What is ‘commun.it’?

Its a twitter intelligence tool!

A what?

A twitter intelligence tool!

Remember old school twitter where you went out and auto followed people by keywords, keywords in bios, keywords in tweets?

If they even sneezed your keyword you were on them, of course you followed them and if they didn’t follow back within 12/24/36 hours they got auto unfollowed.

Now this mass churning of followers is something that twitter hierarchy dislike.

Because for them its about the conversation.

Of course the irony of this following and unfollowing was that no-one actually read any, or very few tweets.

It was a case of throwing lots of mud at the wall hoping some of it would stick.

Fast forward to 2012 and ‘commun.it’ allows you to search for people with influence on a specific topic.

Ask yourself – which would you want – 100,000 followers who have no idea who you are or 100 followers who hang on to your every word and pass on your stuff without thinking about it.

I think the answer is obvious.

So you set up ‘commun.it’ and off it goes and scans your network, both near and far, and suggests influencers you may want to talk to

So what is pluggio
Pluggio is first of all web based. This means there is no software to download, no incompatabilities, no “an error has occurred” error messages. Having software on the “wrong” machine” is a thing of the past.

Once you are signed up, just link your twitter account,and away you go!

The pluggio workflow isn’t totally intuitive, although it does have a certain amount of logic to it. There are a stack of “start” tutorial videos to get you going.

Pluggio helps you to be ‘the signal not the noise’ and whereas most twitter software helps you get more followers

(pluggio does this if you want it to by the way)pluggio helps you get more followers by using a two pronged attack – specifically

a. By finding interesting people
b. Tweeting cool stuff

Lets take each in turn.

Finding interesting people.
You can find people who are tweeting certain words and phrases, hashtags and specific locations. You can turn this feature on or off. Once ‘found’, people are not alerted in any way. They are saved (not is a twitter list – Justin assures me that this is coming soon). At the moment, I have around 100 people who pluggio thinks I might want to talk to.

Tweeting cool stuff
With this cool feature you can add an RSS feed, any RSS feed!, and post from it to your twitter stream.

Thinking about it – you can any RSS feed posts and comments from; a blog, from a forum, anything. The logic here is that if you can’t be the source, be the REsource.

One final feature is that you can add tweets to a ‘rolling schedule’- In essence this means you can add tweets to a heap which will then be tweeted at random intervals.

You can add anything onto this queue and give the illusion that you are sat at your desk, when in fact you are nowhere near it!

There are several feature which I don’t use so can’t pass comment on and these include bulk upload of a spreadsheet of tweets, (Of course pluggio gives you the spreadsheet template to download) and I tend not to upload photos to twitter so I can’t comment on this.

All in all, if you want something that is reliable, funky and where the top man answers emails personally, look no further than pluggio.

Almost every virtual assistant or virtual worker has a blog post entitled (something like). Is this the right thing to do on a blog post? I am not sure.

“Working with a virtual assistant”

So we thought we would collect a few onto one place so you can get the general feel of the postings.

The post title is shown as a hyperlink with the first few lines of the blog post. NO credit taken for any of these posts – They all link back to the original source. Enjoy…

Our rookie manager series features 5 FIVE top titles all aimed at new managers, supervisors and team leaders.

• Time management
• Planning training
• Recruitment & selection for managers
• Train the trainer
• Presentation Skills

All these HOT BITESIZED titles are available with instant access online PLUS a physical CD in the post.

Anyways – for the WHOLE of January 2012 – all these titles have a massive 25% off. (The discount is applied at the checkout).

Business networking groups are starting to meet again.

So our January sale today is networking related. Join our networking university for just £9.95

For JUST £9.95 per month, you get UNLIMITED access to every piece of, business building networking training we have ever produced.

PLUS access to all the recordings of our future networking webinars. There are recorded webinars, online training – hours of good stuff just designed to get you more business.

By the way,  technically this isn’t a sale. The price of £9.95 has been set for the last few weeks.

HOWEVER – This price WILL be rising as we firm up our webinar calendar for 2012.

Jump over now

Anyways, for reader under the age of about 25, the world would work like this at this time of year.

Up to Christmas, prices would be jacked up as high as possible.

