Building your web presence takes time and a bit of consistent effort.  The last thing that you want it to use software that makes life more difficult for you.  You need to be able to update your website yourself, you want to be able to send out email marketing quickly and easily.  Everything you use should help you get the job done quickly.

When choosing a service to recommend, my criteria is:

• Easy to use so the business owner can be independent;
• Affordable (free is also good);
• Have good customer service and support

The following resources all met this criteria.

Where to buy your .com or .ca domain

Buy your domains from Godaddy.  They have the cheapest domains around and are easy to point and forward meaning you can use a different host (which I recommend and explain in the next point).

Godaddy will try to get you to buy a bunch of other stuff as you go through their check out.  Most of it is unnecessary.  Just skip past saying “No Thanks” until you can pay.

The best thing about Godaddy is you can always get coupon codes for discounts at Fat Wallet.  Simply go to the final page and apply some of the codes until you get the best deal.

Hosting

A host is the home for your website files to live.  There are lots of hosts out there and with my clients have tried many of them.  The host that is by far the best is InMotion Hosting.  They have excellent customer service, very reliable servers and they don’t charge extra for stuff like unlimited email (which a host like Godaddy does).

You can start with the business class hosting package Launch which is $84 a year.

WordPress Website

WordPress is the best system to put your website on.  It is an extremely flexible and scalable system that will allow your website to grow and change with you.  You can easily add static pages, blog posts, pictures, videos and almost anything else you would like without requiring assistance from a Web Developer.

Once you have your hosting, WordPress is installed on it.  Then you need a template.  A good WordPress developer will charge you about $3000 to build you a WordPress template.  There are lots of pre-built templates around, but in most cases, they are not worth purchasing as they can cause a lot of headaches and extra money to get them customized to your liking.

The best template around is Catalyst.  The Personal Edition is a bargain at $97 and includes access to the support forums.  It’s an extremely flexible template and allows you to manage a lot of the design elements yourself.  What this means is once it’s set up, if you decide to change your web banner for example, you can without needing to get a web developer to do it for you.  It’s extremely flexible.

I absolutely recommend having someone set this up for you initially if you aren’t extremely technical or don’t want to spend 60+ hours learning WordPress and the Catalyst theme.  My team can do this for you and then train you how to use it.  Email me this interests you.

Email Marketing

I love Mailchimp.  It’s easy to use and best of all, it’s free until you have 2000 subscribers to your email list.  Free is great.

You can set up different lists for different functions – for example you can have a general list that includes everyone and you can have a list for free resource sign ups from your website that automatically sends the free resource after someone enters their information.

Customizing Your Facebook Page

Fan Page Engine is a great tool that allows you to easily set up a custom landing page for your Facebook Page.  I recommend purchasing the Unlimited Fanpage Engine for the one time fee of $67 to get access to the best templates.

Customizing Your Twitter Page background

For a beautiful custom Twitter background go to Twitrbackgrounds.com.  They will make a branded background for $89.  Their work is excellent and they will get your design to you very quickly.

What tools do you use and recommend?

I’d love to hear what you love to use and why, so please add a comment and share it.

When I was a teenager, my friends hated McDonalds pickles. Pickles aren’t really an Aussie thing. Or maybe they just aren’t a teenager thing. They would pick them out of their burgers and throw them against the wall to see who could get their pickle to stick for the longest.

Automated Direct Messages (auto DMs) are like pickles on Twitter, no one really likes them, yet everyone is throwing them against the wall to see what sticks.  In case you don’t know, they are generic little messages sent automatically to you after you follow someone on Twitter. They generally say something like “Hi, thanks for following me. This is what I do. You can also check out my website/blog/facebook”. People send them in hope that, if enough people receive it, someone, somewhere will visit the website/blog/facebook page.

Are Automated Direct Messages Effective?

I’ve very rarely read and never responded to an auto DM.  Since they really aren’t personally sent to me, I categorize them as SPAM. If anything, the only action I’m likely to take from an auto DM is to unfollow someone if the message has made enough of a case that a relationship between us isn’t right (for example they show they are a Spammer).

To figure out if Auto DMs are effective, I did a little research.

• I looked at 40 automated direct messages with a link from bit.ly that have been sent to me in the last couple of weeks.
• I recorded the number of followers the sender had.
• I looked at the number of clicks for that Auto DM link on bit.ly’s statistics and subtracted any links not from Twitter, leaving on any clicks from external Twitter clients for the benefit of doubt.
• I removed any clicks that were from Tweets and not Auto DMs.

There are elements that I couldn’t account for like:

• If the Auto DM was set up at the beginning of the Twitter account meaning every follower actually received the message.
• How many people unfollowed as a result of the Auto DM.
• If there is a difference in response between Auto DMs response without link or that don’t use a URL shortener.

Obviously it’s not an exact science, but it does allow you to see some patterns.  For example the people who only used the link in Auto DMs had zero URL clicks.

Based on my findings the average click-through on direct messages is 0.8%.

