A Non-Intrusive Way To Integrate Twitter With Your Blog

I created a new blog that I want to share with you. Twitter.waynejohn.com is the new location of the domain, and the best thing about it is that I don’t need to do a thing with it to keep it going. It runs itself, and as long as I keep using Twitter, it will keep growing and growing, getting indexed, and maybe even help to increase my search traffic over time.

I also think it’s a great way to give you more insight into who I am and what makes me tick, and what ticks me off. I’ve become pretty vocal on issues and don’t mind sharing with the entire world exactly what I think about something. This is yet another way, perhaps a more convenient way for some, to learn more about me and understand what’s in my wee little head.  For those of you that don’t use Twitter, you can check out my posts on my Twitter blog, comment if you like, and keep up with me there.

Functions this accomplishes for me

The blog performs a couple functions for me.

1. It allows me to integrate Twitter into my blog without clogging the sidebars and my regular posts with Twitter stuff. I’ve always wanted to somehow integrate all my Twitterings into my blog, but I didn’t want to flood my sidebars with all the widgets and “stuff” that you could with Twitter and all that is publicly available for it.
2. It posts a daily digest each and every day. At the time of this writing, I have a total of three posts up there that contain each days Twitterings. Tomorrow there will be another one. I’m doing nothing extra that I’m not already doing for this to happen.
3. It provides me a space (sandbox) to test widgets and code that integrates with Twitter. There are several things that I’d like to write for Twitter, and now I have a place to perform testing where it won’t interfere with my real blog.
4. As a sandbox of sorts, I’m able to try out all the existing Twitter widgets and tools for WordPress, again, without interfering with my normal blog.
5. You won’t be able to see it, but one of my widgets there also allows me to tweet from the page itself. I don’t need to hit Twitter to tweet if I’m logged in on my Twitter blog.
6. It’s completely automated. I don’t have to do a thing to operate it, and I like that very, very much.

Anticipated benefits

Some of the benefits that I and others may get from having this blog under a new subdomain (twitter.waynejohn.com) that I expect I’ll see are:

1. Possibly a good step towards obtaining Google SiteLinks. There are no benefit of Sitelinks in Google other than to help a user navigate more directly to content they might want to see. But I believe one of the unspoken benefits is purely psychological. If a site has Sitelinks, then I believe people will think there is more to the site than others on the search results page. Thus, driving up search traffic.
2. I can capture all my Tweetings. I tweet quite a bit, and interact with many, many people on there. One thing I’ve noticed is that if I tweet a link for something I found back in May, I’ll have a hard time finding it again. It’s my hope that by capturing my tweets, I might also be able to recall things I need to recall more easily.
3. The people I interact with on Twitter will now have an added benefit to communicating with me. If I tweet their links, those links will now show up on my Twitter blog as well. If my Twitter blog begins to gain rank and traffic, well, you know where I’m going with that… I think it adds more value to those that are interacting with me.
4. Find new followers and friends and help to grow my presence on Twitter

Some decisions I’ve made, and why I made them

To give even more insight into my thought processes and explain a little bit of why I created this subdomain blog, here are some of the design decisions I’ve made.

1. I decided to keep the same theme. Consistency, in my opinion, would be better than having a completely different looking theme. I thought perhaps this might confuse people at first, but then, I could always change the theme later should I find that to be true.
2. The major links in the header point back to my www site. No need to have a secondary contact form to support right?
3. Ads are shown from the get-go, and on the homepage. I don’t do that on my www site in favor of giving my regular readers an ad free experience. However, on my Twitter blog I decided that it doesn’t matter when the site begins to display ads.
4. The sidebars on my Twitter blog are filled with Twitter widgets. You can see what I’ve recently tweeted, who has recently visited from Twitter, and see how many people are following me there. As a bonus, I added a widget that display my recent posts on my www site, and a little explanation of what my Twitter blog is all about.
5. I created the site to keep my www site clutter-free. If I didn’t create the site, but still integrated Twitter, you’d see more in the sidebar here, and I’m trying to avoid creating the clutter that I had in the old theme and blog system.

I’ve written this post not only to announce the new blog, but to also give a little insight to those of you who might also want to do something similar. I think the benefits of this site will start to show, if they are even going to, within the first month or so.

I also have a few other subdomains in development that I’ll share with you when they are ready. I believe I’m on the right track with this stuff and can’t wait for a few months to pass to do a review and see where this all takes my site, my traffic, my follower counts and my sanity.

Hope you like it, and please feel free to contact me about your own site if you feel this is something you’d also like to do.

Namaste!

You might also enjoy these related posts

1. Grooming Twitter Traffic For The Future I'm grooming twitter traffic for the future. How many times did you hear your mother say “Sit up straight in your chair?” If you're like me, too many times to...
2. The importance of using a domain name for your blog I don’t want to scare anyone, but I’ve been doing some thinking lately.  Since I’ve written about a non-intrusive way to integrate twitter, people have been coming at me from...
3. The problem with aggregating your blog posts to social networks If you’re like me, and let’s be honest, who is, but if you happen to have a little bit of my traits, you might find social networks to be a...
4. 10 Reasons Why You Should Not Use Your Real Name on Twitter In response to Sean Choe’s post on 10 reasons why you should use your real name on Twitter, I decided to take the other end of that and give you...
5. How To Get A Password – Twitter Phishing Scam If you participate in Twitter like I do, you might have heard about the Jannawalitax phishing scam.  This scam, however it’s built behind the scenes relies on your ignorance to...