If you have a blog – or any site for that matter – here’s a comprehensive list of directories for you to submit your blog to. Since so many of us are running our businesses on a shoestring, I’ve limited the list to those that cost nothing. Enjoy!

1. Sites that require nothing.

2. Sites that require a feed.

3. Sites that require a reciprocal link.

Related posts:

1. Why Google Matters
2. Why This Blog Is Going to Be Better Than My Other Ones
3. Kontera: Monetizing My Blog
4. Advertising Ah-Ha Moment #3: Affiliate Advertising Is an Option

I started using HootSuite off and on a couple of weeks ago. HootSuite is a web interface that allows you to manage most of your Twitter activities.

Considering that I’ll be using Twitter a whole lot in the future, I thought it would be great to use some kind of Twitter console or dashboard that helped me schedule tweets as well as allowed for multiple people to tweet on my behalf without exposing them to my own username and password. Although I’m still deciding whether or not having someone else tweet for me is a good strategy or not (I’m leaning towards Yes, with some caveats), HootSuite seems good for a whole bunch of reasons:

1. Schedule your tweets.

This was a big plus for me. I wanted to pace tweets throughout the day instead of just in the evening between 7 and 10 which is really when I get online to work on my business. HootSuite handles this quite easily and very reliably (I recently tried a competitive product and it sent the tweet immediately, instead of when I had scheduled it).

2. Shrink URLs

You can shrink URLs right away without going to TinyURL or another site that does that. I’m pretty new to Twitter so maybe other products do that native to their product.

3. Manage several Twitter IDs.

Very useful considering I will be adding another Twitter ID for the stroller site in the next coming weeks. I haven’t tested it yet, but you can also tweet the same status from several profiles at once, which is convenient.

4. Hootlet toolbar

You can add the Hootlet toolbar to your browser, which allows you to quickly tweet on pages you are browsing. The flow of posting this way also allows for scheduling your tweet for later.

5. Add several editors

This feature was a big winning point for me. I liked the ability to create “editors” who could submit tweets for me, without revealing the username and password of the main profile. I won’t be having them create tweets (although I might get them to go through a set of blogs and tweet about posts within some set guidelines); instead, I’ll be drafting a bunch of tweets for them to schedule on my behalf. It also might be event-driven – i.e. they might post a tweet everyday about the latest post on my blog. Or new posts to the forums of the stroller site.

6. Track the performance of your tweets

I just re-read the feature list for this post and apparently HootSuite allows allows you to track your URL clickthrough stats. I didn’t find this feature very intuitive to use (hence I didn’t know it was there) or maybe I wasn’t looking for it because I didn’t need (or know I needed) it. Anyway, I can see how this feature is a value-add.

One downside is that I can’t add friends through the HootSuite dashboard. I suppose that’s ok since this isn’t Twitter afterall – it’s just a tool to make tweeting a bit easier.

Bottomline: if you are looking for a Twitter tool that can help you manage several profiles and allow many people to tweet on your behalf, check out HootSuite. It might be right up your alley.

Related posts:

1. 10 Things to Assign to a Virtual Assistant
2. Work-at-Home Tips for Mom Entrepreneurs
3. Joined the Twitter Revolution
4. Why You Can’t Afford NOT to Have Twitter
5. Progress (Or Lack Thereof) with India

I would consider myself an early adopter. I’ve been on Flickr for years. Probably since 2004. I’ve been through about 4 blogs (none of which really took off). Shortly after Facebook was opened to non-students, I joined whole-heartedly, happily updating my status on a daily basis.

But there was something about Twitter that was making me hold out. Maybe it’s the name. Maybe it was the first people that I knew who Twitter (those guys just turned me right off of it). Maybe it’s the fact that I just had my limit of social media and I was just on information overload. Life should be more simple without me clogging it with tweets from twits (or so I thought).

I even updated my Facebook status to say that I was refusing to tweet and was accused of being so 2008.

But finally I couldn’t take it. I joined.

And I’m loving it. Actually, I’m addicted.

For those of you under a rock, Twitter has been around for a few years, but recently gained popularity over the past year. Celebrities like Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have started to post tweets and Twitter devotees enjoy the seemingly close ties they have with the stars. For example, Lance Armstrong will frequently post about where he is (relevant if you follow the Tour de France) and what training rides he just finished (very relevant if you are an avid cyclist). Incidentally, many of these stars don’t Twitter themselves and instead have “their people” do it for them.

I’ve been reading just too much about Twitter and how essential it is to creating “buzz” for your site. I can see how it can be a powerful tool in driving traffic to your site. But even if I don’t use it for that, I can at least get with the times.

