Twitter background essentials

Having a twitter account is very important for a blogger to market and to reach out to the readers.

After having one, the next thing is to make it interesting and attractive like any other social media profile.

Customizing options are very limited in twitter, unlike other social forums like Orkut etc., but that had not stopped creative people from finding ways to brand their profiles.

I too have a custom background suiting my needs in my twitter profile.

Ok. What are the essential things you need to showcase in a custom background of yours. I think I need not convince you of having a custom background as you could understand the potential of the blank spaces around your profiles you find in your twitter account.

There are a lot to display and brand, but what are the essentials that needs to be put in order to make your profile a self promoting online space.

Blog Title
Blog Title is very much essential especially if your blog address is something different from your blog title.

Also when you have more than one blog, you can't have two blog addresses displayed in the URL space provided in twitter. Hence you could use the blank spaces around the profile for displaying titles of your blogs.


Blog Description
An elevator pitch of your blog would also be a good idea to spread your blog's intent in the limited space in twitter.

About You
A small bio of yourself and your email id and the services you offer could be of a great help to people dropping by to get the most from your tweets.

A Twitter Landing Page
In the space provided for displaying your website url, you could display a specially prepared landing page for your twitter followers, if your blog warrants one.

Having a special page for twitter followers to land than the homepage could be helpful in giving an intro of your blog to your new readers and introducing them to the various aspects of your blog.

Products to sell
If you have any product to sell like an e-book, service or anything, you could introduce your products to your twitter followers by displaying them in your profile background.

These are the things I feel are essential in a twitter background.

Have you anything else displayed in your profiles or do you feel something else too could be introduced into the twitter background.

Have you noticed any interesting twitter backgrounds? Do share.

If you like to have a custom twitter background, there are many services out there creating some decent backgrounds. I too have created some basic twitter backgrounds(look for the twitterbgs.zip folder) which you could use as a base and work on them to suit your need, if you like them.


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Socializing with social media

The right attitude and mindset is what a blogger needs to be successful. Knowing what one's passion is and pursuing it diligently with even more passion is the right ingredient needed for any blogger.

But there is also social media which is mainly for getting to know new people which is what makes it interesting but seems to eat up a blogger's time.
But for the good or the bad, we bloggers are using social media to also spread our brand, our blog and sell ourselves.

It is all fine and seems that it is even essential in making your blog reach new readers.

The goodness of these social medias far overweigh the negatives and hence makes them an essential aspects needed in the kitty for any blogger. I don't mean you need to tweet crazy nuts at 1000 tweets/day, Stumbling a couple of hundred sites per day.


Just honor and respect the apps and use them intelligently. Always, blogging would be the priority for our bloggers and it needs to be that way because honing your interest and your knowledge and skill should take precedence over socializing.

But do we use these apps with the same passion with which we run our blog. To say, I am interested in designing and anything related to blogging and that is why iPENthisBLOG is around.

The sweet reality is, if you enjoy these social media as much as you enjoy blogging and as much sincere and honest as you are in your blog, you would be successful in these social medias too and you could manage them comfortably.

Use social media to spread word about your blog but not just as a marketing tool. By using it that way, you suck all the goodness out of these apps.

I am not going to give 10 best ways to handle the social media frenzy out here but I am going to share some simple things what I feel about handling them.

Don't get taken back by the enormity in the number of social medias around. Find those ones which are suitable to your blog and are to your liking and which would help better server your readers.

Include, if possible, these apps in your blog. Also, if possible, automate some updates. I don't mean to say not to get involved in what you are doing by simple retweeting your messages but to use tools like friendfeed to update apps like Facebook regularly.

Make a routine of, on what days are you going to socialize with which people and where.

Use social media with ease by using alternative apps or using browser addons or what ever you feel is making you more YOU and enjoy the process and not one which makes you not like what you are doing.

If some social media doesn't suit you, don't feel bad in dropping out from them.

Social medias are like pals, interact with them, meet with them often and enjoy being with them but remember your obligation, your love - your BLOG. :)

Finding the balance is something what every blogger needs to know and get expertised in. I am trying to get it and working on it. Hope you too have some ideas on social medias and how you use them.

Have you achieved the balance? Is it easy? What do you feel?



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Free ZooZoo Bubbles Iconset

Looking at the zoozoos in Vodafone ad, inspired me to create these zoozoo bubbles iconset. They are a very simple set of 4 web icons.

Yeah, I know that many other essential webicons like rss, email etc., need to have been added.

I would work on them and add them to this initial collection.png images of sizes from 16px to 512px are also available.

These icons are all free to use and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License and could be downloaded, here.

These are very simple icons. I would try to showcase some good quality ones in the future.

