I was blessed to be born into a family of book lovers. “Books are our friends,” I was taught. And libraries and schools across the country are celebrating the love of books this week through the Read Across America program, initiated in honor of one of the best-loved authors who ever put pen to paper, Dr. Seuss.

On this Wednesday is Friends Day, let’s look at six lessons we bloggers can learn from our friend, Dr. Seuss:

Continue reading →

Note to readers: Thanks for taking time out of your day to read On Blogging Well! If you haven't already done so, subscribe to my free newsletter list to receive insider tips and in-depth information PLUS a free copy of The Blogger's Checklist. The signup form is in the right sidebar.

It’s easier to navigate the maze of online social media sites if you understand the different site categories and the purpose of each type. The social media world consists of two segments: social and media. To optimize your experience with each type of social media, it’s best to participate in the communities you choose to join.

Today’s post supplies a list of 23 types of social media, including a brief explanation of the purpose and at least one example of each type. This list will help you determine which types of social media sites would best benefit your situation. Nearly all social media sites offer free memberships.

Continue reading →

Despite the waning popularity of respect in today’s society, the online community tends to enforce a set of unwritten “rules” of social media. Those who ignore or blatantly break these rules will be punished either by being exiled into the land of de-friend/un-follow or publicly blasted for rudeness (yes, that seems a bit hypocritical, but it happens). Before we delve too deep into our social media series, let’s take a few minutes to go over a few ways to make new friends and keep the old.

The Golden Rule of social media is — “Give More than You Receive.” All relationships are give and take, but statistics have proven that those who give online far more than they take gain the respect of others, which in turn spreads their influence and grows their communities. In my free report “Taming the TwitterBeast in 20 Minutes a Day,” I briefly mentioned a suggested 7-1 ratio of information tweets to personal promotion tweets. People who tweet one link after another that leads directly to a sales page are quickly unfollowed. That ratio seems to be a pretty good guideline, not only for Twitter, but for all social media platforms.

If someone were to write the Social Media Book of Etiquette, it would include the following 18 tips:

Continue reading →

No coach who hopes to win a game will take his team on the field without first constructing a game plan. Before we step into the social media stadium, we bloggers also need to develop a social media game plan. Remember, a strategy is an overall plan, and tactics are the means used to implement that plan. Before we get into social media tactics, let’s first get our social media game plan going.

There are many things to consider when planning our social media strategy:

Continue reading →

If you’ve been on Twitter more than about 47 seconds, you’ve likely read or received a tweet about how to grow your list of followers. Many promise hundreds if not thousands of followers within a matter of hours or days. When I first joined Twitter, I was lured into clicking on one of the promotional tweets for growing my list of followers. I wound up with more emails than followers, though, and quickly opted out of the program. Almost instantly, the 50 or so new followers I’d gained “unfollowed” me. No biggie. About half of them didn’t even tweet in my language.

Maybe some of the programs are legitimate. Maybe there is a faster way to grow my group of Twittermates, but I won’t be trying any  more gimmicks to increase my followers list. Besides, the point of Twitter is to network and make friends, which is hard to do with people I either don’t understand or have no common interests with, so I recently started a concentrated effort to gain followers on Twitter and within a week, I’ve nearly doubled my list. The best part is, the group I’m growing is targeted to the same interests as me — Blogging and Internet Marketing.

How did I do it?

Continue reading →