I’ve been experimenting with Twitter although I openly admit to being a little sceptical since I personally take little notice of other people’s Twits – most seem to be promoting something or telling me they’re making a cup of coffee!

But today, Mark at Healthy Foods brought something to my attention that really caught my imagination.

This brand new plugin (like most WordPress addons it’s free) has really opened my eyes to how Twitter can be a real traffic generator. There is an upsell to be fair, which actually is really exciting, but I’ve not gone for it yet. My Homer tendencies had me reaching for the credit card but I’ve got too much else going on right now.

What’s unusual about this plugin is that is does several things. The main part being it should really increase the traffic to your sites due to the viral nature of what it does.

Firstly it automatically posts to Twitter immediately you post to your blog. One job saved.

Secondly, there is a widget that goes on your own blog that immediately shows your latest Twits. Visitors at your site are likely to look at your list of Twits and, if your worth following, will start to follow you.

Thirdly, there’s the upsell. If anyone decides to download the plugin and buy the upsell then you get a share of the commission.

So by simply using a plugin to potentially generate more traffic you could also make some commissions without doing any more promoting at all.

I’ve decided to try to enhance this traffic experiment a little further and you may like to give this a go too.

Anyone posting a comment on Guru-Fodder (at any time) or showing up in my Recent Visitors box will, as always, be visited by me.

What I’ll now do, however, is Twit those blogs / websites so they will get exposure to my followers and perhaps my followers, followers. In addition, the link to those blogs will also show up in My Twitter Feeds on this blog.

So, for a simple comment here you will get two links – one from Twitter and the other from this blog.

Will that lead to more traffic? I can’t answer that but I can tell you – there’ll be no traffic from here if you don’t give it a go since no one will know you’ve visited!

To join just click the link at the bottom of the My Twitter Feed list or take a look at Tweet My Blog.

Looking forward to your comments.

Mark

If you know little about Twitter you’ll find these other resources useful

Ultimate Twitter Resource and Promotional Guide – (Here are the links to my previous Twitter columns: Using Twitter to Increase Readers and Make Friends, Don’t Take Promotional Personal with Twitter, and The Twitter Effect). My series of Twitter entries created quite a bit of buzz, …

Digsby: Get Twitter Followers and Nintendo SP? – Now I have been on Twitter for a little more than 10 months, and I have currently a little over 260 followers. I started actually using Twitter in March, in only five months I have gained 250 followers. How did I do it? …

Relationship Marketing via Twitter – Social networking sites like Twitter have rapidly saturated the Internet landscape and are flourishing. Is your organization capitalizing on this phenomenon? Zappos is using Twitter to connect with job seekers. …

Using Twitter in your Social Media Strategy – For those that aren’t aware, Twitter is a social network that allows ‘friends’ to communicate with each other in brief 140 character bursts of text (known as tweets). You can send these tweets directly through the twitter website, …

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Where do these names come from? Zemanta? I have no idea but it looks like a cool idea.

This post is trying out the service from this new site. It’s a Firefox and Flock plugin that automatically finds links and images to spice up your blog posts.

Does it work? We’ll find out when I’ve finished this post I guess.

I won’t add any links (apart from the link to their site) so anything added is via the Zemanta service. The link I added is in bold – everything else is a link added automatically.

As I’ve been writing this, images and articles have suddenly appeared to the right of my text box (in WordPress admin). Now to be totally honest I don’t know what I’m supposed to do – or if images and links are added automatically.

Ah-ha. Various links, images from Wikipedia and articles (blog posts I guess) are suggested and you just click on the ones you want. Here goes, let’s add a few and see.

We’ll see when I publish – if nothing turns up I’ll come back in to edit and post another article explaining.

The Anti Hype

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Post tags: Blog, Firefox, flock, Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, WordPress, WordPress.com, Zemanta
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I wanted to test how easy it is to upload images to my WordPress blogs using the Drag & Drop facility and editing facility in Flock.

I’ve often had difficulties with images in WordPress but this works like a dream.

I’m a happy old Anti Hype right now!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: Flock, drag & drop, guru fodder, The Anti Hype

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No, this isn’t Guru Fodder terminology and sorry, today isn’t about Homer & Marge, although they will benefit from what I’m about to say.

I’ve been a fan of the Firefox internet browser for the past year or so, mainly because I find it more stable than IE and the range of add-ons really useful to help me be more productive.

And then along comes FLOCK

If, like me, you’re into Web 2.0 social sites and social bookmarking then this free browser may be just right for you.

Take a look yourself for all of the details but as standard there’s a left hand sidebar with links to all of your accounts with services like Twitter, Facebook & YouTube. Having set them up there’s an easy login and simple drag and drop feature makes uploading photos etc very easy.

I must highlight one area that is great for bloggers.

This post was written using the editor inside Flock that I think is superior to the WordPress editor. There’s more control over font, size & colour and I find the editor works more like a standard word processor application.

When you’ve finished just hit the Publish button and you’re away. Depending on your plugins you may need to go into your control panel and do some editing but on the whole it’s not a big problem.

Flock works with all the major blogging platforms, including the free ones like Blogger and WordPress.com.

It also integrates easily with Google & Yahoo Mail and can be used to receive RSS feeds – everything is just a click of an icon away.

Oh, yes, if you use RoboForm that is automatically integrated as well.

Many of the Firefox add-ons also work with Flock although I understand they have not all been tested.

Download it today – I’m not using it as my default browser yet, but for my Social Sites I think it is great. I’ve just added them all to a single folder that lists them in the sidebar for easy access.

This one gets a thumbs up from the grumpy old Anti Hype.

The Anti Hype

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, internet browser, guru fodder, The Anti Hype, web 2.0, social sites

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It simply uploads into the usual plugin folder and once activated that’s the last you see of it. But, the feed for PDAs is supplied with an appropriate theme so it displays much better on handheld devices.

Here’s the PDA Plugin link

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