The Web Wrangler

This first link is actually from last week, but Erica at Erica.biz wrote a post, How To Make Money on the Internet, that gave me one of those “Duh! Why didn’t I already know that?” moments. I’ll be writing more on that next week, but for now I’ll say that her advice to pick ONE thing and learn it well before moving on has inspired me to narrow my focus to understanding Twitter inside and out when it comes to business and marketing. That’s why most of the following links are Twitter-related. If you find yourself a little bit baffled by Twitter, then these next few links are for you:

JeffBullas.com’s 10 Ways To Use Twitter For Business is a good rundown of some of the best reasons for a business to get involved on Twitter. All of the reasons listed are good ones, but #s 5 and 10 are the best reasons — Twitter gives you an opportunity to engage with your audience or customer-base on a personal level and put a human face on your brand.

The Key to Twitter Success? Unfollowing. at ThinkSync is a great article about defying the convention that you must follow people on Twitter who follow you. If people aren’t using Twitter to engage and give back and are only using it as a broadcast medium for their own links, or worse, if people aren’t actually using Twitter at all, what good does it do you to follow them? The answer: none at all. This article gives tips on how to prune your Following list to one that will provide useful engagement instead of being a time suck and energy drain.

TweetSpinner is a nifty app I came across the other day to help you manage your Twitter account. The free version is pretty much limited to cleaning up Direct Message spam and scheduling tweets, but just those to functions are pretty darn useful. Paid accounts offer a lot more functionality, including automated Follow-management and the ability to rotate profiles and background images. Pretty impressive for one little app.

And in the non-Twitter department…

Pat Flynn over at The Smart Passive Income Blog offers up 3 Street Selling Tactics That Boosted E-Mail Subscribers Over 100%. These are some tactics he learned from charity workers who’ve approached him about giving. I haven’t had time to try my own hand at any of them yet, but they do indeed look effective.

And finally…

Hive Logic’s new E-mail Enkoder Form seems like it just might be the answer to the dilemma: do I post a link to my e-mail address and risk having it crawled by Spambots, or should I use an e-mail form instead? Just enter your e-mail address and link text in the Enkoder Form, and it will provide you with a line of javascript that encodes your e-mail address link and makes it invisible to robots. This may be the best of both worlds.

Until next week,

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