You probably already heard that Google started their own URL Shortening Service but, the Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products only and not for broader consumer use.

I didn’t really get that last part, highlighted above, and didn’t really care. You see, I have my own URL shortening Service, have accounts created and obtaining API for extended statistics at both Bit.ly and cli.gs sites, have preview feature set-up for any tinyURL.com, and my existing sites already have a wide variety of URL shortening services available from plugins activated such as Digg Digg and the like.

HAVE YOU BEEN TO YOUR FEEDBURNER RECENTLY?

I remember setting up a bunch of new blogs back in early October 2009 and noticed that there is no more “PING” series of sites … because the “Pingshot” service just notifies all interested services when my feed changes. Before, I had to select a standard set, plus 5 additional ones and who the heck know which ones were better or not better. Honestly .. I’d rather not know! 😀

* BUT – WHAT IS THIS NEW TAB? “SOCIALIZE” ?

There’s a new tab called “Socialize” that lets you publish to your twitter account – directly from your Feedburner account. You have to first give google authorization (OAuth”) to your twitter account and if you are familiar with twitterfeed.com .. the options are pretty similar. Please see the image below and, of course, check out your own Feedburner account!

By the way .. I use the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin on all my blogs and although I’m not really sure if I need it or not have been using the Full Text Feed plugin that prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a “more” link to my website’s feed. So far it ‘ain’t broke my wordpress upgrades to newer versions, so I haven’t stopped using both together.

I AM GIVING THIS A TRYOUT

Currently, I have 93 feeds with my Twitterfeed account .. but, on my new SportsHEN blog (Which will be a front for my five new Olympic Winter Sports Blogs 2010) I have set my feedburner to be submitting my published posts to my newly created twitter.com/SportsHEN account.

This should be interesting to see how this works!

Click on the image to see a bigger screen image view)



View at EasyCaptures.com

Have you tried the Google URL Shortener with your Feedburner account yet?

I am trying something new this month …

I have just purchased the Genesis Rocket system (formerly TwitterRocket) to help me increase my twitter followers.

Imagine Twitter as a massive pool containing millions of people, all connected together either directly or indirectly, some talking, some listening, all communicating. Your influence on Twitter, and therefore the power that you wield, is determined by many things, including the number of people that follow you, the quality of the people that follow you, and the quality of the people that follow the people that follow you. More than that, your influence is determined by how you act, what you say, and what you do on Twitter. To make Twitter work for you it is important to have a growing number of high quality followers and to do certain things that influence your followers, and their followers, making them do exactly what you want them to do. When Twitter works for you your followers, and their followers, will want to do exactly what you want them to do. Twitter, because of it’s viral social structure, makes it easy for anyone to build influence. Once you have influence you can do anything.

And Genesis Rocket shows you exactly how to achieve the level of influence that you need to succeed, 1 step at a time, in 5 easy to follow 30 minute steps.

I have been using twitter since beginning of January 2008 and have various twitter accounts created for separate purposes and slowing trying to increase my followers. Except for @HARTmarket twitter account, all my blogs are using twitterfeed to shoot out messages to my main twitter account – @PetLvr. This is the twitter account I do all of my chatting and tweeting. I know there is automated stuff, but I believe the information that is covered, is a smaller percentage of the manual and personal tweeting that I do, that it is overlooked and admired by my followers! (/ego off)

However, I know with my @HARTmarket I don’t chat much and am currently about 95% automated tweeting (via twitterfeed) new daily posts coming from the Shops @ HART Market store. My followers are growing, but the followers are not as .. “loyal?” .. “dedicated?” … well, not as impressive as my PetLvr followers. About 1/3 of these followers are just like me – people trying to push their affiliate products or some other hidden agenda in the hopes of trying to sell something. I mean, all these followers and their tweets (just like mine) are good – but, only for those specifically looking for these type of information and links!