It’s weird. Because I’m being so secretive about my business venture, I haven’t told my real network of people about my new blog and I will not be adding them to my Twitter. (I may for people that I really really trust.) So while I have a good number of friends on Facebook and contacts on LinkedIn, I won’t be leveraging them right now for building buzz for my web sites. I may need to rethink that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Early impressions of Twitter: I will need to figure out the lingo and morays of the tool. There are probably tips and tricks that I need to discover and master. I find the search for people to follow is a bit difficult since you can’t do it by category or tag.

Darren Rowse at Problogger has an interesting caution in building your Twitter following:

The other key part of your network is how relevant it is and how focused it is upon the topic that you’re doing promotions on. For example – I see some people on Twitter running competitions to build their follower numbers in a way that just brings in any follower that they can. The problem with this is that they end up with a large but unfocused network.

Let’s be blunt: I am using Twitter to follow people with like interests in the hopes that they will also follow me because I have similar interets. It is a bit stalkery, I admit. I would never add random people in Facebook or LinkedIn. But for some reason, this behaviour is expected and condoned.

I’ll keep you posted on my Twitter antics. Hell, you’ll probably see a widget on the sidebar in a couple of days.

Oh and by the way: Please follow me on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/GoGoMamaGo

Related posts:

1. Why You Can’t Afford NOT to Have Twitter
2. Review of HootSuite
3. Natalie Kaminski’s Tips on Online Resources
4. Link Building: Essential For SEO
5. Easing the Social Media Burden

A few days ago, in my post Why Google Matters, I talked about the basic importance of Google and why you need it for the success of your site. Well, duh, you’re thinking. I know. I know. It’s pretty simple, but we need to start at the beginning for those of you who may not be aware of these details.

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) refers to the process of enriching and optimizing your site so that it grows in popularity and rank in search engine results pages. Living somewhere between the marketers and the developers, SEO is considered to be a bit of a “black art” – meaning even if you follow all the rules and suggestions to the comma and quotation mark, there is still no guarantee that you’ll improve your PageRank. In addition, if you abuse the rules, you might even get blacklisted from our friends at Google who don’t take too kindly when publishers try to beat the system.

It’s possible for your site to become popular organically. You could just continue to write great content and hope that it gets picked up in Google and is blessed with a high position – but that’s just like waiting for success to happen to you. Personally, I’m too impatient for that.

Remember that the search engines are always looking for websites that contain relevant content, but it’s possible to help them along (that’s what the “submit url” link is there for!). If you want to improve your site’s rank in engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, it’s important that you employ classic SEO tactics – like link building.

Link Building: The Basic Concept

“Link building” refers to the number of hyperlinks that point to your website from various sources.

Basically, the more sites that link to you, the better. It tells the search engine that your site is important, and depending on the nature of the links themselves, it raises the relevance and aboutness factor of the content – subsequently improving a search engine like Google’s opinion of your content for those particular search terms.

Take this example:

You create a site about strollers. You have a review of the Maclaren Quest, as well as lots of relevant pictures and user comments on your site about that particular stroller. A search engine crawling your site thinks, “Ah ha! This site is not only about strollers, but it’s about a particular kind of stroller – the Maclaren Quest.”

Sally the Stroller Shopper just bought that stroller and posts your review on her public Facebook page to show her mother in Seattle what kind of stroller little Katie will be rolling around town in. She uses the phrase “I’m not the only one that loves my new Maclaren Quest stroller!” as the caption.

When the search engine scans through Sally’s Facebook page, it thinks “Oh, here is the term Maclaren Quest.” And unless there is a no-follow link (we’ll get to that another day), the search engine will follow to the next site and think “Ah ha! Here’s that site again! This content must really be about the Maclaren Quest – and it must be important and relevant since people are linking to it.”

And so on. And so on. And so on.

But how can I increase the number of links pointing to my site?

You can do that a couple of ways. You can pay for an SEO service to execute a link-building campaign for you. Or you can build the links somewhat naturally.

Since I’ve never paid a service, I’ll talk more about the natural link-building.

Building Links Naturally (At Least Semi-Naturally) – A Few Pointers

First and foremost, write compelling content that people WANT to link to. Guru blogger Yaro Starak talks in depth about pillar content. It’s vital. If you have crap content, then no one will link to you.

Good content also requires people to read and have the facility to link back to your site. So make friends online –blogging about a person or site, or linking to their site means that they might scratch your back in return.

Add your link to every possible public profiling and social media thing out there. Just the other day, I read this great post in Daily Blog Tips that suggested that you should update your Google Profile and grab the easy backlink.

Make sure you ping blog search engines like Technorati.

One classic way to build links is to put your link everywhere through blog commenting and participating in online discussion forums.

Be sure to submit your site to all relevant directories. There are both free and paid ones available, depending on your budget.

Make sharing easy. Post Digg, del.icio.us, etc links on your site.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Why Google Matters
2. Easy SEO Rituals
3. Google AdSense – 2nd Attempt
4. My Favorite SEO Blogs
5. The Big Idea