My in-home physicist worked out that the error margin for my little study was 0.8. Meaning that the best case scenario for a click-through on a Automated Direct Message is 1.6%.

Is 0.8% effective? Personally, I think not.  Why bother with something so ineffective that just labels you as a Spammer?  But if you disagree with me and still want to use them, here are some best practices for making the most of your auto direct messages that will hopefully lower the annoyance rate.

Auto Direct Message Best Practices

1. Understand the function of an auto direct message

The point of the direct message isn’t to thank someone for becoming a fan – it’s meaningless, everyone does it. Instead you should try to intrigue your follower enough to check your Bio and Tweets more carefully (ideally liking what they see and adding you to a list) or to build some trust and credibility, which hopefully has the same result.

2. Be Original

If you say something different, you have a chance of catching someone’s attention and improving your response rate. Almost every Auto DM I’ve seen tries too hard, and is about the sender instead of the follower.  Be in service instead of asking for something from your follower so early in the relationship.  Send your best tip – one that got a great response when you tweeted it.  Remember, at this stage you aren’t trying to sell anything but your point of view. Showcase that and give them an opportunity to see what you are made of.

Here are 2 Auto DMs I really liked:

This is a great example of being in service, rather than asking for something early in the relationship. Of course it only works if they actually follow up. If you offer something, make sure you deliver.  With this Tweet, there is an added problem that people can only reply to a Direct Message if the receiver is following them already, so unless this guy auto follows everyone back, people can’t actually DM him, making this tweet pointless.

I would change it to:

“I’d love to tweet to my followers about your business. Send me a tweet telling me what to say and I’ll share it sometime this week.”

This Auto DM is brilliant for 2 reasons – it’s another example of being in service to your follower and it aligns the reader to position the sender in the same category as the other well known bloggers. I would change it to:

“For more blogging tips check out @problogger, @patflynn and @johnhaydon. Send me your blogging questions and I’ll tweet about them.”

Top 7 Auto Direct Message Mistakes

1. Trying to sell or trying to get someone into your sales cycle. It’s too early in the relationship.
2. Trying to get them to visit your website, join your Facebook fanpage or download something.
3. Using URL shorteners. There are lots of warnings about people’s accounts being hijacked from links in Direct Messages. If you must add a link, use the proper URL.
4. Using TrueTwit Validation. No one wants to validate themselves for you, it’s obnoxious.
5. Pretending it’s not a Auto DM. Avoid saying something generic like – nice profile.
6. Asking for a DM. Unless you are following them, they can’t send you a DM.
7. Thanking people for following – it’s a waste of space. Use it more productively.

This week started to notice weird spam accounts Tweeting to my Twitter feed and since I check everyone I follow, I had a feeling some random application out there was adding these SPAM accounts, most likely an application that I had tested out and gave my password too (naughty, naughty me).

So I’ve been motivated into doing the following 5 steps for a major Twitter maintenance:

1. Remove SPAM Accounts

Register yourself a free trial of Twitsweeper. This great little tool checks and removes followers that just Spam and does it so easily. What I love is there are 3 levels of automation: Full, Auto Remove after 72 hours or Manual. Twitsweeper suggested I had 250 spammy accounts (where did the rascals come from?) and I checked a bunch to make sure that they were infact spam.

They’ve done a great job with their filters and hopefully they’ll add the ability to check your following list so I’ll never see another tweet about teeth whitening or improving my downline with Donald Trump.  Tweet them to add this at @twitsweeper.

2. Remove Inactive Followers

UnTweeps is a free service that let’s you bulk unfollow accounts that have been inactive for over 30 days. It has a Whitelist so you can give your favourites a free pass, however, I’m pretty ruthless – yeah maybe they could be on vacation, in the hospital or have a legitimate reason for not tweeting, but more likely they are just lazy. Get rid of them.

3. Back up your Twitter Account

Get yourself a free account with Backupify (until Feb 15th) and start automatically backing up your Twitter account (and Facebook, WordPress and a bunch of others) daily to Amazon Web Services. Once you set it up, it will run daily.

4. Remove connections to your Twitter account.

Each time you use OAuth to authenticate an external application with Twitter, it adds a connection to your account. Since I test out a lot of Twitter apps, I suspect that this could be one of the possible culprits for how I mysteriously follow rogue spam accounts.

Either way, it’s good practice to regularly remove connections you aren’t using or you don’t 100% trust with your first born’s life. Visit Twitter Connections and remove them all – don’t worry they’ll reconnect again when you reuse the service.

5. Change your password

Ah yes, we all hate doing it, but it’s really the best way to protect your Twitter Account from being hijacked. There’s a reason I put this one last too – because since we’ve used services external from Twitter, by removing the connections and changing our password last you’ve ensured the services you used in the previous steps won’t have access to your account unless you reinstate them.

Twitter password change

Repeat regularly for a squeaky clean, protected Twitter account.

