Welcome to another wonderful session of What’s Up Wednesdays on Beyond the Rhetoric!
Each week, I cull the Internet for some of the best blog posts that the online community has to offer, highlighting some of these for all of you to enjoy. A great way to grab my attention (and get a free link back to your blog) is to follow me on Twitter. I usually put out a request on Tuesday evenings for What’s Up Wednesdays submissions, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
For this week’s roundup, we take a little look at being social, getting into networking, and how to get the search engines to find your terrific content.
The Power Struggle with Communities
Martin Reed is an expert when it comes to online communities, particularly those found in niche forums. Although you want to encourage your forum members to contribute as much as possible, power users may actually harm your community. We all know the type. They seem to live on these forums, posting far more than anyone else and, as a result, they can be pretty intimidating.
Getting Comments the Evil Way
Monty of Sensonize knows that encouraging comments on your blog is a very good thing, because it makes your site much more active and dynamic. Sometimes, it can be hard to get those discussions going, so he has derived some evil ways to get comments. Have you partaken in any of these techniques? Personally, I think an awesome contest might be a little more legitimate (and work a little better).
Why Do You Follow Me?
Zac Johnson enjoys being social online. I’ve already talked about why I’d follow you on Twitter, but Zac asked his readers for their number one reason to follow someone on Twitter. Not surprisingly, the majority said that they follow people who are interesting. Let’s face it: if you’re not interesting, you’re not going to be followed.
You Can Go With the Flow
Leo Babauta has been self-employed for over a year now and he has managed to find the natural rhythms and flows of working. Being forced to work, by yourself or others, is never a pleasant experience. Leo has found that working is much more of a pleasant experience now that he is collaborating with other self-employed individuals, but he also has a few words to share with people still stuck in cubicles too.
Canonical URLs and Duplicate Content Penalties
Colin Dean has some search engine news that is hot off the press. You don’t want to run into duplicate content penalties with Google, but it seems search engines will honor new canonical URLs to reduce this problem. You know how you can reach the same blog post using different URLs? That may no longer be an issue with this new development.
I don’t believe in the evil commenting, especially the paying for comments. Belkin got themselves in a PR mess with the paid reviews on Amazon.com.
I subscribe to Leo’s Zenhabits.net. He is very insightful and has a lot of great advice. It falls right in with my Karate training philosophy. Make it a way of life.
I trimmed my twitter followers today to just the people who I follow that are following back. I also have found that I only follow those who I find interesting, get good info from and can teach me something about increasing my income online, like John Chow, Stephen Fung and the Dot Com Pho group. That includes you of course Michael! It’s interesting that I live in Florida and a lot of the people that I follow live in Vancouver or near there.
I don’t believe in following a great number of people right now as I find it hard to follow all the conversations, but TweetDeck does help filter that.
I agree that paying for comments is quite dumb and misleading. I’m not so sure what to think of the commenting with an alias either. It just seems a little shady to me. That and the question of how lame you would have to be to have a comment-conversation with yourself.
Some folks like to talk to themselves, so I guess a comment-conversation with yourself would be okay for them.
In reality some people really want to make their blog look visited and popular so they are going to do anything to get people to comment and come back. I like the way Michael is moving this blog along with the contest. It’s above board, it might be a competition but I don’t see any just “Cool” type comments, so it’s doing it’s job.
I will continue to comment no matter the incentive after the contest this month. I like the content, I like the folks that are participating, it’s fun.
This begs the question of why weren’t you commenting before?
Because I didn’t know about Michael’s blog until a tweet by John Chow. I then started following him on Twitter and added his blog to my RSS feed. You have to start somewhere.
Fair enough 🙂
Nick, I read you comment about comment for the sake of commenting for this contest and agree with you. I was trying to makes some good comments and now it seems that it has become just a comment to win war. I have tweeted and DM’d Michael that I’m going to stop commenting to win the contest because I’m not going to sit here and recomment on everything to get 42 posts as I just watched happen in the last 2 hours.
