Backtype, a web site that allows you to find and follow comments from across the web has recently released their first crack at a WordPress plugin. Installing the plugin to your WordPress blog allows you to show conversation and comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg and more related to your content. Users can then post replies right on your blog.

As for your existing comments, they just seem to mesh right in with comments pulled from around the web. It looks, well, brilliant to be honest with you.

Disqus has an early release that it seems only Mashable has access to right now, but it doesn’t seem as blended as this Backtype version. I’ll be disabling Disqus in the next few days to try this Backtype plugin out on Good Plum.

Features (from Backtype’s site)

• Display comments from other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, and more
• You can configure exactly what sources you want to display related conversations from
• Summarize, display comments inline, or append them to the end of your comments section
• Your readers can even respond to the comments BackType Connect displays

What do you think of this implementation? It seems that anyone with a WordPress blog may want to try this out. If you’re not adventurous, you may want to wait until the bugs are worked out in version 0.2 :).

You’re confused and I know it. The increase in questions I’ve been getting lately from small or home business owners confused about how to tackle the Twitter service is astounding.

I’m sensing that the crossover from Twitter being a “geek-only” tool and then partially spread into the mainstream has started to hit full-throttle into individuals and businesses who have heard of Twitter, but have finally bit the bullet to try and figure out how they should be using it too.

They sign up, post their first Tweet (something like “Figuring out this Twitter thing,” and that’s where they hit the wall.

Some questions that first cross their minds:

- Isn’t this the same as Facebook updates (if they indeed are using Facebook already)?
- Am I supposed to be just Tweeting everything I do all day?
- If so, how is that helpful?
- I’m worried about spamming people asking them to buy stuff from me!
- Who do I follow?
- How in the world do I get people to follow me?
- Wait a minute, why would someone want to follow me?

These are all good questions. Let’s take a look at where Twitter came from and what it is, how some people use it, how you can use it, and why you would even want to use it. We’ll even throw in some etiquette lessons.

My hope is that some part of my opinion about this strikes a chord with you, the light will go on upstairs, and you’ll be able to have a great new tool for online networking.

What Is Twitter?

At the most simple level, Twitter is what people see it as initially – a simple status update service. This was how it was initially used by all members at launch. I was member number two-thousand-something and remember stopping using it almost right away because it seemed like such a waste of time.

On a deeper level, Twitter is a learning tool, a sharing platform, and a networking system beyond any other online tool I’ve used – and I’ve used them all… it’s what I do! I’ve “met” more amazing people on Twitter than on any other web site combined!

So, on the deepest of levels, I would describe Twitter as a customizable personal network. Customizable because you have so much control over people you reach out to and who reaches out to you. The power of immediate interaction with like-minded individuals is life-altering when used and developed correctly.

How You Should Use Twitter

Because we’re addressing small and home businesses here, we’ll focus on great ways you can use Twitter for your business. Here’s an excerpt of one of the many emails I received last week asking about Twitter for business:

“I want to figure out how to use twitter to my favor – business wise. I saw [your article] on the huge amount of choices one had and another list that was even longer. I need someone to walk me through getting it all together before I make a mess.

I asked another site for help and the gal told me NO business stuff on Twitter, but I know that isn’t so. I’m not after spamming for sure.” – Myra

Myra obviously isn’t alone. You want to be able to take advantage of new web tools like Twitter, but don’t know how to start using it, and don’t want to come off as someone who just pukes “buy my stuff” all over the place.

As a business owner, you should be looking at Twitter simply as a networking tool. There ARE ways you can use it for promotion, such as for a live coupon feed, sale-of-the-day, etc. However, you should only be using it this way if you already have a customer base you can direct to it – places like Amazon do this very effectively. You should NEVER use your feed to simply have a running promotion of all your products and services.

Networking on Twitter

So if the small and home business owner should be treating Twitter as a networking tool – how do you go about that? The quick and fast answer is A) by helping people and B) by having patience.

Your Purpose

First of all, you need a purpose. This purpose should relate to a skill or knowledge that you have that other people can benefit from. For instance, if you’re a Realtor, you could present yourself as someone who can answer home-buying questions. If you’re an accountant, you could offer simple tax advice, etc.

By creating your purpose, you can then enter your 160-character self-description in a way that shows that you’re there to support the community – not sell to them. Your Tweets will now also reflect your purpose – the links and quotes you share, the help you provide – will all come back to your purpose.

The website you list on Twitter should be your own web page or blog. A MySpace or Facebook page does not build trust with someone. Having your web site listed there should be a way for people to find out more about what you do once they’re interested in your description.

Remember, selling never happens before trust is built!

Search for People

There are a lot of services out there to find like-minded people on Twitter, but in my experience, the fastest way is by using Twitter Search. Simple type in a keyword of someone you’d have similar interests in. If you don’t know who that is, then you might be in trouble…

Who is your customer? Do you have a description of your customer written down? There are probably many different molds, but having those personas clearly defined will tell you what you’re customers are interested in. Try searching for those things and start following people who look interesting to you.

