Knowing how to configure the tweetmeme button is something most of you will know already, but I get emails about this all the time and I notice it on least one or two different websites everyday. If you have a tweetmeme button you will know how important it is, but unless you have it configured properly you are missing out.

The above screen shot will show you how the untouched tweetmeme button will re-tweet your content when someone else clicks it;

Now this standard version will still allow your readers to RT your content to their twitter followers but what will happen is you won’t know who is RTing your content. I always like to see who is RT’ing my content so I can see the trend of new readers getting involved versus existing readers and to thank them then engage in conversation too.

Below is a quick video on how to configure it properly, you may need to enlarge the screen or up the quality of the resolution, best viewed in 720p;

In case you can’t view the video configuring it is really. Go into your WP dashboard and click your tweetmeme options and go to soure. Replace @tweetmeme with your username leaving out the ‘@’ and click save, easy.

So now your tweetmeme button will actually be Re-Tweeted to you, even if you have done this already I recommend you check it every time you have upgraded because I have noticed some sites tweeting @tweetmeme after they have upgraded the button.

As I said some of you will already know this, but none of us are born knowing everything.

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I recently got a @ tweet from ShareThis after I had a tweet conversation about deciding to stop using the ShareThis plugin in favour of SexyBookMarks. I was having a conversation with NotAProBlog (Jordan) about how sexybookmarks felt and looked better than the share this plugin. Please note that I used the ShareThis plugin to great effect and still really like it, I just think sexybookmarks suits my style more.

ShareThis then sent me an @tweet giving me advice how to change it to suit what I needed. They also give me an example of what it could look like.

• Surprise

This tweet surprised me massively, but it was a welcome surprise. I absolutely wanted to change my plugin back to sharethis straight away. If you help your readers like this, genuine and without prompting you are going to be remembered for being exactly that, helpful and proactive. By getting that tweet I wrote a whole post which is pretty much singing their praises, so get out their and help people without wanting anything in return.

• Retention

By helping your readers and even people who haven’t even found your site yet, you are going to stop the natural attrition rate that all websites deal with. You can keep the natural wastage of readers to near zero by helping them when they aren’t on your site reading your latest post. You can never help too much if you are helping in the right way.

People have to want help and they have to want to help themselves. If they are asking for help or admit they are struggling with something then give them advice without asking for anything in return.

I try and do it a lot, but it’s important to remember that not everyone wants help and not to spend too much time helping. Ultimately you need to make sure you have done all your jobs, before you go out and help others. Another important thing to remember is that readers are not stupid, they will know when someone is being false to be in their face.

If you have spare time on your hands, get out their and provide solutions.

What does everyone think?

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A quick post which will hopefully get you commenting about a question I get asked a lot, Have thousands of Twitter followers, or a small hard core group of followers?

• Thousands

I look at some profiles within my market place and they have upwards of 100,000 followers, and I immeaditely start to think, I need to recruit more followers. As a rule, I try and follow nearly everyone who follows me, with some exceptions, but does that mean I am interested in what they have to tweet, well in my case yes it does, I read, click and re-tweet anything I find interesting. I am fully aware others don’t think like this, and purely follow me so I return the favour and their numbers grow. At the time of writing I have just over 3,000 follows which gives me around 3-4,000 hits a day at the moment. If I had 60,000 followers I’m sure my traffic would be a lot more, but would that traffic represent loyal readers?

• Die Hard

Having a die hard group of followers that rave about your content all day long is what we as InfoPreneurs all want, but what if you only have 150 or so of these followers, could you still make it? Quite possible yes, because although you only have a handfull of followers, they are your groupies if you like. They talk about you all the live long day, and if one or two of these have a massive following themselves and they spend all day re-tweeting your content, you’re going to get just as much traffic from having 60,000 followers who are just interested in boosting their own numbers.

So a case for each camps really. What do you think?

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The Central Intelligence Agency is probably the biggest and most influential in the world. It has an incredible reach, like a giant monster squid, tentacles everywhere, feeling listening and influencing what happens around the world. So how can you enjoy the same success the CIA have?

• Covert Operations

By running long standing covert operations you will have huge success. So what do I mean by covert operations? I mean get into your market place and start controlling the environment. So if your website is all about being a great amateur photographer, join all the leading forums on this matter. Submit comments on sites that specifically talk about cameras and imagery, but here’s the thing to remember; Leave a link to your site, don’t openly promote your site, do it discreetly. The CIA (on the most part) don’t like to show their hand, so comment about the latest post, and what you think, but just leave your site link in your signature or attached to your name as it is in this site. By doing this your showing up in different environments without really being seen, but you will leave an impression in the back of peoples minds, and the next time they see your link they will remember it.

• Hearts and Minds

To win wars you need to win the local population. You can’t go in all guns blazing destroy half the country and not be there to help. The way I help is by to reply to tweets on Twitter or Facebook status if anyone is having a problem, doesn’t matter if they are following me or not. Offer good solid advice with no hidden agenda. In the past week alone I have help over 50 people with things they’re stuck on. All with great feedback and they now come back for more help and to read and distribute my content. This is the most simple and effective way of boosting your readers and traffic by just being helpful. Remember no one starts at the top, they all had help, and its that giving help that got them to the top. So don’t trample on everyone to get the job done, because ultimately it will come back and bite you on the ass.

• Technology

Use your technological superiority to gain the upper hand. Now I know this post is about the CIA but I’m not going to start talking about ‘Shark with frikin’ laser beams attached to their frikin’ heads‘ (nice bit of Austin Powers there) or laser guided missiles. No, what I’m talking about is social media. The super fast, uber cool way to get to your readers. Use lightning speed broadband to access your audience, to control them into coming back to your site, and once they do come back, use more technology to keep them their, let them know where they can find you and what else you have going on. Use technology to your advantage, otherwise you may as well have a sandwich board around your neck, asking people what they think!

• Agents

Agents are becoming more and more popular within my website. Two types of agents; Declared, Deniable. The declared agent is the one who guest posts for you. They then go out and tell their network all about it, which drives fresh traffic to you. They will keep doing this as long as there is mutual benefit. Deniable agents are a different breed, they promote your website, because you’re promoting theirs. You tweet their posts and show support for them, and they do the same for you. I have a couple of people on Facebook and Twitter who between them have over 50,000 followers, and they tweet my posts, because I tweet theirs. One point to remember about deniable agents though is only promote the content you like, otherwise you will lose credibility.

Hopefully this puts a different spin on things.

What does everyone think?

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Twitter has been a big part of getting this site of the ground, but as I was using my other social networks to promote the site (StumbleUpon, Digg, FaceBook, etc) I started to think how screwed I would be if I only used Twitter to get my site out there.

• Fail Whale

Anyone who uses Twitter as much as I do knows the ‘whale’. It’s basically a fail page when Twitter is experiencing problems, usually when it’s so busy, now if you’re using Twitter as your only media outlet then this can hurt you in a big way! Twitter is a great marketing site, most of your followers are pre-sold visitors, in that they’re already interested in what you have to say, but it’s flawed. Most people get a fair amount of tweets constantly, and I personally only read the first page of tweets and ones that mention me, so if your readers don’t read your tweet within 5 minutes it’s probably never going to be read. Add that to the fact if Twitter goes down completely for a few hours or even a day, your website will be in the dark with no new visitors!

• Too Thin

That said though, don’t spend too little time on all the social networks. If you do, you stand the risk of not making an impact on any of the social sites and it will not result in the type of traffic you need. You need the right mixture of not spending too much time, all you’re doing is talking about being a success rather than actually being one, and spending enough time that it makes it worth while in terms of traffic and new readers.

• Self Raising Flour

The best way I can describe how you need to market your website needs to be is like self raising flour. Get the mixture right, use enough to make your website rise through the rankings, but use too much and the cake will split and spoil.

Chances are you are using Twitter already but if you only use it or overuse it, you need to click on my profile links at the start of this profile, and start using other means to get people here.

What Does everyone think?

