Social Network Time-Savers Can Help You Keep Up.
Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc…all these social media platforms contain excellent ways for you, your friends and followers to disseminate your content, bring readers back to your blog and build you up as a credible source.
In our second installment of the follow-up series to Top 10 Ways to Monetize your Blog for 2010, we’re talking about “Keeping up with the Jones’” with regards to participation in various social networks. In our last post, we discussed ways you can help monetize your blog by expanding your blog readership. But we know that every day more people are joining that latest and greatest social media craze. Be it Google Buzz or FourSquare, these new tools of engagement are popping up everywhere and with all the buzz and distraction, it’s very easy for you to get lost in the shuffle and your blog’s readership and community attention diverted this way or that. So the question is, how do you keep up?
If you are looking to keep your audience as engaged and plugged-in to your content as possible it is absolutely necessary to be seen frequently where the eyes are focusing. This all ties in to the notion of as your audience grows, so to does your opportunity for increased revenue. But the game is trying to be seen in as many valuable places as possible while still trying to manage your time in engaging relationships and conversations as efficiently as possible. You only have so many hours in the day! And if you’re trying to make money blogging as a part time gig, then it’s even more important to get heard and be seen in the least amount of time possible while still maintaining quality of engagement and discussion. So here are two problems bloggers and publishers face when trying to remain connected with their communities, and some great tools that can help to alleviate the extra effort!
Problem: You want to say something short and sweet, but just don’t want to log in to 80 different social networks to get your thoughts heard.
Solution: Update your status to multiple social networks from one console.
This is a very friendly tool that syncs your status updates with a whole handful of social networks via the web, SMS, email, and a number of applications including iPhone. You can add images, video, music, and schedule your updates as well. HelloTXT also has a “Recent Friend Activity” feed which shows the status updates of your community as it happens. This is a true status update aggregator worth taking a look at if. I’m impressed with the number of social networks HelloTXT can sync with.
This is probably the most recognizable social network status communicator that’s available. Also with a healthy list of social networks it’s enabled to post to, Ping.fm lets you do much the same as HelloTXT.com by updating your social network status via the web, mobile phone, SMS, MMS, instant message, and a number of 3rd party applications. I do know a ton of people who use this tool for mass updating, and have great things to say about it. The one thing I did notice is that Ping.fm has a very lively and active community at GetSatisfaction.com/pingfm as well as their help and information wiki – plenty of helpful information for the first-time user.
A self-proclaimed “Professional Twitter Client”, which is slightly confusing to me as it does aggregate status updates across many of the more recognizable social networks, and seemingly well! I am very impressed with this tool and would describe it as a similar to TweetDeck, but with major perks – you have monitoring dashboards for LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and Ping.fm. This is slightly different than Ping.fm or HelloTXT.com as it becomes a two-way communication tool of sorts. Not only can you monitor feeds from these spaces but you can mass update to all these social networks with the option of drafting and scheduling posts. I really like the look of this tool, it’s fun and friendly and generally easy to maneuver.
Problem: Not enough time to blog, period.
Solution: If you find that you just can’t seem to get seated in front of your laptop for the amount of time needed to produce a meaty blog post, yet you know that what you need to say is going to be longer than 140 characters, why not try mini blogging!
Tumblr is a great tool for speedy posting to a mini blog via SMS or Email. They offer an iPhone application, a dashboard widget and even audio posting! So it makes posting a status update, photo, or mini blog post from your desktop or mobile phone easy and fun! They do have a Twitter integration where Tumblr updates your twitter status, but it’s strength lies in quick, slick looking web updates providing a great way to ensure that even if you are away from your desk you can still make sure you engage your audience and keep your updates flowing. And from the horse’s mouth, here are 24 reasons why you’ll love Tumblr.
With Posterous, you have virtually no excuse for not blogging. Because if you have email, you can blog. But Posterous isn’t just small-time blog posts, it can do so much more. If you sync up your various social networks with Posterous, you can auto post to them at once via only a simple email! This includes updating your blog with not only your original content, but images, music and files as well! Not to mention it does intelligent things with Twitter posts, it will post your status update up to 130 characters and past that will append a shortened URL that redirects to a slick looking webpage to showcase your post in whole. You can learn all about some of the powerful things it can do here. But in my opinion, the coolest part of this tool is that you don’t need to create an account to get started. You can post your first blog simply by emailing post@posterous.com!
There are so many amazing angles to both of these mini blogging tools, but there is an absolutely great comparative review by Mashable on the two found here. Definitely worth the read!
My point in providing you with a quick glimpse of these tools is that no matter where you are, if you’ve got a phone or an internet connection you can stay up-to-date and keep your community engaged. Not to mention, there are real ways to consolidate your efforts and keep you sane! But I guess the last thing I want to say about all of these tools is that they’re all FREE! So if you are truly looking to make money blogging, it costs you nothing to try these amazing and powerful tools out – but could save you valuable time…and we all know the old saying. Time is money.
Happy posting!
Stay tuned for our next installment in our series profiling the Top 10 Ways to Monetize your Blog for 2010, we’ll talk about tips and tricks to adding interest to your blog with splashes of movement!
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