I’ve read numerous articles on Twitter, some saying it’s a complete waste of time, some saying it’s extremely useful and others, more temperate, saying it’s useful and a time waster as well, depending on what you do with this tool.

I believe saying Twitter or any other Social Media channel for that matter wastes your time is simply stating the obvious. Anything consuming time has potential to waste everything it spends with no real results. Social media, other media, everything you do can have no results, some results or excellent results. It all depends on how much you invest in your actions, what you aim to obtain and there’s also the little yet important part luck plays in the equation. Continue reading

I will start this week’s roundup with a Blogging Bits guest post by Matt Harzevski who has an interesting piece of advice for bloggers: Skip the middleman when it comes to ads. Matt encourages bloggers to maximize advertising income by selling their own ad space instead of joining ad networks.

Karen D. Swim of Words for Hire shows us the power of little things. Doing something apparently insignificant can have a tremendous impact on a situation or end result.

If you’re a social media marketer and need advice on networking in the social media world, head over to Traffikd for a complete bonding guide.

Ivana Taylor of Small Business Trends admits planning, including marketing planning, sucks for most of us. So she shares her solution to this hassle: examples of one page marketing plans that actually work.

Alex Cristache of Blogsessive notices a very important trait of the successful blogger: being a good listener.

I am sure most of you out there need a quick fix for the photos you want to include in your posts. Blogging Sublimely reviews a few free online photo editing tools for you.

Chris Brogan’s entries really caught my eye last week. So I am recommending you two posts in one roundup: a piece describing 100 personal branding tactics that make use of social media and one presenting a goals and measurements aligning take on social media strategy.

One of my favorite bloggers, Joanna Young, has decided to dedicate her business to helping others create powerful content. One of the services she offers is blog coaching to help you jump start your blog. Read her entry on how she plans to achieve her goal and contact her if you’re interested.

Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communication has put up a sales guide using tricks she picked up from toddlers. Funny, but highly effective.

Eric Brantner of  SEONoobs points out an overlooked aspect of guest blogging. Apart from building relationships, generating content for blogs, exposing the author to a new audience, it is also an essential SEO strategy.

SEOMoz is also in the business of pointing out the obvious tools we have and tend to forget: asking our customers to link to our product or service.

In the end, I think we should all stop to remember that the tools we take for granted, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr are not that easily accessed in all countries. Social Media Trader has put up a list of what services are prohibited where.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s roundup! See you next time and in the mean time, if you have an interesting article to add to my list, do so in the comment box!

Enjoy the new week!

Link posts come with a lot of blogs. Some are weekly, some are daily, some are simply once in a while. There are highly branded such posts, that we look forward to each week, such as Liz Strauss’ SOB Business Café, or the Coffee Break of Business and Blogging, written by Laura Spencer and Liz Fuller.

I’m also playing with my own link post and now that I figured which day is better, it is slowly becoming a never missed to-do to have my roundup on Mondays. But from a Marketing and PR specialist’s point of view, what’s behind a link post, why do we write them, what do they bring to us and how do we position ourselves as bloggers through them? Continue reading

Self-submissions are a tricky story with all social bookmarking or news sites you’ll sign up with. And I will probably upset quite a few people by stating that clearly saying that’s a big no-no has its share of hypocrisy. You might jump to saying I’m plain wrong, but bare with me for a moment. You are not allowed to submit, we don’t like it, but it’s OK if you vote for or review your own story, or let’s say you can share it with your friends and let them know someone submitted it for you.

In the end it’s all about self promotion. And no one would dare tell a popular and well connected blogger they should just stop submitting their own content. We just don’t react. Or at least not openly. And that is why I love Twitter so much these days. We are less judgmental there. We mention our posts, if they are good, people retweet them, it’s a nice chain of reaction. Why do we act differently on Stumble Upon or Mixx? Is it less of a bad thing to just ask someone to do it for you? What do you accomplish, other than creating a circle of back scratching?

I have a different method to filter submitted content. I don’t care who wrote what you submit, I just care if it’s good or not. If you submit stories I find interesting, helpful or plain funny, I’ll follow you and thumb up your stories. If it’s boring content that you submit, I’ll just ignore you. Sure, I may raise the occasional eyebrow if I only see articles from your blog on your profile, but I will still judge you by the quality of what you post in the end.

I admit my own stories amount to maybe 10% of what I submit on any site I am an active user of. On sites where I occasionally make an appearance to vote for cool stories I don’t submit anything anyway. But I’ve had amazing results with some stories and normal with others. Thus I tend to believe it’s still the quality that plays the lead part in the end.

My advice is not to be afraid of ever adding your story to a news or bookmarking site. I do warn you to proceed with caution. But don’t fear the skies will open and a lightning bolt will strike you the second you push the submit button. As all others things social media, this issue is all relative. Simply because there’s rarely anything black or white. If anything were so easily labeled, life would stop being so altogether complicated.

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Our Monday Reading Roundup has reached its second edition. Welcome aboard, I really hope you enjoy last week’s list of great articles.

The first one comes from the ClicZ Blog and deals with bad trends in sending out press releases. Basically, PR specialists should stop at sending the press release itself and not adorn it with too much background info.

Steven Snell of Traffikd had an interesting entry teaching social media users to stay relevant.

Lid of BlogWell reminds us of security issues related to wifi internet access. We all use it whenever we can, free is a plus, but do we stop to think about what we expose ourselves to? The purpose is to be aware, not to go into panic mode.

Chris Garrett started a great conversation on Reciprocation and how it affects the social media world. The article itself brings interesting insight, but also read the comments, as they analyzed the issue from many perspectives.

Chris Brogan analyzed the value of personal networks and their value to companies, depending on the position a well connected person would fill.

Joanna Young of Confident Writing drew our attention to something we tend to overlook: should we sign comments or simply rely on the submission form as a signature?

Ian Lurie of Conversational Marketing took us back to the basics of Internet Marketing and got us (re)introduced to the players of this field.

Pearl of Interesting Observations took of on an adventurous trip showing us how to manage multiple blogs. Stay tuned for sequals.

Drew’s Marketing Minute analyzed 5 methods of marketing your business on a tight or inexistent budget.

Michael Martine of Remarkablogger suggested 4 power question a person handling a business blog should reply to then generate valuable posts. The objective of these posts is of course to generate business growth.

Ted Demopoulos of Blogging for Business published a very catchy case study showing how fast a brand new site can get search engine traffic. We should all try to implement his suggestions.

To round up, I’ll move to the funny and entertaining side of last week’s. First with a post of Tad Chef of SEO 2.0 who was thoughtful enough to translate the most common Internet lies. Secondly, I will introduce you to my addiction from last week: a fun game from Stay.com allowing you to win a free stay at a hotel. Just guess those cities fast!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this Monday’s roundup! I am sure I haven’t been able to read all the interesting articles posted last week, so feel free to share your findings in the comments section.

See you all next week!