Should you live tweet that conference/event?

First, what is live tweeting? (scroll to the next sub-heading if you know this)

It is tweeting something that is going on live. You normally have a #hashtag for every live event. For example, the Izea event which took place few days back used #Izeafest as hashtag. People use hashtag to make it easy for others to follow the tweets about a particular event.

I love Copyblogger and I’m a big fan of Brian Clark.

Benefits Of Live Tweeting

What? Can you get extra benefits by posting live tweet? Yes, you can.

1. New And Strong Twitter Relationships

Twitter is all about relationship, conversation and did I mention promotion? Now, the last one should be done carefully and within limits. Anyway, you’d be knowing that by now.

Normally you tweet about conferences live. When you do that you will be following other tweets about the conference using the hashtag assigned for that particular event. So you have a chance to find new people and form a good relationship with them.

If you are in the conference, you can talk to them directly. But if you are not in the conference and watching it in a live stream, you cannot do it. What you can do is, tweet those who are tweeting about the conference and talk to them about it first. Second , take the conversation to the next step. Don’t flood your twitter timeline with many @ messages. Send them in DM or chat in skype or whatever you like.

People who attend conferences are often those who are serious about business and willing to invest time and money to improve themselves and take their business to the next level. Forming relationship with these people is the best thing you can do in twitter.

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2. Learn

Every event has some of the industry’s experts in their list of speakers. These experts know what they do and clearly know what works. When they say it out for you in a conference, listen to them and learn. I hear you. You go to conference only to learn and form new relationship. But wait, according to a Edgar Dale:

10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss with others
80% of what we personally experience
95% or what we teach others

So why not hear it in conference, write it down as a tweet, favorite the ones that are really good and read it, discuss with others and teach them? It takes 21 days according to a research to save anything to your subconscious mind. Is it not easy to read the best tips that you have saved in your favorites everyday for 21 days till it gets installed in your subconscious mind?

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3. Help Your Followers

There will be many people in your followers list who want to take their blog/business to next level. How about helping your followers with what you learn from the conference?

People might have missed the conference due to some reason. Some would have missed it because they are in a different part of a world. Some of them cannot watch it in livestream because of slow internet connection/dialup. They all have one thing in common? The eagerness to learn.

By tweeting the important points of a event, you are helping your followers. Believe me on this. I have trusted few people in twitter who I follow because they teach me something new. It is a fact. You trust people who help you.

Let me remind you that you can even tweet about live games. I have live tweeted about football (Soccer if you are from USA). You don’t educate your followers in this case but you keep them up-to-date with live scores.

Note: It is better to keep your tweets within limits. Don’t tweet a lot about anything within a short period.

So when you live tweet, you not only learn and move your business forward, you also help your followers. Is there a much better way of using twitter? I’ll let you decide.

Please share your views on live tweeting, be it positive or negative. I’d like to hear your opinion on this. I’ll write a follow up post and include the best comments. You can add me on twitter here- @Ramkarthik.

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” — Vincent Van Gogh

Many bloggers miss out small touches to their blogs. This may cost a lot. In this post, I have summed up 5 small(and often overlooked) things that can improve your blog a lot:

Image Source: Bright Angel Point by Wolfgang Staudt

1. Adding Subscription Options

When readers comment, they expect a reply from you. Subscribe to Comments is a great WordPress plugin that can add this option below your blog’s comment form. This will increase reader participation. After all, getting a mail saying “A new reply” is much better than making someone check your blog again and again in hope of a reply! (But hey, isn’t it great way to increase Page Views? )

RSS subscription is another things bloggers tend to overlook often. Make sure that you add a RSS Subscription link/image at a visible spot. Some great areas are top of sidebar (like ProBlogger) or Top Right Corner of page (like Daily Blog Tips).

2. Participating In Community

No one likes to comment on a dead blog. If you do not reply to comments and participate in discussions, no one will bother to come and comment. You should try to reply to every comment on your blog. If you do not have time, make sure that you reply to at least all the questions asked in comments section.

