It is not difficult to drive traffic to your site but what’s the point if visitors don’t stay around and read your blog post, sign up to your email list or buy your product or service?

We’re all familiar with the following saying:

“Traffic is Vanity, Conversion is Sanity!”

Well, maybe you’re not familiar with that saying because I just made it up.  But it does make sense!

Let’s look at five great social media tools to ensure you attract a relevant audience to your blog posts.

1. Tweet at the Optimal Times using SocialBro 

The people that follow you on Twitter are some of the most likely targets for your blog post but you need to have a strategy for reaching them.  One part of this is timing the delivery of your posts to try and get the attention of the majority of your followers.

SocialBro is a social media management tool.  One key feature is that it works out when your followers are online.  This is not going to be 100% accurate but gives you a good idea of the best times to tweet.

Click here for the full article…

We’ve heard the expression:  “All Politics is Local” .    And so it goes on Twitter.     If we want to have a rewarding experience on Twitter, we have to learn to follow locally, and/or teach our staff to do the same.  We can continue to do the same goofball tactics that didn’t work last week, or the week before, and we can continue to get the same results.  Or we can adapt, change what we are doing, and have success.

Twitter is littered with the carcasses of burned out washed up small business ideas that didn’t work.   I see literally thousands of small accounts who’s last tweet was 6 months ago, a year ago.  They came, saw, tried it Twitter’s way, and abandoned the effort.  These are the folks who determined that Twitter is useless,  odd, and just couldn’t get the hang of it.   Then there are others:  They are small businesses with a worldwide audience.  I have to wonder what a Gas Station in Reston, VA is doing with followers from California, Maine and London, UK.

Any small business can use Twitter to locate, target, find and connect with thousands of local followers.   They can convert them to clients and customers.

Click here for the full article….

If you use WordPress, you may have heard this word at least once: “transient”.

Good, you already achieved step one. But do you really know what transients are, and to use them?

I this quick post I’m going to explain what transients are and how to use them in your own developments. First of all, and this should be your first reflex, let’s go to the Codex.

First thing to note: transients is an API. And here is how the Codex describes it:

This page contains the technical documentation of the WordPress Transients API, which offers a simple and standardized way of storing cached data in the database temporarily by giving it a custom name and a timeframe after which it will expire and be deleted.

Click here for the full article….

In today’s fast paced world, we all have hectic schedules. We juggle both work, travel, and meetings without missing a beat. With so much to do, we are still expected to be connected and available. The majority of us are familiar with the great ways to multitask using Google Apps online. Google Apps makes it just as easy to balance your busy schedule on our mobile phone. Not only can you easily manage your schedule, but you can also effectively communicate with your team, even if they are geographically dispersed.  In today’s blog post we will cover the following Android instructions:

1. Adding a Google account
2. Setting up Gmail
3. Installing Chrome
4. Setting up Google Drive
5. Configuring Google+
6. Advanced features of Google+
7. Installing and using Google Talk

Click here for the full article….

While most New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside within a few weeks, vowing to make the most of your social media marketing efforts isn’t one you’ll want to turn your back on. In-between college bowl games and putting away holiday decorations, take a few minutes on New Year’s Day to review your social media accounts. The following simple tweaks can make a world of difference in 2013:

1. Hardcode Your Social Media Share Buttons

Rather than relying on third-party plugins or modules, use the official social network provided code for sharing buttons. Here are links to the proprietary social sharing codes we use on our blog:

• LinkedIn: http://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/share-plugin-generator
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#tweet
• Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
• Google+: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/+1button/

Click here for the full article….

For many bloggers who are new to blogging, getting the word out about your new venture can seem like a pretty big obstacle. How do you build readership from scratch and get people to comment? Why is it that when you post a link to your blog on Facebook or Twitter, the only feedback you get is the sound of chirping crickets?

Here are a few tips for using social media to grow your blog:

1.  Listen first: Throwing up a blog without first understanding your ideal audience is an exercise in frustration. You need to deeply understand your audience first. Take a look at what other successful bloggers are doing in your space.Technorati.com is a good place to look for top-performing blogs in your niche. Browse around and find one or two that appeal to you, and study them. What kinds of posts get the post engagement? What topics? How are they addressed? What kind of comments do they get and from whom? What social platforms does the blogger use for sharing the content? Also try Google BlogSearch (http://google.com/blogsearch) or Twitter Search (http://twitter.com/search) to search for topics to see what people are talking about.

Doing this kind of digging can help, because it gives you more of a sense of your audience, what they’re interested in and where they hang out on social channels. Write these characteristics down and use them to build your own ideal reader profile. This should include more than basic demographics. Are they young mothers? What kind of hobbies do they have? Where do they like to shop? What interests do they list on their social profiles? When you have a full reader profile in mind, you can better understand what drives that person so your topics will have a better chance of resonating with them.

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The Google SEO guide, better known as the Google Webmaster Guidelines, doesn’t really tell you anything about actual Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Instead it spreads a false idealism by telling you to just write great content. Don’t get me wrong here, the guide is educational but not really about SEO.

Great content is important—and it’s the number one thing most sites don’t do—but it won’t help you get your site to the top of the rankings in a Internet where everyone else is using SEO. Remember the article I wrote called “Content is Not the Only King“, you should make the effort to read this as it makes some serious sense. I agree that content is important but that is not all you need to rule the internet world. (evil laugh in the background)

So what else did Google forgot to mention in the Google SEO guide?
Click here for the full article…

Rumors are flying about the next iPhone 5S, which might come in a rainbow of colors, multiple screen sizes including a larger screen, and maybe even have a faster processor.

Read about it: http://on.mash.to/UPbvJg

Graphic courtesy of Apple

Place this smartphone-sized charger in the sun for a day, and it will be able to fully charge your smartphone or tablet and give you eight hours of reading light, too.

See why this is so groundbreaking here: http://on.mash.to/UPc0mB

Images courtesy of WakaWaka

Their criteria for choosing the ten companies and technologies that they briefly describe in this posting was that their technology is distinctive, innovative and relevant to major trends in the industry that they are following.

They list these companies here in alphabetical order to avoid the impression that they are ranking these ten companies in some order of merit.

1. Acuate: What we find attractive about Actuate’s Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) BI capabilities is the combination of versatile BI capabilities married to a fast and easy-to-use development capability. BI is a moving target for most companies and as such the ability to quickly enhance, change and make BI actionable is a important differentiator.
2. Clustrix: It is generally acknowledged now that the traditional relational databases have hit a scalability barrier, mainly because they were engineered to scale up, but not to scale out. We witnessed the recent emergence of column store databases which scale out but which focus on read only applications (i.e., BI). Clustrix is the only recent database platform we are aware of that has been built to a scale out architecture that caters both to transaction processing and BI workloads. It is also relatively inexpensive.

Click here for the full article by InsideAnalysis.com