When I was a kid back in the dark ages, there was no Web, so marketing mainly consisted of TV commercials and other forms of advertising. There was one ad that ran for years for a rug cleaner. My aging memory is a bit dim on the details, but I remember the ad consisting of a series of quick cuts of women out and about doing fun things, each one saying, “I am shampooing my rug right now.” They accomplished this magic by spraying their rug with the rug cleaner and then leaving the house so they could come back and vacuum it up to find a clean rug. Who among us does not want to have things working while you are doing something else? In this month’s Biznology newsletter, I want to share with you how I stayed active on Twitter while on vacation.
Some of you might follow me on Twitter–my handle is @mikemoran–and I try to post several times each day that I am working, but I haven’t been working the entire month of August. But I have posted at least one tweet every work day on vacation. I didn’t set out to do this, but it just worked out that way.
I don’t actually post any of those tips myself–I am just too busy. What I do is have my marketing manager go through all of the books and blog posts I have written and extract sentences that she gives me for my approval. And then she posts them each day as tips–you might have seen them if you follow me.
But she was on vacation a few days, too, so she doesn’t want to post them manually. She uses a automated program that schedules tweets to be posted sometime in the future. She uses CoTweet, but there are lots of free tools that do the same thing.
It might not work for everyone, but if you’ve written articles or blog posts or just about anything on the subject that you tweet about, you can extract the snippets from that material and post it on Twitter. Or you can just type in a bunch tweets in advance and schedule them to post while you are on vacation.
Next year, I want to do the same thing for blog posts. It didn’t work this year because I was using Movable Type (whose scheduling feature I never got to work properly), but moving to WordPress changes all that because its scheduling feature works just fine, thank you very much.
You might have noticed that we have made a few big changes to Biznology–moving to its own domain at biznology.com with a brand new look. My wife Linda built the new site, and is now the managing editor and on-going Web developer. This year, in addition to the move to WordPress and the new domain, we also have introduced monthly Webinars and added even more bloggers to Biznology. We hope you’ve liked the changes so far and will be watching for more.
