I used to use the plugin, tweetme to automatically publish posts to our twitter feed. Recently, it’s started playing up and will never connect to twitter. Annoying.
So, I’ve moved over to auto tweet 2.1 which so far, seems to be doing an excellent job. It shouldn’t be hard should it…
Install the plugin, add your twitter account your WP settings and off you go.
Update… It would seem that auto tweet doesn’t really do what it says it should either… Off to find an alternative.
This one’s written for a friend whose tumblr blog needed a few more visitors. He asked me to help and I suggested that Twitter might be one way to achieve this. After verbalising his distaste for a few moments he came round to the idea. Here’s what we did:
The next thing to do is get followers on Twitter. Here’s what we recommend, in no particular order, just do them all:
Things not to do:
That’s it, have patience – it doesn’t happen over night.
Chris Brogan writes one of the few blogs I read on a regular basis. A marketer who’s truely helped grow my business and this blog.
A few days ago, I realised I hadn’t followed him yet on Twitter. Two hours after doing so, he followed back. Result!
So I sent him a direct message saying hi. I was more than chuffed when he replied a few minutes later.
I’m not just talking about the excitement of having a brief conversation with someone I look up to. I’m talking about the ways in which we now communicate. We’re now connected to almost everyone around the world. I don’t even think we realise how privileged we are.
Think about it, I can walk down the road and send a message on my Blackberry to Chris Brogan (who I’ve never met in person)! The problem we’ll face in the future isn’t how to get in touch, it’s how to get away.
In life and business, he who dares wins.
As discussed many times before, people like to follow like sheep. People don’t like to be different. Make sure you think differently if you want your business to succeed.
Here are a few things you can do to help build your business:
Got of an idea? Implement it before someone else does. Watch your competition but do something different. Think about what people actually want, not what you think they want.
Ideas are nothing without great implementation. Everyone can copy an idea, only a few can implement them.
You’ll get an unpleasant feeling in your stomach when you notice your copy on another website. The sad truth is that if you write decent copy, it’s likely to happen to you. The Internet lends itself to plagiarism and it seems almost acceptable these days. It’s not and fortunately, if it happens to you, you’re well protected (although you will almost certainly have to spend some time with the lawyers).
Intelligent people don’t copy and paste. They’ll adapt, bend and grow their own story from your copy. This is pure evolution and it helps you grow too. Without competition, the world would be a very dry place.
Over the last 12 months, we’ve discovered 3+ companies who’ve borrowed our copy for their own sites and weblogs. We let the first one continue (I will explain in a later post), the second one took the offending copy down and the third ended up in court and landed a fine that almost sent them out of business.
How to deal with it
Blatant copy / paste plagiarism is simple to tackle. Write a firm but polite message to them asking them to remove it. It’s likely they’ll panic and remove it immediately. Rightly so.
If they refuse, find a decent copyright lawyer and send them the offending copy along with your original. Remember, it’s not worth dragging them through the courts unless you know they can afford it. The fines are hefty these days – only those with money in the bank or a decent insurance policy will pay.
Subtle copyright infringement is still worth pursuing. You can receive compensation from a company on the basis that they’ve profited from your ideas.
You can’t really copyright an idea.
And you can’t stop your competition from copying your prices. However, ideas are nothing without good implementation… Think about it.
Make friends not war
In today’s market, it’s better to be friends with your competitors than enemeies. At PolkaSpots, we routinely share information between a select group of Wi-Fi companies. It’s one of the main reasons for our growth this year but was not well received when we started. After all, would you trust your competition? Try it, just be careful.
I wrote this blog from a garden centre, somewhere in Shropshire on Wednesday afternoon. I’m killing a few minutes between a site visit and a 250km drive back to West London. The perfect place to write a blog – no distractions, coffee and some ice cream 
These days, my time is always limited. In the office, I’m constantly bombarded by questions, emails and phone calls. Everyone needs some space to write something interesting.
Amazingly, I’m not always near an Internet connection despite being the proud owner of polkaspots.com! And yet, I publish a blog everyday…
By using all the tools you have, you can easily write half a dozen blogs in one go and then publish them automatically over a week or more. New blogging software does this at the click of a button.
This means your readers still get their daily digest despite the fact that you’re half-way up a mountain or on a beach. It also means you can relax a bit more.
It also means, you can come back and check your blog before it goes out for typos. If you feel like writing, sit down and write.
Wordpress makes it simple to publish your blogs in advance
I’m sitting at my desk when a friend came to ask for some PolkaSpots Internet Vouchers.
Before long we were talking and I asked him if he read my blog. What’s a blog he responded?
I’ve made a mistake writing simonmorley.co.uk: I haven’t started at the beginning.
A blog is a place where people can express themselves online. According to Wikipedia, blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject. Historically they were called Web Logs.
They started out as bland little affairs with some text and maybe a few pictures. Nowadays, entire websites are built around them and include podcasts, videos, photos, forums and everything else you can imagine.
Anyone can write one and there’s loads of software you can use. Most of it’s ridiculously simple. I use WordPress – it took me ten minutes to install and twenty minutes to configure.
You can now subscribe to receive blog entries by email. You can subscribe to mine here.
One of my first blogging rules is to find your place of inspiration. A place where your mind can wander off and think of nice things.
Once you’ve found this place and have some ideas in your head, sit down and write your blogs. A few of them – in one go.
Blogging is a little bit like running – you have to practise a lot before you get good. Naturally some of us are better at writing than others, but there’s a blogger in everyone.
If you have a few ideas in your mind, writing them will be easy – they should flow out of you. Once you’ve written one or two, you’ll find your fingers and mind are more flexible.
You don’t even need to publish them in one go. Set your blogging software to publish them in advance or just save a draft so you can come back to them later.
I consider myself a serial Internet fiddler. I love tweaking layouts, designs, colours, sizes and shapes. Experimenting with new tools, platforms, blogging software, online shops and more… I spend hours on twitter everyday.
“Sometimes you just need to get on with things”
Last weekend, I spent two hours migrating my blog from Blogger to WordPress. (I know someone who’ll be quite upset when he’s reading this – he thinks I never get anything done.) But that’s my job: I need to understand how and why things work so I can help others choose the best option. And, I have just written this here: importing your Blogger blog to WordPress here.
Spending hours on Facebook or Twitter everyday isn’t productive unless you know what you’re doing. In fact, even writing blogs can be couter productive and damaging to you and your business. We have a list of blogs that we show to clients that are great and another list that are shocking and embarrassing.
“Writing a really bad blog is worse than having no blog at all”
Next time you’re fiddling with your blog or just the Internet, ask yourself the question: “Will this change benefit me?” If the answer’s not yes, don’t do it – and be honest with yourself!
My private blog’s been on blogger for about 2 years. This weekend I decided I fancied a change – I wanted to move back to WordPress.
Blogger was good for me when I started out – no hosting charges, simple to use, OK to customise and loads of (free) templates. I just didn’t like the post editor and I was starting to get annoyed with the plugins and templates – nothing was ever in the right place.
Despite having access to a thousand web servers, I like the hosted route because you don’t have to worry about a thing, including being hacked. I went over to wordpress.com and opened an account. Within seconds, I was up and running. Simple.
How do you import from Blogger to WordPress?
I headed over to Tools > Import and found a significant range of blogs that I could import from.
Clicking Import from Blogger, the system automatically connected and then it was pretty much done. Even my drafts came in.
That’s impressive. It wasn’t long ago that we’d have spent days and days doing that. Well done WordPress (again).