I'm cheating a bit for this week's Tech Tuesday. I'm posting a link to Amber Jordan's article "Should I use Twitter or Facebook for Marketing my Handmade Business?" over at Handmade Spark. It's a short piece, but full of great links and information for marketing your handmade crafts online. The short of it - Twitter is the way to go.
The key is to make sure that you are using Twitter effectively. "A constant stream of look at me updates will leave you alone in the tweet-o-sphere. You have to learn the tweeting etiquette and use the 80/20 rule. You retweet useful articles, links, interesting tweets made by others 80% of the time and only self promote 20% of the time," says Jordan. It's all about establishing relationships, especially in the handcrafted online sphere. You need to know who you are connecting with before just jumping in to either Facebook or Twitter. So, to help you get started, Jordan passes along a couple of great links:
Be the spider, not the bee When looking for food, the bee travels from flower to flower to flower. This is the traditional way that we think about researching. We go to a search engine and jump from web page to web page to web page. This is tiring and inefficient. Instead, we need to be like the spider.
The spider spins a web and waits for his food to come to him. He doesn't waste time. He has found a better way to make what he wants come to him. So, how can we do that as researchers?
BEE A Better Searcher: Google Smarter, Not Harder
Using Better Search Terms and Options WHAT TO PUT IN THE SEARCH BOX: Use this handout
It's all about your search terms. Before ever putting a word into the Google search box, first spend some time coming up with 5 - 10 specific search terms. In fact, refer to these pages to help you refine your search terms.
Use quotation marks to limit results. Putting quotation marks around your search terms tells Google to return results that include only that exact phrase. This is especially important to use when you are looking for research on uniquely worded or specific terms. For example, there are over 16 million results for India's water supply but only 186,000 results for "India's water supply," and the results that are returned when using the quotations are more relevant.
Search within a specific website (site:) Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, by typing India site:nytimes.com Google will return pages about India from the New York Times website. You can broaden this, too. If you type India site:.gov, you will get results from a .gov domain.
Use the minus to limit what your search returns. When you put a minus before a word in the search box, Google will not return sites that include that term. For example, by doing a search like salsa -dancing (notice there is no space between the minus and dancing), the minus will remove "dancing" from the search results you get back.
Define: Need a quick definition? Type define: word and viola! An instant definition!
Use OR to refine your search. Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. In fact, you don't need to use and because this is Google's default. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example, Philadelphia Phillies 2008 OR 2009 will give you results about either one of these years, whereas Philadelphia Phillies 2008 2009 (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page.
Use the tilde to find synonymous search terms. Adding the tilde (~) before a search term will help broaden your search because the tilde tells Google to return not only the search term you specified, but also terms that Google thinks are synonymous with your term.
Use an asterisk to find a quick answer. Sometimes the best way to ask a question is to get Google to fill in the blank by adding an asterisk (*) at the part of the sentence or question that you want finished into the Google search box. How many MPH can the world's fastest man run? Ask Google by typing the world's fast man can run * MPH.
USING THE ADVANCED SEARCH:
GOOGLE SEARCH OPTIONS: Search smarter using timeline searches, scholar searches, and book searches
Google Books: Search full texts of books (hint: use the search box to the left of the book's pages)
Google Scholar: Search scholarly online journals, presentations, and texts
Control + F opens a find box at the bottom of the page to make searching within a document for specific information even easier. This works on any web page.
Search a specific site by using site:
site:wardsworld.pbworks.com Kite Runner will return pages on my site that mention Kite Runner
site:.edu India water shortage will search educational sites for mention of India's water shortage issues
filetype:.pdf (or .doc or .ppt, etc.) will help you find specific file types (this can also be done from the advanced search
Make the WEB Work Harder: Google Alerts
Create Alerts to send relevant news resources to your email inbox. BE THE SPIDER!
Access Your WEB of Research Anywhere: Online Bookmarking
I am not new to blogging. In my other life as a high school English teacher, I've been blogging on teaching and technology issues for the past few years. But I had never heard of a linky party until my maternity leave began and I found myself reading and then writing a mom/craft blog. Turns out the linky party is nearly ubiquitous on the mommy craft blogs. So for those uninitiated, I thought I would devote this Tech Tuesday post to linky parties.
What Is A Linky Party? A linky party is a blog tool that allows a blogger to host a list of links. The host blogger declares the theme of the linky - anything from tutorials on crafting for Christmas to a list of blogs written by work-at-home moms of seven children - and readers can submit their blog link for others to see and connect to. Simply put, a linky party is a collection of links to blogs that share a similar interest. And there are a number of online sites that make it easy to host such linky parties (see below).
But be careful before you begin posting. Make sure that you read the host bloggers criteria for adding your link. Some hosts do not want people to cross-post their tutorials or posts on other linky parties. It can get a bit territorial, so make sure that you read the host's rules before posting.
