Blogging is a geat way to start to develop your social media network. It is also a great way to promote your business and services. Let’s take a moment and look at blogs.

By definition, a blog is a type of website used to share information, articles, videos, pictures, opinions on some topic. The sites are usually maintained by an individual or small group, though large corporations are starting to get in the game.
The word derives its meaning from weblog.

My favorite blogs to use are set up on WordPress, Blogger,Bloglines, and Tumblr. Each of these sites will allow you to set a blog, or multiple blogs, for free. You do not even need to write on different subjects. You may carry the same article, or post, on each of the blogs you set up.

My favorite thing to do with a blog is share information on a particular subject of interest. You are reading such a blog entry now. I am fascinated with blogging on social media, and its affects on our current society. So, I share this bit of expertise on these blog sites.

The best blog articles are 500 to 1000 words in length. They will contain keywords in the title, and a couple of times during the article. In this case, I am writing on social media integration. I have used these so called “keywords” in my title, and in the article.

A keyword is a word that someone might use to find something about my business in a informational search on a site like google or yahoo.
So, I use the keywords social,media, and integration as a way for people to find my work on the Internet. In fact, I even own a website named http://ping.fm/YEPC0 or http://ping.fm/36UWc

When I first opened my Twitter account, I had a great deal of trouble learning to “say what I want to say” in the 140 character limit. After serving for years as a minister, I have learned to write in a conversational style. This method does not work well in the new world of social media.

Then I went through a denial phase. I just started doing multiple “tweets’ to get my whole message out. That didn’t work either. No one was responding.

So, I went back to an idea first taught to me by my philosophy/religion professor in undergraduate school. He had us write one page summaries of all our reading. Talk about a task! This is now my “mantra” for Twitter.

So how long should tweets be? The answer is simple in concept: you should tweet with the fewest possible characters to get you message out! Just like a haiku: one concept.

Other considerations for the length of a Tweet include two important items: any “re-tweet or index code” and any URL you add. My re-tweet is @celticozarkian. That knocks out 15 characters. If I index my social media tweets, #socialmedia , that will take 12. Add a tinyurl, and you can easily be down to 100 characters left.

Here are some new tips on Tweeting for length of message:

• Make the message component 80 characters or less. 50 seems to be the new 140, so shoot for that!
• Make your URL as short as possible. There does not need to be clear meaning in the URL itself. Example: my social media site is http://socialmediaintegration.info . I don’t need all this in the URL, to get people interested in clicking the URL. That is the job of the message.
• Text message jargon is typically OK. Most people now understand an OMG, or IDK, or LOL. It saves you space. (My daughter says I still will not be cool!)
• Use caps to express emotion. Just don’t do all caps, unless you intend to be angry.

Talk to you again soon,

Ray Province

Ray Province is a retired minister, who now works as an IT programmer in the healthcare industry. He also owns Celtic Ozark Solutions, and IT Company specializing in website, development, SEO, and social media marketing. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.

What is a good time to tweet? I have spent a lot of time looking at this issue lately, as I try to optimize this process for my own tweets. The answer is not always apparent.

I live in the Central Time zone in the United States. So, I have a several time zones behind me, and one if front, just to be able to tweet with people in the United States. This does not count my friends in Ireland, Scotland, England, etc.

My research is a bit unscientific at this point, but I have a good following for test cases. At last look, I tweet to around 4800 followers. What I have found is that I have the best luck between 11a to 5p CDST.

This is not to say that people don’t tweet later in the day, or earlier. I just seem to get the best responses during these hours. I do know that my tweets late in the day tend to be better recieved when they are on personal type issues, things going on in my life, etc.

This is not a surprise: business gets done during business hours. Tweeting for business purposes tends to follow this plan. Bear that in mind as you are looking at the best times to tweet for your business.

We’ll talk again soon,
Ray Province

Ray Province is an IT programmer in the healthcare industry, and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, and IT company that specialized in website design, social media integration, and SEO. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.

