The Right Tools & Mindset For Success
Twitter is an important tool in building your brand so it makes sense to optimize your Twitter handle. You should work to make sure your handle is as easy to read as possible. Here’s one small change you can make to your Twitter handle that will improve your Twitter brand.
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2. Account settings
Owning your own domain is important in building your brand and Platform. As sharing has increased in importance over the last few years through services like Facebook and Twitter having a custom URL to share you information has also become helpful. The limited number of characters allowed by Twitter make services like bit.ly, goo.gl popular to save precious characters.
CAUTION: This is complicated stuff for some people so I take zero responsibility if you mess something up on your domain. Use a domain that you use for nothing else.
UPDATE: One user had their URL updated and functioning in 20 minutes today. Mine took over 24 hours. So be patient and let me know if you get it to work!
You can now create your own custom short URL to extend your branding throughout your own site and social media reach. One ALTERNATIVE to this process is to use a subdomain to your domain if it’s short enough. My friend Cliff Ravenscraft uses l.gspn.tv for his vanity URL which works well because his gspn.tv URL is so short. I created atraub.us to use as my vanity URL. Here’s an example of what a Twitter message could look like with three different URLs and how many characters each one totals.
No custom URL – How to fix your nag of a wife – http://www.takepermission.com/babh-podcast/how-to-fix-your-nagging-wife-babh-016/ – (114)
Bit.ly custom URL – How to fix your nag of a wife – http://bit.ly/xLgHsx – (52)
Self-hosted custom URL – How to fix your nag of a wife – http://atraub.us/yoKmZX – (55)
The last link starting with http://www.atraub.us was created with the following tools.
The biggest difference between networking 15 years ago and networking today is scale. Sometime over the last few weeks I reached the 1,000 followers mark on Twitter. Do I know all of those people? No. Am I connected to them? Yes. Our networks are scalable because the internet doesn’t care where you are as long as you’re connected. If you were good at networking before LinkedIn or Twitter started you’ll be good at networking now. Social networks are built to connect people and their ideas. That is not a new idea.
The connections are valid
Those who think the new networking creates less valid connections are focusing on the ease of the tools instead of the depth of the connections the tools provide. It is true that most things worth doing are more difficult. Thanks to the internet connecting is the easy.
Even if you’ve never met
Progressing beyond a connection into a relationship is where lives change and the world becomes a better place to live. The internet can help you go deeper in your relationships if you want to. My children live 17 hours from my parents but they see each other through Skype anytime. My mom watches out family YouTube channel (http://www.YouTube.com/Traubfamily) to experience the daily highlights my kids produce. Cliff Ravenscraft and I have done 81 episodes of our podcast Business Tech Weekly over skype. I’ve never met Cliff in person.
Scale the results too
Facebook is measured by the number of friends you have. Relationships are measured by the change they bring; joy, commerce, knowledge, encouragement, wisdom. I think you should ignore the number of friends and connections you have on the digital networks. Focus on the fruit of those relationships. If you use the tools the internet provides us you can not only scale the amount of connections you have, you can scale what those relationships produce.
Turn these off:
(hover over them…I dare you)
Read these:
Poke the Box
The War of Art
Linchpin
Use these:
OmmWriter
Screenflow (Buy it) (My overview of it)
Ejunkie
31 Days to Build a Better Blog
“Twitter is useless.”
“Twitter is for telling people what you had for lunch.”
“Twitter is too noisy. I can’t make sense of it.”