Directory of Crafting Link Parties: Paisley Passions has a great directory of weekly linky parties.
This week's installment of Tech Tuesday is all about organization. How can you simplify your life online, making it easy to find and share the websites and information that you access most? Check out the sites below. They may help you simplify and organize your life online.
Delicious.com Where would I be without Delicious? Likely still saving all my bookmarks to my computer's browser and cursing when I couldn't find a particular web page when I switched computers. Saving your favorite sites online makes it much easier to find them later no matter what computer or browser you use. Delicious uses tags to help you organize and keep track of all your favorites.
Box.net Take it to the cloud! Rather than saving all your files to your computer's hard drive and not having access to them when you switch computers or carting around an external hard drive or multiple USB flash drives (I always lose the caps to those things), try saving your files online. Like saving your bookmarks online, saving your documents, spreadsheets, images, photos, and videos to a secure site like Box.net enables you to access them anywhere you have internet connection. This free storage site not only allows you to keep files private, but you also have the option of sharing files or folders with other users.
Google Docs Like Box.net, Google Docs is a wonderful way to store your files online, but there is oh-so-much more that you can do with Google Docs. Collaborate with others on word processing documents or spreadsheets. Create surveys to embed on your blog or website. Create a mailing list that your clients add their own information to when ever and where ever they wish. The possibilities are nearly limitless.
Symbaloo Symbaloo is just cool. I have tons of bookmarked websites and even more blogs daily packing my reader with new posts. And then there's Twitter and Etsy and email and... How nice would it be to keep track of all my regularly checked sites in one place. Symbaloo helps you do just that. Sign up for free, and create your customized Symbaloo page. "It is our dream to make Symbaloo the easiest starting point on the Internet. It’s that simple; you could have thought of it yourself! Symbaloo is an ancient Greek verb meaning ‘gathering’ ‘assembling’." Check it out!
RockMelt Just released this past week, RockMelt is a new browser that makes keeping track of your favorite sites and sharing your finds with your social networks much easier. Take a quick look and sign up for a free download.
Inspired by my recent posts on using Twitter and Google's AdWords to market my Etsy store, I thought I would start a new series - Tech Tuesdays. In this series, I'll explore some of the web-based tools that work-at-home moms are using to promote their websites and blogs.
Since setting shop, I've been trying to find ways to reach those who might be interested in my creative endeavors. In part, that's how this blog and my Babeecrafts Twitter account got started. But, how do I know if they're working? How do I know if anyone out there hears me? Hello!? Are you out there? Below are some tools that you can use in conjunction with your website or blog to check in on who's checking you out.
A Peek at Who's Peeking:
Feedjit is a great and free little widget that you can customize and add to your site to track who accesses your site, when, and from where. By tracking the IP addresses that connect to your site, Feedjit "listens" to see who accesses your page, for how long, how they arrived, and how they leave your site. Check out my Feedjit at the bottom of this blog.
Google Analytics is another free way to track who visits your website, when, and how long. As mentioned in an earlier post, Google Analytics can be used to see what keywords people have used to find your site. And as an added bonus, if you are using Google's AdWords to advertise your site, you can connect your Analytics page to your AdWords page which allows you to see what keywords some has used to both find your site and have resulted in a sale. Interested in learning more? Check out CraftyPod's video series - Google Analytics for Crafters.
StatCounter, as described on their website, is a free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter, and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyze and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time! It takes the best of Feedjit and Google Analytics and puts it in one place.
ClustrMaps, in addition to adding a nifty little map to your website or blog, when ClustrMap loads on your site, it increments a counter and shows the locations of all visitors to your page, cumulatively (even for huge numbers). Clicking on it zooms in to a big world map, and lets you zoom in to the continents.
And, What Are They Saying?
Social Mention crawls social media sites for mention of your search terms. Track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across 80+ social media sites.
Who's Talkin (or if you look at their url, it could also be who stalkin) works much like Social Mention in that it crawls the web for mentions of your name or website on social media sources.
Google Alerts are easy to set up searches that are sent directly to your email inbox. Set one up with your name, your shop's name, or your blog's web address. Any time someone mentions you on the web, Google will send you an email to let you know where to find the mention. Need help creating your first alert? Check out this handout.
Pipl searches the "deep web" for information, pictures, and more. Plug your name into the search engine and see what Pipl pulls back.
Hopefully these tools will help you figure out who your audience is in order to better reach them. Stay tuned for more Tech Tuesday posts!
I'm cheating a bit for this week's Tech Tuesday. I'm posting a link to Amber Jordan's article "Should I use Twitter or Facebook for Marketing my Handmade Business?" over at Handmade Spark. It's a short piece, but full of great links and information for marketing your handmade crafts online. The short of it - Twitter is the way to go.