Tweeting with new followers can be one of the most important things you do with your Twitter account. As people make the decision to follow you, you will have an opportunity to develop a relationship with that person. Here are some things to consider:

1. Make sure you are sharing some basic information about yourself. One of my biggest grips are with people who think that personal information is a waist of time on Twitter. Granted, people may not want to know that you just brushed your teeth. However, they do want to know that you are human, and have to do the mundane stuff also.

2. Personal information does not have to equal private information. There are aspects of everyone’s life that can be shared. You don’t have to give out DOB’s, phone numbers, age, etc. just to be considered a true social media buff.

3. In terms of timing, you need to tweet some personal information once a day for the first 30 days you have new followers. I do not always do this for all new followers, because I get around 25 new people a day to my Twitter account. I do this during times when I am intentionally adding a lot of new people. Otherwise, I try to share some personal stuff 5 times, for every time I share one piece of business info.

Take time to get to know your new followers. Tweeting with new followers to pay off over time. You just have to be willing to put in the upfront work.

Ray Province
Celtic Ozark Solutions

Ray Province is an IT Programmer by trade, and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, an IT company that specializes in website development, website content, and social media marketing and integration. You can reach Ray at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian onTwitter.

The longer I study Twitter and Facebook, the more I realize it is all about tweeting with attitude.  The way you phrase things can make a big difference in whether or not your messages will be read.  Here are some thoughts on messages that have some attitude.

One of my favorite tactics is to be definitive in my message. Get it said with as few a words as possible. I used to have a boss that told me “5 words or less, Ray!” This hold true for getting to the point!

Another tactic is to use some humor in your messages.  Life is serious enough now, without someone getting too serious with the messages we read. That is why, I believe, people love funny jokes, cartoons, videos, etc.  If you can get a bit of humor in your message, it will almost always increase the hits.

 I throw this one in for my daughter.  Try the OMG shock value!  People love shocking and amazing stories as well. Give people a little OMG factor, and it may be more than they can handle.

Messages about current events and famous people can also help get your message out to the world.  One of my personal favs of the past was “Barach does this. You should too! “ This is not always an easy task for every type of business, but it did work to promote  a Twitter article.

So, that is what I mean by tweeting with attitude.  If you are going to tell me about what type of oatmeal you had for breakfast, then you had better tell me Barach eats it, or it was purple, or you spilled it all over your spouse’s new shoes!  There you have it!

Wow, I have been hit like a freight train this week on questions about writing articles that get noticed on the internet. Folks, there is a lot of information about this topic on the internet. Never the less, here is my attempt at explaining what I do when I write a good blog article. Hope you enjoy this instructional video on the subject: http://youtube.com/CIMhkwG-h1Y

There should be some great sales on computers this holiday season. Buying a computer may just have to be something that climbs to the top of your list. When considering the task, I would like you to consider that price should not be your foremost concern. Here is what I mean.

Getting the most bang for your buck can also be accomplished by buying only the features you need in a computer. Let’s look at some scenarios. It may help to make the point.

Hard Drive Space: If you run a lot of intense software programs, then buying a computer with lots of hard drive space would be important. Programs like Adobe Pagemaker, or Dreamweaver, AutoCAD would be examples of such programs. So look for sales where the hard drive is sufficient in size. This season, you should see some nice deals in the 500-750GB range.

RAM: This is an area where I almost always recommend that people get as much as they can afford. However, random access memory may not be as big a deal to people who use their computer for internet browsing and email. That is why companies like Dell, and HP, have come out with these mini computers! Most of those will come standard with 1GB of RAM. They also run on Windows XP. If you run lots of graphics, or like memory intensive video gaming, better go higher. 6-8GB of RAM would be good.

HD Monitors: why buy a system with a high definition monitor, if you did not need one? You can get a good 19 -21” monitor today for cheap. If , however, you are a movie hound, then you might want the better monitor. This would also apply for people who are buying a computer for 3D graphic work.