My PetLvr crowd is different though. Some are specifically looking for information (pet related information) but that’s not all people could be looking for. I have never automated any script to obtain followers on this “clean” twitter account and believe people follow @PetLvr because of the content I present, and because of my own social nature and status in my social communities that I participate. In this case – (sorry) – I do wish that people trust me enough with my posts that they are actually reading my stuff …. and, if I recommend a product, review or even a movie to see there maybe some people that just might say .. hey! If @PetLvr likes it .. maybe I will too! 😀

Enter the GENESIS ROCKET Experiment

I have mentioned that I have purchased the Genesis Rocket System and have been linking to my affiliate link – meaning, if you decide to purchase this as well I will earn a commission. But, this is an interesting concept. You can automate ways to increase your followings, and I will be doing this as an experiment.

BUT – it is NOT what you think – that I will turn the key “on” and suddenly get 1000’s of new followers without any work. There is work and there are good tips in the 46 page .pdf Ebook that I haven’t even thought of before! Automation would include stuff like using your twitterfeed account to help promote your twitter account. In reality, I think if I were to try to describe it any better, you are really trying to get targeted twitter followers and providing information to these twitter followers to make them want to follow you, and find more twitter followers! For more information than that, I suggest you at least read the sales pitch on the following link:

In reality, what sets those who succeed on Twitter apart from those who fail, can be documented, broken up into 5 simple steps, and turned into a bullet proof plan that will teach you to create multiple pockets of passive income over and over again.

Genesis Rocket is that plan. A plan that will show you, step by step, how to build, maintain, promote, develop and profit from your Twitter account.

The Experiment – The Pet Care Shop @ HART Market

I have created a new twitter account for this experiment …. twitter.com/PetcareShop … and it will be this twitter account that I will be testing the tips and techniques used in the Genesis Rocket system to try to increase targeted followers and hopefully, increase affiliate commissions on my Pet Care Shop @ HART Market sales!

Now, I know that because of this is a twitter account for a “store” .. I don’t expect to obtain growth as much as the 1,000/week. But, I will be happy if by March 1st I can reach over 2,500 followers (about 300/week) and this will be my goal. If successful, I probably won’t be USING this system 100% on my other twitter accounts, but you can probably bet that I will implement some of the techniques and tips that will have worked for me.

Do you remember all those spammy links to ‘guaranteed’ ways to increase your twitter followers by 16,000 in a week or whenever? I probably looked at all these systems and couldn’t believe there are a lot of suckers out there (although, a few geniuses selling those ebooks). I recalled looking at Twitter Rocket just about the time it changed its name to Genesis Rocket and thought if I would ever try a system, this one would be that system. The others are just a time bomb waiting for their accounts to be disabled, in my opinion. I had a little extra money in my own paypal account and decided to give it a try. Also, as an affiliate – you do make 50% earnings so, if two of my readers also try this system with me – my money is paid! And, you can do the same.

My experiment will begin January 5th, 2010 (after my wife goes back to work from the Christmas Break :D)

Did you want to try the experiment with me? Maybe we can look back December 31, 2010 and see how successful we were with this!

The father of an 11-year child on Facebook has given me some concern to rethink my “Facebook” activity. The father is a “Friend” in real life and his children is on facebook and they also “Friend”‘ed me.

In conversation with the father yesterday, he mentioned that the child was concerned because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings .. apparently I am spamming him! He is just getting started on Facebook, and although he might have over 100 friends himself .. I’m his only friend that posts more than once a day.

Actually – I just looked – over one 24 hour period – I have published 23 posts on Facebook! I think looking backwards and forward, the posts in any given day could amount between 20-35 extra posts, depending on how much extra time I have to write and create new content and promote them!

As you can see there are a lot of posts! Of the 23 posts .. 8 of them are manually posted by me either on Facebook, or via Twitter which is posted automatically to twitter. The rest are automated posts to my twitter account either directly from my blogs and their feeds, and/or manually posted from my SU.PR account which, posts to Facebook and Twitter separately, so when the twitter post goes through – it posts twice to Facebook! (There were 2 instances of this above).

