Bear with me while I figure this out

If you’ve read my about page or my “how tweet marketer works” page, then you know that I’m trying to model this blog after the Flylady’s techniques for bringing order to your home and family life. My focus is helping the small busines owner or online marketer make daily progress on developing a successful online presence.

I am trying to figure out how to present the information on this blog and how to use Twitter to effectively deliver the message. Each week Flylady focuses on different zones. She provides a basic set of tasks to accomplish and adds some special missions. I plan to spend each week focusing on a specific area of online marketing. One week it will be all about Twitter, another week it will be all about PR. I’ll have a “building incoming links” week, “search engine optimization” week. Each day I will lay out specific short tasks and some special missions that may take a little longer. Each topic area will repeat periodically, some more frequently than others. Flylady also encourages participation by issuing challenges and then asking her readers to report back. I’d like to incorporate that idea as well.

One of the great things about Flylady is her writing voice! Which is encouraging, forgiving and commanding all at once. I feel certain I cannot write in the same voice, but I will be trying to cultivate my own voice and will aim to make this all seem as fun and inspiring to my readers as it is to me.

The first thing I figured out is that I need two Twitter accounts, which I actually already have. But, I realized really quickly that some tweets just shouldn’t be coming from tweet_marketer. I responded to a few people on Twitter who are looking for shopping cart web sites, which is our primary business, from my tweet_marketer account. Right away, I see that is a bad idea. I want followers of tweet_marketer to trust that tweets coming from this account will be relevant to online marketing. I may sometimes tweet about my business from tweet_marketer, but I will try to only do that if it has some relevance in the current context. From now on, other tweets (both business and personal) will be coming from my iamstaci Twitter account, which you are welcome to follow as well.

Here is how I am envisioning the process:

I will write a series of blog posts on a single topic, most of them quite short, that each give instructions for completing an online marketing task. I will continually add to the library of tasks and topic areas.

I will create a series of scheduled tweets that mirror the blog content. Monday morning, a tweet will go out announcing something like “This week we’re working on keyword research.”  Each day, I’ll send out a few tweets that include keyword research “missions”. The tweets will link back to the blog posts mentioned above that include the instructions to complete the mission. In addition, I will send out a few tweets a day with ongoing tasks to take care of like “optmize a page title on your site”. All task-oriented tweets will link back to the blog, which will have longer instructions.

I am still trying to figure out the process I will use for the scheduled tweets. I am tempted to use the Twitter API to write my own little script that will do it for me. But I am trying really hard not to get side-tracked, so I may try to use an existing solution. At any rate, the scheduled tweets have to come after I get some more content, so I am not deciding on that quite yet.

I also want to create some tweet_marketer shorthand for the tweets. For example, all action tasks will begin with “do it!” followed by the task. Others might start with “fyi” for interesting asides, or “wdyt” to ask for feedback. This will allow followers to easily figure out how much they want to pay attention to the tweet.

This is my first foray into regular blogging, and I am thinking out loud here. But I think that is what bloggers do, yes?

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