This Twitter Resource list isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of everything available, instead it’s a list of tools and applications that I’ve used and liked.  If you know of something better or something I’ve missed, please add a comment and I’ll check it out.

Finding Available Twitter Names

• Tweexchange – checks names and availability and shows if .com is available.

Automate Following Twitter Accounts

It’s important to use discretion when automating following users.  Go for quality, not quantity.  I only automate following of people I have strategically searched for.  I don’t auto follow back anyone who follows me as I want to make sure that I only follow people that I’m actually interested in.

• Tweet Adder - Simple interface, 1 time fee.  Use the coupon code – IMCASHSAVER (20% off).
• SocialOomph -  More advanced than Tweet Adder with loads of options. Reoccurring monthly fee.

Tweeting – Scheduling and Management Consoles

• CoTweet – my favourite Twitter client.  Simple interface, allows you to manage multiple accounts and schedule Tweets.  The features I love about CoTweet are it tracks conversations you’ve had, so when you click on someone’s profile it will tell you all the Tweets that you’ve exchanged with them and it allows you to archive tweets easily.
• Hootsuite – a very popular management console.

Schedule of Twitter Chats

• Twitter Chat Schedule – Maintained by Robert Swanwick (@SpkrInteractive)

Client to participate in Twitter Chats (using hashtags)

• TweetChat – simple interface to follow 1 hashtag per window.
• TweetGrid – follow up to 3 keywords or hashtags in the same window.

Temporarily Unfollow A User

• Twick Twock – allows you to schedule an amount of time to unfollow a user when they filling your feed because they are at a conference or talking about something you aren’t interested in.  Options are 5 min, 1 hour, 8 hours, 1 day, 1 week.

URL Shortening

• Bitly – register an account and this great tool will not only shorten your URL, but track will also track how many people clicked on the link.  Most Twitter clients like CoTweet allow you to add your API Key so Bitly integrates automatically to shorten your links on the fly.

Delete inactive followers

• UnTweeps – Since Twitter make Twitter Karma remove the Bulk Unfollow tool, UnTweeps has become the next best thing. It will allow you to search for inactive followers and delete them.
• Twitter Friends – a tool with lots of interesting statistics.  Check out the Inactive tab to see who hasn’t used Twitter recently.  Unfortunately, there is no bulk select, so to unfollow you have to go to each Twitter user’s page and select unfollow.

Sources for Finding Content

• Delicious.com – bookmarking site allowing you to see popular and recent content that has been bookmarked.
• Daily RT – shows trending tweets.
• Twitt(url)y – tracks and ranks URLs that people are tweeting about.  Make sure you sort by language.
• Digg –  shared content that is voted on by the community based on quality.
• StumbleUpon – community that discovers and rates web content.
• Squidoo –  community generated pages (called lenses) on anything and everything.
• Google Alerts – emails you updates about keywords you specify in news and on the web as they happen, daily or weekly.

Alerts – tracking conversations and keywords

• Tweetalarm - free alerts for Twitter with options to receive emails as they arrive, twice daily, daily and weekly,
• Tweet Beep – this alert service is able to keep track of who’s tweeting about your blog or website even if they use a URL shortener.  Free hourly alerts and premium option available to be alerted every 15 minutes for a monthly fee.
• ListiMonkey - receive alerts for when a keyword appears in Twitter Lists you are monitoring.

Finding People to Follow

• Listorious – directory of the best Twitter Lists and their members.
• Twellow – Twitter Yellow Pages
• GeoFollow – user directory by location.
• Twibs – user business directory.
• Tweep Search – allows you to search by location and Bio

Research and Measuring Results

• Bitly – tracks how many people clicked on your links
• Twitter Advanced Search – options to search based on keywords, people, places, dates and more.
• Twitter Analyzer – includes graphs of daily tweet volume, RTs, reader reach, chats, mentions, subjects, hasthags and more.  Can give you insights into what your competition is doing on Twitter, or how you are stacking up.
• TwitterCounter - some pretty cool statistics and allows compare your account activity with others.
• TweetStats – graphs on analysis of your tweets.  With pretty colours. Win.
• Twitter Grader – Get your Twitter ranking.
• Tweetaholic – simple,but good statistics on your growth.

Back up your Twitter accounts

• Tweetake – backs up to .csv file your followers, friends, favourites, tweets, direct messages or everything.
• Backupify – backs ups Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and much more.

Create a PDF of all your Tweets

• Tweetbook – creates a PDF file of all your tweets.

Share pictures on Twitter

• Twitpic – share pictures on Twitter from your phone or on the web.

Share videos on Twitter

• VidTweeter – create a custom video profile that is synced with Twitter and and allows you to create and share video tweets, short bubble video messages, video greeting cards.

Stop Receiving Automated Direct Messages

• SocialOomph Opt Out – this will only work with auto direct messages that are configured with SocialOomph, so it won’t get them all – it’s still worth doing.

Create Twitter Coupons

• twtQpon – offer exclusive coupons to your followers.