I’m guessing that probably NONE of them really were really interesting to my Friend’s 11-year old child and while we are friends and able to keep in touch in Facebook, I don’t expect him to be a reader of my blogs et al.

My plan is to get my content out there .. to market my stuff, market myself, and find new traffic. But, I already know that I am on the cutting edge with my blogs. I monetize them to the max. I try to promote the posts to the max. I have a popup trying to obtain newsletter subscribers to the max. I post all of my posts directly to twitter to the max. I’m a “Maxxie” type of guy!! (my Papillon dog is named Maxxie! :D)

Well .. good news – I don’t have my @HARTmarket twitter account posting here to Facebook. If I did .. it would post another 60-70 more posts a day!!

About Facebook Fan Pages

I’ve been on Facebook for a while, and have a slew of friends without even using Facebook (or, was that a gaggle of friends? a flock of friends?) Anyway, When I finally decided that I really wanted FAN Pages and set up 5 fan pages for each section of my network of blog sites … I really did not know what to do with my “Personal Account” to which the fan pages are attached to! At first, I had all these NEW friend requests, and ignored them hoping to only get fans. But, I wanted to follow people back, and they do not all have Fan pages themselves! If I were to follow interesting people on Facebook, then I would have to add them as a friend to do that. The next thing you know, I just started accepting all friend requests and even sought out friends myself!

Something Has To Be Done

In the next week or so, I am going to try figuring out a better way to not spam my Facebook readers, while still trying to get the word out – so to speak. I think I learned my lesson now. I have only been tying into the Facebook crowd since post-summer 2009 and have a lot to figure out. Questions that I am concerned with right now are:

1) Do I really need to replicate twitter updates over on facebook?
2) Do I really want to replicate twitter updates over on facebook?

Granted, I might have a lot more sites than the average person on Facebook, but how do other people manage their facebook profiles?

Feel free to offer me some sage advice, tips and suggestions! // Thanks… HART

I’ve decided to add TweetMeme’s “Retweet Button” to all my sites. I am a fan of twitter, and although I have added the Wp-To-Twitter wordpress plugin which, included with other social media buttons appears at the bottom of each of my posts, I think this is complimentary. I remember looking at this plugin early on, and didn’t want anything to do with it because I never saw the RT’s .. it was all going to @tweetmeme, but they changed that. Also, I was receiving a conflicting cron error message with my other twitter plugins (tweet this and wp-to-twitter) so I assumed having more than one twitter plugin will always conflict. This one doesn’t conflict!

The tweetmeme button shows the number of retweets of the post, so I can see how many people LUV the post 😀 .. plus I have configured it to mention @PetLvr (me!) so I know our posts have been retweeted. It’s easy to install – just like all wordpress plugins .. go into your dashboard, click Plugins, then click Add New .. and search for “Tweetmeme” .. and install, then activate. Simple 😀

A few things of note ..

1)

When I activated the plugin for the first time, the plugin appeared next to every post on the front page. Personally, I think that is overkill, because I am using the “Evermore” plugin to show only a few paragraphs of each post with the [more] link, and the button seemed to overwhelm the front page!

So – this is what I did. I’ve edited the single.php page (or appropriate file where the single post is being displayed) and placed the following code .. just before the content is displayed:


< ?php if (function_exists('tweetmeme')) echo tweetmeme(); ?>
< ?php the_content(); ?>


In the Tweetmeme settings, I ticked “Manual” instead of automatically placing the icon at the top or bottom of the post because I manually added the code to the template. I also added the RT @PetLvr so I receive notice everytime someone retweets one of our posts!

2)

Usually, when people RT one of my posts .. I tend to include that person in my #followfriday posts on twitter! 😀 and, naturally we will become bestest of best friends!