If you haven’t heard of it, Twitter is a microblogging tool that is all the rage these days. The basic premise behind Twitter is one of short, simple messages that are “twittered” or posted to the twitter platform from the web, text or desktop applications. Twitter can be a valuable source of information, connections and trending news and you shouldn’t miss out.

Here are a few ways to get more traffic to your website through twitter:

1. Post your RSS Feed to Twitter

There are multiple tools available that allow you to post your RSS feed in realtime. The most popular tool that most people use is Twitterfeed. Your followers will get immediate knowledge that your post has been created on your blog. This is excellent because not all of your followers on twitter will necessarily be readers of your blog, but by tweeting your feed they will gain knowledge of your blog.

2. Follow People In Your Niche

Follow other bloggers, send them tweets and become friends with them. Twitter allows you to communicate much more easily and build relationships faster then email ever would. Once you have become friendly with them, you can start guest posting, asking for more exposure, and getting your posts more readers and your blog more subscribers.

3. Hold Contests Via Twitter

Give things away via twitter. You will gain more followers, who will become more aware of your blog, your brand and will start reading your blog and its posts. The best way to do this is similar to the way the Affiliate Summit gives away Free Passes – ask people to twitter a reason why they should win the contest, the answer to a riddle, or what they think about your blog, for example.

4. Solicit feedback on Twitter

Ask friends and followers to give you feedback on new content, get their reactions, and continue the conversation on your blog or on Twitter.  Social media and Twitter are all about being interactive, so make sure that you continue the conversation in any and all appropriate mediums.

5. Embed a Twitter box on your web page

Let visitors to your web site know that they can always be instantly updated – install a twitter box on your web site that updates with your latest tweets, and invite your website visitors to follow you on Twitter. Why have your subscribers follow you on Twitter? It helps you build a brand, it increases loyalty, and it gives you more exposure for very little extra work.

Hey mates, some weeks ago I changed my hosting and I had to move all my websites from the old hosting to the new one. May be it’s seem like an easy task but it’s not when you are involved with databases.

The problem I got when I was moving this blog was related with its databases. I followed the steps recomended by almost every hosting but without reason, the procedure failed many times… So I decided to stop following those steps and do it my way.

Migrating a WordPress Blog

The following one is a list of steps, that you should follow to change your wordpress blog of hosting successfully:

1. Backup your data: First of all, you need to make a backup of your blog. You can do this by connecting via FTP and downloading everything in the root directory of your wordpress installation, i.e. download everything in /public_html/ or /public_html/blog, or wherever your installed wordpress. Save all those folders and files into a folder on your computer.
2. Backup your databases: This is where the recommendations of the hostings are wrong. First, log into your cpanel and go to phpMyAdmin and when it loads, click Export. After that, select the database you want to export – in this case the one which manages wordpress. By default there will be some options selected: export as SQL, Add IF NOT EXISTS, Add AUTO_INCREMENT value, Enclose table and field names with backquotes, Complete inserts, Extended inserts and Use hexadecimal for BLOB.
3. Save the database: You should not change any of the options mentioned in the step 2, it’s not necessary. I read in many websites that you should check “Add DROP TABLE / VIEW / PROCEDURE / FUNCTION” but that’s totally false! If you check that you won’t be able to import your database in the near future… So after verifying all those settings, check Save As File and press GO. Don’t check any related with compression.
4. Change wp-config.php: This file contains basic configurations of your wordpress blog. Open it in your computer and change the info related with your database name and password, user etc etc… Otherwise you will get an error of database once you upload it to the new server.
5. Upload your blog to the new hosting: Congratulations! You backed up your data from your old hosting with success, but this not ends here. Now, upload all those folders and files which you downloaded in the step 1 to the new hosting. Where to upload it? In the same directory it was in the old hosting!.
6. Create a new database: Log into the cpanel of the new hosting and go MySQL Databases. Create a new database (it will the one which will handle your blog in this new server… if you want, you can give it the same name of the old database). Add a new user to that new database with full privileges.
7. Import your old database: Go to phpMyAdmin. Then click import, selecting the database you want to fill in. In this case, select the database created in the step 5. Select the database from your computer and then change the Character from utf8 to latin1 and then press GO. Why to latin1? In order to verify this, open the backup of your database on your computer with a notepad or another text processor and search for the word “Character”. You will see the character type of your database, which is latin1 for default. Note: If your character type is another one different of latin1, you should select it in phpmyadmin or you will fail importing the database.
8. Change the nameservers: If everything is right, then you should go into your domain manager (godaddy or whatever…) and change the nameservers of your domain to point it to the new hosting. Once you do that, your domain will be bouncing between the old host and the new one, and that could take some days, it’s not instantaneously.

