Managing your Twitter account can be a full-time job. Apps are a great way to use Twitter more efficiently, but, with so many options, choosing the right tool is difficult. Below, I’ve handpicked seven of my favorite under-the-radar tools to take your Tweeting to the next level.

Follower Wonk

What it does: Finds targeted users, sorted by influence.

If you’ve ever used Twitter Search to find accounts, you know how woefully inadequate it is. Follower Wonk finds targeted users by searching Twitter bios for your keywords, then sorting the results by influence or number of followers.

Use Follower Wonk to find accounts to follow and influencers to meet.

For example, Udemy published a great infographic on social media marketing for startups and wanted to share it with that community. By searching Follower Wonk for “social media marketing”, you’ll find over 10,000 results. The top 50 users each have over 40,000 followers.

Congratulations, you just found two million potential readers with one search.

Strawberryj.am

What it does: Finds the most popular content in your stream.

Once you’ve found targeted users to follow, the next issue you’ll face is cutting through the noise of Twitter. With over 200M tweets sent every day, how do you find the best stuff?

Constantly refreshing Twitter.com and forgoing all productivity is one idea. A better solution is to use Strawberryj.am. The still-in-private-beta service will analyze your Twitter stream and organize the content being shared by popularity.

Is everyone talking about Arrington’s latest controversial post on Uncrunched? If it’s popular in your network, Strawberryj.am will surface it without any extra work on your part.

If Digg or Reddit eschewed votes for tweets, they’d be Strawberryj.am.

In addition to your own stream, you can find popular items by search term, hashtag, or Twitter list. The interface is beautiful, but, be warned, it can be slow to analyze your entire stream.

Strawberryj.am is still in beta, but the first 50 people to enter the code “Udemy” here will get instant access.

Topsy

What it does: Finds the most popular tweets and content by topic.

If you need more data than Strawberryj.am provides, try Topsy. With Topsy, you can review the top links, tweets, photos, or videos for a given search term or hashtag. You can also review the data for the last hour, day, week, or month, rather than Strawberryj.am’s 24 hour window.

In addition to aggregate data from the Twittersphere, you can also analyze detailed data for specific links, such as who shared it and which hashtags they’re using. Just replace “http://” with “topsy.com/” for any URL.

Check out this example for Udemy’s “Are You Really an Expert?” infographic.

Buffer

What it does: Queues your tweets to be sent out according to a schedule.

If you use your Twitter account to curate content, Buffer is a must-have. Through the Buffer website or browser extensions, you can queue up tweets to be sent out according to a schedule you set.

Anyone who batches his online reading will love Buffer. Just add any piece of content that you want to share to your Buffer, and the tweets will be automatically spaced out and sent.

By queueing your tweets, you won’t have to schedule every one but will still be able to provide a steady stream of great content to your followers.

If you’re not sure when to schedule your tweets, use Tweriod to find the optimal times to tweet. Their analysis is based on when your tweets will get the most exposure and when your followers are online.

Dlvr.it

What it does: Syndicates your latest content to all of your social networks.

Syndication tools like dlvr.it are imperative for content producers and marketers. Rather than spending time sharing your latest blog post on every social network, you can let dlvr.it do the tedious work of distributing your content.

Every link includes tracking URLs and detailed analytics to see which of your accounts is driving traffic back to your content.

Pay with a Tweet / Cloud:Flood

What it does: Gives free content to users in exchange for a tweet.

Offering free content like ebooks or whitepapers has become a popular tactic to increase newsletter signups. If your goal is Twitter traffic, rather than email subscribers, consider a service that lets users exchange a tweet for the freebie in question.

Pay with a Tweet and Cloud:Flood are the two best tools.

Exchanging tweets for exclusive content is a great way to build buzz and potentially have your content go viral. The most important factor is having content that people are willing to “pay” for with a tweet.

Both services are free and simple to use. The main difference is that Cloud:Flood allows you to use your own button image or the default “Share to Get” buttons. Pay with a Tweet’s button reads “Pay with a Tweet,” so you’ll have to consider the message you’re sending with the button’s text. Are you asking people to share an awesome download or “charging” them for a great piece of content?