Have fun using these icons wherever you feel them to be appropriate in your projects. Also let me know, so that I could have a look and feel happy about it :)..

Please feel free to drop in your feedback, comments. I would appreciate it greatly.

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Why a blogger should comment?

Bloggers are of many kind, some blog for fun, some for money and some to spread their ideas. But all blogs have one thing in common - a comments section.

To say the truth, comments are the integral part of a blog. As much a blog is important, so are the comments the blog accrue.

Why is it expected for readers/bloggers to leave a comment in a blog?

Bloggers are a select group of people who like to share what they know and that's the reason they have taken the pains(pains? ...haha) to open up a blog and voice their views.

There are many 'take home' pointers below for realizing the true joy and potential of blogging via comments section.

To share

This should be the main reason for commenting. Whatever I am to put forward in the below pointers are just a followup. The driving force should be to reach out to other bloggers.

It is always difficult to be the first in all that is good that is happening around. Commenting is joining the good things that you were not the founder of.

Sometimes you could bring perspective to a discussion which is going haywire by commenting.

Ask any blogger, what are the important assets of their blogs apart from ofcourse their content, they would surely shout 'Readers' and the readers leave their footprints in the comment section.

By sharing, you display your personality of what you are.

To reach out

Sometimes because of the enormity of web and blogs, an individual blog could be missed.

It is not bad to say, that you are here by dropping your valuable comments for the good of all.

For your blog and you to get noticed, you need to tell others you are there and remember you need not carry any guilty feeling while doing this.

As time passes, you would better in this skill and your opinions and ideas would be respected and your commenting(sharing ideas) skill gets refined.

To grow

Sharing your thoughts without being closed helps you grow as a blogger. This is the biggest hurdle a blogger could ever have - being closed.

Every blogger would have a feeling of his blog being the best(am i wrong?...really?).

By stopping by in other blogs and when you see the glory of these blogs, you get humbled and you grow as a blogger where you truly appreciate and leave your comments.

This feeling of seeing more knowledgeable, creative people around you and knowing that you are actually talking to them helps you better yourself.

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Yeah, of course, there are always the other reasons - increasing your reader base, making more money(more readers/more clicks), more exposure, increase reliability index.

But, but, I am realizing(replace it with a more powerful word for struggle, effort and experience) that when commenting with these motives, takes the joy out of blogging and that out of reading other blogs.

After all, blogging needs to be fun and everything you do should be relished. Even if blogging is done with a business motive, don't forget, blogosphere is a fun world and it should be rejoiced.

To put everything in a single line - Cut rest of the crap and enjoy blogging and be ready to learn and get surprised all the time and the rest would fall in place.

I am sure you have something to add, let's share.



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LNK.BY - URL Shortener with a meaning.

Url shorteners are services which shrinks a URL to a shorter one.

Why do you need this? Sometimes for aesthetics to hide a long string of 40 to 50 characters and make the link presentable(like in a presentation?).

And for the more obvious reason :) of using the link in Twitter which slaps a 146 character limit on the face of twitter users.

Already there are umpty number of url shorteners like tinyurl, tiny.cc, is.gd, bit.ly, then what is there in lnk.by?

All the services do what they say. They shrink the urls but of all the available url shorteners including Lnk.by, Bit.ly seems to be more sophesticated, enabling the publisher to track the usage pattern, history of links shrunk etc.,

But where all url shorteners fail, Lnk.by wins by a mile. All services cater the publishers who use the service, but Lnk.by actually answers the need of the readers who click the link.

When you shrink a link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o) in to
http://tinyurl.com/384n2f or
http://is.gd/8L1 or
http://tiny.cc/w23AC or
http://bit.ly/27OtIV, it doesn't make any sense to the reader.

It brings a kind of 'Oh! no! what the heck is this link' kind of feeling as soon as you see one, if no proper accompanying description is given.

But when the same link is shrunk using Lnk.by, we get, http://WACH.it/caf. Oh yeah, now the shrunk link makes sense, there is a video in there...

You need not do anything, just paste the url and say go and the Lnk.by detects almost all sites and say whether it is an article to read, a video to watch or a picture to see and shrinks them accordingly.

Lnkby is still in alpha and hence there could be a few kinks (but I didn't notice any for a few urls which I tested).

This is just a beginning of a new idea, later on, just like some famous sites have their own shortening services, to enable readers realize that it is their website to which the shortened url directs to,some service in future could shrink all websites' url and com eup with a service, say instead of youtube - yt.cc/abc and for flickr - flkr.c0m/abc1 etc., :)(far call?)....i think not :)

This would tell the readers not only what kind of content they are going to but also where they are going.

I am presently using tinyurl. Going to give Lnk.by a try, what do you use? Any thoughts?


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