Recommendations

Due to the nameservers bouncing, I highly recommend you NOT to alter anything on your blog: add a new post, comment, plugin… Why? Because you won’t know if you edited the blog of the new hosting or of the new one.

When I did it some weeks ago, I had the wonderful idea of publishing a new post and the next day, many people sent me an email reporting a 404 error. They tried to visit the post through their RSS feed but they got and error because in the new server, that link didn’t exist!. For my luck, I copied/pasted the post from my Google Reader and I published it again ( yes, I’m subscribed to my own feed in order to see how things look lol ).

Also, remember that you can contact your hosting/domain manager if you have any problem – Good luck!

Writing articles for a blog can be a problem when you don’t have inspiration, those days when you don’t have idea about what to write. As I mentioned before, if you don’t have inspiration it will be better for you to take some free days, and after then you could go back to the work.

That’s great, but in this post I’m going to give you some tips about how to get inspiration almost instantaneously! Yes, do you think that bloggers write articles by their own every day? Of course not… Well let’s stop talking and let’s review my main sources of inspiration!.

1- Reading my own articles: May be you can be thinking Are you serious? You gotta be kidding me… But yes! Reading your own articles can give you inspiration automagically and I’m going to tell you why. Sometimes when we write things, we leave -unconsciously- some ideas in the air, and waiting to be developed. By reading your own past posts, you can discover some of those undeveloped ideas and then you can get inspiration to write something completely new, being related with your old post.

2- Reading other people’s articles: I am subscribed through RSS feed to 60 blogs more or less. Blogs about blogging, making money online, tech, design, random and crazy, politics and many other things… Normally, I have about 600 unread posts, but I try to keep that number as low as I can. WIth all those information comming from many sites, everytime I open my Google Reader is such as a big brainstorm. By reading many of those articles from different bloggers you can get another perspective of a specific topic, giving you the inspiration you need to create a killer blog post.

3- Searching for something: Many times I have been looking for something on Google, but after reading many sites I don’t find the information that I expected before. But wait a minute, if I couldn’t find anything about X topic, why don’t I write something about it on my blog?! It has happened to me some times and I’m sure that it has happened to you too. So if the thing you have been looking for many hours is related with your blog, go ahead and write exactly what you were expecting to read in other sites, be the first on providing that information!.

4- Talking with friends: This is my main source of inspiration. Every time I talk with a friend about my online businesses, he or she asks me many things that I never thought to write about on my blog. Everything starts when the person tells me that it was looking for X information but it never found something clearly explained, and it asks me for tips. After that, my brain starts thinking and linking many concepts, creating a big package of information and preparing it to be blogged. So, if you have friends who make businesses on internet, talk with them! Share your tips and you will see that at the end of the conversation, you will have great material to write about.

Also once you have a topic to write about, you can try to detach it in some pieces, let’s say 3. So then, you can create 3 separate posts about the same topic but with different points of view, or may be dealing with different characteristics… When a topic is too big you can create a series of posts and linking each chapter with the other ones. By doing that, you will be giving plenty of content in a pleasant way without boring your readers.

And you? Where do you get inspiration from? Share your main sources!

There are many ways to boost your blog that you can use to increase your subscribers, visits/month, pageviews, etc. In this contest, I will make a study of what I did in my last contest, how I do it and what were the results of applying different techniques…

Promote Something

It’s good to do giveaways without a reason, but it’s even better if you have a reason to do it. If you have a product or service that you want to promote, do it! I recommend you to offer free samples of them, this way you will attract many people, making them stick to your site just because of the product/service. In my case, I was promoting my ebook The Affiliate StartGuide, which the people could get for free by signing up for my newsletter.

Remember something, people love to get things for free. So if you offer them something without charging a penny, you will attract masses…

Find Sponsors

The major of the blog contests on internet are based on Entrecard Credits. That’s not bad, but there are so common and at least that you give away a big amoung of credits, 50k or even more, people won’t pay attention to you.

How can you make them think something different than “bah! It’s just another entrecard contest…” ? Giving uncommon prizes. The first thing you need to do before launching a contest, is to find sponsors for it. Contact companies and bloggers related with your niche asking them for sponsorship.

How I did it? I contacted them by using the following email:

Hi Company/name of the blogger,

First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Javier and I manage a blog on http://mrjavo.com, which is related to blogging and internet marketing tips.