DVD’s If you don’t do a lot of with DVD’s on your computer, then you don’t need Blue Ray on your computer. This year, though, you will see a lot of deals for this, because manufacturers want you to switch to this new format. Just pay attention.

These are just some examples of what to look for when buying a computer this holiday season. If you save yourself some money, you can always add that into security software, and other software you have always wanted.

Hey,

I found another video from my friend Scott Willoughby that I wanted to share with everyone. Hope you enjoy the video.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Getting Indented Listings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

There are two times, at least, in the life of a website that you need to submit your website’s url to the major search engines. When you fail to do so, you leave that task up to the search engine “crawlers,” that scour the Internet ( rather Wraith like), looking for new websites. The good news is there are lots of free website submission tools that you can use.

The first of these times is when you build a brand new website. You need to get word about your website out proactively. It can takes weeks, otherwise, for the search engines to even begin to find your website.

The second time is when you make major changes to your website. This could cause changes to your sitemap, and might even break links attached to your website, or links caught by search engines. A classic example of this is when users of Wordpress themes, like this site, change the default permalink for their website. Search engine friendly url’s have to be built in the custom structure section. Joomla sites started with content have the same issue. If these are not caught from the git-go, you will have a time where your search engine rankings will suffer.

Many so-called free url submission sites are anything but free. They will require you to submit your url, email address, phone number. After a period of time, the companies will want you to try out their services, and will want to “up sell” you to their new and improved submission subscription. In some senses, this is not bad. You may not want to do that work yourself. If you are really wanting to do the work yourself, you need to be careful with these “landing pages.”

Here are some free websites that are directly owned by the search engine companies:

• Google- http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Yahoo Search – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
• Open Directory – http://www.dmoz.org/
• Scrub the Web – http://www.scrubtheweb.com/cgi-bin/addurl.cgi
• Cuil – http://www.cuil.com/info/contact_us/feedback/?to=crawl%20me

All five of these sites are quality search engines. They have a Google PR rating of at least 6. They also have an Alexa traffic rank of at east 11707, up to the number one traffic site, Google.com. With a little work, you can find others.

We’ll

J Gibbs recently emailed me with the question: “so how long does this SEO stuff take?” J is a client of mine. He was not upset, or being snarky. He genuinely wanted to have a feel for how progress was to be made.

Good search engine optimization takes an investment in time. Too often, our society has the expectation that we ought to be able to just do some “dark SEO magic,” click a button, and we done. Boom! That is just not the case. The game played with our search engines changes all the time. We are also competing against all the other businesses that want the same business.

If you are a small business, try investing 30 minutes a day in adding good content to your site, blogs, articles, videos, etc. Add links to your site. Make good use of social media. In time, it pays off. If you don’t want to invest the time yourself, find someone to help you.

In the healthcare It world, and I suspect other IT worlds, we have used a process for years to evalute how well our optimization efforts are working.

1. Set a clear goal for what you want to accomplish. You should know how many people have to visit your site to generate one sale. You should know how many people need to visit your site every day. Step one may be this easy. Step two may be to get analytics on your site, so you do know how many are coming.

2. Set a plan on where you want your business source. Good analytics can tell you how customers got to your website. If all your business is coming from Twitter, let’s say, and you are doing all your optimization on some obscure website that is not in your demographic, you are wasting time.

3. Decide who you want to target: Age, Sex, Income, all that. Do research on where your demographic is spending time online. Target some of those places for SEO. Do some testing to make sure you are getting return for your time investment.

4. Implement a plan based upon your testing.

5. Measure the results. Zero based thinking applies here. If something is not working, change it.

6. Adjust or optimize your plan.

So, you can continue to improve this process through the old 4 step plan: measure, report, analyze, optimize It will be worth the time you spend, if you put metics to your process.

Ray Province

Ray Province is an IT programmer in the healthcare industry and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, an IT company that specializes in website development, SEO, and social media marketing. You can reach Ray at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.