Did You Start Off Right On Twitter?

What is your username?

Is it brand worthy? Does it brand the most important thing? You! Your username isn't just a phrase you're going to enter when you sign in. It will form part of your URL and will be visible whenever you promote your Twitter page.

It's like choosing a domain name for a Web site. Choose poorly, an you could affect your Twitter account's ability to gather followers and build a reputation.

Your username might be the first thing you enter, but it should be an item you think about deeply.

Your full name is a possibility, provided it hasn't been taken already, but another good option is to use your Web site's domain name. That would link your site together with your Twitter account and make clear that the one is just a natural extension of the other.

What ever you choose, just make sure that it's:

1) Short
2) Closely associated with you.
3) Easy to remember

If you keep it short, simple to remember, and closely associated with who you are and what you do, your Twitter id will go along way in helping brand the most important thing you have. You!

5 Ways to Attract People and Drive Traffic To Your Website

Here are 5 ways to attract people and drive traffic to your website.

1) Provide visitors with free content. Your content will be more attractive to your visitors if it's up-to-date or original. To take it a step further, you could also offer the option to reprint the content in their e-zine or web site.

2) Give visitors a free eBook. Don't worry, if you don't want to take the time to write an eBook yourself, you can always ask other writers for permission to use their articles. If you do write your own eBook, you could place an ad in the content and allow your visitors to give it away.

3) Hold a contest or sweepstakes contest and give visitors a free entry. The prizes should be something of interest or value to your visitors. Most people who enter will continually revisit your web site to get the results.

4) Hold free online classes or seminars. The classes could be held in your web site's chat room. The idea of "live" information will definitely entice people to visit your web site. This also presents you as an expert on the topic.

5) Last but not least, give away free consulting to people who visit your web site. You could offer your knowledge via e-mail or by telephone. People will consider this a huge value because consulting fees can be very expensive.

Twubble - Find Twitter Friends Through Your Current Twitter Friends

Twubble is a service that recommends new twitter friends to you based on the friends of your friends. It was created by Google software engineer Bob Lee in April 2008.

Twubble goes through 30 of your follows who’ve updated most recently, and suggests a maximum of 100 suggestions. It then ranks them

- taking the people you like = follow, AND
- checking who of your favorites (nr. 1) follow the up to 100 suggestions

But it is, of course, a bit inbreeding because it is likely that your favorites will appreciate the same type of tweets you would. Nevertheless, you can find a few important ones that you might have missed otherwise.

PS. limiting things to 100 suggestions prevents time-outs from API calls to Twitter (always an issue) as well as any crash if you happen to be following some heavyeights (e.g., TechCrunch)

TweetStats -- Statistics On Your Twitter Usage!

In the innovative world of Micro-blogging, TweetStats aims to organize it all.

TweetStats. This cool little app that gives you statistics, in graphical format, about your Twitter usage. Or the usage of anyone else on Twitter for that matter.

I tweet most often on Friday's and around noon each day. I like to talkt to @LoriPeckham.

To the left are my statistics as of today.

A couple of other cool things about this application is that it provides trends on the top 10 conversations and the top 10 most used applications on Twitter.

TwitterLocal - Do you use it?

One of the things that is interesting about Twitter is how many services and small applications have been built upon its simple interface to provide additional features. It seems that I discover a new application that ties into twitter on a daily basis. I have decided to add them to my blog as I come across them so that a comprehensive list is available in one spot.

Today's twitter application is TwitterLocal. TwitterLocal will allow you to track tweepl that located in a specific location. Now that they ahve gone to a Adobe Air Client, you can now watch as many location-based Twitter feeds as you want.