Recently, I launched Mr Javo dot Com 2.0, which have some new features, including an ebook and a newsletter.

In order to promote the new features, I’m holding a contest which has over $XXX in prizes, sponsored by companies like XXXX,YYYY,ZZZZ among others…

How does it work? To take part in the contest is simple, the users will need to sign up for my newsletter. Once they signed up and verified their mails, they will receive a copy of my new ebook. As you see, is very simple. I will pick 10 lucky winners through a drawing using the service provided by random.org.

What do you get? By sponsoring this contest your website, product or service will be exposed in front of thousand of users, making it a win-win situation for us. This is something big, and I will sponsor it through many ways, including social media networks, forums and blogs, among others…

Let me know if you want to sponsor something, a service, product or anything else is very well welcome!

Best Regards,

Mr Javo.

In this email, there are some important aspects that you need to clarify:

• Brief introduction of yourself, how you are and which’s your blog.
• Why are you asking for sponsorship?
• If you count with other sponsorships, mention them.
• How the contest will work?
• What will a sponsor get by sponsoring your contest?

If one of these aspects are not especified in your email, you have the risk of being ignored, and even more when you deal with big companies… You can use that email format or improve it even more.

Something is sure, the bigger your prizes the more the BOOM that will cause your contest…

Spread The Word

You have different ways to spread the word about your contest. Adding the post of the contest to social media networks (such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, etc…) is a great way to do it, because of the infinite users that you can contact over there. If your contest is good enough, your friends will share it and the other people too, being a big chain read by several people.

By talking of your contest in forums like Digital Point can help you a lot, because there are many users that are looking for an opportunity to get something for free. But something that I highly recommend you is not to ask to your readers to share your contest. Why? When you do something good enough, you don’t need to ask to, and also, it will be more legitimate.

Invite People… directly

Another way to get more participants is contacting the people directly. As the email that I wrote before, I also wrote a letter of invitation, which I spread through the contact forms of the blogs. I invite directly some bloggers, who replied me with an affirmative answer…

Have Fun

Don’t take it so serious. Don’t stress or feel bad if you don’t get great sponsors, it could be a difficult task. In my past experience I contacted many people, getting rejected or ignored by some of them. So, don’t feel bad and keep contacting another people, hopefully you will get great prizes for your contest…

Analyzing My Results

Everything I told you in this post seems to be great, but how was the performance of it? Well, first of all, let’s review the changes in the RSS counter:

When I started the contest, I had an average of 240 subscribers. As you can see, in the first 3 days the number of subscribers jumped over 300! Getting a big peak of 500 in a week (the 7th day). At the present time, I’m handling 450 subscribers, which means that I increased over 100% the number of subscribers!

If we talk about the number of followers on twitter, mybloglog and other social sites, I can’t give you an exact number but I can tell you that I have had a good reaction too.

At the end of the month, I ended with over 100 subscribers listed in my newsletter, which means that I increased that number over 100% again!

To conclude, I can say that I boosted my blog more than 100%, increasing my followers by RSS, newsletter and social media networks. That’s a great thing, it means that I expanded my brand and now, I’m being read by more people than before, helping me in my future actions, contests and projects.

So do you have doubts of my success? I don’t think so… If you need help to hold your own blog contest, don’t doubt on asking me, I will be glad to help you .

Hello readers, first of all I want to talk a little about the effects of my big Give Away. I launched the new version of my blog the past wednesday, and I launched the contest on Thursday 16th. Until now, I want to tell you that I have received over 100 signups on my newsletter, in addition of all those new RSS subscribers which increased my feed counter from an average of 240 to almost 400 ( yesterday it was on 498 ). So I want to thank you so much for give to my blog that awesome boost, and all that in less than a week!.

Now let’s see what was hot this week:

• How to Crack into Google’s Servers and Find Search Keyword Gold by John Cow on JohnCow.com.
• Website Flipping: Dig Deeper Into SitePoint To Improve Your Sales by Jay on Suite J.
• A – Z Blogging Guide by Yan on thou shall blog.
• Want To Start a Blog About Making Money Online? Think Again by Sly on SlyVisions.
• Why You Should Stay Away from the Make Money Online & Internet Marketing Niches by Gyutae on WinningTheWeb.
• The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo! by Lidjia on ReadWriteWeb.

I hope you like this round of Spreading Love, I really enjoyed these posts… By the way, in the next weeks I will be launching a page with some new services which I will provide, so stay tuned to know what is coming on Mr Javo dot Com!

