Micro-blogging has its perks. You can meet cool people and chat all day long. The downside — you rarely get much done except for talking and reading different blogs. Well at least that’s how Sunday went. I interacted on both Twitter and Plurk most of the day, adding in a failed EC forum postings. All in all it was a good day. Then on Monday, I went to the office and got overwhelmed with Twitter. The deluge of messages really came when Gmail went kerplunk.

Back on Plurk, things were a little smoother. Plurk does have the Karma feature afterall.

Recently, everyone reached Plurk Nirvana. I had it with less than 20 Karma. It appears you should only receive it with over 80. No big deal. It’s not like it adds a whole lot to the experience. It’s just a number, right?

It has been fixed though, so no more free Nirvana spirituals.

The Karma Number

It is just a number. But the number ties into your profile and your specific activity so it can be a good indicator of your popularity to someone you don’t know. It’s tough to add random people, because you don’t really want to add just anybody. What if they have a terrible attitude? You need some degree of separation from them. Choose a friend whose judgment you trust and check out their friends.

When you’re new to a service like Plurk, it’s good to judge by numbers. On Twitter you would look at the followers compared to the number of those they’re following. On Plurk, you might also look at this, but you would check out the Karma points too. Those with Karma points above sixty definitely participate. It’s good to be in a community of those who participate because it reinforces our desire to be there. Without those individuals responding to our plurks, we’re simply talking down a long empty hallway.

Mama Always Said Be Picky When You’re Choosing Friends

I joined Plurk from an invite. I then decided to visit that friend’s friends. Ultimately I searched for a few people I knew would be using the site, added them, and then sat back to plurk. Others have added me since. As I’ve grown to use the service more frequently, I’ve found I make genuine connections with people. I could have gone through and added person after person, but people might have denied me and that would have hurt my Karma. It makes sense to add those you know then branch out slowly from there.

I looked through the interesting plurkers earlier and found one of the top plurkers to be TechCrunch’s Arrington. He had over 92 Karma. If I had his cred, I could just let the gravity of my presence feed my karma. Unfortunately I have to work hard at it, like most everyone else.

What’s the Point of All This Again?

The point is to bring in traffic and analyse how well each service helps with that. I suppose there’s lots of intangibles too. Do you have a personality people are drawn towards? Can you stay active enough to make an impression? So far with micro-blogging the newbie seems to go after well known bloggers or industry professionals first, then heads to the lesser known folks like myself. I’m trying to just get out there, get noticed, and help you all out in the process.

1. Follow me on Twitter
2. Join me on Plurk
3. Pownce on me

Recently I’ve been developing a few e-commerce stores. One of the stores has requested my help with building steady traffic to the site. Similar principles apply to an e-commerce store as to a blog. The idea remains the same — build backlinks to increase your site’s authority with search engines. Of course, no one knows the Google algorythm, but the trade secret doesn’t make it any less obvious to site builders that a link back to your domain from a respected source can net you significant jumps in search standings.

It’s not the only thing that matters though. As I’m thinking about ways to increase this store’s visibility on the web, I’m noticing a few stark differences between this store and a blog.

• An e-commerce store doesn’t have regularly updated content, and thus can’t take advantage of search services like Google’s blog search. There’s no pinging.
• Tailoring the content on each product description page should net the best return when it comes to SEO.
• Obtaining linkbacks for a product site remains a difficult challenge, whereas a blog tends to receive linkbacks organically.

So the differences set this project apart from my normal marketing of a blog. I’m in the habit of building traffic to blogs utilizing blog community sites. I also venture into forums, using my site as a signature, and also answer questions on Yahoo! Answers with links to my site. So this project has me looking at marketing a site in a completely different way. Social networks will all but disappear with this site. There’s not going to be any Digg traffic or Stumble visitors to it. So how do I build traffic to it?

Think Outside the Box

There doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule. The Yahoo directory, DMOZ and others would be essential. The e-commerce site would need authority though. We need quality links from well ranked sites. One possibility could be wiki’s, AboutUs.org, WikiPedia (if the content was non-commercial), and others. I could still utilize Yahoo! Answers, but might have to branch out in the field of the e-commerce store to post comments on blogs and create connections with site owners.

I do own quite a few high PRs websites that have been around since the late 1990s. I’m fairly certain a link from one of these sites should benefit the site in the long run. I’m trying to stay positive, as the product niche for this store is saturated with big players and independent powerhouses.

I’m thinking of turning this SEO adventure into a series on this blog. Would this be something my readers would be interested in reading about?

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