out on using the buttons of the web interface.
Guy Kawasaki
A short time later, Lin recommended that I pick an area at "Alltop", a link directory on steroids, and sign up because she was seeing a lot of referrers from there. When I couldn't find a sign-up spot, Lin recommended that I send a "tweet" to Guy Kawasaki.
Umm… you know, whether he puts his trousers on the same way I do or not, I don't feel comfortable asking for something from him quite yet. Heck, I'm just happy he's following me on Twitter!
twirl
A short time later, Maki of "Dosh Dosh" recommended I try out twirl, a desktop client for Twitter. It took me a whopping 5 minutes to download it, install it, configure it and start using it.
I am now officially addicted to Twitter.
I belong to a few blog-specific social sites:
Today, I was in the process of setting up a Twitter account when I stopped myself and asked myself a reasonable question: Why?
At first, I put the gee whiz, golly neato widgets for MyBlogLog and spicypage on the sidebars of my blog. I recently took them back off because the image loading slows everything down. It's nice to look at… for a while. I'm keeping TheGoodBlogs widget on the blog (for now) because it blends in better and also doesn't have a bunch of new images to load every time the page is refreshed.
I use Yahoo Instant Messenger to keep in contact with my son in Germany. Regular phone calls from the Philippines to anywhere are too costly. I also use it to stay in contact with my wife's cousin in Phoenix, Arizona. Now, I'm using it to stay in contact with some other bloggers. While I like leaving it up for those reasons, I still find it annoying because it tends to interrupt me too often. Twitter is another kind of "instant messenger" and sure to be another source of distraction.
I can't keep up with the ones I'm subscribed to so why would I want to add another doohickey to the list? With the recent plethora of new blog-specific social networking sites popping up, we all have to ask ourselves which ones are worth being involved in and how much is too much. I'm not keeping Twitter and I'm not going to be a frequent visitor to any of the ones I already belong to, so why bother?
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