The creator of Pretty Link, Blair Williams, has recently posted an article on how to make short linking even more effective.

Essentially, you register a very short domain name, point it to your top level site, add a small amount of code into you .htaccess file (and if you don’t know what that is then just contact me for more details) which you need and Blair explains clearly the how and where and why.

Magic, all done. Well apart from one thing there’s a very reasonable one of charge for the pro version of the pretty link plugin.

So, if you want to build your brand, have effective links used for your brand in twitter, facebook and all forms of social media and save space at the same time then this information will be very useful for you.

It's normally sold for $397 and I am offering it to the first 10 who totally and honestly complete the survey for $297.

Just complete the survey after you signup below and I will get back to you with the report.

The report will cover:

• structure of your website
• effectiveness of your site with the search engines
• major omissions and problems of your current site
• ideas for how you could improve your online presence

This is more than an SEO report, it's about fine tuning your online presence with the rest of your business.

How can I use Twitter for my business? What makes it special? There's so much written about the use of twitter already but "what does it all mean?".

Twitter offers a completely different method of communication.  It mixes social networking with instant messaging.  Posts are a very brief 140 characters each allowing you to answer that burning question, “What are you up to right now?”  

In order to answer this question you must make every word count.  You need to grab your readers’ attention quickly with each “tweet” (how a post is referred to on Twitter).  Twitter allows you to sign up and send messages to your subscribers and friends.  You can update your audience as frequently as you wish and they can respond to you quickly and easily.  

The way it works is that people follow your “tweets”, so the more followers you have the more you are likely to get as their friends see your details on the profile pages on others and choose to follow you too.  Each time you post an updated tweet, it will be transmitted to your group of followers immediately to their computers and cell phones if they have chosen that way of communication.  

If you send out regular tweets you will start to gather a faithful group of followers.  Make each tweet count and add value.  If you write reviews on computer games or create accessories for Avatars, then you can tell your followers when you have been working on something new or have something new to tell them.  

It is possible to grow a fanatical following who are so interested in what you are doing and offering that they look out for every new tweet from you.  For information marketers such intensity can quickly develop into a faithful band of buyers who react to any new offerings you put their way. 

Friends that want to arrange a meeting can tweet everyone to let them know the time and location of the meeting.  You can also send tweets that give notice of a latest update to your blog or lens update.  Remember to work your tweet carefully so you have enough room to include the link to your site. 

This is essential if you want to create interest in your website and branding yourself successfully.  Even a very brief post can give you an identity in such a way that followers are attracted to your particular niche.  Some people love Twitter and others just do not understand it.  

To understand how it works you really need to use Twitter every day.  Look at what other Twitterers are up to and how they use tweets to market their brand, build an identity, display their expertise and generate website traffic.  

Twitter is addictive and this is mainly down to instant gratification.  It is easy to use and allows you to get your message across to lots of people quickly.  Once you have chosen to use Twitter for your niche, hobby, profession, business, or sport, you will start to see how it is a great way of dispensing huge amounts of information quickly, one tweet at a time. 

It's more than just this though, you can use some of the social bookmarking tools mentioned in a previous post, that will make the tweet for you automatically, for example when you update your blog, or publish a new article. From a business perspective you can send information instantly and also get it back just as quickly. Remember though it's instant gratification and so you need to act fast if a customer contacts you. It's great for support issues, combine Twitter with your support desk and you can have a very effective result for your customers problem resolution and they will be thinking great customer service.

Firstly, what is social bookmarking?

To be successful on the internet, people, customers, prospects, have to be able to find you. To find you they often use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for the "thing" they are interested in. To be found on the first page of a search engine is vitally important as most people, actually more than 95% of people never look at more than the first 3 pages of results. Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. 

How is this relevant to social bookmarking?

Well, in short if you have provided items of value, like an article, a book, a video and put it on the internet then the more references there are to that piece of content the better. The social book marking sites, and there's more than 150 of them, create a link back to your article. The search engines love to see this link, they give you credit for having all these links to your content, and presto you climb up the list of results in the search engines. We want our business to be as high up on this list of results as possible, preferably the first page. This isn't an article about search engines or SEO but it is very relevant.

Lets look at this in a bit more detail.

Social bookmarking is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs online.  You might have the best product in the world, but if you can’t generate the traffic you’ve just got a nice website on your hands with no customers.  Even if you have a loyal mailing list you will still need to constantly update this by attracting new online visitors.  

There are many options for making connections on social bookmarking sites.  To find the best you need to take your time and surf around.  Once you have researched the best start to set up some social bookmarking accounts that you can use regularly.  

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular of the social bookmarking sites which is both powerful and easy to use. First you need to create an account and then create a toolbar interface.  All that’s left to do is click on the Thumbs Up icon (which is found on your browser after you install the StumbleUpon tool) in order to recommend a website.  This can be done for any websites you own and you can also ask your friends to give you the Thumbs Up.  In addition to these ratings you can also add comments about your website.  