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Following on from my Don’t Use Auto Tweets and Know What You Re-Tweet posts, I thought I would do a post of the best of the absolute worst auto-tweets. Hopefully it will serve two purposes, a humorous look at how not to make money, and more importantly back up the point that tweeting the same spam ad’s everyone else is tweeting it will destroy your profile and credibility. By all means schedule your tweets with links about your post, I do, its the only way I can catch readers when I’m sleeping and there online, but don’t use auto-generated tweets banging on about the same rubbish everyone else is.

Without further delay here are the best of the very worst;

5; ‘Hey, i want to see if your iq is higher than mine. go here; http://poiuismart.info (Link Disabled)’ Basically this takes you to a website which ‘works’ out your IQ, this is a light hearted DM, and also sent as an @ but as you can see, all replies and Direct Messages are sent all at the same time! and although it looks like a different URL, there all go to the same site.

4; ‘hahah you should see this http://dwarfurl.com/fc85c (Link Disabled)’ Blocked site, reported as a web forgery, absolute spam!

3; ‘Hey. tell me if thats you.. http://xsgay.co.uk/6924 (Link Disabled) Another Blocked site, reported as a web forgery, absolute spam!

2; ‘This online job can really change your life you have to see this video this works http://bit.ly/CZM2K (Link Disabled) A link to a site using .ws extension, with a guy talking about how he making 12,000 a month with an automated system, when will these guys wise up? Probably when people stop clicking through.

1; ‘How’s your plan B??? The Trump Network could change that for you. http://bit.ly/4LAvK (Link Disabled) I’m sick to death of hearing about the Trump network, sounds exactly like HerbaLife, and the tweeters who promote this, don’t always use related text, sometimes talking about Lottery winners donating huge amounts to strangers etc etc.

So there you have it, Originally post was going to be top 20 list, but I got so frustrated with reading these crazy tweets.

What does everyone else think, whats your worst?

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At the time of writing this the site is 16 days old and working of the 7 day average rankings on Alexa.com its in the top 1.5% of all websites in the world, and that is without doubt 95% down to Twitter. Within seconds of posting my latest post, it receives hits directly from Twitter, then that post will be re-tweeted and the cycle continues, but can you build a successful website purely spreading the word via Twitter?

Why you can;

• Of my tweeted links (which actually work out at about 10-20% of my overall tweets) are visited by roughly 600-800 people a day. At the time of writing I have 2,721 followers.
• The majority of your Twitter followers, follow you because they are interested in what you have to say, pre-sold traffic.
• Tweeting and re-tweeting is one of the fastest ways to boost your traffic beyond recognition.
• Get your post re-tweeted once by someone who has 30,000 followers are your reaching a brand new audience and more importantly your traffic will spike.

Beware

• By only using Twitter your reducing your market reach, Use twitter in conjunction with other social media.
• Tweets are pushed from the top 20 on peoples pages in seconds, which can mean your tweet will be missed by a huge percentage of your followers, and that’s if they are online at all.
• If your followers are following 1,000′s of people themselves your tweet could get lost amongst the competition.
• Unless you use something like HootSuite, your tweets could be lost outside your time zone, I’m in the UK but as I go to bed the rest of the world is actively tweeting away!
• Fail Whale – If twitter goes down for a minute or perhaps an hour, god forbid what would happen if it went down for a day? Don’t but all your eggs in one basket.
• Some people still don’t tweet, so spread your presence.

So does this answer the question, well as most posts I like it to lead to discussion. I have had huge success thanks to Twitter, but in order to reach everybody, you need to diversify your presence and spread the word in different places. the bigger your presence the more memorable you’ll become.

What does everyone think? Please comment

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This post will hopefully outline the importance of good content, This site is new, and while I am not new to running websites, I’m relatively new to this style of site. To take you back to the first sentence of this post, importance of good content is everything, but by reading this it will hopefully illustrate that absolutely anyone can make it online, no matter how crowded you think the market place is, let me explain;

My first post was on the 26th October 2009, and for the first 4 days I got between 37-91 hits a day, which for a site with zero paid advertising and new to the market is quite respectable. My aim at this point was to build quality content and a loyal fan base, over the course of a year, and at the end of that year I wanted to be in the top 10% of all websites, effectively ranked higher than 1,000,000 by Alexa.

