August 12th, 2010 by Lucie Bellemare
I have just updated my blog with a new Twitter Blog Widget!
I was previously using TweetMyBlog to show my latest tweets on my blog, but due to Twitter changes, they will discontinue their service on August 15. Consequently, I went to the Twitter website to fetch a new widget for my blog.
Here is how I did it:
- First, you need to log into your Twitter account.
- Then scroll down to the bottom and click on Goodies in the footer menu.
- On the Twitter Goodies page, you can choose a Tweet Button, which will allow people to easily post a tweet about your website on their Twitter timeline; a button, like the one I have in the upper right corner of my blog above (look for the Follow Me On Twitter bird); or a widget to show your latest tweets on your blog. This is the one we’re looking for here. Click on Widgets.
- You now need to select My Website if you want to put your widget on your website, or Facebook if you want to put your widget on Facebook. Select My Website.
- You now have 4 choices, which are self-explanatory: Profile Widget, Search Widget, Faves Widget or List Widget. Since what you want to do is post your own tweets on your blog, click on Profile Widget.
- You can now Customize Your Twitter Profile Widget. Every time you make a change, just click on the Test Settings button at the bottom, and you will see how your widget looks on the right. You can change your Preferences, the Appearance and the Dimensions of your widget. You can show any number of tweets and change the color of every item, from the links to the background. Feel free to experiment to get just the look you want for your blog.
That’s it! When you are happy with the way your widget looks, click on the Finish & Grab Code button, and copy and paste the code where you want your widget to appear on your blog. You can see mine in the top right corner of this page.
Now every time you make a new tweet, it will automatically show up in real time on your blog widget! Enjoy!
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November 30th, 2009 by Lucie Bellemare
You must have seen it by now: some of your Twitter friends promoting a site promising people to get them thousands of followers. You guessed it, I’m talking about BillionFollowers. It looks exciting, you visit the site and you start thinking, wow, imagine having all these new followers in my account! Very tempting indeed.
However, before joining, be sure to read their TOS. To become a member, you must give them your Twitter credentials (login details) and allow them to post to your Twitter feed every 4 hours. Can you imagine that? I don’t even tweet 4 times a day right now (although I should post more often!). If their bot posts an ad for their site on my Twitter account every 4 hours, my legitimate tweets will get lost in all that spammy promotion of their site. Yes, spammy.
The principle of the site is good, everyone (or at least every marketer!) wants more followers. It’s why we all join Twitter, right? To broadcast to the largest audience possible? It’s the endless tweeting of the same ads that is bad. If they were offering the same service, but letting members promote by themselves or set the frequency of the postings to once a day, or even once a week, it would be a lot better. What good is it if people start to unfollow you because they just can’t stand these BillionFollowers ads that you keep on posting over and over? (well, not you, but the site you gave access to your account).
As more and more people join this site, Twitter will become polluted with all these same identical ads popping all over all the time. Guess what? My bet is that the mighty Twitter machine will put its foot down and say “Enough!” When that day comes, you will not want to be a member of that site with all these annoying ads in your Twitter feed and Direct Messages… or your account just might be swept away in the process… Just a thought. It is possible that nothing as dramatic will ever happen.
Of course, you can still join as a VIP member. I was not able to find out how much it costs, so I guess you have to join to see that. VIP accounts are exempt from automatic tweets for promotional purposes. Is it worth it? I have no idea. Will you get your money’s worth? There’s only one way to find out. I guess it depends on what you want from your Twitter account.
In the end, one of the best ways to get more followers is to look for people who are like-minded, meaning people who are following the same people as you do or who are talking about the same things as you do. Yes, it will take more time than joining a site promising the world, but you will annoy less people in the process. And as you start manually following more people, you will find that more people are starting following you! Some people will follow you back just because you followed them first, and other people will start to follow you because you are following someone they are following… Viral marketing at its best!
Follow me on Twitter, I will follow you back!