Can you Digg it?  Sounds like a line from a 70s song, but it is actually a very popular social bookmarking site. Digg works very much like StumbleUpon in that users are allowed to push up the ratings for a particular site so that it reaches the front page.  If you can make it to the front page you will be presenting yourself to thousands of potential visitors and more and more people will start hitting your site to see what you are all about.  

To assist you in publishing your information out onto the web there are a number of services available to you. There are both free and paid services and those listed here are the free services. They require a bit of effort from your business to maintain but the effort pays off over time. You will need to register yourself or your business to each of the social sites you want to be profiled on. This can take a little time at the beginning, though once done you don't have to worry about again.

• Clipmarks markets itself as “scissors for web pages.”  This site lets you submit items that are transmitted to the Internet – including to an iPhone and to Facebook.  It provides a one stop shop and can save a lot of time.
• You can sign up with services like OnlyWire to get similiar capability to Clipmarks. OnlyWire has a free and a paid option. 
• Another option is to use a site called Socialmarker. Using your social site accounts it steps your through the creation process of entries in each of these sites. You would repeat this process for each new piece of information that you want to promote out onto the internet.  
• Alternatively you can use ping.fm to connect to all your social media accounts. 

Some of these services provide a small application for your browser. Just install one or more of these plugins for your browser. These "plugins" allow you to carry out a multitude of functions such as clicking once to submit your item to many sites in one go.  In order for this to work, you will need to join any social bookmarking sites you want to use.  

You will need to ensure that visitors to your site know how they can rate your site.  It is not possible to bribe or reward them for bookmarking your site.  This is the social bookmarking equivalent to stuffing the ballot box.  

You can publish links to bookmarking sites as a gentle and polite reminder to your visitors.  Don’t be coy about submitting any updated information to these networks yourself.  You will just need to ensure that you do it in such a way that it doesn’t appear as spam.  If you tell people what you have got and where they can find it there is a good chance they will pass this information on to others.

In the spirit of this article there's a button just below that says "Share / Save". Go on, click and and social bookmark this article and see how it works.

On an ongoing basis, typically monthly, your communications costs are likely to be in the top three if not the top charge. Think about it, you have a home phone, a mobile or two or three in the house (if not more), an internet connection (ADSL or cable), maybe even cable television. That all adds up pretty quickly to a recurring few hundred dollars a month for a typical household.

That’s a fair amount of services just for one house!

What about when you are running a business? For businesses the costs can be from a few hundreds to many tens of thousands of dollars, which is significant, no matter what currency you use. The collection of services used in a business will vary of course to the household in both type and quantity of services. For example, multiple lines for the office staff into a PABX (PBX), data services for internet, email, inter-office communication, mobiles for your mobile field, sales and executive staff.

It’s not that you are just paying for services, there are all sorts of technologies, like mobile phones, computers, email servers, data links, modems, handsets, PABX’s, gateways, servers and all manner of gadgets in between. Even for those working in the IC&T industry it’s bewildering to know everything there is to know about all the possibilities.

In the end it comes down to a simple question.

What am I trying to do with my communications? As a business owner or a householder, the question is valid, just the scale is likely to be different.

You might be wondering, what do you mean by “what am I trying to do with my communications”? Let me answer that briefly by giving some examples.

•    do we mainly receive calls
•    how any SMS text messages do I send a day
•    when I call family, we speak for a long time and they are in Europe
•    I miss more calls than I answer
•    my daughter monopolises the phone
•    we make more calls than we receive
•    the coverage at our place is bad
•    there are more interesting things on the internet and I need to make it more affordable

For businesses the questions are largely those of “what type of business am I in”.

•    we mainly make calls to our clients, usually to their mobiles
•    or internet is great though I would like to get more sales through it
•    how can we make the calls between our offices and staff more cost effective
•    is it time to consider IP telephony yet?

The questions will or should relate to, and not be limited by these considerations:

•    your strategy for the type of business you are in,
•    the volume of your transactions,
•    the value of each transaction,
•    the location,
•    the type of communicating you do during the day, e.g. sales, customer care, support, complaints, general enquires, servicing, surveys;

Knowing the answers to these will help define:

•    technology
•    service type
•    redundancy
•    charges
•    functionality
•    resilience

These are a lot of questions to absorb and begin answering. Just remember a phone is not just a phone, a call is not just a call. There are options, it’s just a matter of weeding through to find the package that’s right for you, at home or in your business.

Doing this right will not only save you money it will also improve the what and the how you are communicating. If you need help with the content…well that’s a different topic

In the next topic we’ll start looking at discussing one of the most asked questions…

Section 2: Should I get rid of my landline?