I put off using Twitter for years.  I just seemed an odd little thing, but now, with 150 million plus tweets a day, it's hard to ignore as a viable marketing tool.  Everywhere you look you see @<some_name>; TV, billboards, magazines.  But are businesses using it correctly.  Do they have a plan?  Quality control? Metric tracking?   Do you?

I've been doing some research on Twiiter methods for business and a client talked to me this week about exactly that.  I sent them a somewhat complete email, but, on reflection, realised that I'd not really given them a big how-to, rather a do this.  So I sat down today and wrote "The Twitter Method", which is a complilation of all that I'd gleaned.  I'm sure, given the ever changing landscape of the net, there's a bunch of stuff not in there, but it's a good starting place for those who've never used Twitter for business.  Happy tweeting!

Download "The Twitter Method" here >>

Although everyone told me I didn't need to lose any weight,I've recently shed a little over 20lbs and feel so much better for it.  The only downside, is I now need to go through my closet and get rid of a bunch of clothes that are waaaay too big for me!  A good downside I think you'd agree though.

Reducing your website's wait

When Google is presented with a search query, it looks at the pages in its index and applies a test that includes over 200 parameters to it in a bid to serve the user a relevant result.  One of those is page load speed.  There's a temptation now to overlook this vital aspect of page "health".  After all, most of our users have a fast internet connection right?  Who uses a 56k dial up modem anymore?  Interestingly, I was speaking to someone just a few weeks ago who does.  They're in a "black" area where no one can get broadband access.

From Google's point of view, a fast loading site is good - a tick - and a slow loading one is bad - an X.  So it's crucial to make sure your pages load quickly.  Here

This week I got a very timely reminder about the value of backups, and being on top of your internet security.  Despite the best efforts and intentions, if you don't know, don't assume!  When one buys space of a reputable, respectable and established host, it's reasonable, but very dangerous, to assume they would have put into place all the necessary security measures, right?  Wrong!

This week - well it came to a head this week; the actual damage had been done around Valentines Day - our server got hacked.  Not as badly as it could have been, but enough to be more headaches than a mild irritation.  Obviously I've seriously tightened up security - things which I foolishly assumed would have automatically been put in place already.  That was my mistake, and I am grateful only 1 client suffered anything (2 days without a site) due to my mistake.

The great thing was I did have backups of everything, so it was just a time thing to restore the sites that were badly damaged, and then go through and scan, and clean, all the junk that the hacker or hackers had dropped in there.  Yep, we changed logins and passwords

If the answer is more than a month ago, that's too long. And if you have an e-commerce site, updating doesn't just mean adding a few products or changing their descriptions.  Nor does editing a page a bit count.  Updating means substantial additions or editing.

What's the big deal?

Updating your site is important for 2 entities - your human visitors and your robot visitors.  Humans like fresh stuff to read or look at and keeps them returning - that's why blogs are great additions.  It may also get them to bookmark you or, even better, refer you to friends and collegues.  Robot visitors - those are the electronic spiders which search engines send out - also like fresh content, but for a different reason.  Fresh content indicates that the site owner cares about their site, and is putting effort into making it better = authoritive.

What should I do then?

Write - pure and simple.  However, that's not totally helpful, so let's flesh that out a bit.  Here are some easy ways of updating and addign material to your site.

Blog - A blog is the easiest way to keep new material pumping into your site. I recommend weekly,