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April 3rd, 2009 by Lucie Bellemare
You probably have heard of Twitter by now. If not, Twitter is a micro-blogging application or website that let’s you post Tweets (short messages) of a maximum length of 140 characters. At first glance, it may seem that there isn’t much to it, but this tool can be very powerful and viral.
Here is how Twitter works:
- You join Twitter.
- You start following a few people.
- The messages they post on their page automatically appear on your homepage, so you only have one page to monitor.
- You reply to some of the tweets that the people you are following post on their page.
- Their followers start to notice your replies, get interested and start following you.
- You start posting Tweets on your Twitter page.
- Your new followers click on the links included in your tweets and visit your website or affiliate website.
You can get some good results from Twitter. But as with anything, it is a numbers game. The more followers you have, the more success you will achieve.
There are some cool tools that can help you get more followers faster. For example:
ViralFollowers: This viral system is 100% free, and you don’t even need to give them your email address to start using it. As a bonus, you can promote another program and build your downline in that program.
The way it works is that, upon joining, you simply have to tweet a message in your Twitter account, and once you do, you will automatically start following 8 people. Some of them will follow you back. Then you promote your referral link, and each time someone joins under you, they start following you and 7 other people. They then start to promote their own link, with you in the #2 spot, and when people start following them, they also start following you. And so on for 7 levels! So your number of followers will increase rapidly. You will get more detailed information on the site.
Click here to visit ViralFollowers. [EDIT: This tool no longer exists.]
If you know of any other free viral Twitter systems, let me know by adding a comment below!
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March 6th, 2009 by Lucie Bellemare
In my last post, I told you about this great free WordPress installer that you can use to easily set up your own blog on your own domain with several plugins already installed and ready to monetize with Adsense.
Although this free WordPress installer was already very functional and quite complete, there is always room for improvement. I have since added a few other plugins that complement the ones that were already installed. These new plugins added some more functionality to my blog.
Here are the Twitter-related plugins that I have added to my blog up until now:
TweetMyBlog: (EDIT: This plugin has been discontinued) Once installed on your blog, this plugin will post a tweet on Twitter each time you publish a new post on your blog. This tweet will contain the title of your post along with a short URL that, when clicked, will take the visitor to your post on your blog. There will also be a line of text at the top of the Web page promoting TweetMyBlog with your affiliate link. Although this plugin is free, there is an upsell offer, which will eventually allow you to earn some affiliate commissions.
In addition, you can paste a snippet of code on your blog which will show your last several tweets. You can set the number of tweets you want to show. Take a look in the right column at the extreme right of this post to see what it looks like. It’s called “My Twitter Feed”. This will increase the number of people who view your Twitter profile, and it will at the same time post new dynamic content on your blog instantly and automatically!
TweetThis: This plugin allows you to add a text link at the end of your posts to encourage readers to make a tweet in their Twitter account to let their followers know about your great post. They simply have to click on the link, login to their Twitter account if they have not already and click on the Update button. This is a viral tool that will help you get more visitors and hopefully more subscribers too.
I have also added a “Follow Me on Twitter” icon under my lead capture form in the upper right corner. Hopefully people will click on it to see what it is and it will increase my number of followers.
Yes, but what is Twitter all about? If you don’t know what Twitter is, it is a micro-blogging platform where you can post messages of up to 140 characters about anything you like. You can include links if you want to. This is a viral tool, because if you start following a few people, some of them will follow you back, and their followers may see your profile in their follower or following list and decide to follow you also. The more followers you have, the more people will see or read your tweets (your posts on Twitter). To build rapport with your follower base, some people recommend alternating between tweets with links and tweets with no links. However, it is up to you what you want to do.
So there you go. There are many more plugins available on the Web, and if and when I implement more plugins, I will definitely let you know! Just make sure that you subscribe to my blog in the upper right corner of this page. 🙂
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(Disclaimer: Many of the links on this page are sponsored advertisements and referral links.
(Also, the views expressed here are correct to the best of my knowledge on the day they were posted on this blog.)