Well its that time of year again where we all plan what we are going to tackle this coming 12 months…. sigh…

For this blog however we are going to see a change in the content.

Most of my personal ramblings will head off onto Posterous
This blog will be far more focussed on the following subjects: -

Practical SEO
Guides, tips, advice

Experiments
Some fun, some serious

And above all…

The business of making your living online

Automation
Outsourcing
How to’s

Anyway.. Thats the road we are headed on this year

I am happy to announce the launch of a free tool from SEOidiot, Twitter Brand Builder.

Its a basic version of a tool I use for clients in house that allows them to build followers and manage their Twitter accounts quickly and easily.

I am today giving away the free version to anyone who wants to use it on the understanding that it will be used responsibly.

I like Twitter and I have no interest in allowing people to abuse them, this tool however allows you to get your clients a head start in learning and building up their Twitter account so they get some quick wins.

I am requiring people to give me their email and contact details before you will be sent the scripts but enough with the lecture and lets get started on showing you what she does!

Twitter Brand Builder

The tool was designed as a way for the busy marketing department at a client to grow a following quickly and easily without having to throw all their resource at it and is designed to get you started… Having said that they overdid it a little and grew from 200 to over 14,000 followers in 6 weeks.

I think thats a little extreme but shows what it can do.

The basic idea is to allow the system to add the followers of people who follow you and then remove anyone who doesnt follow back.

When you upload the script here is what you will see

You have options then to manage your settings, good place to start.

Put in your Username and password (Dont panic they only get stored in an xml file on your server they arent sent to me)

You can also change the number of times the script queries the Twitter API if you need to (Twitter often lower this when they have peaks of traffic and we want to play nice)

Now each time you run Add more followers it will magically add around 100 people to your account.

After a week or so you may want to unfollow some of the people who dont follow back so we have an option for that too.

“But what if I have people I want to follow even if they dont follow me back?”

We thought of that too

By choosing the Manage Whitelist option from the homepage you can simply and easily maintain a list of people that you will continue to follow no matter what: -

Sound good?

All you have to do to get this FREE version of our tool is give me your email and I will send it over as quickly as I can.

Tool Withdrawn now sorry

Once you sign up I will send the tool with full and easy instructions on how to get started (Dont worry it takes about 2 minutes to get started!)

Please do not abuse this tool or I will withdraw it. We also have a more powerful tool in house for building and managing multiple accounts across defined interest areas and offer advice and training to clients and agencies wishing to use Twitter as part of your marketing mix or community strategy.

Thanks

Paul

Twitter really seems to be gathering pace lately and if your new to it or if you just want to increase your influence heres a few tips I have picked up: -

1. Use it
There is little point in expecting people to follow your tweets if you only log in once a week. It has to be part of your day to day.
“But I am too busy”
Stop whining its less time consuming that IM and forums and to be honest youll get more from it.

2. Dont be a robot
Whilst I do agree that using some automation is ok you need to make sure you keep it personal. Don’t set autoreplies, new follows shouldnt get a link promoting something.
Try not to announce a stream of crap that people arent interested in, new post announcements? fine but in moderation please.

3. Help people when they ask
If someone tweets a request for advice help them, they are far more likely to reach out to you with help or a follow if you do.

4. Be happy not aggressive
Personally I prefer to read people who post witty remarks and point to cool stuff rather than look at a torrent of tweets from someone with a grudge against the world.
“Found a great post on how to use Tweetdeck here”
Is better than: -
“On roof now with rifle, soon revenge will be mine”
“Voices in head telling me to shoot”

5. Use the tools to make life easier
Twitter via the web is pretty crappy, Tweetdeck is a far better tool that allows you to have a dedicated application running. I also suggest adding the people you really want to follow in a group in tweetdeck then just watching that group. Saves you from the chatter and therefore from the temptation to stop following people who tweet too much!

6. Follow those that use twitter well
Dont blindly follow someone who has 20,000 followers, youll be lost in the crowd. Follow those people who are in your industry and who retweet good things from their friends. They will hopefully do that for you one day too.

7. Be genuine and pay attention
If you really want to be followed make sure you pay attention to what those people say, participate in their sites, it has to be a two way thing.

8. Extend
Make sure you update your Facebook status from Twitter automatically, add your twitter profile link wherever you can. Make sure people know your on there, dont rely on them stumbling across you from a friend you follow.

9. Retweet
If someone tweets something great help them out and retweet it for them, its hardly effort is it? And its the nice helpful thing to do

10. Ask for help
Got a question – ask people. As long as its genuine people will help you and the more you connect the more you will benefit too.

Thats my 10 – have any more – add them in comments!

I miss the old days of creating made for Adsense sites then sitting back and watching the free money roll in. The reason most of us had to slow down from doing that was that Google started banning accounts for very soft reasons and taking all the money back.

But today they opened up a new way for us to get free cash…

Google have announced that they have opened up their Adsense for Domains to normal publishers

And now ill show you what I will be testing so you too can have some free Google cash…

One of the reasons why Google may have banned accounts in the past was that the traffic didnt have any referrer (so Google didnt know where it came from) or it took a spammy path to get to the ad page.

Now Google lets us chumps in their Adsense for domains programme we have some advantages again: -

They expect ‘undeveloped’ sites so we dont have to have anything other than a crappy holding page with reference to the domains subject
We dont have to create crappy MFA style content anymore
Many people reach parked domains through a simple type in method – thats where people type in something like “cheapcarinsurance.com” in the address bar rather than searching for it.
So we can ‘gather’ our traffic from any crappy source (spam spam spam) and then as long as we clean off the referrer we make it look like type in traffic

So heres the plan
Have a look through your domains or buy a new domain like iwantacheapmortgage.com
Put a parking message on the page that includes the line “i want a cheap mortgage”
Add Googles Adsense for Domains code.
Hope their targetting doesnt blow as much as it did
Send traffic from any spam you can through a page that ‘cleans’ it

I would also keep your CTR down to something low for a while as Parked domains will have a really low CTR – we will have to find the level that gets us in trouble..

Let me know how you get on but thanks to Google we are back in the Adsense easy money game..

Had an email (Hi Hugh!) and a few other people asking why their site didnt return any results on my cachechecker tool.

For those who arent aware cachechecker is a tool I made that allows you to check what places Google thinks your site is linking out to. So you can ensure they are all links you put there and arent the result of a hacking attempt or dodgy plugin etc.

Cachechecker works on all domain extensions

Top reasons why your site isnt returning and results: -

Your site isnt indexed
Check this by doing a site: search on google – eg In the google search box type site:domain.co.uk replacing domain.co.uk with your site.
This lists the pages google have indexed for your site and if there arent any thats a good reason why it wouldnt work.

You arent getting or allowing google to show the cache they have of your page.
Sometimes people add code to their site that they have now forgtten or the designer you used had views on this that they didnt tell you about.
Have a look at those site: results and look to see that you have the cache link like this

If you dont have it then in your browser try view > page source and look for this tag in the head section of the code

This piece of code tells Google etc not to show the cache of your page

There are some reasons why people might want to prevent caching of their pages by Google but most of them are rubbish in my opinion

If your still not getting any results then by all means ping me an email like Hugh did and ill look at your domain myself (paul@seoidiot.com)

Now go try out cachechecker and make sure you know who your links are voting for!