Note that this applies specifically to small blogs. Many other factors(traffic, exposure and SEO) come in to play when people comment on bigger blogs like ProBlogger.

Image Source: Happy Our Birthday by Hamed Saber

3. Adding Social Bookmarking Icons

Bookmarking sites like Delicious, Stumble Upon and Digg are a great source of traffic. But hey, you will not get any traffic if you do not give readers the options/tools to share your posts.

You can use Share This Widget below your posts or add custom social bookmarking icons so that it becomes easy for readers to share your content. You should enable Feed Flare in your Feedburner feeds so that RSS readers can also share the posts.

Image Source: 50 Social Media Icons by Ivan Walsh

4. Proofreading Your Posts

No one likes half baked posts that many bloggers churn out! If you want readers to take notice, you should spend some time proofreading your posts. If you use WordPress, After the Deadline plugin is great for spotting spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Note: Remember that no plugin or dictionary can make up for human editing. Spell checker can not catch many small grammatical mistakes(e.g. their in place of there).

5. Including Calls To Action

So, you are doing everything right but not getting results! Not including “Calls To Action” may be the reason.

Even a small call can do wonders. Just try including “If you liked this post, please consider subscribing via RSS” or something similar after your post. You will yourself see results.

If you are using WordPress, here’s how to add a call to action to bottom of all your posts:

Go to Appearance -> Editor. Select “single.php” from the right menu. Look for the following line of code:
<?php the_content() ?>

Enter the desired message(using HTML) after this line. Note that the tag may not be same for every theme. If you can not find it in single.php and need help, just leave a comment here.

Referrer Detector plugin is another good option that you can use for you calls.

These were just 5 small things that can improve your blog a lot. I am sure there are many more. Please share your tips/suggestions in comments.

This is a guest post by Ishan from Blogging With Success. Liked this post? Check out his post How To Sell A Dead Horse For $500.

There are too many information available for you to read every day and the more you spend time reading, the less you will take time to act on what you have read. (If you want a free direct pdf version of this article, go to the end of this post).

Richard Saul Wurman said in his book, Information Anxiety, that:

“There has been more information produced in the last 30 years than during the previous 5000″

This applies for the blogosphere too to certain extent. In the blogosphere, lots of information has been written today than a few years ago.

How will you manage online information overload?

Firstly, what is information overload?

According to Alvin Toffler, who coined to the term information overload, it refers to an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information.

Image Source: Information Overload by cambodia4kidsorg

How does this affect you in blogging?

Due to tons of information available online, which is increasing at a rapid rate every day, you have no time to process the information. As a result, you will neither learn a lot nor act on what you have already learned.

In whatever niche you are, there are already hundreds of good blogs if not thousands. To update yourself in your niche, you have to follow all these blogs. But following all the hundreds of blogs is merely impossible. Even if you subscribe to all the blogs, you are not going to read every post from every blog.

A year back, I subscribed to as many as 127 blogs. At times I used to go offline for a couple of days. Whenever I take short breaks and open my RSS reader after returning, I used to have at least 200+ unread items. I have heard people say they have 1000+ unread items. Is it possible to go through all of them and still have time to act on what you have learned? If you said ‘yes, it is possible for me’, consider yourself gifted. You won’t find much helpful information in this post. You can contact me and let me know how you do it if you wish. I’d be happy to learn from you.

But if you are like me, who cannot read hundreds of useful articles a day and act on whatever I have learned, this post is for you.

I’m going to share with you the exact techniques that have worked for me to avoid information overload. I have been using these methods for nearly 6 months and it has worked very well for me.

Image Source: New Controls in Google Reader
by Yandle

1. Subscribe to Less Blogs

If you want less information, subscribe to less blogs. Simple. If you are going to subscribe to 100+ blogs, you will come across the same thing I experienced (the above example). Be selective when subscribing to blogs. As I said, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of good blogs in your niche.