Twylah

What it does: Turns your tweets into a full website to increase engagement.

According to bit.ly, links shared on Twitter receive half of their total clicks in the first 2.8 hours after being posted. While Twitter can be a great source of traffic to your website, the influx of new visitors is very short lived.

With Twylah, your tweets get their own landing page on a magazine-style site where your previous tweets are categorized and displayed like blog posts. Visitors to your Twylah page will not only see the link that you shared (including large images and videos) but also other, related tweets from you. These landing pages can then drive additional traffic to your older tweets and content.

Even if you haven’t heard of them yet, the seven Twitter tools above can turn you into a power user. After just a few hours of work, you’ll be able to start automating your Twitter strategy to see more results from less work.

What other tools do you recommend? Share them in the comments.

The post 7 Lesser Known Tools to Help You Dominate Twitter appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

The following is a detailed breakdown of how we ran a successful contest from selecting prizes to maximizing new followers and tweets. After reading this case study, you’ll be fully equipped to run your own contest.

The Goal

At launch, we (Tortuga Backpacks) didn’t have many Facebook fans, Twitter followers, or blog subscribers. Our launch announcement and early social media efforts did drive some traffic, however, it was mostly from our friends, not the travel community. We appreciated everyone who checked out the site and shared the announcement but wanted to make a bigger splash in our target market.

The number one goal of the contest was to drive visitors to the contest page where our newly-launched product was the top-billed prize. From there, we wanted visitors to check out the product page and/or enter the contest.

Because of how the contest was set up (see ‘How to Enter’ below), every entry generated a tweet with a link to the contest page, which could then send more traffic to the page.

Hell yeah, social media!

Choosing the Prizes

When choosing a prize, ask yourself two important questions:

1. What type of prizes would be relevant to my target audience?
2. Which partners could help make the contest a success?

Sure, most people would love to win an iPad, but would a general-interest prize get you targeted leads and would Apple help you promote the contest? No and no.

Remember: you’re collecting new followers, fans, or subscribers to get them into your sales funnel. If the contest entrants aren’t prospective buyers, you’re wasting your time (and, possibly, money).

Instead, choose a prize that’s particularly relevant to your audience to weed out irrelevant entrants. In our case, we wanted travelers, preferably frequent and/or international travelers. This target market helped dictate our prize list which included a backpack, gift card for accommodations, language guides, and travel books.

Choosing relevant prizes is the first step in running a social media contest. If possible, you should also consider which sponsors will help you promote the contest.

To reach new customers, you’ll need to reach people outside of your existing followers. Having non-competing companies in your same niche contribute a prize and help to promote the contest is a great way to leverage their audience and social proof to generate leads for you.

For this reason, you’ll probably want to solicit prizes from a range of sources from larger companies to smaller bloggers.

Even if you’re an established brand or website, you’ll get more noes than yeses, so make sure to have a long list of potential partners.

How to Enter

Our first priority for the contest’s entry mechanism was that it had potential for virality. We wanted every entry to be broadcast to the entrant’s friends/followers so that more people would see the message and enter. If you have a small following like us, this is extremely important. We also wanted visitors to be able to enter the contest from the contest page to maximize the percent who converted.

We decided to focus on Twitter. The contest would require entrants to follow us and tweet a specific message. The tweet contained the prize amount, our username, a custom short URL for the contest page, and a hastag for tracking purposes.

Contest entry tweet

Both following our account and sending the tweet could be done right from the entry page via the Follow Button and Tweet Button respectively. You could do something similar on Facebook with the Like Button and Share Button.

Lastly, we placed the entry instructions and Twitter buttons near the beginning of the page to maximize entries. Only the contest graphic (to draw people in) and a short text intro preceded it. The list of prizes came after the entry buttons.

Tracking

To track the traffic visiting the contest page from entry tweets, we created a URL with Google Analytics tracking, then shortened it using bitly so that we could use a custom URL (http://bit.ly/tortugalaunch) for branding.

The most important metric to track was entries. Twitter search can be unreliable, but we wanted to know exactly how many entries we received so that we could share the number with sponsors, use it to sell sponsors on the next contest, and be able to measure the success of subsequent contests.

