How to Get Testimonials for Your Business or Blog Using Twitter for Social Proof

Posted on March 25, 2013 Written by 74 Comments

Have you ever wondered what mentions and retweets are worth to your business or blog besides a boost in the Klout score? Tweets can be the perfect source of testimonials. Collecting them is easy, and publishing them is even easier.

What You Are Looking For

When collecting tweets as testimonials, watch for tweets from readers, customers, well-known people in your industry, mentors, and role models.

Look for tweets where these people are saying something good about you, your skills, your expertise, your content, your products, or your services.

If a tweet makes you feel like your hard work has been recognized and appreciated, then it should be one you save for future reference. Especially be on the lookout for tweets that share a positive result someone received from working with you, reading your content, or using your products.

How to Curate Your Best Mentions

Curating your best mentions while viewing your Twitter mentions on a daily basis is easy. Just favorite them. It’s a fast process that you can do anywhere. You can favorite a tweet in HootSuite.

how-to-favorite-tweet-in-hootsuite

You can favorite a tweet in the mobile Twitter app.

how-to-favorite-tweet-mobile-twitter-app

And, of course, you can favorite a tweet on Twitter itself.

how-to-favorite-tweet-on-twitter

You can access your favorites anytime on Twitter by logging in to your account and going to your Favorites.

how-to-view-your-twitter-favorites

 

How to Increase Twitter Engagement with Nestivity

Posted on March 18, 2013 Written by

This week, I had the privilege of taking a new Twitter tool for a spin. Nestivity (currently in beta) takes your Twitter engagement to a whole new level by encouraging people to engage in conversations and making those conversations easy to follow by placing them in a threaded discussion form.

nestivity-discussion

Benefits for Bloggers

While the tool was developed with brands and businesses in mind, there are lots of benefits for bloggers as well.

1. Engage more with your followers. We all know that frequent engagement with your followers strengthens your relationship with them. Use this tool to really start talking to your Twitter community vs. broadcasting at them.

2. Connect with influencers. Anyone with a significant amount of followers is hard to chat with on Twitter because your tweet is getting lost in a sea of mentions and retweets. Nestivity lets you have discussions with popular Twitter users in an uncluttered environment where they are more likely to notice you.

3. Promote your blog posts with discussions on Twitter. Invite people to come and talk about your latest blog posts on Twitter. This should lead to more retweets of your content.

4. Build your Twitter following. As followers of those who are participating in your discussion start chiming in, you’ll have the chance to meet new people and grow your Twitter following.

5. Increase your Klout. Not that anyone cares about Klout scores (wink wink), but participating in regular discussions on Twitter will help boost your Klout rankings due to the increase in mentions of your @username in discussions.

 

Google Reader Alternatives: 3 Web Based RSS Readers to Manage Your Subscriptions

Posted on March 13, 2013 Written by

If you follow my writing, you probably know how much I love Google Reader. As you can imagine, this stopped me in my tracks.

google-reader-closing-july-1-2013

That’s right. On July 1st, Google Reader says goodbye. The Learn More takes you to a page that tells you what you can export using their Google Takeout tool, but nothing in the way of alternatives.

Now there is three and a half months to find a suitable alternative.

A Little About How I Use(d) Google Reader

I follow a lot of blogs and various RSS feeds. 242 subscriptions to be exact.

how-i-use-google-reader

Each time I subscribe to a blog, I organize them by topic (Blogging, Freelance, Social Media, SEO, etc.). Then I rename each subscription with the blog’s main Twitter handle. This way, when I want to tweet a post I like, I don’t have to search for their @username. Plus, when I’m ready to periodically purge my RSS feeds, I can look at the Twitter handles and figure out quickly whether I have engaged with them or not.

I also use(d) the search in Google Reader for curating content. It made it easy to find posts on a specific topic so I could create lists like 79 Link Building Resources for 2012.

How to Export Your Google Reader RSS Feeds & Subscriptions

The first thing you will want to do is export your RSS subscriptions in Google Reader. To do this, you can go to Google Takeout and click the Create Archive button.

google-takeout-export-google-reader-rss-subscriptions

You will then get to download a zip file of your Google Reader subscriptions.

google-takeout-complete-download-file

In this zip file, you will find your subscriptions.xml which you can use to import your RSS feeds from Google Reader to other services.

My Favorite Google Reader Alternatives

Now that you know handle RSS feeds, here are the alternatives I am considering. I migrate from laptop to desktop to mobile, so I am only choosing web-based options. There are others if you want to install them to your computer like Feeddemon for Windows and Reeder for Mac. The following are my web-based favorites so far.

 

10 Premium SEO Tools That You Can Try for Free (or Cheap)

Posted on March 11, 2013 Written by

If you don’t do SEO for a living but want to do some major search marketing work with your website, you’re in luck. You don’t need to pay an expensive monthly fee if you need to do one-time research. The following are awesome SEO tools you can use for free or cheap for a limited time to do your search marketing research.

Premium SEO Tools with Free Account Options

First off, let’s start with premium SEO tools that offer free accounts for basic functionality.

MajesticSEO

MajesticSEO Site Explorer

MajesticSEO is a link research tool that offers a free account option that allows website owners to run detailed reports on their own websites and limited access to the following tools.

  • Site Explorer – Site Explorer lets you explore a domain’s backlinks. It offers a summary of a website’s backlink profile (number of backlnks, referring domains, .edu backlinks, etc.).
  • Keyword Checker – Search our index for a Keyword or Phrase and see how many times it appears, as well as getting the Search Volume for each keyword.
  • Link Profile Fight – Compare the backlink profiles of two sites graphically with our enhanced link profile “fight” tool.
  • Backlink History – Our Backlink History tool allows SEOs to determine the number of backlinks detected by our sophisticated web robots for given domains, subdomains or URLs.
  • Bulk Backlink Checker – Our Bulk Backlink Checker is a valuable time saver when all you want is backlink counts for many domains. Using the simple form, just enter a few domains and we return the external backlink counts.
  • Majestic Million – The top one Million Domains* on the internet – listed by TLD and updated frequently. Explore the top one Million Domains* on the internet with the Majestic Million tool.
  • Comparator – Compare headline stats for up to 5 different domains with the site comparator tool.
  • Neighborhood Checker – The Majestic SEO Neighbourhood checker tool presents a list of “neighbours” – or, in technical terms, the sites hosted on the same IP.

They also offer a tool called Clique Hunter that can find all of the ‘cliques’ that link to a list of domains, but it is for paid subscribers only. Paid subscriptions start at $49 per month.

Premium SEO Tools with Free Trials

Next, let’s look at services that give you a free trial to use their tools. These are in order of the tools that offer the longest to shortest free trial periods.

 

A Fresh Start on Kikolani

Posted on March 4, 2013 Written by

Spring is almost here, and along with it, a new start for Kikolani!

fresh-start

Photo Credit: Jason Hines

It all started with a webinar from Derek Halpern promoting his new course, Blog That Converts.

During the webinar, he talked about content and how people were being driven mad by the misconception that to be successful, you had to pump out tons of content. Most content creators spend 80% of their time creating content and 20% promoting it.

What he has found to be successful with his blog Social Triggers is this. You need to focus only 20% of your time creating amazing content and 80% promoting it.

Considering the results I’ve seen from promoting a single post to the fullest extent using strategies I wrote about in my Blog Post Promotion guide, I completely understand how the 20% content, 80% promotion works.

With that in mind, I’m changing the way things work here at Kikolani.

Continue Reading A Fresh Start on Kikolani

 

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