Zahid Lilani – Social Media Discourse

5 Ways To Use Twitter To Promote Your Blog

Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani.

Twitter is now more popular than ever. Anita Hamilton at TIME magazine said “While some people call it microblogging or moblogging, I like to think of Twitter simply as blogging for regular people.” She said that in 2007 when Twitter was a baby… it is now microblogging powerhouse.

Bloggers shouldn’t be disappointed because even though you might like to write more detailed posts and not be limited to 140 characters, you can still use Twitter to promote your blogs and keep in touch with your readers.

Here are 5 Ways To Use Twitter To Promote Your Personal Blog

1) Choose a reasonable twitter username that reflects your personality or your blog. If your blog doesn’t have a set topic, which is the case with most personal blogs, go with any name of your liking. It is recommended you use your real name if you are comfortable or a nickname. Avoid numbers, make it simple and easy to remember.

2) Create a background image for your twitter profile page and have the name of your blog in a prominent place or tiled through out the page. Make sure you have a nice left column that has your picture and a small introduction about you or your blog.

3) Every time you publish a post on your blog, send a tweet to all your followers. Use a URL shortner to make long ugly links smaller and less scary to click.

4) Use Twitter search function to find other bloggers and tweeters who have similar interests as you and start following them. This is also useful if you want to generate topic for your next blog post.

5) Instead of just talking about yourself and your blog, try to make conversation with other people. It is as easy as replying to a Tweet that you consider useful or have something to say about. That’s how you will make friends and get more followers.

The more followers you have, the more exposure your blog will get. Time for some shameless promotion. Follow me on Twitter

5 Reasons: You Shouldn’t Start Blogging

Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani.

Blogging is becoming more of a mainstream thing now and everyone will tell you that you should be blogging if you have 5 minutes to spare. Yes you should blog assuming you have something useful to contribute. Anyone can blog, even your dog but that doesn’t make you a good blogger. You should have all the right reasons jotted down if you really want to blog.

I have compiled 5 Reasons for you NOT to start blogging and you can be the judge.

1) You just want to talk about yourself

Please spare me the agony, I don’t care about you unless your life has been somewhat remarkable. I don’t want to know why no one talks to you in school, I don’t want to know what kind of messed up childhood you had and your ex-wife was cheating on you… with another girl. But I would like to know how you overcame your loneliness, I would like to know how you changed your life around… do you mind sharing that?

Complaining about the world doesn’t get you much far in the blogosphere, having good ideas and solutions to real world problems and example from your own life might seem like a decent proposal and will make you sound helpful.

2) You have stories

This is in line with reason one but this time around you are not telling stories about your messed up childhood. It’s the girl next door, the mail man who can’t differentiate between John and Jonathan or the guy who has an opinion on everything including shoe laces.

Stories are great but are they really useful? If I want to read a story, I will pick up a novel or a short story book written by a published author who has all the skills necessary to tell a story. If you are not helping me understand an issue better by telling me a story, don’t indulge me in something you think I like.

3) You want to become someone else

Did you just miss the whole point of blogging here? Whatever that geek told you who pretends to be spider man on his blog is not true. There are only three kinds of blogs, Personal, Business and Opinion. When you see something of importance inside a trash can, you can’t assume that everything else is also important. Remember, your blog can only fall under Personal, Business and Opinion. Everything else is just worthless.

Your blog should offer something about you, it should bring out your personality, your opinions and your life. If you want to become someone else, try wearing a nice costume on Halloween but don’t start blogging pretending you are better than anyone else out there.

4) You lack passion

Writing is hard work, blogging is even harder. If you lack passion, it becomes very difficult to stay on top of things. If you blog with passion, you can easily transcend your message to your readers. Out of all the blogs in the blogosphere, give your readers a reason to come to your blog. Adding passion to your blog posts will make your blog stand out in the blogosphere.

Your blog should be about a topic close to your heart, something that reflects your grasp of the topic and something that drives you to share what you know with passion. You add real meaning to words by adding your passion and mixing it with your ability to deliver it effectively.

5) You are lazy

Accept it, if you are lazy in real life then you won’t get time to blog and after you write those first 5 posts because you just discovered blogging, you will give it up for a month or two. As soon as you do that, it will be hard for you to get back into that same state of mind that helped you start blogging.

When you do start blogging again, you will realize that your life is currently too miserable and there are better things in life you should be doing. Procrastination is not a disease, it is a condition that affects everyone from time to time but the beauty is in knowing how to handle and manage it effectively.