After some research, I found RowFeeder, a social media monitoring tool that will track hastags, usernames, or search terms and dump them into a spreadsheet for easy analysis. Their service is awesome. I’ll be writing a full review soon.

With RowFeeder, we were able to set up tracking for our hashtag (#tortugalaunch), then forget about tracking until the end of the contest.

Traffic Sources

Contest traffic sources

Unfortunately, the tracking was not perfect. However, the data is still useful directionally.

The biggest traffic sources were StumbleUpon (through ads and free stumbles), social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), and two contest sites.

We spent $175 on StumbleUpon which yielded 1,754 paid stumbles and 1,352 free stumbles. If your niche is available for targeting in their ad platform, you should experiment with a small test budget to drive cheap and free traffic. I’ll be writing up a more thorough run down of our StumbleUpon ad campaign soon.

Since the contest ran before Twitter started wrapping everything in t.co links, tracking Twitter traffic was difficult, despite using a Google Analytics tracking URL in the short URL for the contest. Depending on how much of the “direct” traffic is really Twitter traffic, the contest received between 101 and 322 visits via Twitter.

This range is disappointing but not surprising since many of the entrants did not have large follower counts (poor virality) and only one of the sponsors with a large number of followers tweeted a link to the contest.

Facebook performed well considering that we only shared the link and did not pay for any ads. This traffic, however, is less targeted than some of the other sources since many Facebook users do not have a Twitter account, which was required for entry.

Lastly, only two of the many contest sites I submitted the contest to sent any noticeable traffic. Next time, I’ll only submit the contest to those sites.

Choosing a Winner

By using RowFeeder, you’ll be able to export a CSV of entries including the username, location, follower count, and full tweet. This format allows you to dedup the list of multiple entries (if necessary) before awarding a winner.

We removed all but the first tweet from each entrant and any tweets from our corporate and personal accounts.

117 unique entries remained. We then used random.org to choose two random numbers between 1 and 117 for our grand and runner-up prize winners.

Results

Overall, the contest yielded 149 tweets and 117 unique entries.

The contest page received 2,500 visits, 69 likes, 201 tweets, and 5 +1s.

The results were encouraging considering the size of our initial audience. The contest increased our Twitter followers by 66%, from 208 to 345. Our Facebook likes also increased from 179 to 198. We even added a few new blog subscribers.

Some might argue that increasing your followers by such a percentage is easy when the starting number is so small. I disagree. If we had more followers, say 5,000, we would have had more retweets and virality, making growing our follower count even easier.

We were able to grow our audience because we drove 2,500 visits from people interested in our niche to the contest, which was dead simple to enter right from the page.

TL;DR

To run a successful social media contest:

• Select worthwhile, niche-specific prizes.
• Require users to follow your account and share the contest to enter. Make sure they can do both from the contest page.
• Promote the hell out of it.

Have any more tips for a successful contest? Share them in the comments.

The post How To Run a Twitter Sweepstakes and Increase Your Followers by 66% appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

Thrillist’s Wednesday emails (called Playbooks) feature short blurbs on 4-5 local bars, restaurants, stores, or businesses.

We were featured in the July 27th Los Angeles email in the third slot (below two features and an ad). Click the screenshot of the email below to enlarge it.

While Thrillist’s target demographic is similar to ours, we weren’t sure how many sales our feature would generate. Their emails are general-interest, not specific to our niche (travel). Our backpack is also more expensive than many items featured on Thrillist, and we wouldn’t necessarily be reaching consumers at the ideal moment, while they’re planning an international trip.

We were hopeful but uncertain.

Traffic Performance

From Thrillist’s estimated 250,000 LA subscribers, the Tortuga site received 308 visits in the first seven days after the email, over 29% of the site’s total traffic.

Most of the visits (246, 80%) were on the first day, which is unsurprising given the nature of daily email newsletters.

From the chart below you can see that the Thrillist visitors’ time on site, bounce rate, and pages/visit were below site averages.

Since the email linked directly to our product page, these numbers were not surprising. Either the product is of interest to the visitor or not.

We don’t sell anything else, so the product page is make or break for us.