Now this is were I start to get quite excited so please stick with me, on the 31st of October my hits went up to 169, fantastic I thought, great progress, I’m going to beat that tomorrow, and I did, 266 and so on, My best day so far was 828 on the 6th of November. OK but so what, you know sites that are doing 100,000 hits a day ! So do I but this site is mine, its 14 days old, and people are coming to read what I write and that’s exciting stuff!

So where do I rank at the moment? Well Alexa.com has me at

• 3 Month Average; 1,373,169 (Bear in mind the site is at the time of writing 14 days old)
• 1 Month Average; 608,749 (My Goal for next year was top 1Million)
• 7 Day Average; 199,030

Just look at my 7 day average, If I continue to grow the traffic I am at the rate I am, The site will be amongst the top 2%  in the world!

What Contributed to this;

• Social Media

DIGG, Twitter, FriendFeed, FaceBook – Everytime I publish a new post, I share it immediately, and the post receives instant hits

• Valuable Content

I write about things I want to talk about, just take a lot at the other posts I’ve done, Warning, Don’t Use Auto Tweets , Top 20 Most Influential Blogs and others are things I’m passionate about, and want other people to be too, and lucky for me, you are, majority of my posts have great comments, and have been re-tweeted, which leads me onto the next bullet point.

• Re-Tweets

Re-tweets by your readers can transform your site’s traffic ranking, for example I can re-tweet a link, and it will probably be clicked by around 30-50 people depending on the title, but get it re-tweeted by someone who has tens of thousands of followers and your talking serious traffic and unique visitors!

So, where am I going with this post… Again I wanted to talk about it so here it is, but that said if your starting out with your own site, or just having a slump in traffic, or just remember your traffic when you first started out, then hopefully this post will serve its purpose of motivation and inspiration, to look at your traffic and become scarily obsessed with it, so obsessed you have to beat yesterdays traffic, you have to produce content that your readers need and want more of.

I treat it like a snowball, build on your momentum and keep building, your trying to create an avalanche with your traffic, so that it becomes an unstoppable force of nature.

What does everyone think, please comment below;

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I was going to call this post the ‘best of the worst auto-tweets ‘ But while I was thinking about the content, I realised it was a much bigger issue than I was giving it credit. Re-Tweeting certain links will destroy your profile and your brand just as much as auto-tweeting, perhaps more so;

MLM Tweets

• Thousands of millionaires will be made this year Link
• Is this you Link
• I use this to build my followers Link
• Whitening your teeth, What the dentist’s aren’t telling you Link
• Making money with your tweets? Link

Re-tweeting these links is suicide if your serious about building your online profile. We all know that these tweets are, what I like to call, eLitter it’s something you put up and are used to but it would be nice if it was cleaned up! So the people who do tweet these links will be doing so to make a bit of money from it or gain followers etc, which it may do in the short term, but your building the wrong fan base, you want followers who know you as a reliable source of a) Good interactive tweets and b) Excellent links to great information, with a sprinkle of humour and entertainment.

Tweet Blindness

If I see the same people tweeting about Donald Trumps new network all the time, I never associate with them,  Never read there @’s or DM’s, or updated status, I skip over them, read and reply to interesting people with interesting links to their sites or things they have found on other people’s sites. At the time of writing I have just over 2,600 followers, and I willing trawl through the eLitter to find tweeters that are worth interacting with ignoring the crazy tweets that I know are junk, even if they have been worded slightly different from user to user. One I had recently was, I’m a real human being this is not a bot – Link, Probably would have paid it more attention if there wasn’t another tweet from another user saying the same thing a minute later!

Mailbox Madness

DM’s are the same thing, I get a stack of Direct Messages everyday, 99% are garbage, but the ones that are worth bothering with (ie; not spouting on about some multi level marketing scheme, are trying to get me to join their mafia game) I interact with visit their site, re-tweet their information etc, and that’s what your followers will do for you, Its what my followers do for me, and I like to think that’s down to me providing useful and interactive content, and the fact I know what I’m re-tweeting!

What do you think, please leave your comments below;

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