I’m not that desperate to win and I really just want to make good thoughtful comments for a good discussion. You know, this would make a good blog post.
I want to apologize to Michael for what I feel is over commenting to the point of spamming that started in the early morning Feb 21st and has continued today.
I tend not to follow an overwhelming amount of people on Twitter like some others do (in the thousands.) Those I do follow are because they are interesting, as per Zac’s response from his readers.
One thing I did notice is that there’s about a 2-day limit on the amount of time you can go without posting an update on Twitter. I went on a cruise last year and didn’t have Internet access for 10-days. When I returned, I had lost over 60 followers. Obviously they weren’t very loyal. lol
How do you know whether someone is interesting on Twitter if you don’t follow him/her in the first place?
Chicken or Egg come first?
I give their profile a look over to see what they’ve tweeted about in the last few hours/days etc. If they’re providing information I’m interested in, I follow them. 🙂
I look at the people I already knew and started following to who they follow, then check out that persons page. I also started following those people on the blogs that I read, then did the same thing as above in checking out who they follow.
I also check out TwiTip.com which is written by ProBlogger, Darren Rowse. He gives some good advise and sites that helped me pick some people to look at and make my twitter experience better.
TwiTip is a good resource I frequent. I don’t know how Darren keeps up with three or more blogs. It’s amazing.
Certainly not very loyal at all…how many followers did you have to begin with though and what percentage of your total followers did you actually lose?
Thanks for the mention. Btw, I’m really liking the new look of the blog!
The twitter phenomenon is something that has absolutely caught me by surprize, but I must agree that it is proving to be quite a performer! I guess it is time to get my feet wet in the twitter pond, and join the flock.
It’s definitely worth it. I spent months rejecting invites from friends to join Twitter, as I thought it was completely useless. That wasn’t too long ago either.
I agree Chris. I’ve kept the follows and followers low to start, but it has been a great addition to my networking.
Local TV networks in my area have started using Twitter, but they are completely missing what it’s all about. To them, it’s just about business and shooting out their RSS feed with news. But it should really be about networking with their viewers. I hope they’ll learn.
I follow Don Lemon of CNN @donlemoncnn and tweet one or twice to the early show he does. He actually read one of my tweets on the show tonight about the stimulus package.
I follow @ricksanchezcnn for his afternoon show. I didn’t know Don Lemon had his own show? Maybe I just never wake up that early.
I was holding out on joining the Twitter craze as well, but now I plan to jump into it. I just need to figure a couple of things out first as far as how I want to use it 🙂
I’m thinking more in terms of username(s) and such…do I want just one account for everything or an account for my site and a more personal one or what…and if just one, do I want to use my actual name or my site name…what about future use with making new sites…as you can see, I have a few ideas floating around in my head.
Nick,
If you just use you name and then use TweetDeck as the app it uses columns and groups that you can sort the people you follow into. I sort by blogging, Tech, News, School, Local, Dot Com and other. It becomes quite manageable then with one account.
That makes perfect sense, but then I also wonder about the tweets that I will be sending out…my friends and family might not care so much about some of the blogging/dot com tweets I send and you probably won’t care to read some of the more personal/random tweets that I will likely send out that will interest family and friends.
I have two Twitter accounts just for that reason. One for my dot com mogul friends and another for personal friends and family. Got to keep the two separate. 🙂
I was kinda thinking the same thing Chris.
Don’s show is 7pm & 11pm Saturday. 6pm & 10pm Sundays
He has a pretty cool demeanor. I always enjoy watching him when he anchors the news desk.
Now, if only they would bring back Aaron Brown. lol
Nick: Create a custom background with your URL, name, quick bio etc. Twitbacks.com is a free site that allows you to do that. It’s best to brand your Twitter page from the start.
Thanks for the mention, Michael – and for your very kind comments.
I am flattered you are still reading my blog 🙂
– Martin