Note: Do NOT follow everyone who follows you! Only follow people who fit the criteria you define as a someone you could learn from or find interesting.

Join the Conversation

Once you’ve found people you find interesting (start with 20-30), you can start joining-in. Reply to people who ask questions when you know the answer. If someone says something interesting, forward (or Re-Tweet) their Tweet.

Another great way to build rapport with your future audience, is to promote others. If you see someone interesting, Tweet why you think so – they’ll appreciate and remember you for it!

Your Followers Will Come

It may not happen overnight, but if you use Twitter on a regular basis, people will start to find you. If you’ve defined a helpful purpose and displayed that properly in your description, when people click-through to your page it will be clear to them if you’re a fit.

Remember to mention your Twitter name whenever you comment on blogs or forums. It’s also nice to add it into your email signature since so many people are now familiar with, or at least have heard of, Twitter.

Patience

Patience is key, as none of this happens over night. Even though my followers grow by about 10-20 per day now, it only started taking off quickly after I started writing regularly for Mashable. People saw what I was knowledgeable about, and they were interested too – so they followed me. It takes time though.

I know there will be a ton of questions, so if you think it can’t be answered in one sentence – try contacting me here instead. Otherwise, let me know your thoughts or feelings on using Twitter!

“The Twitter Effect” – also known as The Mashable Effect or The Digg Effect – as become a topic of conversation lately due to a handful of blogs being taken offline from the amount of traffic instantaneously sent to them from Twitter.

The basics of the effect are this:  a link is posted by someone on Twitter, that link is “retweeted” (forwarded, in email-speak) again and again and again.  If it’s a popular or timely topic, this can cause a surge of traffic to that one page on your site almost instantly.

At Good Plum, we’ve been lucky enough to have a couple of these situations in the past week – both started by @Mashable’s Pete Cashmore linking to a couple of the posts here, as well as guest posts I’ve written for Mashable.  The flood of visitors added up quickly and at one point, there was many hundreds of simultaneous readers on 1 or 2 pages of the site.  Server logs show a spike, but no where near peaking our processing power.  How did we survive this?

This amount of simultaneous visitors trying to access the same content on a blog can take many servers down temporarily.  We have a couple basic tools in place that help prevent this from happening and we’d like to share:

Tip 1 – Grow Up
Get OFF your shared (or grid) server.  I really don’t care much what technical people tell me about how their shared system grows with my site, etc. — I’ve had too many experiences where the accessibility is way too unpredictable.

We use a virtual private server (VPS) from ServInt here at Good Plum.  A virtual private server gives you dedicated resources (drive space, processor power) to keep your site and database running smooth.  It’s essentially giving you a full dedicated server for a fraction of the cost.

A good VPS from ServInt is only going to cost you about $49 a month to start – probably about double what you might pay for a decent shared server – but the long-term benefits are clear.  Flexibility, reliability, and performanace.  Who wants to lose out on hundreds and thousands of potential readers/visitors just because we have a cheap web host?

Tip 2 – Cache It
On your WordPress blog (which MANY people reading this are using), do you know the amount of stress a lot of visitors at once has on your database?  It’s amazing if you monitor database activity during a high-traffic rush.  WordPress performs so many queries that it’s difficult for it to perform those queries hundreds of time, all at the same time.  The effect is that it shuts down and you lose your traffic until you get the server reset (or, much worse, you actually go over some of your host’s imposed limits and they shut you down).

The ultimate tool to prevent WordPress overload is…..

WP Super Cache.  Super Cache is a WordPress plugin that actually caches (stores) copies of a dynamically generated page.  It then allows subsequent visitors to view that stored copy, instead of having to generate the page all over again for the next visitor, and the next, etc.

Once you activate the plugin and someone visits a page, the page pulls what it needs from the database just like it normally would.  But then it stores that page to a folder on your server.  Next time someone visits that page (or hundreds of people at once), it has the cached version of that page to display instead of having to pull it from the database again!  I can’t stress enough how much this saves your server.

Of course, if you update the page or someone comments on an article, the cache is cleared so the new version is available to the next person.

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Are YOU prepared for the Twitter Effect?  You never know when someone with some social juice will start a retweeting avalanche that could either shut you down, or bring you a thousand new fans!

This is something I’ve been putting off until now.  It may even be something you don’t know about yet!  Feedburner, a tool many of us use to keep track of our RSS feeds, was purchased by Google in May of 2007.  It is now being rolled-up on the Google brand, forcing all users of it’s service to move their account by the end of February, 2009.

They make the process relatively easy – it only took me a few minutes – and, it’s required.  So you better get to it!

Pro Blog Design posted a really good write-up on everything you need to do in order to make the transfer. Take a look at their article here.

In just a few minutes, you’ll have your new feed links and can make any adjustments you may need on your website(s).  If you have any questions about the process, feel free to ask me in the comments!

With RSS feeds, Twitter, and all sorts of other instant communication, email still tops the list of the best broad-contact method marketers use to get response from their base of customers or fans.  My journey through different autoresponders has often landed back to GetResponse vs. Aweber.

