Welcome back!

There are so many useful social networking tools to aid you in your online marketing ventures – everything from Facebook to LinkedIn, Digg to StumbleUpon. You’ve heard it before “I’m on the front page of digg and I’ve gotten a bazillion page views!” or “I launched my new teleclass using Facebook events, and now I’m booked for the next 20 years!”

Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get the point: Social Networking is making promoting your business on the web easier, faster, and more efficient than you thought possible.

Depending on your niche, you could find the best results in any number of networks – each has their own demographics and strengths. LinkedIn is great for businesspeople of all disciplines, Facebook is great with the business-to-consumer market, and Twitter reaches small businesses and consumers alike on a personal level.

Have you tried Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where you have 120 characters or less to give a message.  With over 1 million users, twitter is a platform which brings consumers and businesses together to communicate on a text-message level. Barack Obama is on Twitter. So is The White House and many other government agencies and elected officials.

So, how can you use Twitter to build your business?

1. Connect with prospects

If you’ve been craving one-on-one time with your potential clients and customers, Twitter will give this to you, and more. Twitter has quickly proven itself to be the way to connect individuals in a quick, easy-to-digest format. A simple search will help you find out WHO is talking about what you offer, and by offering useful information and advice you can quickly get on a prospects’ radar.

2. Connecting with Current Customers

In larger companies, it can be stressful just to find someone who can help solve your simple problem or larger issue. By making yourself available on Twitter, you may increase your value to a number of customers just by being available.

A good example of this is @comcastcares . An email rep from comcast set up this account to help people with minor issues – and he also uses this account to let customers know of current service issues and tips to keep everything working at their best. With over 3,000 followers, he’s obviously doing something right.

3. Congealing Your Brand

It’s easy to go unnoticed on the internet – sure some people look specificially for your service or product, but many others are just looking for cures for their symptoms. By talking about what you do – not just in a business sense, but in a real, conversational fasion – you’ll congeal your brand and get your products and services known to a rapt audience.

4. Market Research

Have you ever wanted to know what your customers are interested in beyond the usual demographics? The internet forums they participate in, the books they recommend? Twitter is a great vehicle for market research, and you’ll notice trends and be able to act on them quickly by watching the conversation closely.

5. Product Launches

Have you wondered how some businesses get so many people talking? If you’ve read any of Seth Godin’s Books, you’ll know being remarkable is necessary to get people talking. By being a real contactable person on a social network, instead of being a faceless entity, you’re doing something remarkable. With a good follower-base and the right message, you’ll quickly see how your product launches will be talked and blogged about, making your product launches exponentially more successful.

The first step to being successful in any online social networking venture is to begin! Create a profile, add some friends (or some people you’d like to be friends with!) and add to the conversation. It’s an easy and free way to get more knowledgeable on your online customers and presence.

Feel free to connect with me on Twitter, and other social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Plaxo.

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I’ve installed and configured quite a few wordpress blogs in my time. During this time, I’ve compiled a core of 10 plugins which I install with every wordpress site I work with – some of which make it easier to track and manage readers, some help me to categorize and create posts, and more:

Akismet – Nowadays, (I’m dating myself here in internet-land) Akismet comes preinstalled in wordpress, you just have to configure it with your WordPress.com API key.  (FYI – find your API key by reading this) Akismet has been around for a long time, but it’s still the best spam filter for WordPress.

All in One SEO Pack – WordPress is fantastic for search engine optimization, but it’s difficult to change the meta settings for singular posts manually. This plugin allows you to change the description for each page, including keywords, meta description (the part that comes up in search engines) and more. The best part is it’s very simple to use as it’s placed on every write page.

GoCodes – Do you give out links to your blog posts? If so, GoCodes will help make this simpler and more effective. Let’s say, for example, you were going to link to this article – the full link would be http://www.trinityjacobs.com/blog/2008/08/06/10-must-have-plugins-for-wordpress/. What a PAIN to type out, right? However, if you’re using GoCodes, you can shorten that link to make it easier on you and your readers – for example, it would be trinityjacobs.com/go/10-Wordpress-Plugins. This great tool also works to shorten and track click-throughs with any affiliate links you may have.

Google Analytics Plugin – Google Analytics is a free website statitistics program from Google. It’s robust and has all the tools you need to track your website visitors – the only issue is getting the code placed correctly on the page.  This plugin will allow you to just enter your GA information in one area, and it will immediately propogate on the pages for you.

In Series – This is a new plugin for me, but it’s a fantastic tool. When you’re writing a series of posts, it can be tiresome to create the series links for each article. Instead of fooling around with it, use In Series, a simple tool which allows you to specify with each post a) if the post belongs in a series b) the name of the series c)what number the post is in the series. THEN, it automatically adds the links into your finished post! (And, if you upload the entire series at once to be published later, it won’t show the links for the future posts until the articles are live on the site!)

Simple Tags – The great thing about this plugin is that it allows you to enter tags directly into the writing interface (it can even display your most commonly used tags to choose from), and then it takes those tags to create a ‘related posts’ list at the end of each entry for the user to explore.

Sociable – Sociable adds user-defined social networking buttons to the end of every post, thus allowing your readers to easily Digg, Stumble, or otherwise share the information with others.

Twitter Widget – It’s no secret that I’m a newly-appointed Twitter addict – It’s a great networking medium and I’ve found a lot of like-minded entrepreneurs over there. The Twitter widget allows you to place your most recent twitter posts in your sidebar. (I’ve gotten quite a few Twitter Followers this way)

What Would Seth Godin Do? – This is a fantastic plugin! For the first 5 times a visitor comes to your site, it embedds a message (see top of post) that urges you to follow the rss feed. After 5 vists, it welcomes the visitor back. It’s a great way to get your readers to take action without being intrusive.

Feedburner Plugin – Feedburner is a great tool to help track your RSS readers, it gives you an overall count of subscribers plus some subscriber data – much like Google Analytics, but less robost and exclusively for your RSS feed (which Analytics doesn’t track). In order to get this to work, however, you have to replace all your RSS feed links with the feedburner RSS feed link, which can be a hassle if you’re not a WordPress Coding Wizard. Thankfully, the Feedburner plugin automatically changes all RSS feed links from the default WordPress version to the Feedburner version, with only a little configuration in the settings panel.  (Feedburner was purchased by Google about a year ago… hopefully, they’ll integrate this functionality with their Analytics program.)

Do you have any plugin suggestions? Let us know in the comments below!

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