Here are some tips for selecting the blogs to subscribe:

A. Authority

Subscribe to all the authority blogs in your niche. If you are into blogging, subscribe to Problogger. If you are into community and social media, don’t forget to subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog. These authority blogs will always deliver quality information. They are authority blogs for a reason. They know what they are saying.

B. Quality

This is the most important factor when you are looking for blogs to subscribe to. Read the recent posts in the blog, go through the archives and do all the research you want. It will not take more than 15 minutes for you to do the research but it will save you a lot of time in the long run.

C. Topic

Subscribe more to the blogs that belong to your niche. Subscribing to blogs that are not in your niche will not help you much. Of course you can subscribe to productivity blogs or technology blogs if you are interested. But I would recommend you to limit them.

Don’t subscribe to blogs just because your friends are subscribed to it. Think for a second or at least half a second if the blog will help you in achieving your goals. I used to do this. When my friends used to say that they have subscribed to blog A, I used to do follow them. Now I don’t do that though. Never subscribe to a blog that will not help you move forward in your life.

2. Learn to Speed Read

Take some time to learn how to skim. There are so many books out there that teach you exactly that. Grab a book and read it. Don’t mind about the time it takes you for learning how to skim. It will help you throughout your life. The best investment you can make is investment in yourself. If you spend a couple of dollars and a few hours, you can learn the art of skimming information.

Here are some articles that teach you how to speed read:

How to speed read – Boing Boing

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

3. Using Social Sites

Social sites like StumbleUpon will help you a lot in avoiding information overload if you know how to use it. There are many social sites out there. There are also niche based social sites like Sphinn. If you are a SEO blogger, you should check out Sphinn.

How to use social sites to manage information overload online?

Go to your favorite social site. My favorite is stumbleupon. So I’ll tell you how I use StumbleUpon to process information.

I search for stumbleupon users who continuously stumble articles related to my niche. You can get a RSS link of each user’s stumbles. I add this RSS to Google Reader.

Tip: Don’t subscribe to the ‘likes’ in stumbleupon. Subscribe to ‘reviews’. StumbleUpon users stumble many sites every day. You don’t want 1000+ items in your reader. SU users review only selected articles.

You can find me on StumbleUpon here. I review mostly posts related to blogging and social media.

Small Niche Based Social Sites

You can find a list of niche based social sites here.

My favorite is Sphinn. Though sphinn is a famous social site, the number of front page articles per day is low.

Create a list of social sites based on your niche and subscribe to the front page of these sites. This way, you will only read the best content in your niche.

4. Content Aggregators

Content aggregators are sites which gather the top news in all the niches or all the social sites. The popular ones are Popurls and Alltop.

Popurls

This site gathers news links from social sites and top blogs. You can customize the content which you see in the homepage by creating an account.

Alltop

Alltop gets links from top blogs and categorize it into different niches. There are plenty of niches. You can make your niche alltop as your homepage and glance through the new posts in all top blogs. You can also create your own alltop page with blogs of your choice.

5. Using Twitter

Twitter is useful in many ways. It is not just about updating what you are doing. Twitter can be used to find useful information online.

Follow people who share useful links to articles in your niche. If you are interested in social media and tech, you should follow mashable. Once you have created a list of users who share valuable content in their twitter stream, add them to a group and create a column for it. You can use a twitter client like tweetdeck to do it.

You can find me on twitter here – @Ramkarthik.

These are the techniques I use for managing online information overload. I suggest you to take this as a base and form your own techniques. What works for me might not work well for you. This is the concept. Understand it and develop your method till you find yourself managing information efficiently.

If you liked this post, please give it a stumble and/or bookmark it in del.icio.us. I appreciate it.

As I promised, here is the link to download the pdf version of managing online information overload (Right click -> ‘Save As’).