Tweet Me Me Me Me

You've probably set your blog up and done some really good posts. As you start blogging you may find that you'd really like to get your message out to the world faster than ever. Your blog post is worth at least a million dollars – but will you get it if nobody knows about it?!

Today, Twitter is taking the world by storm. Imagine the idea of having 20 000 followers (at least!) and sending a message to all of them about your terrific blog post? That's of course Step 1! Step 2 is to make sure that everyone else who is also connected with Twitter see to it that they too advertise your blog post to their 20 000 followers. That's called re-tweeting and we may talk about it's value in a later post.

Today, I'd like to share with you a quickie on how to encourage others to re-tweet your post from within the blog post itself. If you look at the top right side of every post I've done, you'll see a "Retweet" button. Give it a try on this very post. Simply click on it and when logged in to your Twitter account, hit the enter button. Voila – there you go, my post just got advertised to all your followers. Terrific. It's exactly what we want, and one of the fastest ways of getting others attracted to our post in seconds!

You're going to get hundreds and thousands of people looking at your blog posts. But without the "Retweet" button installed on your blog template, it's going to make matters difficult for the average user to want to let others know about your post. But WITH the "Reweet" button they'll feel far more relaxed with the idea of letting others know fast about the wonderful post they've just done. Go ahead and retweet this very post to all your friends. You'll soon see how fast others will catch on to it!

Now we need to help to set up YOUR blog with this terrific feature. It does take a bit of technical know-how, but you can do it! Just follow me:

1. Log in to your blog (For more info about blogs see Lesson 5)
2. Choose the Layout tab
3. Choose the Edit Html option
4. Click "Expand Widgets"
5. Do a search using the Ctrl-F option (Control Find) and look for:

<data:post.body/>

6. Just above this, paste the following text:

<div style='float:right;padding:4px;'>
<script type='text/javascript'>
tweetmeme_url = '<data:post.url/>';
tweetmeme_source = 'yourtweetusername';
</script>
<script src='http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js' type='text/javascript'/>
</div>

7. Change the word "yourtwitterusername" with your actual Twitter username eg. in my case – rebeliyahu
8. Click "Save Template"
9. DONE

You'll now see the Retweet button as it appears on my blog in your own blog posts.

Good luck and get others Twittering all about you today!

If you don't come right, be in touch. There are other versions of Retweet buttons available too. If you see something that interests you, let me know, I may well have the code for it!