Posts tagged as:

online marketing

13 Ways To Get Quality Followers on Twitter

by Eric Miltsch on 04/23/2009 · View Comments

Let’s define quality twitter followers – everyone wants them. A quality follower for me:

Follows back
Has a full bios with link(s)
Engages and participates
Has a nice balance of self-promotion & re-tweeting
Has positive energy

Keep in mind, my activities center around providing valuable automotive content, among other things, to help consumers. I’m always trying new stuff, always measuring things and just making sure our hits outweigh our misses. Here’s a random list of my activities for @AuctionDirect.

Address people by their names in direct messages
No automatic direct messages
Try to get to know people – I ask everyone to take my twitter interview
End Game full
Promote others when possible; Re-tweets are good, FollowFridays are cool and links to other people’s sites are awesome!
Provide informative, relevant links
Humor which doesn’t attack or offend. (Especially when tweeting from a business account)
Help people and answer quick questions
Acknowledge other people’s awesomeness
Meeting people face-to-face; get out from behind your screen and talk to some of your followers – Meet-ups really help
Don’t RT content from people with say, 350k followers. Odds are a ton of people have already seen it
Don’t to talk about money, sex or religion. (I try not to at least…)
Follow people my followers follow. Birds of a feather…
Don’t complain

Thankfully, most of the people I know do these things very nicely. @JasonFalls is a great example of someone who applies tactful, real-life common-sense to his twitter stream.

Sometimes, people just aren’t interested in automotive content and I can appreciate that. I’m not there to sell to anyone a car; just trying to educate and inform consumers. Its another place I can help change the way people buy used cars.

What are you doing to get and maintain quality twitter followers?

13: Game of Death movie Rocky IV the movie

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7 Great Places To Post Your Content

by Eric Miltsch on 04/07/2009 · View Comments

Building great content is one of the foundations for building your online presence. More content creates linking opportunities; more links will improve your search engine rankings.

Here’s 7 sites that are easy to set up, easy to use and best of all, the search engines play nice with them:

Google Knol.
Arranged psp

Assault on Precinct 13 buy

(short for knowledge) Create a bio and simply share your knowledge. About anything. This a great place to create an expanded profile and link to your sites.
Live Journal. This is one of the Internet’s original blogging/journal sites (dating back to 1999) Simple control features, nice templates to customize your appearance and its social networking features make this is a long-standing favorite. Originally created by Brad Fitzpatrick.
Ning. Ning is the most expansive on the list as its actually a community platform – you can easily design and create your own social network using Ning’s template driven platform. Netscape founder Marc Andreesen started Ning to let users create their own networks based around specific interests.
Squidoo. This is a fun, easy to use, interactive set of pages called lenses. Squidoo gets a lot of traffic and plenty of features for users to enjoy: RSS feeds, images, videos, links – plus you can even earn $$ for your content and/or contribute to charity. Another great contribution from Seth Godin.
Tumblr. One of my personal favorites. David Karp whipped up this micro-blogging platform in 2007. Use the stock designs or add your own custom themes; use it for blogging, pics, videos, links and audio files. Follow others & people can follow your tumbleblog to build your own community.
PitchEngine. Perfect for your press release content. Created by Jason Kintzler as a new school method of publishing Social Media Releases. (press releases on steroids.) Add links, tags, images and videos to build a powerful press release.
PollDaddy. High Anxiety film Supercross rip Not necessarily creating new content, rather, letting the new content come to you in the form of online polls. Great for feedback and learning more about – well, anything. Especially useful for creating new content based on poll results.

Not using any of these? Make your own 7 day challenge and you’ll have a whole new level of content sites created within a week.

What are some of your favorite sites?

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How To Use Social Tools Effectively

by Eric Miltsch on 03/19/2009 · View Comments

The ways in which social networking tools are used continues to expand. As usage changes, the opportunities and benefits to the members within these communities also grows.

Perfect example. Michael Banovsky hatched an awesome idea which brought together an instant community of car consumers, fanatics and professionals. Some people even fell into all three categories; myself included – its just another easy way to get Auction Direct involved with the community.

Michael became the pied-piper of a popular twitter conversation known as #carchat. (the hashtag is the icon used to easily identify popular search terms within twitter search.)

For two hours, he lobbed thought provoking, automotive-related, open-ended questions to the community.

The questions, comments and re-tweets flowed. Very quickly.

Michael had the group firing on all 12-cylinders – how did he do it and what were the lessons learned?

Honey movies

Leverage your passion to engage others.
Put others before yourself and any motives.
Spread the word among your closest connections; when they believe in you, they’ll tell others. Knowing other power users is key.
Invest time. Michael blocked out two hours of his time for this. He also invested his time leading up to this point – enabling him to put this event into motion.
Know when to reach out. It would have been impossible to pull this off with only 47 followers. Having a couple thousand followers helps.

The final result?

Felon dvdrip

Automotive consumers and professionals participating and sharing – putting the group on cruise control; only subtle nudges of the wheel needed by Michael.
Participants within #carchat building their networks.
Michael’s personal stock gets a boost – all done so unselfishly.
The opportunity to interact with a diverse group – including long time familiar faces like @ScottMonty and newer faces such as @HermanP
A ton of good karma.

Stop by next week’s #carchat. And of course, be sure to follow @michaelbanovsky

In Search of a Midnight Kiss rip Check out Michael’s #carchat article on vLane.com as well.

How effectively are you providing opportunities to engage and discover?