The money is in your list!  So, it’s fair to say that choosing an autoresponder to use for your home business, website, etc. is probably one of the most important choices you can make.  I’ll give you one man’s opinion on the 2 most popular services, as well as a couple others I’ve used along the way.

Aweber vs. GetResponse

We’ll start and end with the big boys.  Now, there are other autoresponders out there, and I’ll mention a few at the end, but most of the people looking to start with an autoresponder, or find the right email management system to move into, are going to end up trying to choose between these two companies: Aweber and GetResponse.

Several years ago, when I started a (fairly strong) email newsletter geared towards hip-hop music, I signed up with Aweber.  They seemed to be the leader at that time, the price was decent (I think it was still $20/mo back then too), and it did what I needed it to do – easily.  I had about 5,000 subscribers on that list and it didn’t cost me anything to send out as many emails as I felt was necessary.

Then along came a problem.  A few months ago, Aweber changed it’s subscriber policy.  Here’s how the old and new policies compare:

Old: $19.95/mo for 10,000 subscribers plus $9.95/mo per additional 10,000 subscribers.  NIce, right?  Well the new one is: $19.95/mo for 500 subscribers, $29.95 for up to 2500 subscribers, $49.95 for up to 5000 subscribers, and then it goes up from there.

My old list would’ve been costing me $49 per month to maintain – not that there’s anything wrong with that at all – but the difference in those two pricing structures is amazing.  For someone with a 10,000 person list, the old price would’ve been $20 and the new price is $69.  That’s quite the jump.

That brings us to GetResponse.  I had tried their trial program years back when comparing to Aweber, and there was a reason I didn’t choose them: their system seemed overly complicated even for someone like me who knew what they were doing.  I can say without doubt, they’ve remedied this.  Although their service is loaded with options, they’re relatively easy to figure out even if you’re new – and if you are new, they have some nice help videos to get you started.

Here’s the other thing with GetResponse — their autoresponder pricing structure is still comparable to the good ‘ole days: $17.95 per month for up to 10,000 subscribers plus $4.95 per month for each additional 10,000 subscribers.

But maybe I’m comparing apples to oranges?  Maybe GetResponse’s service just isn’t as good as Aweber’s?  I’ve heard compelling arguments regarding Aweber’s delivery rates – they’re supposedly over 99%, which is amazing.  I’ve also heard that GetResponse’s are around 98% – no too shabby either.  Feature-wise, both services offer almost everything you need to run multiple autoresponders from one account; easy templates, form creation, contact management, and much more.

A plus for Aweber is they have a really well-done system (email parsing) for integrating into different shopping carts.  For instance, you can usually set in shopping cart software the email addresses to notify of a sale… well, Aweber will give you an email address to forward sales to and it can parse out the user’s email address and name and add them to your list (for many services).

On the other side, GetResponse actually has a public API which allows developers to create integration with the GetResponse system very tightly.  I don’t know if this is new or what, as I’ve had a hard time finding anyone who has integrated with GetResponse yet, but this could be a huge thing for someone who wants to custom integrate their autoresponder with their shopping cart, membership system, blog member system, forum, and anything else you can think of that involves a name and email address.

In the end, I emailed Aweber and asked if I could move back to their old plan (I had previously left Aweber for ListMailPro, see below).  They declined, so I switched to GetResponse and I think I’ll be with them for the long-haul.

The GetResponse vs. Aweber Result

Based mainly on price per subscriber, I’ve chose to go with GetResponse.  All the other tools I need are there, and I really like the fact they have the developer API available to use when necessary.  I know that some readers may be die-hard Aweber fans, but it’s probably also true that those same readers have been grandfathered-in to the old pricing structure.  If those same people were about to sign up new, it would be a tough pill to swallow thinking about your list growing up into the thousands and then ten thousands.

Other Autoresponders I’ve Used:

iContact – This is a good autoresponder if you’re looking for the basics.  It’s clean and very easy to use, but didn’t have much of anything as far as integration into other software.
ListMailPro - This is a php script, and a very, very good one.  It’s loaded with features – almost any feature you could want. I used ListPro for about 4 years with no problems, but what I’ve determined is this:  I’d rather spend money every month on a company who manages white-listing, delivery, and email law for me — I don’t have the time or desire to do that.

As a side note, the music company I work for manages a 500,000+ email list using a $100,000+ server along with thousands in monthly maintenance and bandwidth costs.  I’ll stick with GetResponse for now. ;)

What autoresponder do you use?  Which have you tried? Which one are you leaning towards?

I’ve seen lots of cool sites that allow you to send someone a file that may be too big for email.  What if you have 20 pictures from your camera you want to send to your brother?  You have a couple choices… either zip them up and hope your email client doesn’t reject them… you could go through one-by-one and re-size them down to emailable sizes… OR… you could use the site I just found: EatLime.

Just click “Add File” to keep adding files… up to 1GB!  Then send your buddy the link provided…. they’ll be lead to a simple-to-understand download page where they can download all the files seperately, or all at once.

Give it a try… it may just give you that extra boost of productivity you were looking for today!

Others: File Dropper, Senduit