None of what Facebook offers is new to me in any way. I’ve been chatting, playing online games, and communicating with people online since 1985. It’s little wonder why I find it boring.

However, since starting this blog I’ve been thinking about Facebook in the capacity of a promotional tool. Certainly sounded like a good idea.

However, after reading Nick Bradbury’s post The Great Un-Friending of 2009 I realized the flaw in my thinking.

Anyway…because I never used Facebook, I just blindly friended anyone and everyone.  Which now, of course, makes it such a noisy place that I can’t possibly spend any time there.

This is exactly the place I found myself now. Since your reach only goes as far as your friend list, you need to add massive amounts of people as friends in order to benefit yourself in any possible way.

I’d added quite a few new people in the last couple weeks in hope of expanding my reach. The result was a noise level unlike anything I’d seen before! Emails, alerts, requests, this, that, and the other. There literally was no peace until I followed Nick’s lead. I un-friended many of the newly added ones earlier tonight. Back to my original short list of close friends.

Ahhh… some peace at last! (No offense to anyone dropped)

Will I be using Facebook for Blog Promotion? If I think something I’ve written here will interest any of my close friends then I may share it there. Otherwise, I doubt Facebook will play any significant part in my promotion.

Am I giving up too soon? Is there a way to use Facebook effectively and noise-free? If so, please comment because I’m not seeing it.

Since I moderate on several Forums I thought it might be a good idea to post about proper Forum behaviour. If you go into a Forum with links a-blazin’ chances are you’re going to find yourself infracted, or worse, banned from the Forum altogether.

Each Forum will have their own set of rules but here are a few things that might help keep you out of hot water:

• Finding the Rules: Most welcome emails from joining a new forum will usually contain a link to the Rules. Look for it, read and understand them. Sticky posts in the topic listing is another place to look. There’s nothing worse than spending months building up post counts just to find yourself banned for a simple link drop.
• The Signature itself: Some Forums simply do not allow links in Signatures. Others will have restrictions or posting requirements before you’re allowed to have live links appearing. Be sure to check any rules before doing this.
• Posting: Your Signature links will do nothing unless you get involved in the Forum Community. Adding replies to threads, or creating your own threads can see mention of your site appear in Google within several minutes of posting. (Depending on the popularity of the Forum) Don’t throw your link into every post. Your signature will take care of that.
• Be polite: Just because the person you’re talking to can’t punch you in the face doesn’t mean you can be rude. Remember, these people are a community. They don’t take kindly to someone new mouthing off to their friends.
• Don’t tick off the Moderators: More of a personal request than a useful tip.

I’ve been involved in Forums to one degree or another for many years. Not only are they a great place to meet people with similar interests, but they also contain a community of knowledgeable people who can help with even the most perplexing problem.

Don’t overlook this valuable resource!

Actions:

1. Selected a Theme and hacked it into place.
2. Added relevant content.
3. Added essential Plugins (Firestats, Discus, Google XML Sitemaps, etc)
4. Added my URL to forum signatures and profiles.
5. Almost swallowed an Earwig.
6. Set myself up in various social networks. (Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc)

Results:

1. A Theme that is easy to read and more importantly, easy on the eyes.
2. Getting hits from Search Engines for several posts I’ve made to this point.
3. Plugins just make life easier and in some cases neater.
4. I’m now seeing backlinks due to Forum Signatures. Like I said previously, it takes some time but I’m expecting to see anywhere from 500-1000 backlinks in the coming months just from previous Forum Posts. (Even more if I remain active in these forums)
5. Puke!
6. A blog is useless without connecting to other people. By adding and updating Social Media accounts, I’ve seen several visits from these services.

Some Stats:

• Over 150 Unique visitors
• Over 250 Page views
• 14 RSS subscribers. (As of today… this number fluctuates daily)
• 6 hits from Search Engines for content added to this point.
• Over 100 backlinks. This will likely grow daily for the next while as more Forum Posts are added to the list.
• Over 48 (double sized!) cups of coffee have been consumed.
• Approximately 300 cigarettes have been smoked.
• A dozen meals skipped.

I guess the next step is to get out there and start reading and commenting on other blogs. I’ll be yapping about this method in another post later. Doing this will also prompt more ideas for better posting. To this point I’ve just been posting about what I’ve been doing here and other things off the top of my head from experiences gone by.

It’s time to bring myself up to current speed in the topics I plan to cover here.

Now that the site is somewhat complete my thoughts have been turning to getting the word out. I’ll be joining several social networks in the coming days (weeks?), so I’ll be posting about them once I’ve formulated a few thoughts in their use.

My first stop in doing this was Twitter. Great little social utility and appears simple enough. The hardest part of using it is the selection of a suitable Twitter Client.

The Long Road

The first client suggested to me was twirl. A brief visit to their website informed me that Adobe Air needed to be installed on my system first. Great! More overhead to strain FrankenPuter (a computer built from the dead bodies of 4 other computers).

Deciding to pass on installing more overhead, my thoughts turned to a .NET application. At least I already had that installed!

I decided to give a .NET client a try as I figured it would require no additional installs to get it to run. A simple solution to my aversion to installing more stuff, right?

Wrong! Sure, the client installed in seconds, but it also initiated a download/install of additional .NET crap which took approximately 30 minutes to install. Then, the horrors of all horrors presented itself. A reboot. Gah! (This was seriously starting to cut in on my ‘goofing around’ time!)

Once rebooted the above mentioned client installed itself quite quickly. After taking a quick (?!) 5 minutes to restart all my desktop apps, I launched it. Cannot connect and other error messages dominated the rest of my hour.

Where did this simple task go wrong? Join Twitter, grab a client, done! How hard can this be? As it turns out, not hard at all.

The Short Road

I was not getting any younger here! This above process had now wasted an hour and a half of my life. Screw it!

Install AIR, twirl, done! (With NO reboots!)

I was installed, connected, and ready to tweet within minutes. Ah yes, the boring Short Road.

FrankenPuter will just have to deal with it.

If you’re interested at all, you can follow me: http://twitter.com/LarryMonte

Forum profiles and signatures are great ways to get the word out. My longevity on the web provides me with an abundance of Forum Accounts and Posts. Busy forums are best, but even dead forums will return a certain amount of link juice. So be sure to hit those long forgotten forum accounts if you decide to go this route.

Forum Profiles are not only viewed by people but Search Engine Spiders as well. A perfect place to stuff your blog URL. I’ve seen several of my Forum Profiles appear in Google within an hour of my joining a forum. Google LOVES forums. Make no mistake!

Forum Signatures is where it’s at! Attaching your blog link to your signature instantly adds the URL to any previous posts you’ve made. I have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5,000 posts lurking out there. A good portion of these (but not all) will start showing up as backlinks to my blog. It may take a bit of time for them to start showing so it’s best to do this activity ASAP.

I launched a blog about a year ago and achieved a Page Rank of 3 within the first 7 weeks mainly due to Forum Signature links. So yeah, it’s a very effective way to achieve ranking. And people DO click on signature links.

I also added the link to places like FaceBook, LinkedIn and other social networks.

I’ll be discussing other methods of promotion as we go along. For now, we’ll fly with this.