Leveraging Your Time in Website Marketing

by John Eberhard

There are many things you can do to market yourself or your business online. The thing is that many of these things can be quite time consuming. So it’s smart to find ways to better leverage your time – in other words, to get more done in a given amount of time. I want to discuss a couple ways to do this in this article.

Microblogging from One Source

Microblogging is a term that has sprung up recently to describe social media web sites like Twitter and Facebook where people are posting short little updates on what they are doing. You can also do this on other sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Plurk, and many others.

First of all, you should get on a few of these sites and see what types of things people post in their “status updates.” As I have stated before, you should not be pitching your stuff all day long because people will just “unfriend” you, or on some sites like Facebook they can hide your posts so they never appear even though you are still a Facebook “friend.” So first observe how other handle this (or mishandle it) before you start posting tons of stuff. My personal experience has been that it’s OK to post stuff about your business as long as it is not always a pitch, and as long as you also sprinkle in posts on other aspects of your life.

So a problem that comes up when you start microblogging, i.e. posting status updates about your life and business, is: how do you do this without spending all day on it? How do you get around logging into eight different sites and posting things on each one?

The answer is to use a site that allows you to connect up to all your social media accounts, and send out one message from one place that goes out to all of them. I use a site called Ping.fm, and I currently have it set up so that when I type something in the status update box and hit submit, it goes out to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Plurk, Mashable, FriendFeed, Xanga, Delicious, and Vox.

There are other sites that do this as well, such as FriendFeed and Posterous.com. However, I just learned this week that FriendFeed was bought by Facebook and there are rumors that that site may be going away soon. And I will be recommending another use for Posterous.com in the next section. so I recommend Ping.fm. Once you have your accounts set up on these other sites, it’s easy to set up a Ping.fm account and hook up your other accounts to it.

Of course, bear in mind that you still have to log in to each of these sites at least occasionally, add friends, see what other people are doing, and interact with them.

Blogging on Steroids

Now I’m going to talk about regular blogging, i.e. with longer articles or press releases. There are a number of blogging sites. The most common ways to make a blog are with Wordpress or Typepad. But there are also some free blog sites where you can sign up and put up a free blog, such as Wordpress.com, Blogger.com (which is affiliated with Google), Tumblr.com and more.

So you set up your multiple blog accounts on these various blog sites. Then you set up an account on a site called Posterous.com, and hook it up to all your blog sites. Now you can post an article or release within your Posterous.com account, and it will be posted to all those blogs at the same time. In fact, you can even send an email to an address they give you (after you set up all this stuff) and it will go out to all your blog sites and be posted there. I prefer to do it through the online interface because it allows me to put in links and pictures.

You can also use Posterous.com to post to Twitter, Facebook and other “micro” blogging sites. But I am separating these out and using Posterous.com for the regular blogs, and using Ping.fm for the micro blogging because you can’t really send a whole long article via Ping.fm.

By the way, I found out about Posterous.com through the Thirty Day Challenge, a terrific online free training program being run by Australian Ed Dale.

I believe these two tools are a great way to maximize your time spent on website marketing.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous