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Kristi

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, the official Twilight Saga Eclipse trailer, and what’s coming up on kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging / Writing

Continue Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Official Eclipse Trailer

Comment spam. Everyone has encountered it. Even the typical blog reader who just stumbled upon an article for something they searched in Google has probably seen their fair share of comments from people by the name of Loan Modification that think that article is a “great post” and would also like to drop in the fact that they offer incredible deals. Here are some different viewpoints of valuable comments and comment spam from blog owners to link builders.

Blog Owner’s Perspective

As a blog owner, I engage in a daily battle with comment spam. Every day, there are several posts with moderated comments, waiting to be cleared, from people who have not even seemingly read the post, but comment anyway in hopes of dropping a link for link building or traffic generating purposes.

Do I ask for comment spam? Some people would think so, considering I made my blog dofollow with the added benefit of KeywordLuv. But I kind of consider those things rewards for good, valuable comments. If you can prove in your comment that you actually read the post and had some insight into it, then you deserve a link back to your site. If you can’t, then I will probably not approve your comment.

Continue Valuable Commenters vs. Comment Spammers

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, an effective viral video, and what’s coming up on kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging / Writing

Continue Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & a Viral Video

If you’re like me, you find yourself writing many to do lists for home, work, blogging, etc. And more of the time than not, the planning is easier to do than the execution itself.

I believe that one of the reasons to do lists never get done are because they are not specific enough. Let’s look at three items on my to do list for social media and networking.

  • Update Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn daily
  • Participate on forums
  • Connect with new people on social media networks

Looks pretty standard, right? Well, on a busy day, it’s easy to bypass the goals you have set for yourself, or put minimal effort into each of the goals, thinking you have succeeded in accomplishing them. Let’s look at some ways to define each to do item more effectively using the principle of taking small steps to accomplish goals.

Continue How to Write a Clearly Defined To Do List

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, a journey through Boliva, and what’s coming up on kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging / Writing

Continue Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Journey through Boliva

What is Your Blog About?

by Kristi on February 25, 2010 · 23 comments

It all began while compiling a list of high PageRank dofollow blogs in and not yet a part of the dofollow blog directory. I know, there are a ton of lists out there of high PR dofollow blogs, but I find that most do not include pertinent information, like live links to the blogs, if they require registration, do they allow keywords, etc. Plus a lot of the lists out there are older, so many of the sites are no longer dofollow. Some sites on these lists are dofollow, but don’t actually link to commenters’ websites but some profile page. And some sites have not updated in a long time, plus they close comments for articles after a certain time period, so there is no where to comment. But back to the point…

Do you know what the most difficult information to find was on many of blogs? A quick blurb on what the blog was actually about.

Continue What is Your Blog About?

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, a video from TED on creativity, and what’s coming up on kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging / Writing

Continue Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup, TED & Creativity

One of the things I have been hearing lately is that people are getting overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by following too many people on social networks or subscribing to too many blogs. And although they are inundated, they do not want to just get rid of everything and start from scratch. So how do you get what you really need and not suffer from information overload? Here are some simple ways to organize your sources of incoming information on social media, email, and blogs. I know some of these may sound like they are time intensive, but trust me, the extra time you spend setting up will be worth it for future use on these information avenues.

Twitter Lists

Twitter now allows you to add Twitter members to Twitter Lists, which helps you easily organize people you are interested in following by topic. Once you have created a few lists (or found good ones to follow on sites like Listorious, you can login to Twitter and go straight to your lists, or setup your TweetDeck, HootSuite, or other Twitter applications to show you the people you are following on those lists. This way, instead of having to spend a lot of time unfollowing people or starting up a whole new Twitter account, you can simply just see the people on your lists, bypassing the rest.

Other Twitter Cleanup Methods

  • Use Twitter Karma to take a glance at your followers all on one page. Sometimes it’s easy to spot bots over real people, or people that you don’t recognize. Since the mass unfollow no longer works, you have to open the Twitter profile in another tab / window to unfollow them.
  • Any time you realize you have seen a lot of uninteresting tweets from a particular user, take a moment to unfollow them.
  • If you’re a reciprocal auto-follower, use TweetDeck’s New Followers column to spot out bad followings from the beginning and unfollow those that don’t interest you.

Continue Getting Overwhelmed? Get Organized!

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, and the Mean Kitty Song.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging / Writing

Continue Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Mean Kitty

Twitter offers many ways of promoting your business, blog, or website with interested people in the Twittersphere. Before I get started on the various ways to promote yourself, remember that Twitter should not only be about self promotion. While there are many opportunities to promote your own agenda on Twitter, you have to keep a healthy balance between promoting yourself, responding to others who ask you questions, thanking Twitter users that help you out, and just sharing valuable information with your followers from other websites and blogs.

One thing to do to analyze your usage of Twitter is to simply take a look at your Twitter profile page, which shows your latest status updates. This is a page which potential followers will also be viewing prior to choosing to keep up with your updates, and it will let them know what kind of Twitter member you are. You don’t want people to see nothing but links to your site, advertisements, etc. – you will want people to see that you are contributing valuable information. A nice mixture would be as follows:

  • Status update sharing a promotional link.
  • Status update sharing a beneficial quote related to your niche.
  • Status update with an @reply to someone else.
  • Status update sharing a news article related to your niche (not yours).
  • Status update with an @reply to someone else.
  • Status update sharing a helpful article related to your niche (not yours).
  • Status update sharing a promotional link.

So, without further ado, here are some ways you can use Twitter for promotion, with some examples for businesses and bloggers / article writers.

Continue How to Promote Your Business, Blog or Website on Twitter