Thrillist traffic stats after one week

Sales

Thrillist’s subscribers only bought one bag on the day of the email, but, as traffic continued to trickle in and people mulled over making a purchase, we sold three total bags in four days.

Considering the relevancy issues noted above, we were thrilled.

Those three backpacks accounted for half of our sales volume in the first two weeks.

Thrillist Redux: Philadelphia

On August 10th, were were featured in Thrillist’s Philadelphia Playbook, since Jeremy and I are Pennsylvania natives. Again, we were in the third slot of the email.

The Philadelphia email sent much less traffic, just 86 visits in a week. The bounce rate, time on site, and pages/visit metrics were much better, but that difference can be partially attributed to the traffic landing on our homepage, not the product page. Therefore, visitors had to click and spend more time before they saw the same content as the visitors from the LA email.

Unfortunately, the improved metrics did not include sales. We have not yet sold a single backpack from being featured in the Philadelphia email.

Takeaways

Overall, I’m happy with the results of our two Thrillist features. We received additional, relevant traffic that led to three sales in the short term. We’re optimistic that more of the visitors will convert in the future, when they need our product for a trip.

The feature also makes for great social proof for users and other publications that we will be pitching.

If you’ve been featured in Thrillist, please share if/how it helped your business in the comments.

The post How Thrillist Kickstarted My Business appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

Harsh.

Here’s what happened:

Jeremy and I co-wrote a guest post for the Where I’ve Been blog about the best cheap eats in San Francisco and Los Angeles. We’ve been doing some guest posting as a means of link building and finding new readers for the Tortuga Backpacks’ Blog.

The post featured four restaurants in each city and clocked in at 1,300 words, far from flimsy spam.

When we guest post, we always make sure to promote the post heavily.

Promoting the post and responding to comments are important follow up tasks for any guest blogger. Let the blog owner know you’re not just in it for the links. You’ll be repaid with future invitations and more guest posting opportunities.

As part of the promotion of this post, I submitted it to the SF and LA subreddits (categories) thinking that it might lead to some great crowdsourced restaurant suggestions from and for redditors.

Previously, I haven’t posted much to reddit but have read a lot of the travel threads. On a few occasions, I’ve responded to users asking backpack-related questions.

When suggesting a Tortuga backpack to anyone, I’ve always indicated in my post that it’s shameless self-promotion. Reddit can appreciate self-deprecating humor, right?

The response to the post in the city-specific reddits was surprising.

The LA thread was fairly quiet (4 comments, 4 up votes, 5 down votes).

The SF thread was a bit more, um, lively.

The voting was equally split (15 up votes, 15 down votes), but the link received some very negative comments:

Talk about a lazy blog spam attempt.
You have 3 spots for all of SF. And then ask “Any to add?”
“So hey guys, Abraham Lincoln had a beard and was the 16th president, anything else remarkable about him?” [...]
Have you even been to San Francisco, Fred?

[L]ooks like he’s a blog spammer — mostly dedicated to “travel ideas.” (and probably attempting to monetize the information he gleans from Reddit)
At least, everything he’s submitted leads to his own websites … or ones where he “guests blogs” (read: uses someone else as a front while he tries to cash in on the traffic).

(From a moderator) It appears nearly all your posts here on reddit are for self promotion. As [username] pointed out, you have a low-content post with lifted images from yelp. Please do not use r/sf as a means of advertising — if you would like to advertise please use reddit’s built in system.

Clearly, reddit users consider content marketing to be spam. Noted.

Obviously, I take issue with some of their points, but there’s no reason to continue the vitriol.

Despite the negative comments (and up votes they received), only 5 of the 40 comments were truly negative. The rest were helpful restaurant suggestions, which I look forward to trying.

On the positive side, the link received 15 up votes and 35 helpful comments (some were my responses). So how do we, as marketers, reach these users without incurring the wrath of others?

A few ideas:

• Submit content consistently, only a small percentage of which belongs to you
• Use reddit exclusively to promote others in your niche. Hope for or ask them to reciprocate.

KISSmetrics wrote a helpful Reddit Marketing Guide, but it, unfortunately, doesn’t really offer a solution to this problem.

