How to Efficiently and Effectively use blogs & twitter.

There are many techniques that can be used, I personally use several and I will outline them here to help you not get overwhelmed with blogging and tweeting while trying to manage your zazzle stores

Blogs and twitter can be a very effective way to both drive traffic to your store, and also get you spidered by search engines. more in links to your site, the more chances your sites will be found by both people, and spiders!

***new video on youtube at the bottom of this page to show you exactly what i do!!!***

Well first you want to not waste money - so we will go with the free ones! I will highlight each blog site (i am including twitter as it is a micro blog) that i use and what services they offer. Be sure before you choose that you go to the next step to see what each service entails!!

Ok so now you see what they offer in a quick little table - but what does it mean?

Well lets go column by column -

submitting by email - this is a very fast and efficient way to submit designs, especially since these days most people check their emails at least one time every day, and shooting off a quick email is much faster then going to a web site, signing in there and clicking post, then waiting for the form and filling it out! Also if you can submit by email you can go to the product you just made, click the email link, fill out the 4 box form and zazzle will send the email for with your rf# attached and all formatted nicely with a picture and everything! in just 1-2 minutes every day you can email to multiple blogs at one time!

submitting by the blog/twitter text links - now these are not the share this button or the little icons those are a bit different, they only send a link. if you click the twitter button it will connect you to your twitter account that is currently signed in with a premade tweet - which you can change or edit then you click to post it. If you choose the blog button it will pop up a zazzle window with several tabs including the email tab or link tab - from the blog tab you can post directly to your saved wordpress blog if it is hosted at wordpress (not on your own site) you can add as much text as you want that will appear under the image. Also if you click this button and open this page you can then click the twitter tab and you can send tweets individually to all of your saved twitter accounts! this is so much faster then signing in and out of each twitter account to post on each! now you do need to first from your dashboard click the sharing link to the left and register all your wordpress blogs & twitter accounts, and i have had trouble when i have more then one wordpress blog on 1 account i can only seem to get the 1st one to work this way. again this process take just a moment and will keep your blog fresh if you do it 2 minutes one a day!

Auto-posting to other blog sites, twitter & facebook - while this can cause some duplicate content issues it can also be beneficial and time saving. wordpress will automatically post on 1 facebook and 1 twitter a note every time you blog. Posterous will automatically post to wordpress both hosted and non-hosted blogs, blogger, twitter and many other sites, either with the full post or an amended post. This can be a time saver as 1 email to posterous can update many sites all at once. However to prevent being tagged as a duplicate page be sure to have extra posts at those other sites!

All sites allow people to create a feed from their site - this would allow someone else to feature your blog in their website! You would get full credit for any sales because it is actually you blog being mirrored somewhere else.

All sites allow people to follow or subscribe to your blog so they can check regularly to see what you are up to!

Post dating - this is a very effective way to keep your blog up to date with regular new posts, even when you don't have time to post every day. wordpress only allows you to postdate posts made directly on their site, not those sent from zazzle. Blogger allows you to set the email account to save as draft, then after you email them all to blogger, you can sign into blogger go to edit posts and post date them - this way you can set 1-2 to appear at random times of the day for the next week or 2 - so you only have to blog once a week but your blog has new posts every day!!!

this is the most important thing you need to know - i manage 8 blogs & 3 twitters in 1 hour 1-2 days a week + about 10 minutes per day.

so you want to know how?

ok lets start by naming them all

blogger1, blogger2, blogger3, blogger4, wordpress1, wordpress2, wordpress-self hosted & posterous - twitter1, twitter2, twitter2

blogger1 - is old an about my struggles of building my shop and my daily life - as well as some designs i am working on - all submissions are made by email from my regular email account or from zazzle directly - and all are set to post immediately. This blog gets updated 1-2 a week

blogger2 - has been around for a while and used to accept submissions from other shopkeepers but now it features what ever i want whenever i want. it is fed by instant posts from posterous both by myself and by someone else - this prevents it from being a duplicate content page, but shares the referrals made based on who posted the link. additionally i will email in some posts to this blog which save as drafts which i post date so if me and the other person forget to post for a day, the blog still gets 1 piece of new content every day. this blog normally get 5-10 new posts per day.

blogger3 - almost 100% submission by other people - you may see my wanted posts on the forums for people to submit time and again. posts are made by emailing the submissions to this blog 1-2 times per week and all are saved as drafts to be post dated. this blog usually shows 3-10 new posts per day, although i only work on it 1-2 days per week. also hooked to posterous account and will get any posts from there also.

blogger4 - 100% submission content - interviews other shopkeepers submit to me by email, i paste them into the blogger post, add the formatted links & post date then to appear one per day - this blog is currently filled 1+ months in advance and i now work on it only every other week adding more posts from the stack of emails (which are flagged in outlook by color so i know which need to be added, which need more info & which are in the blog queue already)

Wordpress1 - fed from using the blog button 1-2 times per day almost every day. also feeds to twitter3 & facebook

Wordpress2 - exclusively fed by posterous (i never remember to sign in and make a post). posts only when posterous gets an "everything" post. also has twitter feeders in the side bar to add extra content to this page so it is not duplicate content to the posterous blog. feeds to twitter1

Wordpress-self hosted - almost exclusively fed by posterous, although occasionally i will sign in there and make a post. This site also has widgets that feed separate content to the blog to ensure it is 100% duplicate content.

Posterous - the mother of all blogs - exclusively fed by emails -99% from zazzle directly. updated 1-2 times per day almost every day (unless i forget) and feeds to Blogger2, Blogger3, Wordpress2, wordpress-SH, twitter1 & Twitter2 & facebook. most posts are sent to "everything" at posterous but once a day i send to a separate posterous email address that will post only to the posterous blog so it is not duplicate to anything else.

Soooo....now that all my blogs and posts are pretty much interlinked here is how i spend my time:

every day i use 5-15 minutes to email 2-3 products to posterous, using the product links on zazzle, then i send 1 each to each of the twitters (clicking blog then switching to the twitter tab), 1 blog text link to wordpress1, and 2 emails to blogger (sometimes just blogger1 blogger2 or blogger3, sometimes a combination of them sometimes all 3)

then 1 day (sometimes 2 days) a week i go thru the submissions on the forum and i right click to open in a new tab, and i click the email link and send them all to blogger3 where they are saved as drafts - this usually takes about 1 minute per submission - then after i have emailed about 50 of them - i go into blogger3 on blogger.com and i click edit on each and randomly change the date to some date in the future - usually i will start with tomorrow or a week from today and just go up one day on each one until they are all scheduled to appear - then i jump over to blogger2 and i post date the 6-7 submissions waiting in that blog starting at whatever date i last left off on - this only takes about 20 seconds per post ....alternately i will spend my 1 hour or part of my hour going thru the emails and copying and pasting them onto blogger4 and post dating them to appear