Then, as soon as the Christmas period was over – the January sales would start.

And by sale, I mean HUGE slashing discounts. I recall scenes of hysteria in central London stores shown on TV news programs. People pushing each other out of the way to get a handbag or some jeans from a specific manufacturer.

A sort of 20th Century version of an apple, Microsoft or google launch.

So what about our January sale?

We have picked out a series of products that we think fit the January Sale bill exactly.

Over the next few days, we will be unveiling stunning discounts and never to be repeated offers. One blog post a day.

These products will be discontinued and some of them WILL NEVER be available again. They will be defunct, finished, desupported and removed from our inventory.

So what is first up in our January sale?

First up in our January sale is our “Marketing Basics” training course.
If you are a start up or new business, then the marketing basics is for you. Assuming you know nothing about marketing, this online training will walk you through working out what EXACTLY you sell and WHO you want to sell it to. Dealing with the pitfalls of each and helping you to work out the best plan of action to PROPEL YOUR business upwards in 2012.

So to get this SUPERB training (which will NOT be available again) for just £5 – jump over to the marketing basics site.

We have put together a short (no a very short) simple survey on small business marketing habits.

There are no right or wrong answers. It is totally confidential. You can give us your views WITHOUT entering the contest. We will make a “results” video later when all the results are in.

The small print
We will be giving away 10 x £50 google adwords vouchers. Each entrant can only win ONE prize.

These vouchers are for NEW adwords account or those less than 14 days old. They expire on 31st December 2011.

Your prize is a serial number which will be emailed to you week commencing 28th November 2011. UK registered businesses only. Winners picked at random and we need to your email (to tell you if you have won).

You wil be double opted in and therefore will receive other news of what we are doing.

I read a lot (and I mean a lot of blogs). For someone who has a first wordpress indexed post in 2005, I feel I can talk with some confidence about what to blog about.

Firstly, take a step back and think – before you even write.
What is the purpose of the blog. Is it engagement, is it to get signups to your newsletter or list, is it to show your expertise in a topic.

Once you have this – you can start to construct a plan. (Yes I know thinking and planning are boring but jumping right in is never a good thing).

Once you start writing a blogging plan, bear in mind, one thing the blogging gurus continually bang on about is your “authentic voice.” Writing in corporate speak isn’t for me – I had enough of it in a previous life. So you will find my writing peppered with questions, brackets and generally broken up.

(This has the added benefit of making it easy to skim read).

How does all this help you with what to blog about?
As an aside, many people seem to make the mistake of confusing blogging with selling. If a blog post is a veiled sales piece (or even an unveiled one) – it leaves the reader very little scope for doing anything meaningful.

For a sales blog post, all you will ever get comment wise is
1. Great blog post (Difficult to distinguish these from spam comments – reap what you sow and all that).
2. People complaining they have used your product or service and it was lousy.

Neither very good if you blog goal is engagement.

So, what’s the £63,000 answer
Take ideas from this list (assuming you have a business blog related to your expertise..)
Product reviews
Book reviews – You do read don’t you?
TV programs (No – the ones RELATED to your expertise)
Industry events, conferences and exhibitions you attend.
What YOU personally think about news or current affairs and how they affect your industry. (Maybe you want to be controversial, maybe you don’t?)
Things you did recently – No not what you had for lunch – more interesting stuff. Did you see something unusual or strange related to your industry.

But what are your options for designing the site?

Get someone else – a pro designer to do it for you?

But that costs money…

Get a friend or relation

Sorry I meant a wannabe web designer.

Here’s the thing – If you are paying no money, you can’t really insist on what you want.

You do it yourself

Now we are talking – but you don’t know anything about webdesign – or more importantly – layout & presentation. You don’t know your divs from your alts.

FREE TRAINING

What if we said that we wanted to GIVE AWAY our “what not to do with wordpress” training to one lucky person.

Easy to enter contest

No hunting around the web – no wild goose chases – just 3 simple steps

1. Like us on facebook

2. Send a tweet (using the oauth system so we don’t get to see your password)

3. Leave a comment below – as short or as long as you like – but there may be a bonus prize or two for the best comments.

That’s it

Winner picked at random