Have you had any success with content marketing on reddit? If so, what was your strategy?

Images: 1, 2

The post The Dangers of Marketing on Reddit appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

Using a ProBlogger guest post and a helpful PR Web rep as my guides, I dove headfirst into the press world.

PR Web’s basic, text-only release typically runs $80, but the account rep pointed me to a $50 off PR Web coupon, which sealed my decision to test the service.

Writing the Release

Using press release templates and best practices found online, I wrote a short release which you can see here (screenshot below).

One important factor to keep in mind: if your company is unknown, no one will care that you’re launching a new product. Don’t lead with your company or product name.

In fact, leave both out of the headline altogether.

Instead, try to hook readers with a topic that’s already in the news. I used the angle of Tortuga helping travelers avoid baggage fees since it’s a carry-on bag.

Paid services often allow for extra features like embedding links or attaching images. Make sure to take advantage.

PR Web’s Basic package allows for links within the text (full URLs only, no anchor text), images as attachments, and a screenshot of your site. Use all of these to help your SEO and keep readers engaged.

Results

Free Sites

0 visits.

I didn’t expect much, but 0 visits is pretty sad. In this case, I got exactly what I paid for.

Don’t waste your time. You’ll get far more spam emails than site visitors after the release is posted.

The free sites do offer paid add-ons, which may yield better results, but, if you’re paying anyway, just use PR Web since it’s the industry leader.

PR Web

According to PR Web’s analytics, the release was read 680 times.

Is this typical for a new/unknown company? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to have some benchmarks based on industry or company size.

Traffic and Conversions

In the first 30 days, PRWeb.com accounted for 56 site visits, about 8% of the total readers reported by their analytics.

The traffic performed well with low bounce rates and over 2.5 pages/visit. However, in the most important category (sales), it registered a 0.

No sales.

I also didn’t receive any press requests from the release. I certainly didn’t expect to land any TV interviews, but this is still a metric worth tracking for PR efforts.

SEO

The release was picked up and syndicated (stolen by scrapers?) quite a bit. This Google search for the headline (linked to in PR Web’s analytics) yields 18,600 results.

However, many of these sites only publish the headline. Sites that post the entire release usually post it as plain text, stripping out the hyperlink to your site. In these cases, SEO benefits are probably negligible.

The one exception is Yahoo! News. They syndicated the release, including the hyperlink, resulting in 19 visits but, again, no sales.

Evaluation

Writing the press release and going through the distribution process was a good learning experience. Reframing a business’s value proposition into a media-ready story is a valuable exercise for any entrepreneur or marketer.

Ultimately, I’m not ready to recommend PR Web, or any similar services, based on my experience. The math is straightforward: I spent $30 and made $0.

I’m glad that I tested it out and hope that some of the SEO benefits will help over time.

Have your used a PR distribution service for your business? Share your experience in the comments.

The post Do Press Release Distribution Services Work? appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

As the article states (thrice!), 40% of tickets go unsold. These, no doubt, are largely tickets to high-capacity arenas. However, tickets to smaller (~1,000 person) venues like the Fillmore in San Francisco often sell out quickly, to scalpers. Fans are left to pay up 2x face value, or more, on Craigslist or StubHub. This problem also happens, perhaps even more so, at arena shows with big name headliners.

StubHub, according to the article, is the largest player in the $4 billion secondary ticket market. Ticketmaster owns TicketsNow, a smaller player in the space. With a stake in the secondary ticket market, Ticketmaster has no incentive to stop scalpers from using automated software to buy a significant number of tickets when they go on sale. In fact, Ticketmaster has a disincentive to stop this practice. The more tickets that go directly to fans, the fewer TicketsNow will be able to earn a processing fee on later. By allowing scalpers to game their system, Ticketmaster is able to profit twice on these tickets, while scalpers bear all of the financial risk if the tickets don’t resell on the secondary market.

More transparent pricing was a good start by Hubbard. Selling TicketsNow as a show of good faith toward music fans would be even better. Putting increased emphasis on selling tickets to fans instead of just selling tickets, is the next big step toward repairing Ticketmaster’s fractured relationship with its customers. Otherwise, Ticketmaster will continue to be, as the article calls it, “The Most Hated Brand in America.”

