I was a little slow getting onto Twitter last year (when so many other bloggers embraced it). To be honest I didn’t think it had much to offer me - I’m beginning to see how wrong I was. In this post I want to explore how I’m using Twitter to: improve the quality of my blogs network with other bloggers widen my readership grow my profile drive traffic to my blogs 1. Research Tool One of the things that I’ve come to enjoy about Twitter the most is the way that it can be used when you’re researching a post. Stuck for inspiration? Twitter and idea and see what others add to it. Need an example for a point you’re making? Twitter it and you might get some good ones. Got a question that you’re stuck on? Ask it to your followers to see what they think. Need to test a hypothesis? Do a straw poll on your followers. The beauty of Twitter is that it’s quick, is used by a wide variety of types of people and because of the 140 character limit to messages it keeps interactions concise, manageable and productive (usually). Example - Let me illustrate this with a ‘live’ example. Lets just say that I’m writing a post on RSS feed subscriptions and wanted to find out how many feeds people were following. I’d post a Tweet like this: Now I actually posted that Tweet a few minutes ago and in the time that it took me to grab a screen shot of the tweet and made myself a coffee I’ve had the following responses: What other medium can you gather that kind of data in 5 minutes? (actually by now - 10 minutes later there have been 30 responses and it’s the middle of the night for most of my followers). 2. Reinforce (and expand) Your Personal Brand I’ve written previously about how I’ve found interacting on multiple mediums can be important in building your personal brand. Whether it be social networking, blogging, bookmarking, real life interactions etc - all of these ’straws’ when added together can go a long way to building your own brand. Twitter is another ’straw’ in my personal brand (and that of my blogs). What I’ve found is that I’m getting emails and messages from people saying things like: ‘I used to read you at ProBlogger but had lost track until I found you on Twitter’ ‘I subscribe to your RSS feed on the blog but seeing your posts on Twitter reminds me to read them more’ ‘I was Follow

Now I have removed my Christmas theme formatting, I am ready to work more on my blog design.. Having made the move to Wordpress from Blogger not long before I added the festive colors and images, I had not spent any time on the real theme. I know I am doing this backwards - most sane people would decide on a theme before showing their blog face in public. The reason, I want to talk through the process I am going through as I do my design as a way of teaching anyone who may be interested. To alleviate the problem of those resource hungry social networking widgets making page load time slow, I have now relegated them to the footer. Not being a php expert - (not much past the “hello dolly” stage) I had to search for a way of doing this. I had to piece together various bits of information here and there so I thought it an idea to put it all together for your edification and delight. (I am wondering how many left after reading the last part, thinking how boring). Anyone using anything other than Wordpress may as well take their leave at this point too, although I would much rather you click on recent posts or archives and stay a while longer on this blog of course. Rather than having to add widget codes directly into my footer.php, I have added “sidebar” elements into the footer. This means I can add widgets to them from the Wordpress dashboard widget page, which gives me more flexibility if I change their content.. How to add a sidebar to a Wordpress footer Firstly I had to tell Wordpress to insert new sidebars into my theme by altering the footer.php file. As I already have two sidebars and wanted 3 columns in the footer, I needed to let the Wordpress architects know that instead of two sidebars I now needed 5. (the architects are those that work on the basic structure and design - in my imagination that is). For this I had to alter the functions.php file in my theme folder. Edit functions.php: Find the section in your theme folder’s functions php file that says something similar to the following- except the number will not be 5 yet:, it may be 1 or 2. Change the number to reflect how many sidebar elements you want in total (that is the number of sidebar(s) in your sidebar area plus how many you want in your footer) . If you do not have a functions.php file but have a widget enabled theme create the functions.php file including all of the code below. <?php if ( Follow