Twitter is a Winner

Twitter is unlike any social network out there. When I first heard of its success, I couldn't imagine why it was so popular. After all, who's possibly interested in very short "tweets" that are up to 140 characters in length?

Just recently, I gave it a shot to see what the buzz is all about. And you know what. It's great. You'll meet all types of people there: doctors, pilots, single moms, web designers, marketers, you name it...

Twitter has a very simple interface. Each post or "tweet" may contain a link or URL, so you can actually share your favorite pages with your followers. Now that's powerful stuff.

Free Traffic...
I less than 2 days, I already have over 60 followers. The easiest way to get followers is to follow other people. In return, they will check your bio box or web page to see if you're worth following too. You can expect a couple of hundred followers in no time.

Ready to write some tweets yourself? Then follow me and sign up now. Twitter is a free service. I think you'll like it.

Getting Traffic from Social Bookmarking

According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages.

Many internet users take social bookmarking to another level. Some call it social spamming, others call it just being smart, but pretty much everybody who makes money online does it: "dropping" bookmarks of personal web pages in the social networks to get traffic from that exposure.

Now, I deliberately used the word exposure because exposure alone doesn't give you any traffic. It is the way you write your bookmarks that does the trick. The more enticing your bookmark is , the more traffic you will get. (Doing some basic keyword research is pretty important as well, but I will get into that in a later post)

Social bookmarking can be a time consuming process, so you better get things right straight away: make sure the title and description of your bookmark catches everyone's attention - like a normal ad would do - but avoid a blatant style. Just make it interesting.

Your next step is to "share" your "discovery" (ahum). Most social bookmarking sites require you to sign up. It's a quick process but you have to use a real working email address to confirm your subscription.

A social bookmarking service like SocialMarker is a great starting point and is designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark blogs and websites. It's a free service and once you're subscribed to all the bookmarking sites SocialMarker supports (+/- 50), you can easily share your bookmark in less than 10 minutes.

Some people prefer to use more advanced tools for this. One of the best social bookmarking tools out there (in fact it is THE best) is called bookmarking demon.
Edwin Brian just released a new version of this brilliant software package. It's not cheap ($147) but it's worth every penny. You'll save tons of time and effort with it. If you can afford it, then go get it now!

Ping for Website Traffic

I am not too worried about the amount of website traffic I get at this time. Cashtrix dot com is a brand-new marketing site and like all new sites, it's a bit of a waiting game in the beginning.

Now, unless your main concern is getting people to click on your adsense ads (*), you can't go wrong with writing good content.

(*)Adsense is Google's revenue sharing program. Each time someone clicks an Adsense ad, Google gives a percentage to the owner of the site on which the ad was served.

Since I decided not to place adsense ads on my website - there's really no point to do that right now - I will focus my attention on writing good content. It might capture someone's attention...

Write, publish and ping
Each time you publish a new post, your wordpress installation automatically notifies a couple of blog directories by means of a pinging service.

I prefer to disable that feature because I wish to keep control over the amount of times I send out a ping (hint: once a day) so that blog directories don't think I am spamming them.
To disable, go to your dashboard, click "settings", click "writing", remove the listed update services and click on "save changes".

Now that you disabled it, you must do it manually. I try Ping-o-Matic first, and if that one stalls, I switch to autopinger or pingates.

It's really easy to do, and it gives your site some exposure and back-links. But don't expect a traffic explosion because you're headed for a big disappointment. Just do it because every little bit (and ping) helps. It really does.

Next time, I will talk about social bookmarking. Till then!