The post The Important Issue Ticketmaster is Overlooking appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

In the two decades after the Quill Corp. ruling, online retailers, such as Amazon, have been exempt from collecting sales tax except on purchases made from a state where they have a physical presence. This practice gives online retailers an advantage. Local retailers, from small bookstores to chains like Best Buy and Walmart, were at a disadvantage because they had to collect sales tax on purchases from their stores. Not surprisingly, big box retailers were pushing strongly for Governor Brown’s latest legislation.

While Amazon is benefitting from some possibly unfair advantages, the new law is a short-sighted band-aid for a state desperate for tax revenue. Even evidence would not dissuade California. After a similar law was passed in Rhode Island, Amazon dropped those affiliates. Officials at the Rhode Island Department of Revenue “do not believe that there has been any sales tax collected as a result of the Amazon legislation.” States are hurting their own businesses (affiliates) without actually making any additional tax revenue.

Since this is an issue of interstate commerce, a longer term solution will need to come from the federal government. Current state-by-state sales tax measures place an unnecessary clerical burden on small online businesses. Only two solutions make much sense:

• Maintain the status quo: Collect sales tax only on sales to states in which a business has a physical presence. Exclude affiliate marketers from the definition of physical presence.
• Level the playing field: Collect sales tax on all sales.

Anything else is a half-way, short-term solution. The most recent landmark decision on this issue was decided long before the current omnipresence of e-commerce. Let’s hope that a ruling relevant to our current time will be part of the tax overhaul that President Obama has promised.

[Full disclosure: I was a (very small) Amazon affiliate.]

The post New Sales Tax Laws are Needed for the Internet Era appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

How much time do you spend each day consuming? How much time do you spend each day creating?

Most Americans probably spend at least 90% of that combined time consuming (watching TV, listening to music, reading news articles) and just 10% creating (writing, creating new products, planting a garden). Since you’re reading this blog, you’re probably interested in starting companies, so your ratios are likely more balanced, but I would bet that you’re still a consumer, on net. I certainly am.

Consuming

In the Internet Age, information and media are readily available and seemingly infinite. As much as we consume, there’s always more.

Somehow, the more movies I watch from Netflix, the longer my queue gets. Damn your recommendation algorithm!

Consumption is effortless. Turning on the TV or clicking a single StumbleUpon button will bombard you with entertainment until your eyeballs fall out (and then keep on going). Consumption is easy.

Creating

Creating is hard. Creating is work. Unlike watching TV, nothing about creating is passive. These are the reasons that so few people ever create anything.

So, why does anyone do it? Because creating something is insanely gratifying. Creating brings satisfaction to yourself and others. Sure, watching a sitcom will give you a few quick laughs, but the rewards of creating are so much more. They last forever and keep on giving. Creating isn’t just the output, it’s what you learn through the process. The most difficult work has the biggest payoff.

What’s next?

Flopping the percentages to 90% creating and 10% consuming is probably unrealistic. 51%/49% seems like a good stretch goal. Giving back more than you take is an admirable philosophy in any situation.

If you’re having trouble getting started, cut out 30 minutes of consumption (watching TV or reading blogs are good candidates for the chopping block) and replace it with 30 minutes of creative work every day. Odds are, the outcome will be encouragement enough for you to keep going and to keep upping the ante. You’ll soon be trading more and more consuming for creating without even realizing it.

Thinking about this topic and writing this post have made me consider how I’ll continue to tilt the scales for myself. My resolution: 30 minutes of writing every day. Keeping up this blog and the Tortuga Backpacks’ Blog has been a struggle due to a lack of consistent commitment to writing. That ends now.

How will you allocate more time to creative work? What will you do with that newfound time?

The post Are You Creating or Just Consuming? appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

Despite yesterday’s badly needed update to Facebook Comments, I’m sticking with Disqus as my commenting platform of choice here and on the Tortuga Backpacks’ Blog. The updates are promising, however, and definitely look cleaner than the previous version.