PS: Probably I will send you a special offers/discounts of this new services through my newsletter, so I recommend you to sign up to receive them! Don’t forget to vote on my polls!

The fact is that many people use this kind of marketing just to send unwanted emails, or commonly called as spam. In the last years, the number of spam messages in people’s inboxes have considerably increased. In a year, more than 3 trillions of emails are sent, of which an average of 70% of them are spam. For our luck, email service’s providers are constantly improving their algorithms to filter the good messages of the bad ones .

What should you know to run an email marketing campaign?

Well like everything related with marketing, creating a good campaign can take you more time than you expect. Obviously, the first thing you need to do is create a newsletter. You can do this by using Aweber, a service which you can send scheduled emails, broadcasts and configure autoresponders… And as every service of this nature, it lets you send bulk emails to your mailing lists.

Once you have ordered your email marketing service, you can start creating email lists and promoting your campaigns! On now, , let’s start with reviewing the things you need to have in mind to create and run with success an email campaign:

Respecting the Subject

• Keep it short: Make your subject as short as possible, with a maximum of 50 characters including spaces. This way, the message will be direct and concise.
• Keep it simple, don’t overdo it: Avoid using capital letters in all the words, as well as using punctuation like exclamation marks. In the case of the capital letters, they will be directly filtered by spam protectors, but if you want you could use exclamation marks, is not so bad but sometimes it could be misinterpret.
• Don’t forget your brand: Include your brand, i.e. the name of the company, product or service in the subject line. It helps the subscriber to recognize you.
• Create a sense of urgency: You can include time-depending words in order to encourage your subscribers to read the newsletter as soon as possible. Phrases like now, this week, for limited time, exclusive offer and similar can be use it to create this sensation.
• Motive the subscribers, entice it: You can let the reader know about the benefits it will get by reading the newsletter. Things like get free… or get a discount for… can work.
• Be honest: I think I have been a good broadcaster of that phrase. Being honest with the subscribers will create a sense of loyalty between you and they. You won’t get anything by deceiving them.

Respecting the From

• Don’t forget your brand: Your brand should appear either in the subject or the from fields.
• Use your website tags: This is something relatively optional, you can choose between adding or not the tags of your website, i.e. Mr Javo dot Com – Blogging and Internet Marketing Tips. This can give you good or bad results, it depends of its length. In my case, it’s fairly long to include my tags in the From field. If your tag is too long, I recommend you not to use it.

Respecting the Message

This is may be the most important aspect of email marketing because here will be displayed the information you want to promote. So let’s see the guidelines for this field:

• Provide relevant content: What would you feel if I send you through my newsletter something related with Food, Cars or Deports? Exactly, you could find it surprising and annoying! If you signed up to receive blogging and internet marketing tips why are you getting information related with other niches? So with this I want to tell you that it’s really important to match your content with your audience. You will get better click-through rates if you send relevant content.
• Emphasize your brand: Including logos and URLs related to your business will boost your click-throught rates and at the same time, you will be imposing your authority.
• Send copies in both HTML and Plain Text: It is very recommendable to send the newsletter in both HTML and Plain Text formats. The reason of this is because there are people who don’t allow HTML code in their email inbox. If the subscriber don’t allow HTML code the text plain version will be shown instead.
• Include a link to unsubscribe: Is a really important thing to include a link which the subscribers could use to unsubscribe for your newsletter whenever they want. By doing this, they won’t be moored to you if they don’t want to!.
• Provide a RSS link: If you constantly update the content of your website, as the case of blogs, you could include a link of your RSS feed encouraging the people to subscribe. Remember to tell them the benefits, i.e. a little message explaining them that they will get (quicker) updates of your site…
• Include your contact information: Is a must to include your personal information, like your company’s street address, phone number and contact email. Some services ask for this in their policy.

Ok these were the recommended things that you need to do in order to run an email marketing campaign successfully. Another great tip is to set a Follow-up message in order to give them a welcome when they sign up for your newsletter. This create a good relationship between you and them, and helps you to estimulate the sense of loyalty. For this message, you can include a kind of coupon or offer of your product/service to estimulate a sell.

To conclude this post, remember to tell to your visitors the advantages of subscribing to your newsletter or how do you expect to attract subscribers if you don’t tell them what will they win? Keep in mind NOT to send spam, and send emails only to people who are willing to receive them.

By the way, if you are not in my newsletter yet, I invite you to take part in to receive my very best tips, exclusive offers and mailings, in addition of a free copy of my ebook The Affiliate’s Start Guide .