My list is not comprehensive but a mere peek into reasons people I have come across tell me they should take up blogging. One other reason I didn’t talk about was “I can make money”. That is only true for 1% of blogs on the internet that make more money in a day than you do in a week. Most of these money making folks are professional writers who have taken their topic of expertise to a new level by being the first few to blog. Sometimes all it takes is for you to be the first… and in 2009, you are definitely not the first.

The resources I used to write these post are listed below for your reference:

41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks
Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog
10 Reasons not to blog

People Search Website That Will Scare Your Pants Off

Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani.

Do you know why you didn’t really get that job you interviewed for and had good vibes about? Do you know why that girl didn’t call you up after the blind date your friend set you up for? Well… very soon you will find out because I will tell you about a website that can make your life miserable if you have had any kind of negative existence online.

Google is good if you want to do a general search about someone but it is not really that comprehensive. What if I told that there is very powerful website out there that specializes in people search? You have probably never heard about it because it is not used by regular folks like you and me. It is primarily used by detectives, employers, and stalkers. According to Careerbuilder, “77% of recruiters use search engines to research applicants.”

There is only one free website that I was able to find that is the best of the best in people search. I decided to test it myself and was really surprised as well as scared after looking at what is out there about me.

Pipl
Pipl is not kidding when it says “The most comprehensive people search on the web.” You can search for people using four options; Name, Email, Username and Phone. When I search for my name, it shows links to this blog, one way to reach me. Pipl searches the deep web and produces content that no other search engine can touch.

On a typical Pipl name search result you can see Contact Details, Public Records, Personal Profiles, Photos, Web Pages, News Articles, Blog Posts, and Documents. Pipl doesn’t state a list of all the websites it searches but I am sure it is a large list because the results are very comprehensive.

If you search by email, Pipl will show you websites were you have posted your email in public. Long time ago I had a profile on Friendster and it showed up in the results when I searched for my email. I right away went to Friendster and canceled my account and searched Pipl again, this time no link to my Friendster profile. Every time you search on Pipl, the results are fresh, seems like Pipl is not in the business of storing the data on its own servers, that’s a good thing.

Username search yielded the most results for me as far as social networking is concerned; it showed me my LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, Flickr and StumbleUpon profiles. Pipl displayed profile pictures from these sites and linked to my profile. If you are smart, you will make sure that your profile picture on social networking websites is clean.

Pipl phone search is currently limited to U.S. and Canada only. It doesn’t list much, shows few sponsored results where you can get the name of the phone number owner if you are willing to spend some money. Not a useful search feature really, other websites seem to do better with phone search.

You will be surprised at the sheer power of Pipl and similar websites. Just a simple query can list information about you that you have been cultivating all these years without being remotely aware. There are few other websites like Pipl, most notably, 123People, Wink, and Peekyou. If you find information about yourself online that you believe destroys your reputation and you can’t get rid of, try ReputationDefender.

Other than that, best of luck… just imagine what will happen 10-20 years down the line, everything about us and the new generation will be a click away.

My Guest post on MyBlog2Day

Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani.

I was recently approached by Lee from MyBlog2Day to write a guest post on his blog related to blogging. I had been approached in the past but I didn’t really think the blogs were of any merit.

MyBlog2Day is a different kind of a blog and I really liked the way Lee asked me to write the blog post, couldn’t say no. I decided to give it a shot and even got a nod from my Business Communications Instructor Shari Weiss at SF State.

I am not going to repost the entire post on my blog because Google will penalize me for duplicate content, here is the link:

The Power of Reviews and Downloads For Bloggers

Master of All Distractions

Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by Zahid Lilani.

Let’s accept it, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace are all just big distractions. You log onto FB and then you go onto Twitter and then you realize you have a MySpace account too and so on… but wait… now there is something else that will provide you all the distraction right on your desktop. It is called Digsby and I love it!

Digsby is a nifty little software that reminds me of ICQ because of its vertical rectangular layout that floats on the right of your monitor. Don’t worry, it is nothing like ICQ, it is 10 times better!

Digsby = Social Networking + Email + Instant Messaging

You can now save most of your time by having everything in one place right on your desktop. You now have no excuse not to be distracted.

Instant Messaging
AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts all in one place. If you have two MSN IDs, you can use both at the same time.

Email
Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts. Be notified when new email arrives, add as many email accounts as you want.

Social Networking
Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts. This is the main reason I use Digsby because I am hooked to Twitter and Facebook. It also allows me to manage my three Twitter accounts.

Chat
Easily place a widget on your blog, website, or social network profile so you can chat with visitors’ right from digsby.

To sum it up, Digsby is a great tool if you spend most of your time being lost in the sea of social networking website and have a strong urge of updating your status or profile all the time.