New Features

The best new features that cannot be found on other commenting platforms are:

Comment syncing: When you post a comment on a publisher’s site, that comment is posted to your wall and, consequently, your friends’ news feeds. Any comments made on that news item within Facebook will be synced back to the site where you left the original comment. This feature will create more active discussions on publishers’ sites and drive more traffic to those posts from all of the news feed items. A win for publishers and Page administrators.

Commenting as a Page: The original Facebook Comments prevented anonymous posting and cut down on the associated spam, but the new version also allows users to comment as a Page. Commenting as a Page will help you drive traffic to your Facebook pages when posting comments on other sites in your niche.

Social sort: Comments are now dynamically sorted by social relevance to each user, meaning your friends’ comments appear first. Sorting comments by a user’s social graph, rather than just recency, will lead to more interest in and interaction with the comments. The benefits of this feature may be offset by the lack of website covisitation across a user’s social graph.

Shortcomings

Unfortunately, these strong new features are still outweighed by Facebook Comments’ shortcomings (in order of importance):

Comment ownership: Unlike other commenting platforms, Facebook owns your comments. Disqus syncs with WordPress comments, which makes switching platforms easy. WordPress allows their comments to be exported. If Facebook Comments ever shut down or you wanted to switch to a different platform, you would lose all of those comments. As usual with Facebook, it’s their way or the highway.

Single login: You can only post a comment as your Facebook identity. The new platform was allegedly intended to launch with support for Twitter and Google logins, which those companies blocked at the last minute. Yahoo ID is included as an alternate login option, but, obviously, no one will use it. Requiring commenters to use their Facebook identities is a problem, especially since not everyone will use their Facebook account to comment everywhere. Facebook is a network of your personal friends. My friends don’t care about the brilliant marketing insights I’m leaving on your site. Many users prefer to use separate identities for friends, industry, and their niche interests. Additionally, many workplaces block Facebook eliminating those users from commenting on your site.

Should Facebook Comments fix its current shortcomings in a future update, I would definitely be willing to switch to their platform, especially if I could import my blogs’ existing comments.

Have you switched to Facebook comments? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in the (Disqus) comments below.

The post Why I’m Sticking With Disqus Over Facebook Comments (For Now) appeared first on Fred Perrotta.

I learned HTML and CSS in the last month. My newfound skills were not sought out or learned in a classroom. I learned to code out of necessity by teaching myself.

While I didn’t want to learn a programming language, I did need to make changes to this and other websites without spending any money on a programmer. So I copied some code and taught myself enough HTML and CSS to build the “Popular Posts” widget in the sidebar, among other things. Not bad, right?

Copying is a Good Thing

Sure, copying sounds bad at first, but emulating the work of someone more experienced lays a great foundation for your own skill set. Look at how music is taught: first, you learn the basics of the instrument, then you learn to play famous symphonies or guitar licks. By tapping into shared, collective wisdom, your journey to mastery is infinitely easier.

Create a Need

If you have the thought, “I should learn HTML, it might come in handy,” you will never sit down and tech yourself from a book. You will probably never sign up for a class, either. The best way to learn is to back yourself into a corner, even if it’s an artificial one. Which is the faster way to learn how to swim: listen to an explanation of proper technique or get thrown in the pool? Create a sink or swim situation to eliminiate excuses and procrastination.

Try, Try Again

Copying others’ code was a start, but, since every website is different, it was not enough. The rest of my learning was through trial and error. Change one number, observe the result. Take out a line, observe the result. Keep changing and testing as needed. Once you’re close, don’t settle for good enough, keep iterating until you have exactly what you want. Rinse and repeat. Most importantly, track which strings, when pulled, elicit which results to understand the cause/effect relationship.

How to Learn HTML and CSS

If you’re looking to learn HTML and CSS, first find elements of other websites that you like. For example, the “Popular Posts” widget is based on one I found on Tim Ferriss’s blog. Next, use the free browser plugin Firebug to inspect other websites’ code. Firebug gives you access to a page’s HTML and CSS, far more information than “View Page Source.” Once you have the code, use W3Schools to determine what each tag and property does and experiment with their live, sample code before making changes to your own site.

That’s my method. How do you learn new skills?

The post The Best Way to Learn: Necessity + Trial and Error appeared first on Fred Perrotta.